The Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht with Dr. Finn Ballard

In the centre of Berlin there is a quarter-size replica of the Roman Pantheon, constructed in 1818 by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, which today serves as the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny. In the otherwise-empty chamber, you will find a statue by the Berliner artist Käthe Kollwitz, depicting a mother and her dying son, which is situated under an open skylight through which rain or snow may be falling. Underneath that powerful statue is the grave which contains two bodies: that of an unidentified prisoner murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp; and that of an unknown German soldier who perished during World War Two. 

To understand how these two bodies could be interred together, it's necessary to understand the potency of a historiographic narrative which proliferated in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This narrative is called by its critics 'the myth of the clean Wehrmacht,' and it holds that members of the German armed forces were entirely separate from the SS, were innocent of Nazi crimes against humanity, and were in fact victims of those crimes themselves. In this lecture, we will investigate how the 'myth of the clean Wehrmacht' spread: which historians were most responsible for its dissemination, the function it served in both East and West Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich's collapse, and how it was eventually debunked. We will discuss both tales of self-sacrifice from members of the German Army, Navy and Air Force, and the part which the armed forces played in the Nazis' atrocities.