Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations 1942-45

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Long after 1945, what has been called ‘the legend of the “unblemished” Wehrmacht’, which claimed to have remained largely detached from the criminality of the Hitler regime and the atrocities attributable to the SS, still survived. This was to some extent an indication of the limited state of research (and a tendency to separate the military history of the war from the structural analysis of the Nazi state). The legend was shored up, too, by the postwar memoirs of leading military figures, who sought to uphold the honour of the Wehrmacht – and at the same time to exculpate themselves. But the sustenance of the legend also had political and social underpinnings. It fitted the interests of the young Federal Republic of Germany (especially when it acquired its new army, the Bundeswehr, in 1955), and of the Western Allies in the early years of the Cold War. And, not least, it accorded in part with a readiness (in some ways perhaps a necessity) among many ordinary people to believe that the deep stain of Nazism had not permeated absolutely everything, that the armed forces in which fathers, brothers, uncles and friends had served, had fought honourably for their country.

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