the ending of Germany as a great power and the Holocaust. Despite his claim that both events were equally tragic, Hillgruber wrote much more about the sufferings of the Germans than he did the Jews with the Holocaust essay taking 29 pages compared to the 74 pages allocated to the "smashing" of the Reich. In the same essay, Hillgruber attacked American President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for supporting at various war-time conferences the expansion of Poland and the Soviet Union at the expense of Germany. Hillgruber asserted that Germany had every moral right to keep all the territory that had belonged to the Reich in 1914, plus Austria and the Sudetenland, and that any effort to take land away from Germany was profoundly wrong. Hillgruber wrote that the doomed German defence in the East was "justified" as every city, every town and every village in eastern Germany the Soviets took was "lost forever for Germany and its German inhabitants". In Hillgruber's opinion, what he considered to be the great wrong that Germany was to lose some of its eastern territories after losing the war could only be explained by anti-German prejudices that he accused American and especially British leaders of holding. Hillgruber wrote that the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe was not a response to Nazi crimes, but was instead part of pre-existing Allied plans to destroy Germany, writing that the expulsions were not: "some kind of "answer" to the crimes of German despotism - the full extent of which was not actually recognised while the war was on. They also corresponded to objectives which had long been harboured by the main enemy powers, and which were put into effect during the war". In an apparent disavowal of his own criticism of the Anglophobic American historical writer David Hoggan in his 1967 book Germany and the Two World Wars, Hillgruber claimed in his 1986 essay that it had been British policy to seek the destruction of Germany since 1907 starting with Sir Eyre Crowe's memo on Germany entitled "Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany". Hillgruber claimed that irrational anti-German prejudices said to be rampant within the British elite drove British policy, and that what happened to Germany in 1945 was merely the culmination of a long-term British policy to destroy Germany as a nation, which every British