Myth of the clean Wehrmacht

Even where the perpetration of war crimes and the waging of an extermination campaign, particularly in the Soviet Union – the populace of which was viewed by the Nazis as "sub-humans" ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators – has been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers corps", the Schutzstaffel (SS), but not the regular German military.

This memorandum laid out the conditions under which West Germany would rearm: their war criminals must be released, the "defamation" of the German soldier must cease and foreign public opinion of the Wehrmacht must be raised.

The Supreme Commander of NATO, U.S. General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, having previously stated his belief that the "Wehrmacht and the "Hitler gang" (Nazi Party) were all the same",[4] reversed this position and began to facilitate German rearmament in light of his deep concern over Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe.

These writings proved enormously popular, especially the memoirs of Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein, and further disseminated the myth among a German public eager to cast off the shame of Nazism.

[16] Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers described the Soviets to their soldiers as "Jewish Bolshevik sub-humans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "Red beast",[17] and many German troops accepted this racialist ideology.

[25] On the first day of the invasion, Polish prisoners of war were murdered by the Wehrmacht at Pilchowice, Czuchów, Gierałtowice, Bojków, Lubliniec, Kochcice, Zawiść, Ornontowice, and Wyry.

[37]According to a study by Alex J. Kay and David Stahel, the majority of Wehrmacht soldiers deployed to the Soviet Union participated in war crimes, including massacres, rape, and looting.

Donovan served as a deputy prosecutor at Nuremberg; he and some other U.S. representatives believed the trials should not proceed, but that Germany should be recruited as a military ally against the Soviet Union in the growing Cold War.

[52] As a master of bureaucratic in-fighting with excellent connections among the British Establishment and the media, Hankey was, in the words of German historian Kerstin von Lingen, the leader of the "most powerful" lobby group ever formed on behalf of the Wehrmacht generals.

[56] The chairman of the meetings summarised the foreign policy changes demanded in the memorandum as follows: "Western nations must take public measures against the 'prejudicial characterisation' of former German soldiers and must distance the former regular armed forces from the 'war crimes issue'".

[56] In response, U.S. General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, recently appointed as the Supreme Commander of NATO on 19 December 1950, and the future 34th President of the United States, changed his negative rhetoric on the Wehrmacht.

The British High Commissioner in occupied Germany felt compelled to remind the German public the criminals involved had been found guilty of participating in the torture or murder of Allied citizens.

[64] The Wehrmacht was a central founding institution of Germany, tracing its descent back to the Prussian Army of the "Great Elector" Frederich Wilhelm, and its complicity with Hitler presented problems for those who wanted to portray the Nazi era as a "freakish aberration" from the course of German history.

So many Germans had served in the Wehrmacht that there was a widespread demand for a version of the past that allowed them to "...honour the memory of their fallen comrades and to find meaning in the hardships and personal sacrifice of their own military service".

The myth was firmly established in the public mind and German prosecutors were unwilling to challenge the prevailing national mood and investigate suspected war criminals in the Wehrmacht.

[69] Following the return of the last prisoners of war from Soviet captivity, 600 former members of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS swore a public oath on 7 October 1955 in the Friedland Barracks, which received a strong media reaction.

[73] The picture of highly "professional" Wehrmacht committed to Prussian values that were allegedly inimical to Nazism while displaying super-human courage and endurance against overwhelming odds, especially on the Eastern Front, does appeal to a certain type of historian.

[75] Various historians across the political spectrum such as Gordon A. Craig, General J. F. C. Fuller, Gerhard Ritter, Friedrich Meinecke, Basil Liddell Hart, and John Wheeler-Bennett all found it inconceivable that the "correct" Wehrmacht officer's corps could have been involved in genocide and war crimes.

Mellenthin's memoirs use racist language such as characterising the Russian soldier as an "Asiatic dragged from the deepest recess of the Soviet Union", a "primitive", and "[lacking] any true religious or moral balance, his moods alter between bestial cruelty and genuine kindness".

[83] Until the 1990s, military historians writing the history of World War II focused on the campaigns and battles of the Wehrmacht, treating the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime in passing.

[107] One celebrity who joined Paget's campaign, left-wing philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in a 1949 essay that the 'enemy today' was the Soviet Union, not Germany, and, given how Manstein had become a hero to the German people, it was necessary for the Allied forces to free him so he was able to fight on their side in the Cold War.

[113] Both myths glorify the Confederate military and the Wehrmacht as superior fighting organisations led by deeply honourable, noble, and courageous men who were overwhelmed by inferior opponents by sheer numbers and materiel together with bad luck.

Though not successful in preventing the total collapse of the Third Reich, these efforts did bear fruit in another important sense, for they both prepared the ground for the FRG's [Federal Republic of Germany] eventual alliance with the West, and provided the Wehrmacht's apologists with a forceful and politically useful argument, even if it conveniently confused cause and effect".

[118] Initially, when Operation Barbarossa was launched in 1941, the peoples of the Soviet Union were portrayed in Nazi propaganda as untermenschen (sub-humans) who were threatening "European civilisation", and for whom there was to be no sympathy or compassion.

On one hand, the emphasis on atrocities committed by the "Asian" Red Army soldiers echoed the wartime propaganda theme of the "Asiatic hordes" laying waste to civilisation.

[124] Nolte and Hillgruber sought to "normalise" the German past by portraying the Holocaust as a defensive reaction to the Soviet Union and demanding "empathy" for the last stand of the Wehrmacht as it attempted to stop the "Asiatic flood" into Europe.

[125] Such studies tended to confirm what the ordinary soldiers claimed to be up against on the Eastern Front, thanks to indoctrination propaganda,[16] many German troops regarded the Soviets as sub-human, leading to what Bartov called the "barbarisation of warfare".

[128] Heer wrote: "The creators of these photographs are present in their images – laughing, triumphant, or businesslike" and "this place is, in my opinion, at the centre of Hitler's Wehrmacht, standing inside the 'heart of darkness'".

[126] In 2000, historian Truman Anderson identified a new scholarly consensus centering around the "recognition of the Wehrmacht's affinity for key features of the National Socialist world view, especially for its hatred of communism and its anti-Semitism".

[137] Heer et al. conclude the newspapers conveyed only two types of events: those that would engender a feeling of empathy with Wehrmacht soldiers and to portray them as victims of Hitler, the OKH, or the enemy; and those that involved crimes by the Allied forces.