The Myth of the Eastern Front

The Myth of the Eastern Front

Book cover of The Myth of the Eastern Front; image adopted from cover art of electronic game The Last Victory: Von Manstein's Backhand Blow, February–March 1943, which depicts the Third Battle of Kharkov.
Author	Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	History; Historiography
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Publication date	2008
Media type	Print
ISBN	978-0-521-83365-3

The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture is a 2008 book by the American historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J Davies of the University of Utah. It discusses perceptions of the Eastern Front of World War II in the United States in the context of historical revisionism. The book traces the foundation of the post-war myth of the clean Wehrmacht, its support by U.S. military officials, and the impact of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS mythology on American popular culture, including at the present time.

The book garnered largely positive reviews, for its thorough analysis on the creation of the myth by German ex-participants and its entry into American culture. Several reviews noted limitations of the book in its discussion on the myth's role in the contemporary culture and the extent of its impact on popular perceptions of the Eastern Front.

Structure

The first section of the book focuses on the prevailing American attitudes towards Nazi Germany, the Wehrmacht, and the SS in the period during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Their sources involve newspapers, magazines, and other American media of the period. The book also discusses the role of the war-time American propaganda in shaping a positive image of the Soviet Union as the United Kingdom's and the United States' ally.

The book then covers positive views on the Germans, produced early in the Cold War era. These arose due to the changing geopolitical climate, the appearance of German military sources which vindicated their side of the conflict, and support of this effort by the American military. A review by H-Net finds that "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".

The third section of the book covers the appearance of a new generation of "devotees of the German army and its campaigns in the east". They included new authors, wargaming fans, and World War II reenactment participants. The review in H-Net finds that this section provides "insightful and exciting research" and that "Smelser and Davies astutely identify a set of sources historians have rarely tapped and survey it thoroughly." They identify the so-called "gurus" of this generation, influential authors and speakers which present "a heroic, sanitized picture of the German army in the east".

Themes

The book introduces several themes, which are, in the authors' opinion, important to the understanding of the myth of the Eastern Front:

• Impact of propaganda in shaping popular perceptions.
• The role of the U.S. Army Historical Division in providing the German military commanders an opportunity to put down their recollections of Soviet-German conflict.
• Parallels with the "Lost Cause" mythology in the post-American Civil War era
• The romanticisation of the German war effort in contemporary popular culture, especially with regards to the elite units such as the Waffen-SS.

Reception

The Foreign Affairs magazine called it a "fascinating exercise in historiography", highlighting the book's analysis of how a "number of Hitler's leading generals were given an opportunity to write the history of the Eastern Front to help develop lessons for the Americans on fighting the Russians, and in doing so they provided a sanitized version of events".

Military historian Jonathan House, who, together with David Glantz, wrote the 1995 book When Titans Clashed on the Soviet-German war, reviewed the book for the The Journal of Military History, describing it as a "tour de force of cultural historiography". He notes Smelser's and Davies's analysis of the post-war mythology that presented the Wehrmacht and even the Waffen-SS as "above reproach, knights engaged in a crusade to defend Western civilization against the barbaric hordes of Bolshevism. (...) Ronald Smelser and Edward Davies have performed a signal service by tracing the origin and spread of this mythology". House recommends that military historians not only study the book, but "use it to teach students the dangers of bias and propaganda in history".

The American Historical Review, the official publication of the American Historical Association, notes that the book "present[s] a discomforting portrait of the American views of the Eastern Front. The authors are to be commended for exploring sources such as website and war games, that, while usually not studied by historians, are places where Americans encounter and enact World War II memory".

Martin H. Folly provided a critical assessment of the book in a review published in the journal History. While he complemented the authors for setting out the main myths concerning the Eastern Front, he argued that they did not provide convincing evidence to support their argument that most Americans accept such an account of the German-Soviet war. Moreover, Folly states that the book overlooks the influence of prominent and more accurate accounts of the war on the Eastern Front. His overall summary is that "the book therefore delivers a rather weak conclusion, which dilutes the impact of the useful analysis earlier in the book on the creation of the myth by German ex-participants and its entry into American culture with the help of the US Army".

See also

• Waffen-SS in popular culture

External links

• Official book page at Cambridge University Press
• "...Has a convincing central line of argument but will fail to have any impact on its target": a review on feldgrau.net, a website dedicated to World War II. According to The Myth of the Eastern Front, feldgrau.net is one of the websites attractive to those who romanticise the German war effort; the website is critiqued in the book.