easily approved of. Hillgruber largely ignored the fact that the reason for Soviet troops being in Germany in 1945 was that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union in 1941. Hillgruber mostly ignored the fact that the same troops fighting to save German civilians from the Soviets were also allowing the Nazis to continue the Holocaust. The Israeli historian Omer Bartov commented that it was simply disgusting on the part of Hillgruber to call upon historians to "identify" with German troops fighting to extend the Holocaust. Furthermore, it was noted that Hillgruber's call for "empathy" for the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front implicitly devalued the lives of those held in the German death camps or forced to walk in the death marches. Critics of Hillgruber such as Bartov noted that his call for historians to have "empathy" with German soldiers placed a higher value on the lives of German civilians protected by the Wehrmacht then on those dying in the Holocaust. In another essay, Bartov commented that Hillgruber appeared to imply that the British government's decision to repudiate the Munich Agreement in 1942 was the basis of the decision to expel the Germans after the war. Bartov commented that Hillgruber appeared not to care that the German aggression against the states of Eastern Europe such as the destruction of Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939, which itself negated the Munich Agreement might have had something to do with the British abrogation of the Munich Agreement, and that there is no direct link between the repudiation of Munich in 1942 and the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia after the war. That the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe, which today might come under the rubric of "ethnic cleansing", cannot be equated with the racially-based extermination of European Jewry. The sufferings of Germans were presented in isolation, with little reference to the sufferings of Jews, Poles, Russians, Czechs etc. The impression given is that Germans were the primary victims of the war. That Hillgruber asked his readers to sympathize with the officers and the men of the German Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine who fought to protect and evacuate the German population while at the same time to fight for the continuation of the Holocaust is morally indefensible. The sub-title of Hillgruber's book drew controversy with the Swiss historian Micha Brumlik in an essay entitled "New Myth of State" first published in Die Tagezeitung