Besides Nolte, Wehler also attacked the work of Michael Stürmer as "a strident declaration of war against a key element of the consensus upon which the socio-political life of this second republic has rested heretofore" During the "Historikerstreit", Wehler was one of the few historians to endorse Jürgen Habermas's method of attacking Andreas Hillgruber by creating a sentence about "tested senior officials in Nazi Party in the East" out of a long sentence in which Hillgruber had said no such thing on the grounds that it was a secondary issue of no real importance.