![]() ![]() The Great War was a defining experience for the German military. The enormous losses on all sides resulted in part from the introduction of new weapons, like the machine gun and gas warfare, as well as from the failure of military leaders to adjus t their tactics to the increasingly mechanized nature of warfare. Over 9 million soldiers died, a figure which far exceeded the military deaths in all the wars of the previous hundred years combined. Initial enthusiasm on all sides for a quick and decisive victory faded as the war devolved into a stalemate of costly battles and trench warfare, particularly on the western front. World War I was one of the most destructive wars in modern history. It pays specific attention to the military leaders’ acceptance of Nazi ideology and their role in perpetrating crimes against Jews, prisoners of war, and unarmed civilians in the name of that ideology. This timeline addresses these distortions by chronicling the relationship between the professional military elite and the Nazi state. Second, the German military’s role in the Holocaust was largely forgotten. ![]() First, German generals came to be seen as models of military skill rather than as war criminals complicit in the crimes of the Nazi regime. ![]() This led to two long-lasting distortions of the historical record of World War II. And because the few available Soviet accounts of the war were deemed untrustworthy-and most of the crimes committed by the German military had taken place in Soviet territory-the myth remained unchallenged for decades. This myth of the German military’s “clean hands” was largely accepted in the United States, where American military leaders, embroiled in the Cold War, looked to their German counterparts for information that would help them against the Soviet Union. They insisted it was the SS-the Nazi elite guard-and the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler, who were responsible for all crimes. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Germany’s military generals claimed they had fought honorably in World War II. ![]()
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