The Myth of the Eastern Front
The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi–Soviet War in American Popular Culture (2008) by Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, is a historical analysis of the post-war myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht", the negative impact of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS mythologies in popular culture, and the effects of historical negationism upon cultural perceptions of the Eastern Front of the Second World War.
Book cover of The Myth of the Eastern Front; image adopted from cover art of the 1987 wargame The Last Victory: Von Manstein's Backhand Blow, February–March 1943, which depicts the Third Battle of Kharkov
US government material, 1942: Photo of smiling Russian soldier. US media also played a key role in shaping a positive image of the Soviet Union during World War II.
Nazi propaganda poster in Ukrainian; the headline reads: "German soldier is fighting for Europe". According to the introduction, the book examines, in part, the "romantic heroicization of the German army fighting to save Europe from a rapacious Communism".
Myth of the clean Wehrmacht
The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is the negationist notion that the regular German armed forces were not involved in the Holocaust or other war crimes during World War II. The myth, heavily promoted by German authors and military personnel after World War II, completely denies the culpability of the German military command in the planning and perpetration of war crimes. Even where the perpetration of war crimes and the waging of an extermination campaign, particularly in the Soviet Union – where the Nazis viewed the population as "sub-humans" ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators – has been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers corps", the Schutzstaffel (SS), but not the regular German military.
Germans protesting the Wehrmacht exhibition in 2002. The touring exhibition, organised by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, began to erode the myth for the German public in the 1990s. The signs state "Glory and honour to the German soldier!".
About 300 Polish prisoners of war were murdered by soldiers of the German 15th Motorised Infantry Regiment in the Ciepielów massacre on 9 September 1939.
Großadmiral Karl Dönitz and several Kriegsmarine (Naval branch of the Wehrmacht) officers performing the Nazi salute in 1941
Three men about to be hanged in front of a large crowd of Wehrmacht soldiers