In a 1980 article, the German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler was highly dismissive of all theories that sought to attribute the rise and policies of Nazi Germany to some defect, medical or otherwise, of Hitler's. In Wehler's opinion, besides the problem that such theories about Hitler's medical condition were extremely difficult to prove, the problem was that they had the effect of personalizing the phenomena of Nazi Germany by more or less attributing everything that happened in the Third Reich to one flawed individual. Wehler wrote: