Andreas Fritz Hillgruber (18 January 1925 – 8 May 1989) was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as a result of the Historikerstreit.
Life and career
Hillgruber was born in Angerburg, Germany (present-day Wegorzewo, Poland), near the then East Prussian city of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad, Russia). Hillgruber's father lost his job as a teacher under Nazi rule. Hillgruber served in the German Army from 1943 to 1945 and spent the years 1945-48 as a POW in France. During World War II, Hillgruber fought on the Eastern Front, an experience that was later to play a role in his evaluation and writing about the period. In 1945, Hillgruber fled west to escape the Red Army, another experience that was to influence him greatly. After his release, he studied at the University of Göttingen, where he received a PhD in 1952. As a student, Hillgruber was a leading protégé of the medievalist Percy Ernst Schramm, an academic who, as Eberhard Jäckel commented, regarded World War II as a normal war that regrettably, the Nazis were not as skilled at waging as they should have been. Much of Hillgruber's early work reflected Schramm's influence. He spent the decade 1954-64 working as school teacher. In 1960 he married Karin Zieran, with whom he had three children. Hillgruber worked as a professor at the University of Marburg (1965–68), the University of Freiburg (1968–72) and the University of Cologne (1972–89). In the late 1960s he was a target of radical student protesters. He died in Cologne of throat cancer.
Early historical work
In the early 1950s Hillgruber still saw World War II as a conventional war, but by 1965 in his book Hitlers Strategie (Hitler's Strategy), he was arguing that the war was for Hitler a vicious, ideological war in which no mercy was to be given to one's enemies. In his first book, Hitler, König Carol und Marschall Antonescu (Hitler, King Carol and Marshal Antonescu) (1953), a study of relations between Germany and Romania from 1938 to 1944 with a focus on the personalities of Adolf Hitler, King Carol II and Marshal Ion Antonescu, Hillgruber argued for the fundamental normality of German foreign policy, with the foreign policy of the Reich being no different from that of any other power. Because of the importance of Romania's oil without which the Wehrmacht would have been unable to fight after June 1941, Hillgruber paid special attention to the oil question in German-Romanian relations while assigning the "Jewish Question" in Romania to an appendix, which seemed to imply that the plans on part of Marshal Antonescu to murder all of Romania's Jews were of minor importance. By contrast, in his 1965 book Hitlers Strategie, which was Hillgruber's Habilitationsschrift, Hillgruber examined the grand strategic decision-making progress in 1940-41 and concluded that, while Hitler had to adjust to diplomatic, economic, strategic and operational military realities, whenever possible his decisions were influenced by his racist, anti-Semitic and Social Darwinist beliefs. Hillgruber's work on German foreign policy made him one of the leading players in the debates about National Socialist foreign policy.