wanted only to seize Europe) and the "Globalists" (who argued that Hitler wanted to conquer the entire world), Hillgruber definitely belonged in the latter camp. As a globalist historian, Hillgruber argued that Hitler was always intent upon a war with the Soviet Union and he maintained that Hitler's interest in Admiral Erich Raeder's "Mediterranean plan" in the fall of 1940 as an alternative to Barbarossa was half-hearted at best, and that right from June 1940 Hitler was firmly committed to turning east. Other historians, such as the German historian Wolfgang Michalka, the Anglo-German historian H.W Koch and the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, have contended that Hitler's efforts to form an anti-British Eurasian "continental bloc" that was to include the Soviet Union in late 1940 as a diplomatic prelude to the "Mediterranean plan" were sincere, that until December 1940 Hitler's first priority was in defeating Britain, and that it was only when Hitler gave his approval to Operation Barbarossa on 18 December 1940 that he finally lost interest in Raeder's "Mediterranean strategy". The British historian Aristotle Kallis wrote that the best evidence suggests that in late 1940 Hitler was serious about carrying out Raeder's "Mediterranean plan", but only within certain strict limits and conditions, and that he saw the "Mediterranean plan" as part of the preparations for Barbarossa by defeating Britain first. Hillgruber regarded Hitler as a fanatical ideologue with a firmly fixed programme, and criticized the view of him as a grasping opportunist with no real beliefs other than the pursuit of power - a thesis promoted by such British historians as A.J.P. Taylor and Alan Bullock, and which Hillgruber thought profoundly shallow and facile. Moreover, he categorically rejected Taylor's contention that the German invasion of Poland was an "accident" precipitated by diplomatic blunders. Hillgruber argued adamantly that the German invasion of Poland was a war of aggression caused by Hitler's ideological belief in war and the need for Lebensraum (living space). World War II, for Hillgruber, really consisted of two wars. One was an europäischer Normalkrieg ("normal European war") between the Western powers and Germany, a conflict which Hitler caused but did not really want. The other war - which Hitler both caused and most decidedly did want (as evidenced in part by Mein Kampf) - was the German-Soviet one, a savage, merciless and brutal all-out struggle of racial and ideological extermination between German National Socialism and Soviet