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 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The 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.
Marshal Ion Antonescu and Adolf Hitler at the Führerbau in Munich (June 1941). Joachim von Ribbentrop and Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel in the background. Hillgruber's first book, 1953's Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu concerned German-Romanian relations in the years 1938–44.
Dead German civilians in Nemmersdorf, East Prussia. A Tragedy Equal to the Holocaust? Hillgruber claimed in Zweierlei Untergang that the killings and expulsion of Germans during the last days of World War II and immediately there afterwards were just as great of a tragedy as the Shoah.
The American historian Gerhard Weinberg
The Historikerstreit was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves. The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS were buried. The service was attended by President of the United States Ronald Reagan, who had been invited by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the nation's Nazi past, and inspired a slew of criticisms and defenses that made up the initiating arguments of the Historikerstreit. The dispute quickly outgrew the initial context of the Bitburg controversy, however, and became a series of broader historiographic, political, and critical debates about how the episode of the Holocaust should be understood in Germany's history and identity.
Nolte called the Auschwitz death camp and the other German death camps of World War II a "copy" of the Soviet Gulag camps.
Skulls of Khmer Rouge victims. Nolte's admirer Joachim Fest was to defend Nolte by arguing that Habermas was a racist for arguing that it was natural for Cambodians to practice genocide and unnatural for Germans.
Adolf Hitler. The German historian Heinrich August Winkler wrote: "No German historian has ever accorded Hitler such a sympathetic treatment” as did Nolte.