Nolte's critic, the British historian Richard J. Evans accused Nolte of taking too seriously the work of Holocaust deniers, whom Evans called cranks, not historians. Likewise, Evans charged that Nolte was guilty of making assertions not supported by the evidence as claiming that the SS massacres of Russian Jews was a form of counterinsurgency or taking at face value the self-justifying claims of German generals who professed to be ignorant of the "Shoah". Evans wrote that it was not enough for Nolte to cite the claim of a functional division of labour in modern society as a way of rebutting Hilburg, instead arguing that as a historian Nolte should have found evidence that most people in Germany did not know of the "Final Solution" rather than just a quoting a sociological theory. Evans wrote that most of Nolte's claims were either "Der europäische Bürgerkrieg" rested either on speculation and/or were based on a slight base of evidence often taken wildly out of context. Moreover, Evans claimed that the bibliography of "Der europäische Bürgerkrieg" suggested that Nolte was not aware of much of the vast secondary sources on German and Soviet history.