the perspective of a democratically constituted community that orients itself towards Western moral and political standards.There is no getting around the bitter truth that the defeat of National Socialist Germany was not only in the interest of the peoples who were bulldozed by Hitler's war and of the peoples who were selected by his henchmen for annihilation or oppression or exploitation - it was also in the interest of the Germans. Accordingly, parts of the gigantic scenery of the Second World War were, at least as far as we were concerned, totally senseless, even self-destructive. We cannot escape this bitter truth by assigning partial responsibility to other partners who took part in the war. Mommsen wrote the attempts to "strengthen" the Federal Republic by writing nationalistic histories that meant to end any sense of German shame would in fact have the extract opposite effect. Also in an essay published in the December 1, 1986 edition of The New Republic, the American historian Charles S. Maier rejected Nolte's claim of moral equivalence between the actions of the Soviet Communists and German Nazis under the grounds that while the former were extremely brutal, the latter sought the total extermination of a people, namely the Jews. "What May Not, Cannot Be" The German historian Horst Möller in an essay entitled "What May Not Be, Cannot Be" first published in the December 1986 edition of Beiträge zur Konfliktforschung magazine argued that Nolte was not attempting to "excuse" Nazi crimes by comparing it with other crimes of others, but was instead trying to explain the Nazi war-crimes. Möller wrote that Habermas was highly prejudiced by his left-wing beliefs and did not really understand the work of Nolte, Hillgruber and Hildebrand, whom Möller wrote were all serious historians. Möller argued that Nolte was only attempting to explain "irrational" events rationally, and that the Nazis really did believe that they were confronted with a world Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy that was out to destroy Germany. Möller asserted that all historical events are unique and thus "singular". Möller defended Hillgruber by arguing that: Hillgruber comes to the conclusion, on the basis of British files that were declassified in the meantime, that the destruction of the German Reich was planned before the mass murder of the Jews became known - and that the mass murder does not explain the end of the Reich ... It is hardly disputable that the attempt