Reddit reviews The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture
We found 11 Reddit comments about The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
The Clean Wehrmacht myth is a blatant lie. The Wehrmacht were repeatedly involved in war crimes, including the extermination of undesirables, and at the very least most, if not all, members were aware that their government was pursuing a campaign of violence against civilians and had purged undesirables (such as cripples and mentally ill) from society back home. The Wehrmacht may have been normal men, but that does not mean they are free of the blame for what occurred during World War 2.
Here are some resources regarding the Clean Wehrmacht Myth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht
https://www.amazon.com/The-Wehrmacht-History-Myth-Reality/dp/0674025776
https://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet/dp/0521712319
https://www.amazon.com/War-Extermination-Military-Studies-Genocide/dp/1571814930
I'd also add Ordinary Men to that list, as it's a very interesting study/discussion of how plain people like you and me can become bloodthirsty exterminators of other people in the right circumstances. https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0060995068/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1492122897&sr=1-1&keywords=ordinary+men
Edit: Done replying to comments in this thread, it's exhausting. None of the argumentation is new. To quote the Duke of Wellington, "they came on in the same old way...". The materials are there for you to explore and read. You can form your own judgments based on facts and rigorous research, that's the beauty of a free and open society, the kind of society Nazi Germany was actively trying to prevent. The reason the Clean Wehrmacht myth needs to be refuted is because, as I've said in another comment, it presents an ignorant view of history that allows us to avoid the hard truth, learned largely from World War Two, that ordinary men who would otherwise be considered honorable, decent people can take part in atrocious crimes or, at the very least, hear about them and be permissive or even supportive of them. If we deny that, we can't learn to prevent such things happening again.
Edit 2: Honestly last thing, I just want to add a comment by one of the mods of r/askhistorians specifically relating to this subject. It's honestly the best comment on Reddit I've ever seen regarding this subject and it has a list of plenty of resources for those who want to investigate this issue further: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xc03h/just_how_much_of_the_wehrmacht_was_dirty/cy3cxs0/
Do you want proof? Read, oh which to choose, how about
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet-American/dp/0521712319
The idea that the Wehrmacht engaged in an honourable war and the SS committed the atrocities is known as the "clean wehrmacht myth". There's lots of books and sources available, some good starting points would be https://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet/dp/0521712319 and https://www.amazon.com/War-Extermination-Military-Studies-Genocide/dp/1571814930
There's also a wikipedia page that might be more accessible on the "clean wehrmacht myth". The gist is that we needed allies for the war against communism, so we rehabilitated the German Army and let them have a scapegoat. We literally let them write the history of the war in the East.
The German army was horribly complicit in atrocities during WWII; while it's a tiresome, badly written book, in The Myth Of The Eastern Front, Smelser & Davies very thoroughly debunk the propaganda lie actively disseminated by German senior officers and sympathetic historians after WWII (and readily eaten up by British and American general staffs) that the German non-SS military was merely a patriotic, professional organization that was only incidentally complicit in war crimes.
The German officer corps readily supported Hitler and his rearmament and offensive war plans, and were frequently at least aware and often active participants in ethnic cleansing, crimes against POWs and civilians, and other rotten deeds. It was only when the tide of the war turned that German generals began to plot against Hitler in earnest (there had been dissatisfaction in the ranks even prior to the start of the war, as well as disagreement with German policy, but nowhere near on the scale of the July 1944 plot).
And no, this does not excuse anything the Allies might have done, or in any way mitigate the actions of the Nazis / SS.
All I do is for the glory of the Volcano.
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Glantz, David M and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 384 pages, available as paperback, hardback, and ebook.
This is one of the best single-volume operational histories of the Nazi-Soviet War. It is not as in-depth as, say, Erickson's duology, but it's relatively quick and easy to read. Glantz is still the English-language historian par excellence of the operational aspect of the Nazi-Soviet War and of Soviet doctrine and theory, though he is unfortunately semi-retired now. Jonathan House's coauthorship saves When Titans Clashed from the worst of the usual criticisms of Glantz's writing, namely his dry "I have copy-pasted and translated this section of a Russian field manual" style.
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Smelser, Ronald M., and Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 342 pages, hardback or paperback.
I recommend this book as a companion to Titans, as the two of them dismantle many Western assumptions & myths about the so-called "Eastern Front," albeit from different angles. Where Titans presents a less Wehrmacht-centric perspective on the purely military aspects of that conflict and sheds light on the actual military skill of the Red Army, The Myth of the Eastern Front explains the origins of many of those assumptions and is an important historiographic piece.
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Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador, 2006. 462 pages, paperback, hardback, or audiobook.
Ivan's War is a social history of the Red Army, told partly through interviews with veterans and civilians and partly through memoirs, and contextualized by improved access to archives during the post-Soviet, pre-current-unpleasantness era. It is less academically rigorous than, say, Reese's Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941, but more approachable and quite compelling. If you're wondering what it was like to be an anonymous frontovik in the wartime Red Army, this is a good place to start. By dispelling the implicitly dehumanizing and racist narratives of the largely Wehrmacht-influenced prevailing Western literature on the Nazi-Soviet War, Ivan's War also rounds out a sort of mythbusting trilogy with Titans and Myth of the Eastern Front.
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Continuing the World War II theme, Robert Citino's Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (448 pages), The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 (440 pages), and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 (632 pages) are, as a trilogy, a good look into the institutional culture of the German officer corps. Citino posits that, in addition to the distortive effects of Nazism on that culture, the officer corps embodied a long tradition of a particular way of war - short, sharp, lively wars of strategic preemption and the pursuit of the rapid defeat by encirclement of enemy armies - that proved unsuited for modern industrialized total war, and ultimately contributed to the Reich's defeat. Citino is quite readable; his prose is actually *enjoyable* which can be quite rare for military history.
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Glantz, David M. Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle. New York: Frank Cass, 1991. 320 pages, paperback.
Returning to Glantz and the Soviet focus, this is a good surface-level (but satisfactorily deep) introduction to the history, theory, and practice of the Soviet concept of operational art - the intermediate level of war between tactics and strategy, involving the use of large formations like armies to achieve coordinated tactical successes, the sum of which contribute to strategic victory. It is, as I mentioned before, rather dry, but compared to some of Glantz's other stuff it's still perfectly readable. In my opinion, this text is an indispensable primer for understanding how the Red Army expected to fight at various points in its history, but also the roots of modern Russian theories of war. It is unfortunately a little expensive, however. I think Glantz might have long-form essays floating around on dtic.mil that summarize some of the book's content but I'm not sure.
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Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2017. 528 pages, paperback.
A departure from the rest of the list, I really like this book as a survey of the Irish Revolution and the beginnings of the IRA. It covers military matters, but mostly social and political matters, and for that reason alone I think it's a good introduction to the (arguably much more important) broader & less technical-tactical parts of military history. The first ten chapters cover the historiography of the Revolution, and a few chapters in the last third of the book discuss memory and how different communities have constructed different histories of the Revolution. These sections helped me, as a student of military history, to learn to look beyond the pure battlefield matters and examine the impact of war on society as a whole, because war is nothing if not a social phenomenon.
Lol, Heinz Guderian was just as much of a Nazi as the rest of them. He was one of the highest ranking officers who coordinates reprisal killings after the Warsaw Uprising and units under his command carried out the Commissar order so he’s a war criminal. He also continued to defend Hitler up until the day he died. He isn’t to be respected at all.
Edit:
In 1950, Guderian published a pamphlet entitled Can Europe Be Defended?, where he lamented that the Western powers had picked the wrong side to ally themselves with during the war, even as Germany "was fighting for its naked existence", as a "defender of Europe" against the supposed Bolshevik menace. Guderian issued apologetics for Hitler, writing: "For one may judge Hitler's acts as one will, in retrospect his struggle was about Europe, even if he made dreadful mistakes and errors". 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.
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". Guderian's claimed, contrary to historical evidence, that the criminal Commissar Order was not carried out by his troops because it "never reached [his] panzer group". 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. Guderian claimed to have been solicitous towards the civilian population, that he took pains to preserve Russian cultural objects, and that his troops had "liberated" the Soviet citizens.
Stop trying to find ways to defend nazis
Edit:
Since that guy deleted his comment and I typed out a response to him asking me for sources I’ll post it here in case anyone is interested, I’m so tired of the Nazi defenders on this sub.
Battistelli, Pier (2011). Heinz Guderian: Leadership, Strategy, Conflict. United Kingdom: Osprey Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978 1 84908 366 9.
It’s on page 58
Also from Guderian:
Even after the war, Guderian retained an affinity with Hitler and National Socialism. While interned by the Americans, his conversations were secretly taped. In one such recording, while conversing with former field marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb and former general Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, Guderian opined: "The fundamental principles [of Nazism] were fine".
A member of the Nazi high command was a Nazi, shocker.
Just in case you want a source for that too, it’s in page 108.
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet-American/dp/0521712319
I own the books, I tried to find free PDFs but couldn’t.
Part II:
For Stalingrad/Leningrad:
STALINGRAD: How the Red Army Survived the German Onslaught
Leningrad: State of Siege
Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad
To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations, April-August 1942
Armageddon in Stalingrad: September-November 1942
Stopped at Stalingrad: The Luftwaffe and Hitler's Defeat in the East, 1942-1943
The 900 Days: The Siege Of Leningrad
Kursk:
The Battle of Kursk
Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative
Air War:
Barbarossa: The Air Battle July-December 1941
Stalingrad: The Air Battle: 1942-January 1943
Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943
Bagration to Berlin: The Final Air Battles in the East 1944-1945
Black Cross/Red Star : Vol. 1, Operation Barbarossa 1941
Black Cross / Red Star: The Air War Over The Eastern Front, Vol. 2 - Resurgence: January - June 1942
Black Cross Red Star: The Air War Over the Eastern Front Volume 3
German Army:
War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II
Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality
The Unknown Eastern Front: The Wehrmacht and Hitler's Foreign Soldiers
Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942
The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943
Partisans:
Defiance
Stalin's Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II
Holocaust/Genocide:
Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine
The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
https://www.amazon.com/The-Wehrmacht-History-Myth-Reality/dp/0674025776
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht
https://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet/dp/0521712319
https://www.amazon.com/War-Extermination-Military-Studies-Genocide/dp/1571814930
> Why does my roll as a player matter at all? Its a video game and a multiplayer one at that.
I think your inability to see the difference between watching a story in a movie vs participate in it as a player invalidates everything you say automatically. But I digress.
>Nice strawman. Nobody is saying we want to kill jews in game.
??? I wasn't saying that, I'm saying it's the same logic of "if something is in a movie, we should be able to play as characters in that event"
>This is LAUGHABLY wrong. Many german soldiers in the german military did not enjoy what was demanded of them. They weren't all nazi's like you think they were. A lot of them hoped to just defend germany against the allies and never be asked to shoot or gas jews. Very few were willing to risk saying no to the gestapo when they commanded such actions to be done. FEAR is a powerful tool.
That is literally nazi propaganda. Do Some Research. These are the only good german soldiers.
>A lot of them hoped to just defend germany against the allies
You're so historically illiterate, Germany attacked Poland and France first. This isn't even to mention the dehumanization and hate crimes against people before the war began. The average person in Germany in the 1930's was totally racist and okay with terrible things happening to "undesirables" my great grandfather's friend was murdered in frankfurt for being jewish and none of the police would investigate and people said he deserved it. You're so ignorant.
>Alone it wouldn't matter but when stacked upon the unholy mess that of which BFV is its just yet another thing that they fucked up. And for a lot of people here thats enough reasoning.
That doesn't even make sense "If there was nothing wrong with the game no one would care but since the game is in a bad state we need more things to complain about"
>Your argument reminds me of that retarded EXTRA SENSITIVE "Extra Credit" channel on youtube with their most downvoted video yet. "Stop normalizing nazis"
I don't know who that is, but I can take a wild guess who would disagree that normalizing nazis is a good thing.
>HeRe YoU aRe PLaYinG tHe PVp In yOUr FaVoItE Ww2 ViDeO gAmE WiTh ThE NaZi FlAG As yOuR fAcTiOnS SyMbOle. AnD aLL oF a SuDDeN, YoU'Re A nAzI!.
Damn you got me, now spell ICUP
Stop with this Wehraboo revisionist bullshit. It doesn't matter if they were a good person or a bad person, they were all standing over the same mass graves. The average German civilian knew what was happening, let alone the soldiers carrying out the work. If they didn't defect or resist, they were as guilty as the rest.
 
EDIT: Since I'm already catching downvotes, if you're not a Nazi apologist and maybe just misinformed, here are some great resources that go into explicit detail how the average German soldier was far from clean:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3xc03h/just_how_much_of_the_wehrmacht_was_dirty/?st=jse6fwxk&sh=c852a62b
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/480hnc/were_the_nazis_encouraged_to_use_terror_as_a_form/?st=jse6fxso&sh=835b61d6
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vc22s/how_much_did_the_wehrmacht_on_the_eastern_front/?st=jse6g0af&sh=7fb522db
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5voi0y/is_it_true_that_the_wehrmacht_generally_treated/?st=jse6g1dz&sh=d2a96c8a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht
http://www.amazon.com/The-Wehrmacht-History-Myth-Reality/dp/0674025776
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Eastern-Front-Nazi-Soviet/dp/0521712319
http://www.amazon.com/War-Extermination-Military-Studies-Genocide/dp/1571814930