during the war. The American historian Deborah Lipstadt in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust accused Hillgruber of being a grossly offensive German apologist with his claim that the Holocaust and the end of Germany as a great power were equally great tragedies that "belonged together". Lipstadt wrote that she regarded Hillgruber as guilty of a moral relativism with his call for historians to "identify" with German soldiers on the Eastern Front that consciously down-played Jewish suffering and the Jewish dead of the Holocaust while falsely elevating German suffering and the German dead to the same level. In his 1994 book A World At Arms, Hillgruber's old adversary Gerhard Weinberg called Hillgruber's thesis in Zweierlei Untergang "...a preposterous reversal of the realities". Weinberg sarcastically commented that if the German Army had held out longer against the Allies in 1945 as Hillgruber had wished, the result would not have been the saving of more German lives as Hillgruber had claimed, but rather an American atomic bombing of Germany. In a 1998 essay, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer called Hillgruber as a "great German historian" who "unfortunately" in the 1980s "unwittingly" and "unwillingly" allowed himself to be associated with the fraction of German historians centered on Ernst Nolte. Bauer went on to praise Hillgruber as a way of rebutting Arno J. Mayer as the historian who proved in his 1972 essay "`Die Endlösung' und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologische Programms des Nationsozialismus" (The 'Final Solution' and the German Eastern Imperium as the Nucleus of the National Socialist Racial-Ideological Program) that in National Socialism Communism was viewed as an instrument of the Jews, and thus contra Mayer that Nazi anti-Communism was most definitely subordinated to anti-Semitism. The British historian Sir Ian Kershaw in the 2000 edition of his book The Nazi Dictatorship argued that Hillgruber's approach was flawed as it was based on the assumption that to "understand" a period in history required one to "identify" with one side or the other. Kershaw wrote:It was precisely the claim that the historians' only valid position is one of identification with the German troops fighting on the Eastern Front which invoked such widespread and vehement criticism of Hillgruber's essay. The critical method, which in his other work - not excluding his essay on "The Historical Place of the Extermination of the Jews" in the same volume as the controversial treatment of the Eastern