Original sentence: In 1998, several younger German historians criticized Mommsen for not denouncing the Nazi past of his mentors while a university student in the 1950s
Edited sentence: According, parts of the gigantic scenery of the Second World War were, at least as far as we were concerned, totally senseless, even self-destructive.All this, the essay argued, was justified as long as the fronts held.Hillgruber’s essay is extremely problematic when viewed from the perspective of a democratically constituted community that orients itself towards Western moral and political standards.It was, as Hillgruber’s argument would have it, also justified even from today’s standpoint, despite the fact that prolonging the war in the East mean that the gigantic murder machinery of the Holocaust would be allowed to continue to run.Mommsen wrote about Andreas Hillgruber's demands that historians identified with the “justified” German defence of the Eastern Front that:“In light of the Allied war goals, which independent of Stalin’s final plans, envisioned breaking up Prussia, and destroying the defensive position of a strong, Prussian-led Central European state that could serve as a bulwark against Bolshevism, the continuation of the war in the East was justified from the viewpoint of those involved.There is no getting around the bitter truth that the defeat of National Socialist Germany was not only in the interest of the peoples who were bulldozed by Hitler’s war and of the peoples who were selected by his henchmen for annihilation or oppression or exploitation-it was also in the interest of the Germans.We cannot escape this bitter truth by assigning partial responsibility to other partners who took part in the war”In 1998, several younger German historians criticized Mommsen for not denouncing the Nazi past of his mentors while a university student in the 1950s