his longing for the lost Heimat of East Prussia, stating Hillgruber had been born and grew up in East Prussia, a place that he deeply loved that now literally no longer existed, and to which he could never return to. In support of Hillgruber's claim that it was a tragedy that Germany had ceased to play its traditional "Land in the Middle" role after 1945, Anderson argued Germany's position in Central Europe had historically played a central role in German national identity, and that Hillgruber was correct to moan its absence. Anderson wrote: Hillgruber died in May 1989. In November the Berlin Wall was breached. Today, less than a year later [Anderson was writing in April 1990], German reunification is at hand. Hillgruber, a conservative, saw things more lucidly than his liberal critics. The reunion of Germany will indeed involve the reemergence of a Central Europe already in statu nascendi; and the reconstruction of Central Europe will all but certainly restore independence to Europe as a whole, in the wider theatre of the world. To have asserted these connexions so clearly, on the eve of their historical realization, was not an inconsiderable achievement. Anderson claimed that it was hard to argue against Hillgruber's point that the Holocaust was only one chapter in the wider history of horror in the 20th century. Anderson praised Hillgruber as the first historian who traced how the plans for an extensive Eastern empire for Germany unveiled in the summer of 1916 by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff evolved 25 years later into genocidal reality by the summer of 1941. Despite some sympathy for Hillgruber, Anderson was more critical of other aspects of Zweierlei Untergang. Anderson argued that Hillgruber's condemnation of the putsch attempt of 20 July 1944 as irresponsible and his claim that having World War II go on to May 1945 was "justified" by allowing 2 million German civilians to escape West and another 2 million German soldiers to surrender to the Western Allies instead of the Soviets was entirely mistaken. Anderson wrote that the one million German soldiers killed between the summer of 1944 and the spring of 1945, to say nothing of the Allied dead and wounded, German civilians killed by Allied bombing, those killed in the Holocaust and other victims of Nazi terror simply invalidated Hillgruber's claim about the benefits of World War II going on until May 1945. Anderson