evidence" that Hitler "...had a clear plan for world domination..." As a conservative historian In the 1970s, Hillgruber, together with his close associate Klaus Hildebrand, was involved in a very acrimonious debate with Hans-Ulrich Wehler over the merits of the Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign politics") and Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") schools. Hillgruber and Hildebrand made a case for the traditional Primat der Aussenpolitik approach to diplomatic history with the stress on examining the records of the relevant foreign ministry and studies of the foreign policy decision-making elite. Wehler, who favored the Primat der Innenpolitik, for his part contended that diplomatic history should be treated as a sub-branch of social history, calling for theoretically based research, and argued that the real focus should be on the study of the society in question. The exchange between Wehler on one side and Hillgruber and Hildebrand on the other frequently involved charges of bad faith, intentional misquotation and suggestions that the other side did not understand history properly. In 1971, Hillgruber was a leading critic of the Quadripartite Agreement on the status of Berlin accusing the West German government and the three western powers with rights in West Berlin, namely the United States, Great Britain and France of granting approval to what he saw as the illegal Soviet occupation of eastern Germany and the equally illegitimate East German regime while at the same time accepted the partition of Berlin as permanent. Hillgruber wrote that the agreement had confirmed the "status quo minus" of Berlin, and that the agreement was too vague with the reference to the "existing conditions in the relevant area". Finally, Hillgruber charged that the West had given in by promising to limit contact between West and East Berlin and allowing a Soviet consulate to be established in West Berlin, which Hillgruber claimed was an implicit admission of the Soviet claim that West Berlin was not part of the Federal Republic. As a right-wing historian, Hillgruber often felt uncomfortable with the increasing left-wing influence in German academia from the late 1960s onwards. In his 1974 textbook, Deutsche Geschichte 1945-1972 (German History 1945-1972), Hillgruber complained that radicals influenced by "the forces of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism", and leaning towards East Germany, were having too much influence in West German higher education. In the same book, Hillgruber attacked the New Left for lacking the proper methodological tools for the understanding of