[2] Along similar lines, in a 1976 article, Hildebrand commented on left-wing historians of the Nazi Germany that in his view they were: theoretically fixed, are vainly concerned with functional explanations of the autonomous force in history and as a result frequently contribute towards its trivialization.
[3]Hildebrand has argued that the distinction drawn by the functionalists between the Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews in the German-occupied parts of the Soviet Union in 1941-42 and between the rest of the Shoah is largely meaningless.
Though Hildebrand is a leading advocate of the totalitarianism school and rejects any notion of generic fascism as intellectually inadequate, he does believe that the Third Reich was characterized by what he deems "authoritarian anarchy".
However, Hildebrand believes in contrast to the work of Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen that the "authoritarian anarchy" caused by numerous competing bureaucracies strengthened, not weakened Hitler's power.
[13] A rival fraction whom Hildebrand calls the "agrarians" centered around the agrarian leader Richard Walther Darré, the Party "race theorist" Alfred Rosenberg and the Reichsfũhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, favored an anti-industrial and anti-urban "blood and soil" ideology, expansion at the expense of the Soviet Union in order to acquire Lebensraum, alliance with Britain and opposition to the restoration of overseas colonies as threatening German racial purity.
[14] Another fraction, who Hildebrand refers to as the Wilhelmine Imperialists and whose leading personality was Hermann Göring, advocated at minimum the restoration of the borders of 1914 and the overseas empire, a zone of influence for Germany in Eastern Europe, and greater emphasis on traditional Machtpolitik as opposed to Hitler's racist vision of an endless and merciless Social Darwinist struggle between different "races" for lebensraum.
In the mid-1980s, Hildebrand sat on a committee together with Thomas Nipperdey and Michael Stürmer in charge of vetting the publications issued by the Research Office of the West German Ministry of Defence.
[24][25] Hildebrand argued that in response to concentrations of the Red Army near in the border in the spring of 1941, Hitler engaged in a flucht nach vorn ("flight forward"-i.e. responding to a danger by charging on rather than retreating).
[28] In a 1995 introduction to an essay about German-American relations by Detlef Junker, Hildebrand asserted that first Britain and then the United States in the 19th-20th centuries had a tendency to be highly ignorant of Central European affairs, and likewise had a propensity for engaging in "black legend" type of propaganda against Germany.