It should also be noted that the state of knowledge regarding the army's involvement in Nazi crimes was not a function of any substantial lack in archival sources. Large quantities of German documents were taken to Britain and the United States after the war and later returned to Germany; much of the material eventually used by scholars had been available long before it was examined. What was lacking in those first two decades was scholarly interest, not evidence, as well as the more obvious limitations imposed on research by the vast amounts of material and the laborious process of its organization and categorization. At least as crucial, however, was the impact of certain interpretive concepts of Nazism specifically and methodological conventions about historical research more generally. This meant that during the reign of the paradigms of totalitarianism and fascism, scholars were often more interested in theory than in fact, and that with the emergence of social history, historians devoted little attention to the military.8 Consequenriy, the only scholars to examine army records were so-called "pure" military historians, whose interests lay more in tactics and strategy, command and logistics, than in ideology and criminality. Mainstream historians therefore tended to rely mainly on the memoirs of German generals and veterans' accounts for the reconstruction of the soldiers' experience in the war. And precisely because former soldiers understandably stressed their professionalism and denied any ideological or organizational links with the regime, they were viewed as objective and reliable sources. It took a generation of scholars more skeptical about the explanatory power of the old paradigms, less tnistful of former soldiers and, not least, willing to undermine the myths on which West German society was founded, to finally venture into the archives and begin to write the history of the Wehrmacht's relationship with the Nazi regime.
