it was Hitler alone who made the Holocaust possible. He argued that, even if the Nazis had come to power under some other leader such as Hermann Göring or Joseph Goebbels, for example, the Jews would have suffered persecution and discrimination, but not genocide. Hillgruber once presented at a historians' conference in 1984 a counter-factual scenario whereby, had it been a coalition of the German National People's Party and the Stahlhelm that took power in 1933 without the NSDAP, all the anti-Semitic laws in Germany that were passed between 1933 and 1938 would still have been passed, but there would have been no Holocaust. He maintained that the other Nazi leaders such as Göring, Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler willingly participated in the Holocaust, as did many other Germans in the ever-widening "rings of responsibility" for the Holocaust, but that without Hitler's decisive role there would have been no Holocaust. Despite his emphasis on the role of Hitler, Hillgruber often stressed that the Holocaust was the work of both the German state bureaucracy and the Nazi Party, the apolitical and committed Nazis while "the mass of the German population" accepted "unvermeidlicherweise nur unzulänglich verschleierten Vorgangs" ("a process that could never be more than inadequately concealed"). Hillgruber wrote that:The evident ease with which people could be recruited and "manipulated", under the civilized conditions of the 20th century, to treat human beings like merchandise and kill them in large numbers ... is the most disturbing aspect; the large number of university graduates involved is the most deeply alarming. One must raise the question - which touches anthropology, social psychology and individual psychology - of a possible repetition under other ideological conditions, in actual or perceived extreme situations and circumstances. Beyond the historian's responsibility to keep alive the memory of the millions of victims, this question - which points to a central problem of the present and future, and thus transcends the historian's task - presents a challenge to us all. The Historikerstreit Zweierlei Untergang Hillgruber was one of the protagonists in the so-called Historikerstreit, the Historians' Dispute (or Historians' Controversy) of 1986-87. Hillgruber felt that the Holocaust was a horrific tragedy, but just one of many that occurred in the 20th century. In a 1986 interview, Hillgruber stated there was no moral difference between the Soviet regime and the Nazi regime, and that the Holocaust was not unique. In his highly controversial 1986