Andreas Hillgruber

[9] Thereafter, he maintained that Operation Barbarossa had been prompted solely by Hitler's ideological belief in the need for Lebensraum (living space) in Russia, where a massive German colonization effort was planned and the entire Russian people were to be reduced to slave status.

[6] For Hillgruber, the continuities of the "Bismarck Reich" were a certain mentalité amongst German elites, namely a Weltanschauung (world view) that emphasized an "either-or" outlook on international relations, Social Darwinism, a deterministic understanding of history, and dreams of worldwide expansionism.

[19] In response to negative international reaction to the "war-in-sight crisis", Bismarck ultimately issued the Bad Kissingen decree of June 25, 1877 in which he called for a situation "in which all powers save France need us and in which they are prevented from forming coalitions against us through their ties to one another".

[20] Hillgruber argued that Wilhelm's policy of Weltpolitik (World Politics) which he launched with great fanfare in 1897 had with the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 ended in failure, and that thereafter Germany was forced to retreat into a defensive posture in the "bastion" of Central Europe with Austria-Hungary forming the crucial "land bridge" to the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East.

[28] The Canadian historian Holger Herwig commented that Hillgruber's "calculated risk" theory was the most intellectually sophisticated and ingenious attempt to rebut Fischer's claim of a premeditated war of aggression in 1914, but suffered from his heavy reliance on passages in Riezler's diary likely to have been forged.

In Hillgruber's opinion, after the war had begun, a split occurred within the German leadership between the moderate imperialism of the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who wished for territorial gains if they could be obtained, but was prepared to settle for a peace based on the pre-1914 status quo, and a more radical group centered on General Erich Ludendorff and the rest of the Third Supreme Command who wanted total victory over all of Germany's enemies, no matter what the cost, and very wide-ranging annexations in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Hillgruber wrote:To understand later German history one must pay special attention to a consequence of the Eastern situation in the autumn of 1918 that has often been overlooked: the widely shared and strangely irrational misconceptions concerning the end of the war that found such currency in the Weimar period.

In the 1960s and 1970s Hillgruber was one of the leaders of a group of German historians - comprising Klaus Hildebrand, Gunter Moltman and J. Henke - who argued that, far from being haphazard, Hitler possessed and attempted to execute a coherent and detailed foreign-policy programme aiming at nothing less than world conquest.

Hillgruber argued that after the conquest of the Soviet Union, Hitler wanted to seize most of Africa, to build a huge navy, and (in alliance with both the Japanese and the British) to engage the United States in a "War of the Continents" for world domination.

[54] As Hillgruber described it: After the creation of a European continental empire buttressed by the conquest of Russia, a second stage of imperial expansion was to follow with the acquisition of complementary territory in Central Africa and a system of bases to support a strong surface fleet in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean.

[57] Hillgruber believed that the interwar period was dominated by a "Cold War" between Britain and the Soviet Union, and that intense Anglo-Soviet competition for worldwide spheres of influence gave Germany the room to maneuver and to assert its interests after the defeat of 1918 as, at various times, both Moscow and London sought better relations with Berlin.

[63] The other war - which Hitler both caused and most decidedly did want (as evidenced in part by Mein Kampf) - was the German-Soviet one, a savage, merciless and brutal all-out struggle of racial and ideological extermination between German National Socialism and Soviet Communism.

In support of this argument, Hillgruber quoted from a letter written by General Eduard Wagner, who was one of the officers involved in the abortive putsch of 1938, who wrote to his wife just before the invasion of Poland, "We believe we will make quick work of the Poles, and in truth, we are delighted at the prospect.

[86] Mason contended that, when faced with the deep socio-economic crisis, the Nazi leadership had decided to embark upon a ruthless "smash and grab" foreign policy of seizing territory in Eastern Europe which could be pitilessly plundered to support living-standards in Germany.

[135] In his highly controversial 1986 essay "Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45" ("The Collapse in the East 1944/45") from his book Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of Ruin), Hillgruber highlighted the sufferings of Germans in what was then eastern Germany, who had to flee or were expelled or killed by the Red Army.

[3][5][10] Hillgruber described the efforts to evacuate the German population, much of which was hopelessly bungled by corrupt and incompetent Nazi Party officials, and the savage and desperate fighting which marked the bloody climax of the war on the Eastern Front.

[137] In this way, Hillgruber argued "that the amputation of the Reich in favor of a greater Poland was a war aim of the Allies long before Auschwitz", and asserted that the loss of the German eastern territories was due to anti-German prejudices.

Hillgruber wrote that: The mighty happenings between the autumn of 1944 and the spring of 1945 still demand a description and treatment which keeps in view the events on the world historical stage, and yet illustrates the sufferings, deeds, ambitions and failings of men as individuals.

Perhaps the last great demand on this historiography will be to form a comprehensive picture of the collapse of the battle fronts, the conquest of eastern Central Europe, and the shattering of the Third Reich and the fall of the Germanic East, together with all the things that these developments mean.

[183]Joachim Fest defended Hillgruber in an essay entitled "Encumbered Remembrance", first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 16 August 1986, by arguing that Habermas himself was guilty of euphemistic language such as labelling dekulakization as "the expulsion of the kulaks".

[191] Hillgruber defended his call for the identification with the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in an interview with the Rheinischer Merkur newspaper on 31 October 1986, on the ground that he was only trying "…to experience things from the perspective of the main body of the population".

[108] In another essay first published in the Die Zeit newspaper on 7 November 1986, Habermas wrote that: "This longing for the unframed memories from the perspective of the veterans can now be satisfied by reading Andreas Hillgruber's presentation of the events on the Eastern Front in 1944-45.

[214] Finally, Hillgruber accused Habermas of being behind the "agitation and psychic terror" suffered by non-Marxist professors in the late 1960s, and warned him that if he was trying to bring back "...that unbearable atmosphere that ruled in those years at West German universities, then he is deluding himself".

[227] Maier concluded that through Hillgruber believed Hitler to have "maniacal" views, his Germany as the threatened "land in the middle" geopolitics-Primat der Aussenpolitik approach to history meant the last stand of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front was still "sub specie necessitatis" (under the sight of necessity).

[232] Evans wrote that Hillgruber was simply wrong when he claimed that the Polish government-in-exile in London had ambitions for annexing eastern Germany, and that the Poles were opposed to the west-ward expansion of their nation, preferring instead that Poland be restored to its pre-September 1939 borders.

[241] Likewise, Evans maintained that Hillgruber had ignored the widespread popularity of völkisch anti-Semitic, eugenic and Social Darwinist ideas in Germany in the 1880s-1890s, which may not had an immediate political impact at the time, but did provide the intellectual atmosphere which made the Third Reich possible.

[242] Against Evans, Anderson wrote that Hillgruber was right when he claimed that General Władysław Sikorski and other leading Polish politicians supported by Churchill wished to annex East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania from 1940 onwards.

Finally, Hillgruber's projection of Central Europe as the common scene, and victim, of the tragedies he related, signally failed to situate the Jews historically within it; but political in impulse, it captured the current position of the Germans, and some of its possible consequences, remarkable well.

[250]The American historian Peter Baldwin in the 1990 book Reworking the Past commented on the cold and clinical way in which Hillgruber spoke of the Holocaust in contrast to his passionate anger about the fate of the Germans killed or expelled in 1945-46.

The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw in the 2000 edition of his book The Nazi Dictatorship argued that Hillgruber's approach was flawed as it was based on the assumption that to "understand" a period in history required one to "identify" with one side or the other.