light of the Soviet threat in 1944, the right and moral thing for a German to do was to rally around the Führer. In addition, Hillgruber claimed falsely that Himmler had ordered the death camps to cease operating in September 1944, and argued that after January 1945 all the death camps were in Soviet hands anyhow. Thus, in Hillgruber's opinion, the only moral question in 1945 was whether the German Army could hold out long enough to allow as many German civilians as possible to escape westwards. In his essay, Hillgruber raised the "problem of identification" for the historian when writing about the last days of World War II. Hillgruber wrote that, as a German historian, he could not "identify" with those in the German death and concentration camps, for whom the defeat of Germany meant liberation. Hilgruber wrote that, although the term "liberation" was "completely justified for the victims of the National Socialist regime freed from the concentration camps and gaols", it was "inappropriate" as concerns "the fate of the German nation". Hillgruber wrote that the Allies, especially the Red Army, came as conquerors, not liberators, to Germany, and that no German could "identify" with them. Hillgruber wrote:If the historian gazes on the winter catastrophe of 1944-45, only one position is possible...he must identify himself with the concrete fate of the German population in the East and with the desperate and sacrificial exertions of the German Army of the East and the German Baltic navy, which sought to defend the population from the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapine, the arbitrary killing, and the compulsory deportations. Hillgruber argued when writing about the last days of the "German East" in 1944-45, only valid perspective was that of the front-line German soldiers fighting to protect German civilians from the Red Army, even through he noted that by holding out the Wehrmacht were "protecting" the gas chambers as he argued the Wehrmacht were "preventing the worse" from being done to the Germans. Hillgruber presented the German defense of the eastern Germany as part of an idealistic, pan-European effort noting with pleasure that French, Dutch, Belgian, Danish and Norwegian volunteers serving in the Waffen SS units, namely the 33rd SS Charlemagne Division, 23rd SS Nederland Division, 28th SS Wallonien Division, and 11th SS Nordland Division had fought fiercely for the Reich, and that in addition many French and Polish