newspaper on 12 July 1986, commenting that the use of the word Zerschlagung (destruction) for the Germans indicated that an act of extreme violence was committed against the Germans while the Jews were assigned only the neutral term Ende (end) to describe the Holocaust. Brumlik argued that in his view, Hillgruber by his use of the word "End" to label the Holocaust implied that the Shoah was just something terrible that happened to the Jews of Europe, but it was not anybody's fault. Brumlik accused Hillgruber of reducing German history down to the level of Landserheft (a type of comics in Germany glorifying war). Brumlik argued that Hillgruber's thesis about the Holocaust as one of many genocides, instead of a unique event, was a form of "psychological repression". The American historian Gordon A. Craig expressed the view that Hillgruber's choice of the word Ende for the Holocaust suggested that the Holocaust was "something that just sort of happened". The right-wing German historian Klaus Hildebrand defended Hillgruber in an essay first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on 31 July 1986, by attacking Habermas over the "tried and true higher-ups of the NSDAP" line created by Habermas, which Hildebrand considered a highly-dishonest method of attack. Hildebrand argued that Hillgruber was merely trying to show the "tragedy" of the Eastern Front, and was not engaging in moral equivalence between the German and Soviet sides. Responding to the defence of Hillgruber by his close associate Hildebrand in his essay "The Age of the Tyrants", Habermas argued in a letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 11 August 1986 that Hillgruber's approach of "identifying" with German soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front "...would perhaps be a legitimate point of view for the memoirs of a veteran - but not for a historian writing from the distance of four decades". Habermas went to warn of the "apologetic effect" of the sub-title of Hillgruber's book. Habermas stated that:<blockquote>A German reader would have to bring along a healthy portion of linguistic insensitivity in order not to let himself be influenced by the juxtaposition of an aggressive 'destruction of the German Reich by its external enemies and an almost automatic following 'end of European Jewry'. This first impression justifies itself above all through the compilation of two parts so unlike in their style of presentation and declared partisanship.</blockquote> Joachim Fest defended Hillgruber in an