Reviewed by Kelly ***all (Department of History, Newman University)
Published on H-Genocide (November, 2010)
Commissioned by Elisa G. von Joeden-Forgey
Tracing the Resurrection of a Reputation: How Americans Came to Love
the German Army
Unusually, I want to begin with a personal anecdote. In 1995 I was a
graduate student in Vienna researching my dissertation. Through
great good fortune I was able to join a friend chaperoning Austrian
teenagers on a field trip to London. I found myself accompanying the
students as they ventured across London to museums, galleries, and
stores. During one shopping expedition, my friend and I lagged
behind our charges and surveyed the selection of fine frozen foods.
Ahead of us, a pair of English stock boys whispered and laughed as
the Austrians passed by. Suddenly, one of the employees walked out
into the aisle and performed a credible goose step behind the girls
for several seconds while simultaneously extending his arm in a
Hitler salute.
Being teenagers, the girls didn't notice. I did and briefly
exchanged some unpleasant words with the young man, who clearly
couldn't understand why I was sticking up for people he had
misidentified as Germans. The mocking ended quickly (if a bit
reluctantly) and we went on our way.
I start with this story because it contrasts so directly with the
American attitudes toward the German army explored by Ronald Smelser
and Edward Davies II in their _The Myth of the Eastern Front: The
Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. _The book is a
fascinating immersion into a simple but important question: How did
the German soldiers who fought on the eastern front during World War
Two become hero figures to so many Americans? The authors address a
narrow topic and investigate it thoroughly. Precisely because they
frame their question so narrowly, they leave ample room for other
scholars to explore. Accordingly, American historians, military
historians, and perhaps historians of genocide will want to read this
book. But they will do that with notepads (or laptops) handy,
scribbling down ideas for future research projects as they go.
The book breaks down into three sections. In the first, the authors
summarize the prevailing American view of Germany and the German
military (and SS) during and immediately after the war. They review
newspapers, magazines, and other sources to show that American public
opinion viewed the Soviets sympathetically while seeing Germany and
its soldiers as enemies and war criminals. In my opinion, this is
the best and most convincing part of the book. The extensive survey
of reports and articles about the Soviet Union demonstrates clearly
reporters' successful attempts to present the Soviet Union as
honorable and its people as similar to Americans. The subsequent
discussion of the postwar trials shows how widespread knowledge of
German wartime misconduct was. American opinion is aptly summarized
with the words of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote his wife toward the
end of the war that "the German is a beast.... God, I hate the
Germans" (p. 75) and who in 1944 advocated "exterminat[ing] all of
the general staff" (p. 40).
Toward the end of the decade, however, attitudes toward the German
army changed decisively. They did so for two broad reasons. First,
the advent of the Cold War changed the geopolitical climate
significantly. The need to integrate West Germany into the new
alliance system meant rethinking accepted narratives about the Second
World War. Only by erasing memories of Germans as fascist and
criminal could Americans see them as allies and friends. Just as
important, a campaign by German officers to defend the German army
and soldiers against accusations of war crimes and dishonor proved
enormously successful. This effort took several forms.
First, many German officers worked closely with the American army to
produce reports and histories about the German army's war against the
Soviet Union. With the West's strategic planning increasingly
assuming that any new world war would begin with NATO forces giving
ground in Europe, precisely the same kind of war the Germans had
fought from 1943-45, the American army solicited these reports to
learn how to wage such a campaign effectively. Closely coordinated
by the prominent German general Franz Halder, the Germans produced
hundreds of manuscripts. The U.S. Army thought these materials
extremely useful and distributed them widely.
Secondly, the publication of memoirs by German officers played an
important part in changing perceptions of German soldiers. Written
mostly by formerly high-ranking German generals, these accounts were
widely read by American officers and politicians. While these
authors don't seem to have coordinated as explicitly as in the
production of military manuscripts, the messages the memoirs convey
remain remarkably similar. The German army, according to these
officers, was at least apolitical and, for some, actively
disassociated from the Nazi Party. The incompetent leadership of
Hitler and the Nazis sabotaged the army and the German war effort.
General after general argued that Germany would have won the war
except for the meddling of amateurs in affairs about which they knew
little (while Smelser and Davies don't use the words, they are
essentially recounting the creation of a second "stab in the back"
legend). Even with this political interference, the army had fought
valiantly and lost only because the Soviet army vastly outnumbered
the German. The memoirs also insist the German army had fought the
war honorably and had been unaware of any atrocities. In instances
where awareness could not be denied, they accused rear-area police or
SS forces as having initiated and conducted the atrocities as an
honorable army fumed powerlessly. Indeed, they claim the German army
treated Russian civilians and prisoners of war well throughout the
war, in alleged contrast to the bad conduct of the Soviet army.
Finally, Smelser and Davies address memoirs written by front-line
soldiers and novels about these men. These books concentrate heavily
on the fear and adrenaline of combat, the emotional impact of losing
friends and superiors, and the exhaustion of constant retreats.
Precisely by focusing on battlefield events, they portray German
soldiers as "ordinary men," uninterested in and unmotivated by
politics or race, rather simply trying to survive. Atrocities (at
least by Germans) simply don't appear in these memoirs.
The broad outlines of this argument are familiar, but Smelser and
Davies add a degree of detail that is both persuasive and
enlightening. It's clear American soldiers and leaders read these
memoirs and this reading played a significant role in reversing
images of the German army. Moreover, the authors do a thorough job
discrediting the claims made by the German officers in their memoirs,
which can no longer be viewed as even minimally respectable. It is
less clear how the broader public responded to the German message.
The authors make some effort to measure how ordinary Americans
responded to these memoirs by discussing the types of presses that
published these accounts and the blurbs that appeared on back covers.
But they could go farther in this direction. There's no reference
to public opinion polling data, for instance, nor to sales figures
nor is there an attempt to do a demographic analysis of readership
(admittedly a challenging task). Consequently, it's more difficult
to assess changing perceptions of the German army among ordinary
Americans.
The same dynamic exists in the third section of the book. Here,
Davies and Smelser examine the emergence of a community of writers,
"war-gamers" and re-enactors who became devotees of the German army
and its campaigns in the east. As far as it goes, this is insightful
and exciting research (if sometimes too detailed for some tastes).
Smelser and Davies astutely identify a set of sources historians have
rarely tapped and survey it thoroughly. They identify a set of
authors and speakers (whom they label "gurus") who have been
exceptionally influential in presenting a heroic, sanitized picture
of the German army in the east. In a path-breaking discussion, they
examine the iconography and mechanics of war games published in the
1970s and 1980s to show how they presented gamers with an honorable
and heroic German army. They have thoroughly convinced me of the
existence of a community of "buffs" who have made a fetish of the
German army as super-efficient and super-heroic (although it would be
helpful to compare games set on the eastern front with other games).
The difficulty comes in understanding how influential this image was.
The authors don't really identify how large the community is (it's
unclear, for instance, when they cite Web site views, whether these
are total views or unique visitors) and whether the views of
war-gamers and re-enactors have spread outside their group.
Moreover, by focusing the discussion mostly on the 1970s and 80s,
they leave unclear how the creation of vast networks of computer
gamers have affected this community. As early as 2002, for instance,
the _New York Times_ wrote about games like _Day of Defeat_ which
allowed players to take the part of German soldiers and used Nazi
symbols and characters in a way that attracted a neo-Nazi
following.[1] It's unclear what kind of following war games like
_Panzerblitz_ (one of several cited by the authors as widely
influential) have had since the rise of computer gaming and whether
this has reinforced or redirected the communities highlighted by the
authors.
What is most interesting and potentially valuable about the book is
the broad framework the authors offer to explain the trends they have
identified. They suggest Americans have created two separate but
similar "myths of the lost cause" as lenses through which to view
their past. The first, obviously, relates to the South and the Civil
War. The second identifies German soldiers from World War Two as
good people fighting unwillingly for a bad cause. It encourages
Americans, precisely because it represents German soldiers as
fundamentally honorable, to focus on the battlefield rather than
atrocities. And it offers them a coherent narrative explaining why
the United States was suddenly allied with its former enemies and
opposed to its former allies. This is a rich and thought-provoking
interpretation, well worth more exploration than the authors give it.
Here we come back to my story about the British stock boys and the
Austrian girls. The authors do what they set out to do and do it,
for the most part, convincingly. But they miss the chance to dig
deeper. They don't attempt to explain (and never intend to) why
American attitudes diverged so clearly from those of another NATO
ally of Germany, the British (as I believe they did). Why would
British teenagers mock girls they believed to be German while
American teenagers stayed up late searching the Internet for the most
realistic recreations of Wehrmacht boots and caps? More broadly, as
I read, I kept asking for more. It would be fascinating, for
instance, to have dived into visual and oral culture before and after
the war in the way John Dower does in his book on perceptions of
Japan and Japanese soldiers, _War Without Mercy _(1987)_._ The
authors take some steps in this direction but could have gone much
farther. Similarly, they rarely address the influence of movies and
television. Given how many of my students refer to the History
Channel as the "Hitler Channel," it seems this would offer a rich set
of sources that would flesh out the authors' interpretations. In
particular, one wonders if the recent spate of Holocaust and war
movies touched off by Steven Spielberg (both the branch emerging from
_Schindler's List_ [1993] and that from _Saving Private Ryan _[1998])
changed American impressions of the German war effort at all.
Finally, and entirely appropriate for this list, they don't even
begin to suggest how this study might shed light on the aftermaths of
other genocides and military conflicts.
This should not be taken as criticism. All authors hope their work
will prompt other historians to wrestle with the issues they
identified. Davies and Smelser have given us an interesting and
persuasive study. It is likely to be most influential, however, in
prompting historians to further investigate the ideas they engage
here for the first time.
Note
[1]. Jonathan Kay, "Defying a Taboo, Nazi Protagonists Invade Video
Games," _New York Times_ (January 3, 2002),
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/03/te...deo-games.html,
accessed September 2, 2010.
Citation: Kelly ***all. Review of Smelser, Ronald M.; Davies II,
Edward J., _The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in
American Popular Culture_. H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews. November, 2010.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30397
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
-----
For subscription help, go to: http://www.h-net.org/lists/help/
To change your subscription settings, go to
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=h-war
-----
Published on H-Genocide (November, 2010)
Commissioned by Elisa G. von Joeden-Forgey
Tracing the Resurrection of a Reputation: How Americans Came to Love
the German Army
Unusually, I want to begin with a personal anecdote. In 1995 I was a
graduate student in Vienna researching my dissertation. Through
great good fortune I was able to join a friend chaperoning Austrian
teenagers on a field trip to London. I found myself accompanying the
students as they ventured across London to museums, galleries, and
stores. During one shopping expedition, my friend and I lagged
behind our charges and surveyed the selection of fine frozen foods.
Ahead of us, a pair of English stock boys whispered and laughed as
the Austrians passed by. Suddenly, one of the employees walked out
into the aisle and performed a credible goose step behind the girls
for several seconds while simultaneously extending his arm in a
Hitler salute.
Being teenagers, the girls didn't notice. I did and briefly
exchanged some unpleasant words with the young man, who clearly
couldn't understand why I was sticking up for people he had
misidentified as Germans. The mocking ended quickly (if a bit
reluctantly) and we went on our way.
I start with this story because it contrasts so directly with the
American attitudes toward the German army explored by Ronald Smelser
and Edward Davies II in their _The Myth of the Eastern Front: The
Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. _The book is a
fascinating immersion into a simple but important question: How did
the German soldiers who fought on the eastern front during World War
Two become hero figures to so many Americans? The authors address a
narrow topic and investigate it thoroughly. Precisely because they
frame their question so narrowly, they leave ample room for other
scholars to explore. Accordingly, American historians, military
historians, and perhaps historians of genocide will want to read this
book. But they will do that with notepads (or laptops) handy,
scribbling down ideas for future research projects as they go.
The book breaks down into three sections. In the first, the authors
summarize the prevailing American view of Germany and the German
military (and SS) during and immediately after the war. They review
newspapers, magazines, and other sources to show that American public
opinion viewed the Soviets sympathetically while seeing Germany and
its soldiers as enemies and war criminals. In my opinion, this is
the best and most convincing part of the book. The extensive survey
of reports and articles about the Soviet Union demonstrates clearly
reporters' successful attempts to present the Soviet Union as
honorable and its people as similar to Americans. The subsequent
discussion of the postwar trials shows how widespread knowledge of
German wartime misconduct was. American opinion is aptly summarized
with the words of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote his wife toward the
end of the war that "the German is a beast.... God, I hate the
Germans" (p. 75) and who in 1944 advocated "exterminat[ing] all of
the general staff" (p. 40).
Toward the end of the decade, however, attitudes toward the German
army changed decisively. They did so for two broad reasons. First,
the advent of the Cold War changed the geopolitical climate
significantly. The need to integrate West Germany into the new
alliance system meant rethinking accepted narratives about the Second
World War. Only by erasing memories of Germans as fascist and
criminal could Americans see them as allies and friends. Just as
important, a campaign by German officers to defend the German army
and soldiers against accusations of war crimes and dishonor proved
enormously successful. This effort took several forms.
First, many German officers worked closely with the American army to
produce reports and histories about the German army's war against the
Soviet Union. With the West's strategic planning increasingly
assuming that any new world war would begin with NATO forces giving
ground in Europe, precisely the same kind of war the Germans had
fought from 1943-45, the American army solicited these reports to
learn how to wage such a campaign effectively. Closely coordinated
by the prominent German general Franz Halder, the Germans produced
hundreds of manuscripts. The U.S. Army thought these materials
extremely useful and distributed them widely.
Secondly, the publication of memoirs by German officers played an
important part in changing perceptions of German soldiers. Written
mostly by formerly high-ranking German generals, these accounts were
widely read by American officers and politicians. While these
authors don't seem to have coordinated as explicitly as in the
production of military manuscripts, the messages the memoirs convey
remain remarkably similar. The German army, according to these
officers, was at least apolitical and, for some, actively
disassociated from the Nazi Party. The incompetent leadership of
Hitler and the Nazis sabotaged the army and the German war effort.
General after general argued that Germany would have won the war
except for the meddling of amateurs in affairs about which they knew
little (while Smelser and Davies don't use the words, they are
essentially recounting the creation of a second "stab in the back"
legend). Even with this political interference, the army had fought
valiantly and lost only because the Soviet army vastly outnumbered
the German. The memoirs also insist the German army had fought the
war honorably and had been unaware of any atrocities. In instances
where awareness could not be denied, they accused rear-area police or
SS forces as having initiated and conducted the atrocities as an
honorable army fumed powerlessly. Indeed, they claim the German army
treated Russian civilians and prisoners of war well throughout the
war, in alleged contrast to the bad conduct of the Soviet army.
Finally, Smelser and Davies address memoirs written by front-line
soldiers and novels about these men. These books concentrate heavily
on the fear and adrenaline of combat, the emotional impact of losing
friends and superiors, and the exhaustion of constant retreats.
Precisely by focusing on battlefield events, they portray German
soldiers as "ordinary men," uninterested in and unmotivated by
politics or race, rather simply trying to survive. Atrocities (at
least by Germans) simply don't appear in these memoirs.
The broad outlines of this argument are familiar, but Smelser and
Davies add a degree of detail that is both persuasive and
enlightening. It's clear American soldiers and leaders read these
memoirs and this reading played a significant role in reversing
images of the German army. Moreover, the authors do a thorough job
discrediting the claims made by the German officers in their memoirs,
which can no longer be viewed as even minimally respectable. It is
less clear how the broader public responded to the German message.
The authors make some effort to measure how ordinary Americans
responded to these memoirs by discussing the types of presses that
published these accounts and the blurbs that appeared on back covers.
But they could go farther in this direction. There's no reference
to public opinion polling data, for instance, nor to sales figures
nor is there an attempt to do a demographic analysis of readership
(admittedly a challenging task). Consequently, it's more difficult
to assess changing perceptions of the German army among ordinary
Americans.
The same dynamic exists in the third section of the book. Here,
Davies and Smelser examine the emergence of a community of writers,
"war-gamers" and re-enactors who became devotees of the German army
and its campaigns in the east. As far as it goes, this is insightful
and exciting research (if sometimes too detailed for some tastes).
Smelser and Davies astutely identify a set of sources historians have
rarely tapped and survey it thoroughly. They identify a set of
authors and speakers (whom they label "gurus") who have been
exceptionally influential in presenting a heroic, sanitized picture
of the German army in the east. In a path-breaking discussion, they
examine the iconography and mechanics of war games published in the
1970s and 1980s to show how they presented gamers with an honorable
and heroic German army. They have thoroughly convinced me of the
existence of a community of "buffs" who have made a fetish of the
German army as super-efficient and super-heroic (although it would be
helpful to compare games set on the eastern front with other games).
The difficulty comes in understanding how influential this image was.
The authors don't really identify how large the community is (it's
unclear, for instance, when they cite Web site views, whether these
are total views or unique visitors) and whether the views of
war-gamers and re-enactors have spread outside their group.
Moreover, by focusing the discussion mostly on the 1970s and 80s,
they leave unclear how the creation of vast networks of computer
gamers have affected this community. As early as 2002, for instance,
the _New York Times_ wrote about games like _Day of Defeat_ which
allowed players to take the part of German soldiers and used Nazi
symbols and characters in a way that attracted a neo-Nazi
following.[1] It's unclear what kind of following war games like
_Panzerblitz_ (one of several cited by the authors as widely
influential) have had since the rise of computer gaming and whether
this has reinforced or redirected the communities highlighted by the
authors.
What is most interesting and potentially valuable about the book is
the broad framework the authors offer to explain the trends they have
identified. They suggest Americans have created two separate but
similar "myths of the lost cause" as lenses through which to view
their past. The first, obviously, relates to the South and the Civil
War. The second identifies German soldiers from World War Two as
good people fighting unwillingly for a bad cause. It encourages
Americans, precisely because it represents German soldiers as
fundamentally honorable, to focus on the battlefield rather than
atrocities. And it offers them a coherent narrative explaining why
the United States was suddenly allied with its former enemies and
opposed to its former allies. This is a rich and thought-provoking
interpretation, well worth more exploration than the authors give it.
Here we come back to my story about the British stock boys and the
Austrian girls. The authors do what they set out to do and do it,
for the most part, convincingly. But they miss the chance to dig
deeper. They don't attempt to explain (and never intend to) why
American attitudes diverged so clearly from those of another NATO
ally of Germany, the British (as I believe they did). Why would
British teenagers mock girls they believed to be German while
American teenagers stayed up late searching the Internet for the most
realistic recreations of Wehrmacht boots and caps? More broadly, as
I read, I kept asking for more. It would be fascinating, for
instance, to have dived into visual and oral culture before and after
the war in the way John Dower does in his book on perceptions of
Japan and Japanese soldiers, _War Without Mercy _(1987)_._ The
authors take some steps in this direction but could have gone much
farther. Similarly, they rarely address the influence of movies and
television. Given how many of my students refer to the History
Channel as the "Hitler Channel," it seems this would offer a rich set
of sources that would flesh out the authors' interpretations. In
particular, one wonders if the recent spate of Holocaust and war
movies touched off by Steven Spielberg (both the branch emerging from
_Schindler's List_ [1993] and that from _Saving Private Ryan _[1998])
changed American impressions of the German war effort at all.
Finally, and entirely appropriate for this list, they don't even
begin to suggest how this study might shed light on the aftermaths of
other genocides and military conflicts.
This should not be taken as criticism. All authors hope their work
will prompt other historians to wrestle with the issues they
identified. Davies and Smelser have given us an interesting and
persuasive study. It is likely to be most influential, however, in
prompting historians to further investigate the ideas they engage
here for the first time.
Note
[1]. Jonathan Kay, "Defying a Taboo, Nazi Protagonists Invade Video
Games," _New York Times_ (January 3, 2002),
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/03/te...deo-games.html,
accessed September 2, 2010.
Citation: Kelly ***all. Review of Smelser, Ronald M.; Davies II,
Edward J., _The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in
American Popular Culture_. H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews. November, 2010.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30397
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
-----
For subscription help, go to: http://www.h-net.org/lists/help/
To change your subscription settings, go to
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=h-war
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