The Wehrmacht is portrayed by some and perceived by many as an organisation independent of Nazi atrocities during WW2, and that the SS and party organs were responsible for the wholesale slaughter during the Holocaust. The myth of the clean Wehrmacht emerged out of the post-war environment as a justification to rearm West Germany in the new Cold War. This video examines the foundation of the myth and both analyses and debunks its key pillars.

Sources:

Omer Bartov - The Conduct of War: Soldiers and the Barbarization of Warfare

Stephen Fritz - Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East

Narayan J. Saviskas Jr - The Clean Wehrmacht: Myths about German War Crimes Then and Now

Ben Shepherd - The Clean Wehrmacht, The War of Extermination, and Beyond

Wendy Gertjejanssen - Victims, heroes, survivors : sexual violence on the Eastern Front during World War II

Andrew Kapinos - Dismantling the Myths of the eastern Front: The Role of the Wehrmacht in the War of Annihilation

David Glantz - When Titans Clashed

Kiril Feferman - Soviet investigation of Nazi crimes in the USSR: documenting the Holocaust

DA Searle - Revising the ‘myth’ of a ‘clean wehrmacht’: generals’ trials, public opinion, and the dynamics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in West Germany, 1948–60

David Loneragan - The Wehrmacht and its involvement in war crimes on the Eastern Front

Jurgen Foster - The Wehrmacht and the War of Extermination Against the Soviet Union

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