Front - made him a formidable historian whose strength lay in the careful and measured treatment of empirical data, entirely deserted him here and was wholly lacking in this one-sided, uncritical, empathizing with the German troops. The American historian Kriss Ravetto noted that Hillgruber's picture of the Red Army as the "Asiatic hordes" who personified sexual barbarism and his use of "flooding" and body penetration imagery seemed to invoke traditional Yellow Peril stereotypes, especially the fear of a ravenous, demasculinizing Asian sexuality threatening whites. In addition Hillgruber seemed to have a fear of an all-consuming Asian sexuality that was the alleged reason for the rapes of millions of German women by the Red Army in 1945, which perhaps reflected deep-settled personal anxieties of his own. The American historian Donald McKale in his 2002 book Hitler's Shadow War accused Hillgruber of writing the sort of nonsense one would expect from a German apologist with his claim that the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive was an act of "genocide" against the German people, and thought especially offensive Hillgruber's comparison of the strategic bombing offensive with the Holocaust. McKale argued that historians like Hillgruber were trying to create a version of the German past that would allow Germans to get over the guilt caused by the Holocaust, and allow Germans to feel good about being German again. The British historian Norman Davies in his 2006 book Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory appeared to lend Hillgruber some support by writing:...Andreas Hillgruber published a book provocatively entitled Zweirelei Untergang or 'Double Ruin' (1986). The subject was the expulsion of Germans from the east in 1945-47. But the clear implication was that Germany had been victimized twice over - once by the military defeat and again by the expulsions. The explosion was immediate. Habermas and other left-wingers went into action with a flurry of articles and of letter-writing. They claimed that the uniqueness of the Holocaust was under attack. They disliked comparisons, particularly between the tragedy of the Jews and the misfortunes of the Germans. Davies went to argue that revelations made after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989-91 supported Hillgruber's moral equating of National Socialism and Communism. The British economic historian Adam Tooze in his 2006 book The Wages of Destruction wrote his interpretation of German foreign policy owed much to Hillgruber's "monumental" book Hitlers Strategie (Hitler's Strategy). Tooze added that