pride, they argued, developed into hubris. Since 1950, historians such as Fischer, Wehler and Hans Mommsen have drawn a harsh indictment of the German elite from 1870 to 1945, who were accused of promoting authoritarian values; being solely responsible for launching World War I; sabotaging the democratic Weimar Republic; and aiding and abetting the Nazi dictatorship in internal repression, war, and genocide. In the view of Wehler, Fischer and their supporters, only the German defeat in 1945 put an end to the "premodern" social structure, which had led to and then sustained traditional German authoritarianism and its more radical variant, National Socialism. Wehler has asserted that the effects of the traditional power elite in maintaining power up to 1945 "and in many respects even beyond that" took the form of: a penchant for authoritarian politics; a hostility toward democracy in the educational and party system; the influence of preindustrial leadership groups, values and ideas; the tenacity of German state ideology; the myth of the bureaucracy; the superimposition of caste tendencies and class distinctions; and the manipulation of political antisemitism. Another version of the thesis emerged in the United States in the 1950s to the 1960s, when historians such as Fritz Stern and George Mosse examined ideas and culture in 19th-century Germany, especially those of the virulently anti-Semitic movement. Mosse and Stern both concluded that the intellectual and cultural elites in Germany by and large chose to consciously reject modernity and along with it those groups they identified with modernity, such as Jews, and embraced anti-Semitism as the basis for their (world-view). However, in recent years, Stern has abandoned his conclusion and now argues against the thesis, holding the views of the movement to be a mere "dark undercurrent" in Imperial Germany. In 1990, Jürgen Kocka wrote about the s theories: Yet, at the same time, researches looked back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to uncover the deeper roots of the Third Reich. Through comparisons with England, France, the United States, or simply "the West", they attempted to identify the peculiarities of Germany history, those structures and processes, experiences, and turning points, which while they may not have led directly to National Socialism, nevertheless hindered the long term development of liberal democracy in Germany and eventually facilitated the triumph of fascism. Many authors made various contributions to the elaboration of this argument, usually without actually using the word . Helmuth