achieve through a mixture of bribery and blackmail in the form of a vastly expanded German navy. The huge build-up in the Navy known as the Tirpitz Plan spearheaded by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz with his Riskflotte (Risk Fleet) concept of creating a sufficiently powerful fleet that Britain could never risk war with, had the opposite effect from the one intended on Britain. Instead of leading British leaders to conclude that they could never risk a war with Germany, and therefore must ally themselves with the Reich, the build-up in German naval power led to the Anglo-German naval race of the early 20th century, and Britain aligning herself against Germany. Hillgruber maintained that influenced by Friedrich von Holstein, Wilhelm came to believe in the inevitability of a "race war" in Eastern Europe between the "Teutonic race" and "Slavic race", which ultimately came to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hillgruber argued that Wilhelm's policy of Weltpolitik (World Politics) which he launched with great fanfare in 1897 had with the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 ended in failure, and that thereafter Germany was forced to retreat into a defensive posture in the "bastion" of Central Europe with Austria-Hungary forming the crucial "land bridge" to the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. To some extent he agreed with Fritz Fischer's assessment that the differences between Imperial, Weimar and Nazi foreign policy were of degree rather than kind. Moreover, he accepted Fischer's argument that Germany was primarily responsible for World War I, but as a follower of the Primat der Aussenpolitik ("primacy of foreign policy") school, Hillgruber rejected Fischer's Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic policy") argument as to why Germany started the First World War. During the so-called "Fischer Controversy" which coalesced the German historical profession in the early 1960s, Hillgruber stood apart from the various right-wing historians who attempted to rebut Fischer, such as Gerhard Ritter, Hans Herzfeld, Egmont Zechlin, and Karl Dietrich Erdmann, by accepting Fischer's arguments in part instead of attempting to rebut Fischer in toto. Hillgruber argued in the aftermath of Fischer's 1961 book Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grasping at World Power) that the old distinction made by the Swiss historian Walter Hofer between the "outbreak" of World War I in 1914, in which all of the Great Powers were equally at fault, and the "unleashing" of World War II in 1939, in which Germany was exclusively responsible, was no