ways seeking a version of history that allowed for the continuity of German history to be celebrated despite the Nazi era. Mommsen argued that the Nazi period, was however painful and distasteful, part of German history and the memory of which was something all Germans had to face. Mommsen wrote the Bitburg ceremony of 1985 was intended to "be a kind of line drawn under that segment of German history. But it turned out that, at least in terms of intellectual honesty, that cannot be done, and that no matter what we do, other peoples will not be willing to accept such an act from us". Mommsen charged that Nolte was attempting to egregiously whitewash the German past. Mommsen argued that Nolte was attempting a "justification" of Nazi crimes and making "inappropriate" comparisons of the Holocaust with other genocides. Mommsen wrote that Nolte intended to provide the sort of history that would allow Germans to feel good about being Germans by engaging in “…an explanatory strategy that…will be seen as a justification of National Socialist crimes by all those who are still under the influence of the extreme anti-Soviet propaganda of National Socialism". Mommsen wrote about Hillgruber's demands that historians identified with the "justified" German defence of the Eastern Front that:Andreas Hillgruber recently attempted to accord a relative historical justification to the Wehrmacht campaign in the East and the desperate resistance of the army in the East after the summer of 1944. He argued that the goal was to prevent the German civilian population from falling into the hands of the Red Army. However, the chief reason, he argued, was that the defense of German cities in the East had become tantamount to defending Western civilization. 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. 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 meant that the gigantic murder machinery of the Holocaust would be allowed to continue to run. All this, the essay argued, was justified as long as the fronts held. Hillgruber's essay is extremely problematic when viewed from