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Andreas Hillgruber
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Andreas Fritz Hillgruber (January 18, 1925 - May 8, 1989) was a conservative West German historian.
gruber was born in Angerburg, Germany (modern Wegorzewo, Poland) near the then East Prussian city of Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia). Hillgruber served in the German Army in the years 1943-1945 and spent the years 1945-1948 as a POW in France). After his release, he studied at the University of Göttingen where he received a PhD in 1952.
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Andreas Fritz Hillgruber (January 18, 1925 - May 8, 1989) was a conservative West German historian.
Biography
Hillgruber was born in Angerburg, Germany (modern Wegorzewo, Poland) near the then East Prussian city of Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad, Russia). Hillgruber served in the German Army in the years 1943-1945 and spent the years 1945-1948 as a POW in France). After his release, he studied at the University of Göttingen where he received a PhD in 1952. As a student, Hillgruber was a leading protégée of the medievalist, Percy Ernst Schramm, an academic whom as Eberhard Jäckel commented regarded World War II as a normal war that regrettably the Nazis were not as skilled at waging as they should have been. Much of Hillgruber's early work reflected Schramm's influence. He spent the decade 1954-1964 working as school teacher. In 1960, he married Karin Zieran, with whom he had three children. Hillgruber worked as a professor at the University of Marburg (1965-1968), University of Freiburg (1968-1972) and at the University of Cologne (1972-1989). In the late 1960s, he was a target of radical student protesters. He died in Cologne of throat cancer.
Work as an historian
Hillgruber's area of expertise was German history from 1871 to 1945, especially its political, diplomatic and military aspects. He argued for understanding this period as one of continuities. In his first address as a professor at Freiburg in 1969, Hillgruber argued for understanding the entire "Bismarck Reich" as one of continuities between 1871-1945. For Hillgruber, the continuities of the "Bismarck Reich" were certain mentalité amongst the German elite, namely a Weltanschuauung that emphasized "either-or" outlook, Social Darwinism, a deterministic understanding of history, and dreams of expansionism both in Europe and all over the world. However, through Hillgruber paid attention to structural factors, in his opinion, it was the actions of individuals that made the difference.
In the early 1950s he still saw World War II as a conventional war, but by 1965 Hillgruber was arguing that the war was for Hitler a vicious, ideological war in which no mercy was to be given to one's enemies. In his first book, 1953's Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu (Hitler, King Carol and Marshal Antonescu), a study of relations between Germany and Romania from 1938-1944, Hillgruber argued for the fundamental normality of German foreign policy with the foreign policy of the Reich being no different from that of any other power. By contrast, in his 1965 book, Hitlers Strategie (Hitler's Strategy), Hillgruber examined the grand strategic decision-making progress in 1940-1941 and concluded that while Hitler had to adjust to diplomatic, strategic and operational military realities, whenever possible his decisions were influenced by racist, anti-Semitic and Social Darwinist beliefs.
Hillgruber’s writings on the Soviet Union show certain constancies as well as changes over the years. He always argued that the Soviet Union was a brutal, expansionary, totalitarian power, in many ways similar to Nazi Germany. But, on the other hand, he argued that Moscow’s foreign policy was conducted in a way that was rational and realistic, while the foreign policy of Berlin during the Nazi era was completely irrational and unrealistic. The turning point in Hillgruber’s attitude came in 1954 when he was in involved in a celebrated debate with Gerhard Weinberg and Hans Rothfels on the pages of the Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Together with Hans-Günther Seraphim, Hillgruber had argued that Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had been a “preventive war", forced on Hitler to prevent an imminent Soviet attack on Germany. So effectively did Weinberg and Rothfels demolish Hillgruber’s arguments that he repudiated his previous views. Thereafter, he maintained that Operation Barbarossa had been prompted solely by Hitler’s ideological belief in the need for Lebensraum (Living Space) in Russia, where a massive German colonization effort was planned and the entire Russian people were to be reduced to slave status. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hillgruber often attacked historians such as David Irving and Viktor Suvorov for putting forward the same arguments as he had done in 1954. Along the same lines, he criticized the American neo-Nazi historian David Hoggan, who argued that the British had provoked World War II in 1939.
The exchange between Hillgruber and Weinberg on the pages of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte marked the beginning of a long series of clashes between the two historians over interprations of German foreign policy. In a 1956 book review of Hillgruber's Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu, Weinberg criticized Hillgruber for engaging in what Weinberg considered an apologia for Germany in World War Two
Historical perspective
Hillgruber was an Intentionist on the origins of the Holocaust debate, arguing that Adolf Hitler was the driving force behind the Holocaust. This set Hillgruber against Functionalist historians such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, whose "revisionist" claims on the origins of the Holocaust Hillgruber found distasteful. Hillgruber was well known for arguing that there was a close connection between Hitler's foreign policy and anti-Semitic policies and that Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 was linked to the decision to initiate the Holocaust. Hillgruber argued that the Kernstück (Nucleus) of Hitler's racist Weltanschauung (world-view) was to be found in Mein Kampf. He believed that the Holocaust was meant to be launched only with the invasion of the Soviet Union. In Hillgruber's view, Hitler's frequent references to "Judaeo-Bolshevism", to describe both Jews and Communism, betrayed his desire to destroy both simultaneously.
Hillgruber took a rather extreme “No Hitler, no Holocaust” position. He believed it was Adolf Hitler and Hitler alone who made the Holocaust possible. He argued that even if the Nazis had come to power under some other leader such as Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels for example, the Jews would have suffered persecution and discrimination, but not genocide. He maintained that the other Nazi leaders such as Göring, Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler willingly participated in the Holocaust, as did many other Germans in the every-widening “rings of responsibility” for the Holocaust, but that without Hitler's decisive role, there would have been no Holocaust.
For Hillgruber, there were many elements of continuity in German foreign policy in the 1871-1945 period, especially in regard to Eastern Europe. To some extent he agreed with Fritz Fischer's assessment that the differences between Imperial, Weimar and Nazi foreign policy were of degree rather than kind. Moreover, he accepted Fischer's argument that Germany was primarily responsible for World War I, but as a follower of the Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign policy") school, Hillgruber rejected Fischer's Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic policy") argument as to why Germany started the First World War. Hillgruber believed that what had happened in 1914 was a “calculated risk” on the part of the Imperial German government that had gone horribly wrong. Germany had encouraged Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia in an attempt to break the informal Triple Entente alliance between the United Kingdom, France and Russia by provoking a crisis that would concern Russia only. Hillgruber maintained that Germany did not want to cause a world war in 1914, but, by pursuing a high-risk diplomatic strategy of provoking what was supposed to be only a limited war in the Balkans, had inadvertently caused the wider conflict.
But, for Hillgruber, the changes introduced by National Socialist Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy) were so radical as to be almost differences of kind rather than degree. He argued that Nazi foreign policy was an extremely radical version of traditional German foreign policy. Furthermore, he argued that what during the Weimar era had been the ends became, for the Nazis, just the means. He presented a case that goals such as the re-militarization of the Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria, which had been the end-goals during the Weimar period, were just the beginning for the Nazis. Unlike the Weimar government, the Nazis' desire to re-militarize was only a step on the road to the complete domination of all Europe, and eventual world domination.
Hillgruber argued that Adolf Hitler had a Stufenplan (stage by stage plan) for conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe. According to this argument, the first stage of Hitler's plan consisted of the military build-up of German strength and the achievement of the Weimar Republic's traditional foreign policy goals. The second stage was to be a series of swift regional wars to destroy such states as Poland, Czechoslovakia and France. The third stage was to be a war to liquidate the Soviet Union and what Hitler regarded as its "Judaeo-Bolshevik" regime. The fourth stage was to be a war against the United States by the now Greater Germany in alliance with the British Empire and Japan. Hillgruber argued that after the conquest of the Soviet Union, Hitler wanted to seize most of Africa, to build a huge navy and in alliance with both the Japanese and the British to engage with the United States in a “War of the Continents" for world domination. Hillgruber maintained that the strategy of Blitzkrieg was based largely upon economic factors, namely, that for the earlier stages of the stufenplan, Germany did not have the economic resources for a long war, and as such, a military programme based upon quality, not quantity, was the most rational use of German economic capacity. Hillgruber argued that Hitler's desire to postpone the final struggle with the United States to the last stage of the stufenplan was likewise determined by economic considerations, namely that only a Germany with sufficient lebensraum ruling most of Eurasia and Africa would be immune to the effects of blockade, and have the necessary economic resources to match the enormous economic capacity of the United States. In the debate between the "Continentists" such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Axel Kuhn, and Eberhard Jäckel, who argued that Hitler wanted only to seize Europe, and the "Globalists", who argued that Hitler wanted to conquer the entire world, Hillgruber was definitely in the latter camp.
Hillgruber regarded Hitler as a fanatical ideologue with a firmly fixed programme, and criticized the view of him as a grasping opportunist with no real beliefs other than the pursuit of power--a thesis promoted by such British historians as A.J.P. Taylor and Alan Bullock, which he thought profoundly shallow and facile. Moreover, he categorically rejected Taylor’s contention that the German invasion of Poland was an “accident” precipitated by diplomatic blunders. Hillgruber argued adamantly that the German invasion of Poland was a war of aggression caused by Hitler’s ideological belief in war and the need for Lebensraum (Living Space). World War II, for Hillgruber, really consisted of two wars. One was an europäisches Normalkrieg (“normal European war”) between the Western powers and Germany, a conflict which Hitler caused but did not really want. The other war--which Hitler both caused and most decidedly did want (as evidenced in part by Mein Kampf) was the German-Soviet one, a savage, merciless and brutal all-out struggle of racial and ideological extermination between German National Socialism and Soviet Communism.
In Hillgruber's opinion, Hitler's foreign policy programme was totally unrealistic and incapable of being realized. Hillgruber argued that Hitler's assumption that a German "renunciation" of naval and colonial claims in exchange for British recognition of all of Europe as laying within the German sphere of influence was based on an unviable notion that British interests were limited only to the naval and colonial spheres. Hillgruber noted that Britain was just as much a European as a world power, and would never accept so far-reaching a disruption of the balance of power as Hitler proposed in the 1920s in Mein Kampf.. Likewise, Hillgruber argued that Hitler's contempt for the Soviet Union, especially the fighting power of the Red Army was a dangerous illusion
Hillgruber noted that in 1939, when war threatened over Poland that unlike in 1938 when war threatened to occur over Czechoslovakia, that Hitler received overwhelming support from the Wehrmacht leadership.The reasons for this difference in Hillgruber’s opinion were the rampant anti-Polish feelings in the German Army. In support of this argument, Hillgruber quoted from a letter written by one of the officers involved in the abroative putsch of 1938 who wrote to his wife just before the invasion of Poland, "We believe we will make quick work of the Poles, and in truth, we are delighted at the prospect. That business must be cleared up" (Emphasis in the original) . Hillgruber noted because of anti-Polish prejudices that in 1939 Fall Weiss served to unite Hitler and the German military in a way that Fall Grün had failed to do in 1938.
Hillgruber argued that Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States before he had defeated the Soviet Union was due to Hitler's belief that the United States might quickly defeat Japan, and hence it was better to engage the Americans while they were still involved in a two front war. Likewise, Hillgruber argued that Hitler's decision to take on the United States in December 1941 was influenced by his belief that the Soviet Union would be defeated by no later then the summer of 1942.
In his 1965 book, Hitlers Strategie Hillgruber caused some controversy with his argument that the French attack on the Siegfried Line in the autumn of 1939 would have resulted in a swift German defeat. In 1969, the French historian Albert Merglen expanded upon Hillgruber's suggestion by writing PhD thesis depicting a counter-factual successful French offensive against the Siegfried Line. However, many historians have criticized both Hillgruber and Merglen for ignoring the realities of the time, and of using the advantage of historical hindsight too much in making these judgements
In the 1970s, Hillgruber, together with Klaus Hildebrand, was involved in a very acrimonious debate with Hans-Ulrich Wehler over the merits of the Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") and Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") schools. Hillgruber and Hildebrand made a case for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach to diplomatic history with the stress on examining the records of the relevant foreign ministry and studies of the foreign policy decision-making elite. Wehler, who favored the Primat der Innenpolitik, for his part contended that diplomatic history should be treated as a sub-branch of social history, calling for theoretically-based research, and argued that the real focus should be on the study of the society in question.
As a right-wing historian, Hillgruber often felt uncomfortable with the increasing left-wing influence in German academia from the late 1960s onwards In his 1974 textbook, Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1972, Hillgruber complained of radicals influenced by “the forces of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism”, and leaning towards East Germany were having too much influence in West German higher education. In the same book, Hillgruber attacked the New Left for lacking the proper methodological tools for the understanding German history. In particular, Hillgruber argued that the Primat der Innenpolitik thesis employed by historians such as Wehler was not a proper scholarly device, but was instead “an apparent scholarly legitimation” for the New Left to advance its agenda in the present.
A self-proclaimed conservative and nationalist, Hillgruber never denied nor downplayed the crimes committed in Germany's name and in no way can he be considered a Holocaust denier; but he argued that Germany as a great power had the potential to do much good for Europe. For Hillgruber, the tragedy was that this potential was never fulfilled. In his view, the problem did not lie with Germany's domination of Eastern and Central Europe, but rather with the particular way this domination was exercised by the Nazis. He argued that German-Russian, German-Polish, German-Czech, German-Hungarian and German-Jewish relations were traditionally friendly, and lamented that the Nazis had shattered these friendly ties. Others contended that these bonds of friendship had never existed, except as figments of Hillgruber's imagination. For Hillgruber, Germany's defeat in 1945 was a catastrophe that ended both the ethnic German presence in Eastern Europe and Germany as a great power in Europe. As someone from the "Germanic East", Hillgruber wrote nostalgically of the lost Heimat of East Prussia where he had grown up. Left-wing West German historians, together with their East German, Soviet, Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovakian counterparts, denounced him as a German chauvinist, racist and imperialist, and accused him of glorifying the Drang nach Osten concept.
However, Hillgruber was prepared to accept, albeit grudgingly, what he often called Germany’s “Yalta frontiers” after the Yalta Conference of 1945. What he was not prepared to accept was the partition of Germany. He often complained that the West German government was not doing enough to re-unite Germany. In a 1981 speech, he called on Bonn to create a new German nationalism based on a respect for human rights that would ensure that future generations would not lose sight of the dream of re-unification.
The Historikerstreit
Hillgruber was one of the protagonists in the so-called Historikerstreit, the
Historians' Dispute (or Historians' Controversy). Hillgruber felt that the Holocaust was a horrific tragedy, but just one of many that occurred in the 20th century. In his highly controversial 1986 essay "Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45" ("The Collapse in the East 1944/45") from his book Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of Ruin), Hillgruber highlighted the sufferings of Germans in what was then eastern Germany, who had to flee or were expelled or killed by the Red Army. He documented the mass gang-rapings of German women and girls, widespread looting and massacres of German civilians by the Soviet army. He paid homage to those who had had to evacuate the German population and to those soldiers who did their best to stem the Soviet advance. Hillgruber described the efforts to evacuate the German population, much of which was hopelessly bungled by corrupt and incompetent Nazi Party officials, and the savage and desperate fighting which marked the bloody climax of the war on the Eastern Front.
For Hillgruber, the end of the "German East", in which he had been born and grew up, was just as tragic as the Holocaust and marked the end of what he considered to be Eastern Europe's best chance for progress. The two kinds of ruin in the title were the Holocaust and the expulsion of Reichsdeutsche (Reich Germans; those Germans living in Germany) and Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside of Germany). For Hillgruber, both events, or "national catastrophes" as he preferred to call them, were equally tragic. He blamed both ultimately on the Nazis and their ideologically driven inhuman expansionism. Perhaps most controversially, however, Hillgruber described how the German Wehrmacht acted in what he regarded as a “heroic” and “self-sacrificing” way in defending the German population against against the Red Army and the "orgy of revenge" that they perpetrated in 1944-1945.
Of the two essays in Zweierlei Untergang, one was a well regarded summary (at least by those who take an Intentionalist position such as John Lukacs) of the history of the Holocaust. The other one concerned the ending of the "Germanic East". With his favorable description of Wehrmacht activities, Hillgruber drew the anger of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas who attacked Hillgruber for allegedly praising the “tested senior officials" in Nazi Party in the East. 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 “…”’s that indicate a space 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. 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. Apart from philosopher Habermas, there were numerous historians who took issue with Hillgruber’s essay included Hans Mommsen, Eberhard Jäckel, Heinrich August Winkler, Martin Broszat, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and Wolfgang Mommsen.
Criticism centered around 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.
- 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.
- That the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe (which today might come under the rubric of "ethnic cleansing") cannot be equated with the racially-based extermination of European Jewry.
- The sufferings of Germans were presented in isolation, with little reference to the sufferings of Jews, Poles, Russians, Czechs, etc. The impression given is that Germans were the primary victims of the war.
- That Hillgruber asked his readers to sympathize with the officers and men of the German Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine who fought to protect and evacuate the German population is morally indefensible.
His defenders have argued that his work shows that World War II is more morally complex than it is usually presented, and that he was merely highlighting a little known chapter of history. More importantly however, Hillgruber's historical method of "comparing" was considered by many to be "equating". This is the same criticism Ernst Nolte had faced, during the Historians' Debate.
Endnotes
Work
- Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonesu: die deutsch-rumänischen Beziehungen, 1938-1944, 1954.
- co-written with Hans-Günther Seraphim "Hitlers Entschluss zum Angriff auf Russland (Eine Entgegnung)" pages 240-254 from Vieteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 2, 1954.
- Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegsführung, 1940-1941, 1965.
- Deutschlands Rolle in der Vorgeschichte der beiden Weltkriege, 1967; translated into English by William C. Kirby as Germany And The Two World Wars, Mass. ; London: Harvard University Press, 1981.
- Kontinuität und Diskontinuität in der deutschen Aussenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler, 1969.
- Bismarcks Aussenpolitik, 1972.
- "`Die Endlösung' und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologische Programms des Nationsozialismus" pages 133-153 from Vieteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 20, 1972.
- Deutsche Geschichte, 1945-1972: Die "Deutsche Frage" in der Weltpolitik, 1974.
- "England's Place In Hitler's Plans for World Dominion" pages 5-22 from Journal of Contemporary History, Volume 9, 1974.
- Deutsche Grossmacht-und Weltpolitik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 1977.
- Otto von Bismarck: Gründer der europäischen Grossmacht Deutsches Reich, 1978.
- "Tendenzen, Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der gegenwärtigen Hitler-Forschung" pages 600-621 from Historische Zeitschrift, Volume 226, 1978.
- Europa in der Weltpolitik der Nachkriegszeit (1945-1963), 1979.
- Sowjetische Aussenpolitik im Zweten Weltkrieg, 1979.
- Die gescheiterte Grossmacht: Eine Skizze des Deutschen Reiches, 1871-1945, 1980.
- Der Zweite Weltkriege, 1939-1945: Kriegsziele und Strategie der grossen Mächte, 1982.
- Die Last der Nation: Fünf Beiträge über Deutschland und die Deutschen, 1984.
- "The Extermination of the European Jews in Its Historical Context—a Recapitulation," pages 1-15 from Yad Vashem Studies Volume 17, 1986.
- Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, 1986.
- Die Zerstörung Europas: Beiträge zur Weltkriegsepoche 1914 bis 1945, 1988.
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