the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on July 31, 1986, went on to praise Nolte for daring to open up new questions for research. Hildebrand wrote that Habermas had done a "bad service to politics and denies scholarship outright". Hildebrand accused Habermas of fabricating the sentence in which Hillgruber had praised the "tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP", noting that Hillgruber wrote a long sentence in which Habermas had selectively quoted from without ellipsis. Hildebrand wrote that Hillgruber had understood history as a tragedy and "... this fact escaped Habermas, perhaps due to a lack of expertise, perhaps also due to an unfamiliarity with historical research". Hildebrand wrote that Hillgruber was not trying to glorify the Wehmarcht as Habermas was charging; instead maintaining Hillgruber approach in writing history from the viewpoint of the average German soldier on the Eastern Front in 1944-45 was "legitimate and necessary". Hildebrand praised Hillgruber for his new approach to the Eastern Front and accused Habermas of having a "simplistic image of history... without regard to new sources, new realizations, and new questions". Hildebrand ended his essay with the remarking that Habermas should have just remained silent as he nothing intelligent to say as he was suffering from a "loss of reality and Manichaenism". Nolte's letter to Die Zeit, 1 August 1986 Nolte for his part, started to write a series of letters to various newspapers such as Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung attacking his critics; for an example, in a letter to Die Zeit on 1 August 1986, Nolte complained that his critic Jürgen Habermas was attempting to censor him for expressing his views, and accused Habermas of being the one responsible for blocking him from attending the Römerberg Conversations. In the same letter, Nolte described himself as the unnamed historian whose views on the reasons for the Holocaust had at dinner party in May 1986 in Bonn had caused Saul Friedländer to walk out in disgust that Habermas had alluded to an earlier letter Habermas's letter to the FAZ, 11 August 1986 Responding to the essay "The Age of Tyrants: History and Politics" by Klaus Hildebrand defending Nolte and Hillgruber, Habermas wrote that Hillgruber's approach "perhaps would be a legitimate point of view for the memoirs of a veteran-but not for a historian writing from the distance of four decades". Habermas wrote: "In his essay Ernst Nolte treats the 'so-called' annihilation of the Jews