essay "Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45" ("The Collapse in the East 1944/45") from his book Zweierlei Untergang (Two Kinds of Ruin), Hillgruber highlighted the sufferings of Germans in what was then eastern Germany, who had to flee or were expelled or killed by the Red Army. He documented the mass gang rapes of German women and girls, and widespread looting and massacres of German civilians by the Soviet army. It is estimated that in 1945 that Red Army soldiers raped two million German women and girls during their advance into Germany. Hillgruber paid homage to those who had had to evacuate the German population and to those soldiers who did their best to stem the Soviet advance. Hillgruber described the efforts to evacuate the German population, much of which was hopelessly bungled by corrupt and incompetent Nazi Party officials, and the savage and desperate fighting which marked the bloody climax of the war on the Eastern Front. For Hillgruber, the end of the "German East", in which he had been born and grew up, was just as tragic as the Holocaust and marked the end of what he considered to be Eastern Europe's best chance for progress. Hillgruber's intention in Zweierlei Untergang was to show the "obscure intertwinement" between the Shoah and the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe. Hillgruber described it as "a tragedy for all of Europe" that World War II ended with Eastern Europe brought into the Soviet sphere of influence, with the expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe (which, Hillgruber pointed out, included his family) and with Germany reduced from a great power to a Cold War battlefield between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two kinds of ruin in the title were the Holocaust and the expulsion of Reichsdeutsche (Reich Germans; those Germans living in Germany) and Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans living outside of Germany). For Hillgruber, both events, or "national catastrophes" as he preferred to call them, were equally tragic.Low, Alfred, "Historikerstreit" p. 474 in Buse, Dieter; Doerr, Jürgen (Eds.), Modern Germany, Volume 1 A-K, New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. He blamed both ultimately on the Nazis and their ideologically driven and inhuman expansionism. The subtitle of Zweierlei Untergang, Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry), reflected his controversial view of the moral equivalence of