page_title: Andreas Hillgruber
section_title: Other historians react, and Hillgruber's defence
hierarchical_section_title: Andreas Hillgruber / The Historikerstreit / Other historians react, and Hillgruber's defence
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Gerhard Weinberg
context_page_description: Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s.
  In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944-45 and the genocide waged against the Jews. British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as a result of the Historikerstreit.
context_section_description: With his favorable description of Wehrmacht activities, Hillgruber drew the anger of the Marxist philosopher Jürgen Habermas who rebuked Hillgruber in a feuilleton (opinion piece) entitled “A Kind of Settlement of Damages” published on 11 July 1986 in Die Zeit. Habermas attacked Hillgruber for allegedly praising the "tested senior officials" in the Nazi Party in the East in Zweierlei Untergang. In fact, Hillgruber had written no such sentence. What Hillgruber had written was a lengthy sentence in which he had commented that different officials of the Nazi Party in eastern Germany evacuated the German public with varying degrees of success. What Habermas had done was to edit Hillgruber's sentence selectively and remove the customary ellipsis that indicate that something is being left out of the quote to produce the sentence about the Nazi Party's "tested senior officials". Hillgruber was enraged at what he considered to be a fabricated quote being attributed to him, which he called a "scandal". Many, such as the British historian Richard J. Evans (who was otherwise highly critical of Hillgruber's historical work), felt that this was an intellectually disreputable method of attacking Hillgruber. In addition, Habermas claimed in a sentence where Hillgruber wrote that Hitler believed that only through the genocide of the Jews “could” Germany become the world’s greatest power that Hillgruber’s use of the word “could” might have indicated that he shared Hitler’s perspective. Habermas wrote: "Since Hillgruber does not use the verb in the subjunctive, one does not know whether the historian has adopted the perspective of the particulars this time too".
  It was Habermas's attack in Die Zeit in July 1986 that first drew attention to Zweierlei Untergang, which had until then been an obscure book published in the spring of 1986 by the Siedler press of Berlin. Habermas wrote in his essay first published in Die Zeit newspaper on 11 July 1986 that the work of Hillgruber in glorifying the last days of the German Army on the Eastern Front was, together with the work of Michael Stürmer and Ernst Nolte, intended to serve as a "...kind of NATO philosophy colored with German nationalism". Habermas argued that Hillgruber's claims that Allied plans for the borders of a post-war Germany were due to anti-German prejudices and a "cliché-image of Prussia" was absurd, and that "it does not occur to Hillgruber that the structure of power in the Reich could actually have had something to do, as the Allies had assumed, with the social structure especially well-preserved in Prussia". Writing of Hillgruber's intentionist theories about the Holocaust, Habermas claimed that Hillgruber wrote in such a way as to imply that even top Nazis were opposed to the Shoah, and were only reluctantly forced to participate in the "Final Solution" by Hitler.  Apart from philosopher Habermas, numerous historians took issue with Hillgruber's essay, including Hans Mommsen, Eberhard Jäckel, Heinrich August Winkler, Martin Broszat, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and Wolfgang Mommsen.
  Criticism centered on a number of areas. The following points were raised against Hillgruber:
  Those historians who take a functionalist line on the origins of the Shoah like Richard J. Evans felt that Hillgruber attributed too much responsibility for the Shoah to Hitler. Evans went on to write that Hillgruber had down-played both the level and the virulence of anti-Semitism in pre-1914 Germany, writing that Wilhelm II and his Court were a center of a vicious anti-Semitism that Hitler could have easily approved of.
  Hillgruber largely ignored the fact that the reason why Soviet troops were in Germany in 1945 was because Germany had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.
  Hillgruber mostly ignored the fact that the same troops fighting to save German civilians from the Soviets were also allowing the Nazis to continue the Holocaust. The Israeli historian Omer Bartov commented that it was simply disgusting on the part of Hillgruber to call upon historians to "identify" with German troops fighti
caption: The American historian Gerhard Weinberg
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