At the end of July 1943, at about the time that the strategic air war against Germany reached a new peak with the raids on Hamburg, Alfred von Wegerer, a member of the army's Military History Research Institute (Kriegsgeschichtliche Forschungsanstalt des Heeres), which had been given the responsibility to complete the German official military history of World War I, looked back on more than twenty years of work: “It seems necessary to me that we break with the old tradition of military history. . . . Instead of separate accounts of the history of operations and politics, we must - in the interest of a better understanding of the totality [Totalität] of war and its universal-historical consequences - find a way to comprehend the totality [Ganzheit] of war, in all its military and political aspects, as Clausewitz described it. In this way, we should reach a deeper understanding of the interrelationship and complementarity of politics and the conduct of war.” At the same time, however, his colleague Friedrich Solger complained about the same official history's want of practical applicability. “Having seen how fourteen bulky volumes on the First World War have served inadequately to prepare for the Second,” he wrote, “we must conclude that the approach was wrong.”