Guderian's writings have received some backlash in the decades since their release, with a number of historians finding the original works to contain post-war myths, including that of the "clean Wehrmacht".

Guderian's autobiography portrayed himself as the sole originator of the German panzer force and refused the stipulation that units under his command committed crimes of war.

These criticisms were partially addressed in his 1952 re-release edition of the book, newly entitled Panzer Leader, which mended certain historically inaccurate errors and introduced a foreword from B. H. Liddell Hart.

[9] In the 1920s, Guderian was introduced to armored warfare tactics by Ernst Volckheim, a World War I tank commander and a prolific writer on the subject.

[10] While the topics covered were mundane, Guderian related them to why Germany had lost World War I, a controversial subject at the time, and thus raised his profile in the military.

[11] In 1927, Guderian was promoted to major and in October he was posted to the transport section of the Truppenamt, a clandestine form of the army's General Staff, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.

[20] In the resulting work, Guderian mixed academic lectures, a review of military history and armored warfare theory that partly relied on a 1934 book on the subject by Ludwig von Eimannsberger.

[33] The historian Russell Hart writes that Guderian supported the invasion because he "despised the Catholic, Slavic Poles who now occupied parts of his native, beloved Prussia".

The plan established a force for the penetration of the forest that comprised the largest concentration of German armor to that date: 1,112 out of Germany's total of 2,438 tanks.

[42] Hitler and his generals became overconfident after their historic victory, and came to believe they could defeat the Soviet Union: a country with significantly more natural resources, manpower and industrial capacity.

[48] Following the conclusion of the Battle of Smolensk, which ended with the encirclement and destruction of the Soviet 16th, 19th and 20th Armies, General Franz Halder, Chief-of-Staff of the OKH, argued in favor of the all-out drive toward Moscow.

Owing to the 2nd Panzer Group's southward turn during the battle, the Wehrmacht destroyed the entire Southwestern Front east of Kiev, inflicting over 600,000 losses on the Red Army by 26 September.

[55] By November, the attack by the 2nd Panzer Group on Tula and Kashira, 125 km (78 mi) south of Moscow, achieved limited success, while Guderian vacillated between despair and optimism, depending on the situation at the front.

[56] Facing pressure from the German High Command, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge finally committed the weaker south flank of his 4th Army to the attack on 1 December.

[58] In the aftermath of the German failure, Guderian refused to pass on Hitler's 'stand fast' order and fell out with Kluge, the new commander of the Army Group Centre.

[61] On 1 March 1943, after the German defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler appointed Guderian to the newly created position of Inspector General of Armoured Troops.

[68] He replaced General of the Infantry Kurt Zeitzler, who had abandoned the position on 1 July after losing faith in Hitler's judgement and suffering a nervous breakdown.

The situation was not improved by Guderian's long-standing bias against the General Staff which he blamed for having allegedly opposed his attempts to introduce modern armored doctrine into the army back in the 1930s.

[74] The latter months of 1944 were marked by the ever-increasing strife between the OKH and the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), as the two organizations competed for resources, especially in the run-up to the last-ditch German December, 1944 offensive on the Western Front.

After the war, Guderian blamed Hitler for frittering away the last German reserves in the operation; nonetheless, Germany's strategic situation was such that even twenty or thirty extra divisions would not have helped.

[76] As chief-of-staff of the OKH, Guderian did not object to the orders that Hitler and Himmler issued during the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising nor the atrocities being perpetrated against the civilian population of the city.

[78] After the war, Guderian claimed that his actions in the final months as head of the OKH were driven by a search for a solution to Germany's increasingly-bleak prospects.

This was supposedly the rationale behind Guderian's plans to turn major urban centers along the Eastern Front into so-called fortress cities (feste Plätze).

[81] On 6 March 1945, shortly before the end of the war, Guderian participated in a propaganda broadcast that denied the Holocaust; the Red Army in its advance had just liberated several extermination camps.

1 POW camp in Grizedale Hall in the north of England from 9 August 1945, as a Political Intelligence Department lecturer taking part in the Re-education programme, in an effort to use that to re-establish his reputation as a military theorist and commentator.

[2] James Corum writes in his book The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform that Guderian was an excellent general, a first-rate tactician and a man who played a central role in developing Panzer divisions, irrespective of his memoirs.

He claimed that only the Nazi civilian administration (not the Wehrmacht) was responsible for atrocities against Soviet civilians, and scapegoated Hitler and the Russian winter for the Wehrmacht's military reverses, as he later did in Panzer Leader;[102] in addition, he wrote that six million Germans died during their expulsion from the Eastern territories by the Soviet Union and its allies,[103] while also writing that the defendants executed at the Nuremberg trials (for war crimes such as the Holocaust) were "defenders of Europe".

[104] Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, in their book The Myth of the Eastern Front, conclude that Guderian's memoirs are full of "egregious untruths, half truths, and omissions", as well as outright "nonsense".

He also lied about the Barbarossa Decree that preemptively exempted German troops from prosecution for crimes committed against Soviet civilians, claiming that it was never carried out either.

As late as 2002, for the 55th anniversary[anachronism] of the first publication of the book, The New York Times, Newsweek, The New Yorker and other outlets published positive reviews, reinforcing the tenets of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.