![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Is that just selling fluff or does he seem to have something to say there? Is it just 'the Germans were really good?' Also for those who have read it, where do you think this falls on the memoir to scholarship spectrum? Sometimes you get these guys who do this annoying thing where they want to contribute to bigger questions about a subject, but are too lazy to do more research so they just take their own direct experience and apply it writ large to the whole Army or the whole system. Its interesting stuff.īack on schedule Amazon page suggests he has some SHOCKING revelation about the Bundeswehr. Also no comment on the fact that the Germans lost(!!!) and why that may have been the case. Yet the US Army took those lessons seemingly uncritical and really adopted the German lessons from fighting the Soviets without any comment on all the nasty parts of WWII on the Eastern front. Thats not really true (see the work of Omar Bartov who takes down that specific myth). Balck also definitely takes the line in his memoir that Berlin and the rear area troops were responsible for the brutality not the troops on the line. The interviews with Hermann Balck I linked in that other thread are also interesting, I've always gotten the vibe from reading the interview transcripts that what theyre really saying is that the Russians are incapable of being good soldiers, Germans are inherently good soldiers, etc. There is even an infamous Military Review article which is very flattering to Joachim Piper and has, as I recall, one line in it about all the bad stuff he did. From what I've read of both documents and of writing on the subject, the US Army was pretty uncritical when it came to the Nazis. After all we forced many of them to write us histories while they were in prison camps, histories which were pretty influential in how the civilian community has gone on to remember WWII and especially the Eastern Front. This is something I am a bit interested in for the later Cold War era, the relationship between German Generals, Nazis, and the US Army has always been. ![]()
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