Habermas criticized Hillgruber for demanding historians "identify" with the Wehrmacht's last stand on the Eastern Front as being purely "selective". Habermas charged that as long as the Wehrmacht held out, the Holocaust continued, but that Hillgruber's approach which emphasized the war on the Eastern Front from the viewpoint of the ordinary German soldier and the "desperate civilian population" serves to sever the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" from history. Habermas charged that Hillgruber had much sympathy with the German soldiers who found a "picture of horror of raped and murdered women and children" at Nemmersdorf, but his way of "identifying" with the Wehrmacht meant the Holocaust went unmentioned. Habermas wrote in the second part of his essay, Hillgruber who previously insisted on a "bird's eye" view of the Eastern Front from the viewpoint of the ordinary German soldier now used the perspective of a historian to argue the Allies were always planning on destroying Germany and it was wrong for the Allies to impose the Oder-Neisse line as the new eastern frontier of Germany, which Habermas felt to be a double standard.Habermas wrote Hillgruber had failed as a historian, stating: "Hillgruber is most deeply appalled by the high proportion of university-trained men who participated the Holocaust-as if there were not a completely plausible explanation for that. In short, the phenomenon that a civilized populace let these horrible things happen is one that Hillguber removes from the technical competence of the overburdened historian and blithely pushes off into the dimension of the generally human".