Originally posted by Toby
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This is part of a review he did of other books (sadly most is behind a pay wall):
Two events in the 1990s altered this situation. The first was the publication of my book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland in 1992, quickly followed by Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in 1996. The second event was the exhibition of the Hamburg Institute of Social Research, “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–1944,” which extensively toured Germany from 1995 to 1999 and engendered both high attendance and considerable controversy. Ordinary Men and Hitler’s Willing Executioners overlapped in their focus on Reserve Police Battalion 101 as a test case because its commander had openly given his men—randomly conscripted, middle-aged reservists with a low rate of party membership and little police training and ideological indoctrination—the option not to participate in mass executions of Jews in Poland. Nonetheless the great majority did not avail themselves of this option.
Both books demonstrated that “ordinary” German men—and not just SS fanatics and ideologues, carefully selected and indoctrinated—had become mass murderers.
Both books demonstrated that “ordinary” German men—and not just SS fanatics and ideologues, carefully selected and indoctrinated—had become mass murderers.
Right watched that, He gives a fair summation of an area which has been neglected in Western history books. I noticed when I was in the US that the book shops still had copies of books written by Manstein, Guderian etc Which is where I bought my copies.. Clearly they are useful reading but without a Soviet English version of events its very difficult to get a balanced perspective.
An example of how this has changed things is a simple thing like Russian casualties in the Winter War. In the post-Stalin era no less than Khruschev was waving around figures like 1 million Russian dead. Post-Soviet scholarship has provided a range of figures, but none are more than 15% of that figure. Quite the change.
One point on the influence of postwar German narratives that is worth spelling out (I've hinted at it) is its impact on Holocaust scholarship. As you have encountered already with your 'blame the SS' book, Germans were very keen to convince themselves and everyone else that it was just a core of fanatics who did the bad stuff. A key part of that has been the 'clean Wehrmacht' idea, something that has had a powerful impact on Western thinking. German officers got to paint themselves as skillful, detached professionals and their men as brave warriors. True as far as it went, but leaving out some very important facts. When an exhibition toured Germany in the late 90s trying to dispel some of these ideas it attracted considerable controversy and anger.
What interests me is the extent to which people in the anglosphere have internalized the 'clean Wehrmacht' idea. You can still get into some pretty willing online arguments if you dare to point out just how nasty the German Army really was.
As was said to me by my Grandad, "we (the allies) were pretty hopeless at war, so the Germans must have been diabolical at it"
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