during the July 20th putsch as making the right moral choice, and felt that Hillgruber had slandered those Germans who chose to resist the Nazi regime as traitors who let down their country in its hour of need. Perels wrote that Hillgruber's identification with those Wehrmacht officers who stayed loyal to Hitler with Germany meant excluding all of the Germans suffering in the concentration camps in 1944-45 from history. In the same way, Perels wrote that Meir had praised those Germans who joined the Wehrmacht as doing their duty to the Fatherland which Perels felt disparaged those Germans who refused to join the Wehrmacht and were sent to concentration camps. Perels felt that both Meir and even more so Hillgruber with his call for historians to "identify" with the Wehrmacht had equated Germany with those who fought for Hitler, charging this way of writing history excluded those Germans opposed to Hitler. Perels used as an example of what he arguing against that in 1956 the West German Supreme Court upheld the death sentences handed down to Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the lawyer Hans von Dohnányi as legal, under the grounds that Hitler was the legal leader of Germany and Bonhoeffer and Dohnayi were guilty of treason by working for his overthrow, meaning their executions by the SS were lawful and the judge and prosecutor in their case did nothing wrong. Perels wrote that Hillgruber's book Zweierlei Untergang which praised those German officers who stayed to Hitler as making the correct ethical choice served to put him in the same moral camp as the judges of the Supreme Court who regarded Bonhoeffer and Dohnányi as traitors who were properly executed. Perels argued it was time for historians to have a "serious discussion about the hereditary encumbrance of National Socialism". In this regard, Perels argued that far being "The Past That Will Not Go Away", that the memory of the Nazi period was a subject that the Germans were only tentatively even in the 1980s starting to explore. “On the Historkerstreit” In an essay first published in the Evangelische Kommentare magazine in February 1987, Geiss called Nolte's claim about Weizmann's letter being a Jewish “declaration of war” as “hair-raising nonsense” Geiss wrote that both essays in Zweierlei Untergang were "respectable", but that it was "irritating" and ill-advised on the part of Hillgruber to publish them together, with the implied moral equivalence