of the Balkan front after Bulgaria's withdrawal from the war. They were instead largely determined by the fact that German troops, as "victors" held vast strategically and economically important areas of Russia.At the moment of the November 1918 ceasefire in the West, newspaper maps of the military situation showed German troops in Finland, holding a line from the Finnish fjords near Narva, down through Pskov-Orsha-Mogilev and the area south of Kursk, to the Don east of Rostov. Germany had thus secured the Ukraine. The Russian recognition of the Ukraine's separation exacted at Brest-Litovsk represented the key element in German efforts to keep Russia perpetually subservient. In addition, German troops held the Crimea and were stationed in smaller numbers in Transcaucasia. Even the unoccupied "rump" Russia appeared - with the conclusion of the German-Soviet Supplementary Treaty on 28 August 1918 - to be in firm though indirect dependency on the Reich. Thus, Hitler's long-range aim, fixed in the 1920s, of erecting a German Eastern Imperium on the ruins of the Soviet Union was not simply a vision emanating from an abstract wish. In the Eastern sphere established in 1918, this goal had a concrete point of departure. The German Eastern Imperium had already been - if only for a short time - a reality. Hillgruber argued that the Weimar Republic was only a "bridge" between the expansionism of the German Empire and the even more radical expansionism of Nazi Germany, rather than a new era in German diplomacy. In his 1974 book Grossmachtpolitik und Militarismus im 20. Jahrhundert, Hillgruber took a revisionist view of the Treaty of Versailles. Far from being an intolerably harsh "Carthaginian peace" that crippled Germany, Hillgruber argued that Versailles was actually a moderate peace treaty that left the German state intact and with the potential to once again be a great power. Furthermore, Hillgruber argued that with the disappearance of Austria-Hungary and with Soviet Russia widely mistrusted, the outcome of World War I meant that Germany now had the potential to dominate Eastern Europe in a way that never been possible before 1914. Hillgruber argued that none of the states of interwar Eastern Europe had the economic or military potential to be serious rivals to Germany. In 2000, the American historian Robert M. Citino wrote that "Hillgruber's thesis has become the consensus among German historians". Hillgruber argued that Gustav Stresemann was carrying out a "liberal-imperialist" policy in