events of 1944-45 and their immediate consequences - was a subject worthy of study in its own right, and one which could be best studied from the perspective of those immediately involved; that is, the soldiers of the German army and the civilians who lost their homes, their families, and their friends in the course of those terrible months. Hillgruber did not deny that the German soldiers who defended to the last possible moment every inch of German territory in the East were also defending a brutal regime. But he added to this observation the equally important fact that there was an independent moral value to the defensive efforts, namely to allow as many civilians as possible to escape. The British historian Richard J. Evans in his 1989 book In Hitler's Shadow attacked Hillgruber for taking the Eastern Front out of context, arguing that the Wehrmacht had been guilty of far worse crimes in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union than the Red Army was in the occupied areas of Germany. Evans wrote that "it was not the Soviet Army which adhered to a fundamentally barbarous concept of war, but the German Army". Evans went on to argue that: None of this of course excuses the conduct of the Soviet troops, the mass rape of German women, the looting and the plundering, the deportation and lengthy imprisonment in Russia of many German troops, or the unauthorized killing of many German civilians. But it has to be said that the conduct of the Red Army in Germany was by no means as barbarous as that of the German Army in Russia. The Russians did not deliberately lay waste whole towns and villages in Germany, nor did they systematically destroy whole communities during their occupation of German territory. Evans argued against Hillgruber that through the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe was done in an extremely brutal manner that could not be defended, the basic aim of expelling the ethnic German population of Poland and Czechoslovakia was justified by the subversive role played by the German minorities before World War II. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was simply wrong when he claimed that the Polish government-in-exile in London had ambitions for annexing eastern Germany, and that the Poles were opposed to the west-ward expansion of their nation, preferring instead that Poland be restored to its pre-September 1939 borders. Evans wrote the