government had pursued since 1907. According to Hillgruber: "Anti-Prussianism was the basis of the British war policy against Germany". Hillgruber accused the British of holding to "a negative image of Prussia, exaggerated to the point of becoming a myth", which led them to seek the utter destruction of the Prussian-German state in World War II, and blinded them to the fact that a strong Central European state led by Prussia was the only thing that prevented the "flooding" of Central Europe by the Red Army. In this way, Hillgruber argued "that the amputation of the Reich in favor of a greater Poland was a war aim of the Allies long before Auschwitz", and asserted that the loss of the German eastern territories was due to anti-German prejudices. Hillgruber claimed that the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive against Germany was just as much a policy of Anglo-American genocide for the Germans as the policy of genocide that Germans were waging against European Jews at the same time. Perhaps most controversially, Hillgruber described how the German Wehrmacht acted in what he regarded as a "heroic" and "self-sacrificing" way in defending the German population against the Red Army and the "orgy of revenge" that they perpetrated in 1944-1945. Hillgruber wrote that it was time to start celebrating what he regarded as the Wehrmacht's "heroic" last stand on the Eastern Front. Hillgruber asserted that the Wehrmacht was fighting in 1944-45 "for a centuries-old area of German settlement, for the home of millions of Germans who lived in a core of the German Reich - namely in eastern Prussia, in the provinces of East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, East Brandenburg and Pomerania". Hillgruber claimed that during the war there were four versions of what Central Europe should look after the war. These were: Hitler's vision of a greater Germany ruling over all of Europe from the English Channel to the Urals with all of the European Jewish population exterminated and 30 million Slavs expelled from Eastern Europe to make way for German colonization. The conservative German vision associated with the July 20 plotters, who envisioned the destruction of the Versailles system and a greater Germany ruling over all of Central and Eastern Europe. The Anglo-American vision which called for a greater Poland up to the Oder–Neisse line at Germany's expense, and an alliance of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria to keep the peace. And finally Stalin's