will initiate a process of historicization of the Hitler period, for example by comparing it with Stalinist Russia and with examples such as the Stone Age Communism of Cambodia. This would doubtless be accompanied by terrifying scholarly insights and painful human experiences. Both phenomena could, horribile dictu, even relativize the concept of the German Sonderweg between 1933 and 1945 In response, Heinrich August Winkler argued that there was a Sonderweg before 1933, and that Germany as a country deeply influenced by the Enlightenment meant there was no point of comparison between Hitler on one hand, and Pol Pot and Stalin on the other In Germany, Hildebrand is well known for his disputes with the Mommsen brothers, Hans and Wolfgang over how best to understand Nazi Germany, especially evident at a conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 1979 which resulted in numerous hostile exchanges. In the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) of the 1980s, Hildebrand sided with those who contended that the Holocaust, while a major tragedy of the 20th century was not a uniquely evil event, but just one out of many genocides of the 20th century. In a 1987 article, Hildebrand argued that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were totalitarian, expansionary states that were destined to come into conflict with each other. Hildebrand argued that in response to concentrations of the Red Army near in the border in the spring of 1941, Hitler engaged in a flucht nach vorn ("flight forward"-i.e. responding to a danger by charging on rather than retreating). Hildebrand concluded that: Independently, the National Socialist program of conquest met the equally far-reaching war-aims program which Stalin had drawn up in 1940 at the latest.. Hildebrand's critics such as the British historian Richard J. Evans accused Hildebrand of seeking to obscure German responsibility for the attack on the Soviet Union, and of not being well informed on Soviet foreign policy. Some champions of the "preventive war" theory were critical of Hildebrand for using the term Überfall (fell upon) to describe Operation Barbarossa because it implied Hitler still had some freedom of choice in 1941. In a 1995 introduction to an essay about German-American relations by Detlef Junker, Hildebrand asserted that first Britain and then the United States in the 19th-20th centuries had a tendency to be highly ignorant of Central European affairs, and likewise had a propensity for engaging in "black legend" type