integrity in the East during the final phrase of the war, to have been justified. Moreover, Hillgruber evaluates the bitter defensive battle against the Soviet army on the Eastern Front as a tragic historical dilemma even through he recognizes its connection to the machinery of death at Auschwitz. In this way he affirms the ready nationalism of his own subjective perspective on the era. The choice of such a perspective contains, whether explicitly or not, a clear historiographic judgment: for the sake of the nation, the historian takes sides in a "dilemma" - against the victims of National Socialism.By proceeding from the experiences and subjective feelings of the greater part of the German populace to arrive at his paradigm of national identification, Hillgruber necessarily ignores the centrality of the phenomenon "Auschwitz" in his evaluation of National Socialism. Paradoxically, the conservative Hillgruber justifies his approach with what is usually considered a left-wing concern: the history of everyday life, or what might be called a locally oriented, close-up of National Socialism. This might seem surprising; but when applied to Nazism, a close-up perspective oriented towards the everyday experiences brings with it a depoliticizing, desubstantiating, structurally desubjectivizing effect. In 1989, the American historian Dennis Bark and the Danish historian David Gress wrote in defense of Hillgruber: Hillgruber made three simple, but historically very important points. One was that the annihilation of European Jews by the Nazis and the destruction of the German state were simultaneous, but not casually related: Germany's wartime enemies decided to mutilate and divide Germany long before they knew of the Holocaust, so that the fate of Germany was not intended as retribution for the Holocaust, but as general punishment of Germany. The second point was that these two events - the genocide of European Jewry and the destruction of German political power - even if causally unrelated, were a tragedy for Europe. Middle-class Jewish and German cultures were civilizing factors in the Central European area from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the south, Hillgruber argued, and their destruction opened the way to domination of that area by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes. The disappearance of Germany as a cultural and political factor, and the Holocaust weakened European civilization as a whole by destroying its most important Central European component. Hillgruber's third point was that the German defeat in the East - the military