Hitler's Soldiers

In the twenty years following the end of the Second World War in Europe, the losers wrote the history books. That is, Germany's military leaders established a narrative in which the war's origins, its culmination in their country's ruinous defeat, and the horrible crimes that attended it were all solely the fault of Adolf Hitler and his evil Nazi minions, while the German Army fought honorably and skillfully against overwhelming odds. Although evidence to the contrary was there from the start, the generals led a campaign of dissimulation that, in the context of the emerging Cold War, met with success on both sides of the Iron Curtain. British and American military historians, who lacked access to the original documents but who were eager to benefit from firsthand accounts, bought into a story of military and moral superiority. Their accounts also tended to look at the clash of arms rather than at messy affairs behind the lines. Later, when Holocaust studies came on the scene, its scholars were often ignorant of military matters; for a long time they focused their attention on the Nazi Party, and especially on the SS. All of this was just what the former generals wanted

Adversary · Art · Context (archaeology · German · Literature · Narrative · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · The Holocaust · World War II · European history and politics · German History and Society · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · History · Law