Strasser brothers, Gregor and Otto the "revolutionary socialist" fraction played no important role in the foreign policy of the Third Reich. A rival fraction whom Hildebrand calls the "agrarians" centered around the agrarian leader Richard Walther Darré, the Party "race theorist" Alfred Rosenberg and the Reichsfũhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, favored an anti-industrial and anti-urban "blood and soil" ideology, expansion at the expense of the Soviet Union in order to acquire Lebensraum, alliance with Britain and opposition to the restoration of overseas colonies as threatening German racial purity. Another fraction, who Hildebrand refers to as the Wilhelmine Imperialists and whose leading personality was Hermann Göring, advocated at minimum the restoration of the borders of 1914 and the overseas empire, a zone of influence for Germany in Eastern Europe, and greater emphasis on traditional Machtpolitik as opposed to Hitler's racist vision of an endless and merciless Social Darwinist struggle between different "races" for lebensraum. The emphasis on the restoration of German colonies implied an anti-British policy but, in general, the Wilhelmine Imperialists were cautious about the prospect of war with Britain, and preferred to restore the pre-1914 German colonial empire through diplomacy rather than war. Of the three fractions, it was the "agrarians" whose views were the closest to Hitler's programme, but Hildebrand argues that there was an important difference in that the "agrarians" saw an alliance with Britain as being the natural alignment of two "Aryan" powers, whereas for Hitler the proposed British alliance was more a matter of power politics. Since 1982, Hildebrand has worked at the University of Bonn as a professor in medieval and modern history, with a special interest in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hildebrand's major work has been in diplomatic history and the development of the nation-state. He served as editor of the series concerning the publication of the documents of German foreign policy. In the mid-1980s, Hildebrand sat on a committee together with Thomas Nipperdey and Michael Stürmer in charge of vetting the publications issued by the Research Office of the West German Ministry of Defence. The committee attracted some controversy when it refused to publish a hostile biography of Gustav Noske. In a 1983 speech, Hildebrand denied there had been a Sonderweg, and claimed that the Sonderweg applied only to the "special case" of the Nazi dictatorship In a 1984 essay, Hildebrand went further and wrote: It remains to be seen, whether future scholarship