Since 1950, historians such as Fischer, Wehler, and Hans Mommsen have drawn a harsh indictment of the German elite of the period 1870–1945, who were accused of promoting authoritarian values during the Second Reich, being solely responsible for launching World War I, sabotaging the democratic Weimar Republic, and aiding and abetting the Nazi dictatorship in internal repression, war, and genocide. In the view of Wehler, Fischer, and their supporters, only the German defeat in 1945 put an end to the "premodern" social structure which had led to and then sustained traditional German authoritarianism and its more radical variant, National Socialism. Wehler has asserted that the effects of the traditional power elite in maintaining power up to 1945 "and in many respects even beyond that" took the form of: