a history of the Eastern Front that paid special cognition to the end of the "German East" Duffy stated his book Red Storm on the Reich was an attempt to write the sort of history Hillgruber had demanded In 1992, the Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that Hillgruber was one of the three leaders of the "new revisionism" in German history that sparked the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s, who were all in some ways seeking to promote the image of the Wehrmacht as a force for the good by downplaying Wehrmacht war crimes, and seeking to portray the Wehrmacht as a victim of the Allies rather the victimizer of the peoples of Europe, writing of "...the bizarre inversion of the Wehrmacht's roles proposed by all three exponents of the new revisionism, whereby overtly or by implication the Army is transformed from culprit to saviour, from an object of hatred and fear to one of empathy and pity, from victimizer to victim". Specially, Bartov noted that for: That Michael Stürmer's geographical interpretation of German history meant that Germany's "mission" in Central Europe was to serve as a bulwark against the Slavic menace from the East in both World Wars. That Ernst Nolte's argument about a "casual nexus" with the National Socialist genocide as a logical, if extreme response to the horrors of Communism led to Wehrmacht crimes in the Soviet Union being portrayed as essentially justified. This was even more the case as Nolte insisted that Operation Barbarossa was as Hitler claimed a "preventive war", which meant that for Nolte Wehrmacht war crimes were portrayed as a defensive response to the threat posed to Germany by the "Asiatic hordes". That Hillgruber's call for historians to "identity" and "empathize" with German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in 1944-45 implicitly devalued the lives of those suffering and dying in the Holocaust, which was allowed to continue in part because the German troops held out for so long. Bartov wrote that all three historians had in varying ways sought to justify and excuse Wehrmacht war crimes by depicting the Wehrmacht as engaging in a heroic battle for Western civilization, often using the same language as the Nazis such as referring to the Red Army as the "Asiatic hordes". Bartov ended that these sorts of arguments reflected a broader unwillingness of the part of some Germans to admit to what their Army did