In their 2008 book The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi–Soviet War in American Popular Culture, historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies criticise Panzer Aces as ahistorical and misleading, presenting a picture of the German soldiers "without flaws or character defects".

[2] Franz Kurowski (1923−2011) was a German author of fiction and non-fiction who is best known for producing apologist, revisionist and semi-fictional works on the history of World War II.

[3] Kurowski produced numerous accounts featuring the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, providing laudatory and non-peer-reviewed wartime chronicles of military units and highly decorated soldiers.

[7] The Panzer Aces series focuses on the combat careers of successful German tank commanders and popular Waffen-SS personalities such as Kurt "Panzermeyer" Meyer, Jochen Peiper, Paul Hausser, and Rudolf von Ribbentrop, the son of Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, among others.

In another of Kurowski's accounts, while attempting to relieve the 6th Army encircled in Stalingrad, Bäke destroys thirty-two enemy tanks in a single engagement.

Many similar acts of "humanity" are present in the books, amounting to an image of the German fighting men "without flaws or character defects".

Smelser and Davies conclude that "Kurowski's accounts are laudatory texts that cast the German soldier in an extraordinarily favorable light".