German history. In particular, Hillgruber argued that the Primat der Innenpolitik thesis employed by historians such as Wehler was not a proper scholarly device, but was instead "an apparent scholarly legitimation" for the New Left to advance its agenda in the present. Hillgruber accused Wehler of "quasi-totalitarian" goals for the German historical profession, and called for conservative historians to make a sustained offensive to defeat Wehler and his "cultural revolutionaries" for the sake of saving history as a profession in Germany. Likewise, despite his partial agreement with Fischer about the origins of the First World War, Hillgruber frequently fought against Fischer's interpretation of the German Empire as a uniquely aggressive power threatening its neighbours throughout its existence. In 1990, Hillgruber was a posthumous contributor to the book Escape Into War?, a collection of essays examining Imperial German foreign policy that attacked Fischer and the left-wing Bielefeld school of historians headed by Wehler for "relativising" history, and making "banal" statements The Canadian historian James Retallack took the view that Hillgruber together with his allies Klaus Hildebrand, Lothar Gall, Gregor Schöllgen and Michael Stürmer were guilty of a "grave injustice" with their attacks in Escape Into War? on those German historians like Fischer and Wehler critical of Imperial German foreign policy. Hillgruber expressed considerable disappointment with the republication of the once-banned work by Eckart Kehr, which Hillgruber dismissed as merely "trendy Marxisants" typical of the intellectual environment of the 1960s-70s. In a book review published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 18 June 1979, Hillgruber for the most part offered a highly unfavorable judgment of David Irving's work. Despite his criticism, Hillgruber ended his review with the comment that Irving's work "amounts to an indubitable and in no way small merit of Irving". The American historian John Lukacs thought it a sign of Hillgruber's general right-wing biases that he attached no such qualifying words of praise like those he gave to Irving during any of his attacks on left-wing historians like Eberhard Jäckel and Hans-Ulrich Wehler. As part of his criticism of the left-wing social historians, Hillgruber affirmed what he considered the primacy of traditional diplomatic-military history by writing:Despite the significance of all long-term developments, the great differences between the great world powers have basically determined the course of general history, even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Canadian historian Holger Herwig wrote in 1982 that Hillgruber was a follower of