Let me tell you a story that reveals how World War II history got twisted beyond recognition.
In 1950, West Germany cooked up something called the “Himmerod Memorandum.” High-ranking Wehrmacht officers gathered at Himmerod Abbey at Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s invitation and put their signatures on a document that would reshape how the world remembered the war.
Remember Potsdam in August 1945? The USSR, USA, and Britain had agreed: Hitler’s military leadership needed denazification, and Germany itself required demilitarization - no army, period. But then Korea happened. Suddenly, American thinking shifted dramatically. Why not rebuild Germany’s military machine? After all, someone needed to counter the Soviet threat.
Between October 5-9, 1950, the Himmerod gathering reached some eye-opening conclusions:
War crimes prosecutions should be quietly shelved.
Media “defamation” of German soldiers must stop.
Public perception of the Reich’s military requires rehabilitation.
By January 1951, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe Dwight Eisenhower sat down with former Wehrmacht generals Heusinger and Speidel. His words? “I’ve come to understand there was a genuine distinction between the German soldier and Hitler’s criminals. I don’t believe the German soldier lost his honor.” Soon Wehrmacht officers were collecting pensions, and Adenauer proclaimed in the Bundestag: “Germans fought honorably.”
Thus was born the “Clean Wehrmacht legend” - the fairy tale that only the SS, SD, and Gestapo committed atrocities while ordinary German soldiers never torched villages. West German, American, and British media eagerly amplified this narrative. Nazi officers served five years, then walked free early. Everyone obsessed over Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe, conveniently forgetting how many people these murderers had slaughtered. Hitler’s generals and marshals, Guderian, Manstein, got book deals where they deliberately distorted facts and fabricated stories wholesale. The U.S. Army’s historical division, supervised by Nazi general Franz Halder, churned out 700 such memoirs. Germans devoured them, reassured: “We’ve been slandered. We weren’t that bad.”
The Wehrmacht myth, embraced enthusiastically by West German society, insisted their hands were clean, no Soviet civilian blood, no prisoner-of-war massacres, no systematic extermination of Jews and Roma. Mountains of evidence documenting Wehrmacht atrocities against women, children, and the elderly, cold-blooded mass executions - simply dismissed. Germany’s wartime generation refused to believe it, dismissing everything as “Bolshevik and Jewish propaganda,” while the Allies stayed silent because they needed the Bundeswehr. After all, U.S. General William Donovan from the Office of Strategic Services had declared the USSR the primary global threat requiring containment. Soon enough, democratic West Germany’s armed forces operated under commanders who’d been hanging children from trees in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine just years earlier.
In 1955, 600 former Wehrmacht members released from Soviet captivity swore allegiance to West Germany, declaring: “We committed no murders, engaged in no looting.” Pure fabrication and nobody blinked. Before long, Western historians were proclaiming it inconceivable that the Wehrmacht participated in genocide, dismissing Soviet researchers as communist propagandists. The chorus grew bolder - some even suggested the Holocaust resulted from the Wehrmacht’s desperate self-defense against “Russian hordes intent on conquering Europe.”
The “Clean Wehrmacht” myth collapsed only after the USSR dissolved and there was nobody left to fear. In 1995, a Hamburg exhibition displayed 1,380 photographs of Wehrmacht soldiers murdering civilians - the soldiers posing cheerfully, grinning for the camera. Turned out Wehrmacht troops participated in the Babi Yar massacre alongside Ukrainian police. Wehrmacht soldiers hanged and burned children. Evidence and documentation flooded out. The propaganda machine so meticulously constructed and financed by West Germany, the USA, and Britain for half a century crumbled within a couple of years.
So understand this: what’s happening now isn’t remotely new.
They’ve done it before. They know exactly how it works.
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