AHC: make sure the “clean Wehrmacht” myth non-existent, and have the Wehrmacht have as bad as a post war reputation as the SS

[AHE]

If you don’t know, what the clean Wehrmacht myth is, it is the notion that the regular German armed forces did not commit war crimes/crimes against humanity, and were simply brave men fighting for their country. With any POD from 1939 onwards, your goal is to (mostly) eliminat this myth and give the Wehrmacht the horrible reputation it deserves.

 

[blsssd]

Wehrmacht coup of the Reich, chemical warfare when they start being pushed back, countless people die.

 

[Ficboy]

It's impossible to really prevent it from happening barring short of any radical changes. The Wehrmacht had some anti-Nazi members amongst its ranks and they were part of the 20 July plot otherwise known as Operation Valkyrie. The best case scenario is in a Nazi victory and eventual civil war in Germany where a pro-Nazi faction of the Wehrmacht commit numerous war crimes even then they will be overshadowed by the SS and others.

 

[Gukpard]

If you don’t know, what the clean Wehrmacht myth is, it is the notion that the regular German armed forces did not commit war crimes/crimes against humanity, and were simply brave men fighting for their country. With any POD from 1939 onwards, your goal is to (mostly) eliminat this myth and give the Wehrmacht the horrible reputation it deserves.

The main figures behind it's myth were Franz Halder and Erich Von Mastein, but especially Halder since the allies pardoned him and he set the basic narrative to use on it, the formulae to "blame Hitler, the officers knew the best", and he made sure that anything being publishied was seen by him to prevent possible deviations for such a narrative.

If the allied tribunals are more fair and people like Mastein and Halder are hanged, the myth will never be as developed as it did OTL, and this might help to crush it earlier.

Also, a nice video about it, go for 8:01 :

 

[juanml82]

Can that be sustained in the post war world? Both the (soon to be) NATO and the USSR needed a German army in their alliance in order to fight WW3. And those armies would have to be built on the basis of the Wehrmacht so some sort of PR campaign to keep its reputation would happen.

I think the only way for the OP premise to happen is if there is no Cold War border dividing Germany in two or if Germany is kept as a non aligned buffer. So IMHO the less unlikely scenario is the USSR pushing at least to the Rhine and if at all possible, all the way to the English channel. With those borders, the Cold War doesn't need German armies to fight for the USA and the USSR (because in a nuclear war, both Germanys would be obliterated, so we can't really say they'd be fighting for their countries) so the USSR can keep the Wehrmacht bad reputation while the Wallies wouldn't care.

 

[Adelkman]

I remember watching a short interview with Simon Wiesenthal. He was telling how in the 60s, during a conference in Italy about the Holocaust, an old widow asked him if he only searched for those who killed jews or also other ethnicities. Wiesenthal answered "I search every criminal". So, the widow recounted how her husband was killed in a massacre that Wiesenthal never heard of, the Cephalonia Massacre.
The massacre was the nearly obliteration of the Italian 33rd Infantry Division Acqui. After the 8 september Armistice, a small firefight happened between German ships and an Italian artillery battery. What followed was a battle that lasted seven days. After the Italian soldiers surrendered after running out of munitions, the now prisoners were executed and the survivors loaded on ships to be deported in Germany. Those ships were then sunk by the allies. In numbers, 1315 Italian soldiers died in battle, 5155 were executed and about 3000 drowned; around 200 survivors spent the rest of the war doing forced labors.
When Wiesenthal tried to open an investigation about the massacre at the Dortmund's attorney , he clashed with a wall. Then he undestood that it was not the SS who committed the crime, but the Wehrmacht. And "the Wehrmacht was a sacred thing".
The Wehrmacht committed other massacres in the Aegean territories: Kos (102 officers and a veterinarian) and Rhodes (90 execution + 5800 prisoners drowned).

I think the Germans truly needed to feel separated from their recent past. Giving all responsibility to the SS was the quickest way to exorcise the collective fault of all the crimes committed during the war. The SS, with all their hateful actions and thinking, were just the perfect scapegoat. Giving the Wehrmacht their share of guilt probably felt to tiring, socially and spiritually speaking. Once people felt confortable in this construct, the "clean Wehrmacht" truly became a myth, one that nobody wanted to dissolve.
Only after many decades, when the war started to become "abstract" (when fewer and fewer people that lived it remained) the myth was seriously challenged in Germany.

 

[rommel12]

punish all German officers who committed crimes, in addition to when the Bundeswehr is created, it will not allow any German officer who is paralyzed in the Second World War to enlist in the new army.


You ask, if the Bundeswehr will not accept officers from the Wehrmacht, what would be the ages of these officers within the army, would there be colonels between 25 and 30 years old and maybe generals between 35 and 40 years old or would they have even younger officers?

 

[TDM]

The problem is roughly half of all men between the ages of 15 and 40 served in the German armed forces during WW2 (a pretty mind boggling figure). This means that even say 20 years later a huge chunk of the population served in the armed forces during WW2. But also an even larger chunk of the population's father, husband, son, brother, uncle, nephew, etc served in the German armed forces.

So yeah imagine wondering if your much loved relative was guilty of mass murder, or even how would you'd feel if you had been part of an organisation that was responsible for deliberate mass murder, geocide etc. And I don't even mean in the divorced dropping bombs on cities but actually shooting naked people in the back of the head over a pit of bodies way. Not too pleasant. Lots of cultural reasons to load it all on the SS and pretend the ordinary soldiers were either blameless or under 24 hour threat of SS firing squad if they baulked at anything.

It's comparatively easy to distance yourself from the Nazis and take a hard position against their beliefs, because the actually active identifiable baddie nazis were usually someone else or at the very least you could usually point to some Nazi group worse than you. Much harder to do that with an organisation that so many were involved in.



On a larger scale and outside of Germany, we wanted to know how to fight Russians, and the boys with most experience of doing that were the Germany 1941-45 army. So we developed a relationship with them and naturally they wanted us to know how it really was just the nasty old SS who did everything, because frankly pretty soon we didn't care because we had more pressing concerns, (which also required an active and effective West German army). The corollary of that was we weren't doing that with the Russian soldiers, because Russia was now our shared enemy with Germany and so we got a very lopsided side of the story.

So unless the Heer en masse literally goes on door to door killing their own families, not much


EDIT: Excellent post by Adelkman

 

[Gukpard]

Also, a small curiosity is that there was a "clean as myth", that was made by former waffen SS veterans. You can read it on the Wikipedia page of Sepp Dietrich and on the page about a Nazi organisation called HIAG. Basically former waffen SS veterans alleged that the SS made the war crimes, not the armed forces of the SS. The most mind boggling thing is not their allegations per se, but the fact that the allies allowed people like Sepp Dietrich to remain alive and free

 

[Veiovis]

Also, a small curiosity is that there was a "clean as myth", that was made by former waffen SS veterans. You can read it on the Wikipedia page of Sepp Dietrich and on the page about a Nazi organisation called HIAG. Basically former waffen SS veterans alleged that the SS made the war crimes, not the armed forces of the SS. The most mind boggling thing is not their allegations per se, but the fact that the allies allowed people like Sepp Dietrich to remain alive and free

Alive and free? They nurtured many such people and allowed them to thrive. The massive injustice of the post war time really cannot be overstated, to the point that when I read about some Nazi butchers killing themselves in the Endtimes I can't help but think "well had you survived you would have thought your suicide attempt mighty stupid, it all works out for you anyways".

 

[Gukpard]

Alive and free? They nurtured many such people and allowed them to thrive. The massive injustice of the post war time really cannot be overstated, to the point that when I read about some Nazi butchers killing themselves in the Endtimes I can't help but think "well had you survived you would have thought your suicide attempt mighty stupid, it all works out for you anyways".

Yeah, people like Friedrich Flick who was friendly to Himmler and became the richest man in post war brd.

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

If you don’t know, what the clean Wehrmacht myth is, it is the notion that the regular German armed forces did not commit war crimes/crimes against humanity, and were simply brave men fighting for their country. With any POD from 1939 onwards, your goal is to (mostly) eliminat this myth and give the Wehrmacht the horrible reputation it deserves.

Not going to happen. The 'Clean Wehrmacht' myth was very convenient for the West - it allowed the rearming of Germany to be a lot easier, both practically and in terms of selling it to the people of the US, Britain etc.

 

[Simon]

The British had a number of prisoner of war holding areas for captured senior German officers which were all thoroughly bugged with the conversations being recorded – Latimer House near Amersham and Wilton Park near Beaconsfield for Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe officers respectively where they'd be held for a few weeks before being moved to regular camps, and Trent Park near Cockfosters for Heer officers where they were kept for the duration. Apparently their conversations were quite damning with regards to knowledge of and participation in various war crimes, especially on the Eastern Front. Have those transcripts or the actual recordings used in post-war trials would do a lot to dent the Wehrmacht's image.

As has already been mentioned Franz Halder was able to interfere with the US Army Historical Division's work. He used his position to scrub any mentions of atrocities or war crimes and to paint the Wehrmacht in only a positive light. Since that was contributing to the official history it effectively poisoned the well for some some. You need to find some way of both removing him from that position and instituting precautions against attempts to subvert the historical narrative.

 

[GarethC]

D-Day is postponed due to weather, and more weather, and more weather. WAllies eventually only meet the Soviets significantly further west, maybe only on the Rhine.

It is a Soviet narrative that dominates the post-war zeitgeist, as it is a Soviet occupation of the majority of Germany, and a Soviet trial and bullet in the back of the head for the vast majority of the officers of the Wehrmacht and of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the RSHA, the Abwehr, university staff and other intellectuals who survived the Nazis , landowners, factory owners, lawyers, and priests, and the justification for the Katyn-like purge across Germany is that they were all just as much a part of the Final Solution as the einsatzgruppen.

 

[RedSword12]

I'm not sure a Clean Wehrmacht Myth can easily be avoided. It was convenient for the Allies to whitewash the Wehrmacht, so as to bring relations with postwar Germany to a somewhat cordial state, among other political reasons. Note how a company of Alsace-Lorraine men in the SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" immolated the entire village of Oradour in the Oradour-sur-Glane Incident, with only a handful managing to escape (the death toll was 642 people, with even the youngest children not spared). The SS men of that company who survived the war were spared as "unwilling participants" by the French government, which wanted to retain the loyalty of the ethnically German parts of Alsace-Lorraine's population, despite the damning evidence the SS men had done it of their own accord (and that the massacre was not a result of the stresses of soldiers expecting to die, but a premeditated "retaliation" for the alleged capture/killing of a German officer in the area). It was politically convenient to pretend that the German army was mostly morally clean, as it helped normalize postwar relations between West Germany and the rest of Europe.

 

[Ficboy]

I'm not sure a Clean Wehrmacht Myth can easily be avoided. It was convenient for the Allies to whitewash the Wehrmacht, so as to bring relations with postwar Germany to a somewhat cordial state, among other political reasons. Note how a company of Alsace-Lorraine men in the SS Panzer Division "Das Reich" immolated the entire village of Oradour in the Oradour-sur-Glane Incident, with only a handful managing to escape. The SS men of that company who survived the war were spared as "unwilling participants" by the French government, which wanted to retain the loyalty of the ethnically German parts of Alsace-Lorraine's population, despite the damning evidence the SS men had done it of their own accord (and that the massacre was not a response to the stresses of soldiers expecting to die, but a premeditated "retaliation" for the alleged capture/killing of a German officer in the area). It was politically convenient to pretend that the German army was mostly morally clean, as it helped normalize postwar relations between West Germany and the rest of Europe.

It also helped that unlike the SS, the Wehrmacht wasn't solely comprised of ideological fanatics and there were anti-Nazi officers and soldiers in the Heer some of whom were part of Operation Valkyrie on July 20, 1944. The Kriegsmarine were even less loyal to Nazism and were politically neutral.

 

[RedSword12]

and there were anti-Nazi officers and soldiers some of whom were part of Operation Valkyrie on July 20, 1944.

Many anti-Nazi war criminals.

 

[Ficboy]

Many anti-Nazi war criminals.

Well some of them to be precise. At least there were those who realized at what the hell they just did.

 

[Father Maryland]

Also, a small curiosity is that there was a "clean as myth", that was made by former waffen SS veterans. You can read it on the Wikipedia page of Sepp Dietrich and on the page about a Nazi organisation called HIAG. Basically former waffen SS veterans alleged that the SS made the war crimes, not the armed forces of the SS. The most mind boggling thing is not their allegations per se, but the fact that the allies allowed people like Sepp Dietrich to remain alive and free

The Nuremburg trials were one of those rare occasions in human history when not having nearly enough hangings was a real problem.

If you want a full on view of the "Clean SS" myth try out Watch on the Rhine. The Posleen novel by Tom Kratman. The SS are portrayed as virtually all good honorable soldiers who did nothing wrong. In a cast primarily composed of former SS men there's all of a single unrepentant Nazi.

Watch on the Rhine (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A lot of the novel is about how evil the enviromental and anti war movements are and the SS is portrayed as "putting things right".

 

[theg*ddam*hoi2fan]

The Nuremburg trials were one of those rare occasions in human history when not having nearly enough hangings was a real problem.

If you want a full on view of the "Clean SS" myth try out Watch on the Rhine. The Posleen novel by Tom Kratman. The SS are portrayed as virtually all good honorable soldiers who did nothing wrong. In a cast primarily composed of former SS men there's all of a single unrepentant Nazi.

Watch on the Rhine (novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A lot of the novel is about how evil the enviromental and anti war movements are and the SS is portrayed as "putting things right".

Not just that...the SS is played up as ‘the most International army’ in the world (based on their volunteers and ‘volunteers’ from elsewhere in Europe), Kratman’s German author-insert firmly believes that if the Madagaskar plan had happened there’d have been Jews in the SS one day...and in-story, Israeli soldiers who survive their homeland’s loss join the SS as ‘Judas Maccabaeus-Division’, wearing SS black with little Stars of David and Menorahs as well as the SS-Runes.