of "the German east". Hillgruber had been born and grew up in the town of Angerburg (modern Węgorzewo, Poland) in what was then East Prussia and often wrote nostalgically about his lost Heimat. Hillgruber expressed much anger in Zweierlei Untergang about the Oder-Neisse line, the expulsions of the Germans from Eastern Europe and the partitioning of Germany, all of which he used to argue that the policies of the Allies towards the Germans during and after World War II were just as horrific as the Holocaust. In particular, Hillgruber accused Winston Churchill and the rest of the British government of being obsessed with anti-German and anti-Prussian prejudices going back to at least 1907, and maintained it was always Britain's goal to "smash" the German Reich. Hillgruber accused the British of holding "a negative image of Prussia, exaggerated to the point of becoming a myth", which according to Hillgruber led them to seek the complete dismantlement of the Prussian-German state in World War II and blinded them to the fact that only a strong Central European state led by Prussia could have prevented the "flooding" of Central Europe by the Red Army. Hillgruber in Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 was also concerned with the "justified" last stand of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in 1944-45 as Hillgruber gave a lengthy account of Red Army war crimes against German civilians. Hillgruber wrote the Wehrmacht in 1944-1945 was fighting "for a centuries-old area of German settlement, for the home of millions of Germans who lived in a core of the German Reich - namely in eastern Prussia, in the provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, East Brandenburg and Pomerania". Hillgruber wrote: "If the historian gazes on the winter catastrophe of 1944-45, only one position is possible...he must identify himself with the concrete fate of the German population in the East and with the desperate and sacrificial exertions of the German Army of the East and the German Baltic navy, which sought to defend the population from the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapine, the arbitrary killing, and the compulsory deportations." Besides for his call for historians to "identify" with the Wehrmacht, Hillgruber condemned the putsch of 20 July 1944 as irresponsible and wrong and praised those Wehrmacht officers who stayed loyal to Hitler as making the correct moral choice. Hillgruber argued that the need to protect German