For there to be security in Europe, Haffner insisted (in original italics) that "[The] "German Reich must disappear, and the last seventy-five years of Germany history must be erased. The Germans must retrace their steps to the point where they took the wrong path--to the year 1866"" (the year when, on the battlefield of Königgrätz, Prussia removed Austrian protection from the smaller German states). Articulating a thesis he was to defend at length his last (dictated) work, "Von Bismarck zu Hitler" (1987), Haffner maintained that "No peace is conceivable with the Prussian Reich which was born at that time, and whose last logical expression is no other than Nazi Germany". Germany should be returned to an historical pattern of regional states bound by confederal arrangements that are European and not exclusively national.