Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945) fierce attacks from the right, almost certainly because Acheson believed Hiss and had a deep sense of personal loyalty In 1990 Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB defector, stated that Hiss had been a “penetration agent” during and after the war A year before Hiss died, documents released from Soviet archives confirmed that he was a wartime agent who was later secretly decorated by the KGB, successor agency to the NKVD and NKGB Suggested Reading: Alan Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (1999) HISTORIKERSTREIT “Historians’ controversy.” A bitter academic dispute in the 1980s occasioned by the effort of a Soviet emigré historian, Victor Suvorov, supported by extreme revisionists in Germany, to show that Operation BARBAROSSA was a justifiable assault by Germany Suvorov posited, and the German revisionists embraced, the argument that BARBAROSSA was a preemptive strike by Germany made necessary because Joseph Stalin was purportedly planning to attack Supporting the thesis was weak circumstantial evidence from Red Army war games and planned dispositions, or wrongly inferred from Soviet weapons experiments and fighting doctrine: the idea of deep battle Other historians of the Soviet war demonstrated conclusively the falsity of the German revisionist claim, originally and most baldly expressed in the Nazi declaration of war on June 22, 1941, in subsequent wartime propaganda, and in Hitler’s final “Testament” in April 1945 Underlying the most spurious revisionist writing was a truly pernicious argument: that Nazism was essentially a defensive ideology and movement, which understandably took power and aggressive action against the enormous threat presented by Bolshevism to all Western Civilization HITLER, ADOLF (1889–1945) Dictator of Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 Adolf Hitler was the son of a minor Austrian customs official, Alois Schicklgruber Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to Alois illegitimately, with the father left unnamed in parish records It was later charged that Hitler’s paternal grandfather was the young Jewish heir of the Frankenberger family of Graz, whose patron supposedly paid child support to Maria for years The Schicklgruber family name and baptismal records were retroactively changed by Alois to “Hitler” in 1876, perhaps to facilitate his civil service career Alois Hitler fathered a son and daughter, Alois Jr and Angela, by his second wife He married his third wife, Klara Pölzl, in 1885 The couple had six children Only their fourth child, Adolf, and one sister, Paula, survived childhood illnesses Adolf Hitler’s father died in 1903 His mother, who always doted on her sickly son, died in 1907 The possibility that the Hitler family included a Jewish ancestor was secretly investigated by Hans Frank at Hitler’s request in 1930 The Gestapo also investigated in the 1930s and 1940s, and declared that all such rumors were false After the war, while awaiting execution for war crimes as governor of German-occupied Poland, Frank laid out the thinly sourced Frankenberger ancestry Hitler’s major biographer, Ian Kershaw, dismisses the rumor as unsubstantiated Yet, even the 509