The Poisonous Myths of the Eastern Front

За нас за вас и за десант и за спецназ! The Red Army was the single greatest contributor to the defeat of
Nazi Germany sixty-four years ago, a truly evil empire based on slavery and oppression, and responsible for
the genocide of millions of Slav civilians, Jews, Soviet POW’s and Roma by gas, bullets and starvation.
Yet ever since the first days of the Cold War, there has been a concerted campaign to whitewash the
Wehrmacht of participation in war crimes and to rehabilitate the generals who participated in it as
enthusiastically as Hitler and the upper echelons of the Nazi Party. This resulted in the promulgation of
many poisonous myths about the Eastern Front that are only now being laid to rest. I already wrote about
several of these myths in my Top 10 Russophobe Myths
MYTH I: Heroic Americans with their British sidekicks won World War Two, while the Russian campaign
was a sideshow.
REALITY: Although Western Lend-Lease and strategic bombing was highly useful, the reality is that the
vast majority of German soldiers and airmen fought and died on the Eastern Front throughout the war.
Rüdiger Overmans in Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg estimates that from the Polish
campaign to the end of 1944, 75-80% of all German armed forces personnel died or went missing in action
on the Eastern Front up to the end of 1944. According to Krivosheev’s research, throughout the war, the vast
majority of German divisions were concentrated against the Soviet Union – in 1942, for instance, there were
240 fighting in the East and 15 in North Africa, in 1943 there were 257 in the East and up to 26 in Italy and
even in 1944 there were more than 200 in the East compared to just 50 understrength and sub-par divisions
in the West. From June 1941 to June 1944, 507 German (and 607 German and Allied) divisions and 77,000
fighters were destroyed in the East, compared to 176 divisions and 23,000 fighters in the West. The two
pivotal battles, Stalingrad and El Alamein, differed in scale by a factor of about ten.
This is not to disparage the Western Allied soldiers who fought and died to free the world from Nazism. In
particular, the seamen who enabled Lend-Lease, at high risk of lethal submarine attack, to transport
indispensables like canned food, trucks and aviation fuel to Russia, possibly played a crucial role in
preventing its collapse in 1941-42. And the bomber crews massively disrupted Germany’s war potential at
the cost of horrid fatality ratios, significantly shortening the war (albeit it is currently fashionable to
castigate them for killing 600,000 people who by and large had no problem with waging a war of
extermination responsible for tens of millions of deaths on the Eastern Front).
MYTH II: The Russians just threw billions of soldiers without rifles in front of German machine guns.
REALITY: The vast majority of German soldiers were killed, taken POW or otherwise incapacitated on the
Eastern front. The Soviet to Axis loss ratio was 1.3:1 and the USSR outproduced Germany in every weapons
system throughout the war.
According to meticulous post-Soviet archival work (G. I. Krivosheev in Soviet Casualties and Combat
Losses), the total number of men (and in the Soviet case, about 1mn women) who passed through the armed
forces of the USSR was 34,476,700 and through Germany’s was 21,107,000. Of these, the “irrevocable
losses” (the number of soldiers who were killed in military action, went MIA, became POWs and died of
non-combat causes) was 11,285,057 for the USSR, 6,231,700 for Germany, 6,923,700 for Germany and its
occupied territories, and 8,649,500 for all the Axis forces on the Eastern Front. Thus, the total ratio of
Soviet to Nazi military losses was 1.3:1. Hardly the stuff of “Asiatic hordes” of Nazi and Russophobic
imagination (that said, also contrary to popular opinion, Mongol armies were almost always a lot smaller
than those of their enemies and they achieved victory through superior mobility and coordination, not
numbers).

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The problem is that during the Cold War, the historiography in the West was dominated by the memoirs of
Tippelskirch, who wrote in the 1950’s citing constant Soviet/German forces ratios of 7:1 and losses ratio of
10:1. This has been carried over into the 1990’s (as with popular “historians” like Anthony Beevor),
although it should be noted that more professional folks like Richard Overy are aware of the new research.
Note also that cumulatively 28% and 57% of all Soviet losses were incurred in 1941 and 1942 (Krivosheev)
respectively – the period when the Soviet army was still relatively disorganized and immobile, whereas for
the Germans the balance was roughly the opposite with losses concentrated in 1944-45.
The idea that there were two soldiers for every rifle in the Red Army, as portrayed in the ahistorical
propaganda film Enemy at the Gates, is a complete figment of the Russophobic Western imagination. From
1939 to 1945, the USSR outproduced Germany in aircraft (by a factor of 1.3), tanks (1.7), machine guns
(2.2), artillery (3.2) and mortars (5.5), so in fact if anything the Red Army was better equipped than the
Wehrmacht (sources – Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won; Chris Chant, Small Arms).
MYTH III: Though the Wehrmacht fought with honor and dignity on the Eastern Front, the Russians killed
all the German POW’s and raped and looted east Germany when they conquered it.
REALITY: The Great Patriotic War was an absolute war that was more brutal than anything seen in the
West by orders of magnitude throughout its entire length. The hundreds of thousands German civilian and
POW deaths at Soviet hands, though tragic, pale besides the up to 15-20mn Soviet civilian dead and the 60%
mortality ratio of Soviet POW’s in German camps. Set against these numbers, the Red Army rapes in east
Germany seem almost irrelevant.
One of the greatest crimes in Western Europe was the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, in which 642
civilians were murdered by a Waffen-SS battalion. But just one region in the East, Belarus, with 20% of
France’s population, experienced the equivalent of more than 3,000 Oradours – some 2,230,000 people
were killed in Belarus during the three years of German occupation, or a quarter of its population. At least
5,295 Belorussian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and more than 600 villages like Khatyn were
annihilated with their entire population under the cover of anti-partisan operations.
A poignant memorial to Nazi genocide in Khatyn – the one flame among three birch trees symbolizes the
quarter of the Belarussian population who died in 1941-44.
Furthermore,
The Russian Academy of Science in 1995 reported civilian victims in the USSR at German hands, including
Jews, totaled 13.7mn dead, 20% of the 68mn persons in the occupied USSR. This included 7.4mn victims of
Nazi genocide and reprisals; 2.2mn deaths of persons deported to Germany for forced labor; and 4.1mn
famine and disease deaths in occupied territory. There were an additional estimated 3.0 million famine
deaths in the USSR not under German occupation.
This was all part of a Nazi scheme, Generalplan Ost, which called for the extermination of the Slavic
intelligentsia and most of their urban populations, as well as the helotization or exile to Siberia of their
peasants. Confirmed by internal documents and numerous quotes from high Nazi officials:
The war between Germany and Russia is not a war between two states or two armies, but between two
ideologies–namely, the National Socialist and the Bolshevist ideology. The Red Army must be looked upon
not as a soldier in the sense of the word applying to our western opponents, but as an ideological enemy. He
must be regarded as the archenemy of National Socialism and must be treated accordingly. — General
Hermann Reinecke
We must break away from the principle of soldierly comradeship. The communist has been and will be no
comrade. We are dealing with a struggle of annihilation. — Adolf Hitler

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Some 3.3mn Soviet POWs died in the Nazi custody out of 5.7mn (USHMM), the vast majority of them from
July 1941 to January 1942 (i.e. when the Germans still thought they’d win quickly so no consequences for
their own POW’s). This death rate of around 60% can be contrasted with the 8,300 out of 231,000 British
and American prisoners who died (3.6%) in Nazi hands, or even the 580,548 out of 4,126,964 Axis
servicemen who died as Soviet POW’s (Krivosheev), that is around 15%. (The question of how many
German POW’s died in Western camps is hotly disputed. Though they ostensibly followed the Geneva
conventions and cited numbers are typically low, of the roughly 1,000 U.S. combat veterans that historian
Stephen Ambrose interviewed, roughly 1/3 told him they had seen U.S. troops kill German prisoners. The
controversial historian James Bacque claims that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower
deliberately caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation
and cold from 1944 to 1949, and that 250,000 perished in French camps in similar conditions).
The Red Army gets bad press for its behavior during the final invasion of Prussia, in which they are
frequently described as drunk looters and rapists. The consensus seems that although formal orders were
against such activities, in practice most turned a blind eye to it. Yet while tragic, it is completely
understandable and does not deserve the centrality placed on it by too many anti-Communist (or frequently
plain Russophobic) pseudo-historians.
Consider what the typical Red Army soldier experienced before getting to Berlin: years of brutal fighting
with a very high risk of death and almost certain to be wounded one time or another; hearing the stories of
murdered Soviet POW’s; the sight of thousands of burned villages and massacred women, children and old
men in Western Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Poland; the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka; and
finally, the (seemingly) decadent luxury of the conditions in which German citizens themselves lived (who,
let us not forget, democratically elected Hitler and who with just a few honorable exceptions like the White
Rose passively or even enthusiastically accepted Nazism).
This was, in the words of German leaders themselves, a war of extermination. Set against German atrocities
in the East, or even the frequently brutal postwar ethnic cleansing of millions of Germans from countries
like Poland and Czechoslovakia, it is at best wrong-headed and at worse racialist in the Nazi style to give
such centrality to the rape of Berlin.
One more myth. Many accounts allege that the Soviets sent all their returned POW’s to the Gulag, if they
didn’t shoot them for treason. Actually, according to Krivosheev, 233,400 were found guilty of collaborating
with the enemy and sent to Gulag camps out of 1,836,562 Soviet soldiers that returned from captivity.
MYTH IV: The mainstream Western narrative on the Eastern Front during the Second World War was
formed by academic historians and is fundamentally fair and objective.
REALITY: The exigencies of the Cold War, coupled with traditional US anti-Communism, meant that
many Americans sympathized with the German narrative of the war. In particular, the Wehrmacht officers
talked, networked and wrote about how the German military was not complicit in Nazi war crimes so as to
cement West Germany (not to mention their own careers) into the Western alliance on equal terms. The
complexities and compromises of military involvement in genocide in the East was whitewashed into a
kitschy image of the German soldier as a patriot braving the odds to defend family and Heimat from the
Bolshevik hordes. The US military and politicians were just fine with this, because they faced an ideological
struggle and possible land war with the Soviet Union. Though there is serious and reasonably objective
Western academic work on the Eastern Front, popular culture is still dominated by German memoirs and a-
historical romanticizers.
I’ve long been skeptical about the way Russians were portrayed in accounts of WW2. Although some
(generally recent) work is sympathetic and appreciative of the combat capabilities of the Red Army (e.g.
Chris Bellamy), most stress the German side of the conflict. The latter typically distinguish themselves by
traits like: admiration for the supposed brilliant of German generals like von Manstein and Guderian, who’d
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have won if not for Hitler’s interference; constant reference to the supposed vast numerical superiority and
callous disregard for casualties of the Soviets; emphasize “Russian” war crimes (offensives, etc, are however
“Soviet”), while attributing all German crimes to “Nazis”, usually focusing on groups like the
Einsatzgruppen and SS and avoiding discussing Wehrmacht complicity, etc.
Thankfully, two authors, Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, recently wrote a book, The Myth of the
Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in Popular Culture, which finally collates and authoritatively confirms
these strong suspicions about the objectiveness of Western popular historiography on the subject into an
accessible, well-argued narrative. Most of what follows is drawn directly from the book, in chronological
order.
1) Deep Ambivalence. Before WW2, many Americans had deeply ambivalent attitudes towards the Soviet
Union. Though bloggers generally consider the Russophile-Russophobe dichotomy in contemporary terms,
this division was as stark and relevant in the 1930’s – John Scott in Behind the Urals (BTW, though
considered by some a Soviet apologist, it is in fact fairly objective and certainly not a pro-Soviet propaganda
tract by any stretch of the imagination) writes, “In talking with people in France and America I was
impressed by the interest in the Soviet Union and the widespread misinformation about Russia and all things
Russian. Everyone I met was opinionated [aren’t we all lol!]. The Communists and their sympathizers held
Russia up as a panacea…Other people were steeped in Eugene Lyons’ stories and would not concede the
possibility that Russia had produced anything during recent years except chaos, suffering and disorder. They
dismissed the industrial and material successes of the Russians with an angry wave of the hand. Any
economist or businessman should have been able to see that the tripling of pig-iron production within a
decade was a serious achievement, and would necessarily have far-reaching effects on the balance of
economic and therefore military power in Europe”. So basically there was (much like today?) a hardcore
Communist / Russophile fringe, a sizable anti-Communist bloc and a majority that were mostly apathetic but
overall disapproving.
2) War and Friendship. The exigencies of war against a common enemy, Nazi Germany, necessitated a
rehabilitation of the Soviet Union in American eyes. In contrast to the “dirty, ignorant, brutalized peasants of
Nazi mythology” and traditional stereotypes of Russians as “mechanically inept and stupid”, Americans
began to emphasize the scale of industrial modernization in the Soviet Union, their growing religiosity
(helped by Stalin’s rehabilitation of the Church) and their focus on family – according to Life Magazine,
Russians now “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans”. The Red Army was
lauded for its growing technical and operational competence, with its soldiers portrayed as decent, ordinary
folks defending their families and Motherland from Nazi depredations, who did not want to die but were not
afraid to do so if called upon. Americans built “bridges” to ordinary Soviet workers such as writing letters to
people in similar occupations and organizing humanitarian relief efforts to supply food and consumer
durables to needy Russians. As the war drew to a close, even the American population, which suffered
relatively few war casualties and whose homeland remained untouched, thirsted for vengeance. Tentative
plans (Morgenthau Plan) were drawn up for the coercive deindustrialization of Germany and its
fragmentation into several demilitarized states – according to the aforementioned James Bacque, parts of
this plan were actually carried out after 1945 though gradually eased in the late 1940’s as the US realized it
needed a strong German ally during the Cold War.
3) Inversion of History during the Cold War. Aided by traditional American ambivalence towards
Bolshevism and Slavs in general, memories of Russian friendship froze over under the emerging Cold War,
to be “replaced by a pro-German version, one that stressed Russian atrocities, German heroism, and even a
superhuman sacrifice to defend Western culture from the Eastern hordes”. From the 1950’s Americans
became very receptive to the German view of the conflict (as constructed by the German officers who
wanted to rehabilitate the Wehrmacht from complicity in war crimes so as to set the new Bundeswehr and
the Western alliance in general on firmer footing), viewing the German soldier as a simple patriot in a

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Romantic “lost cause” defense of family, Church and Fatherland from red tyranny. Though the prospect of a
land war with Russia is long gone, this romantization continues unabated, little affected by academic
research from the 1970’s which questioned the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” and the opening up of
Russian archives and personal accounts in the 1990’s.
However, as covered above much of this narrative was simply false. As early as November 1942 the USSR
assembled the Extraordinary State Commission to examine German war crimes, with early trials held in
Kharkov and Krasnodar. The complicity of the German generals in atrocities emerged in the postwar
Nuremberg Trials, in which military men Keitel and Jodl were hanged for planning aggressive war and
participating in crimes against humanity, incriminated by their signatures on things like the Commissar
Order (immediate execution of all captured Communist military commissars), the Jurisdictional Order
(suspending traditional military laws on proper conduct of troops in the Eastern Front), the Hostage Order
(allowing for the killing of 50-100 hostages for every German soldier killed by Soviet partisans), the Night
and Fog Order (allowing for disappearance of undesirable elements in the occupied territories) and the
Commando Order (immediate execution of captured commandos behind German lines).
According to Rode, major-general of the Waffen-SS, “the military commanders…were thoroughly
cognizant of the missions and operational methods of these units. They approved of these missions and
operational methods because, apparently, they never opposed them”, and admitted that it was clear to him
that “anti-partisan warfare gradually became an excuse for the systematic annihilation of Jewry and
Slavism”. To the US prosecutor Rapp, who was conducting trials of German military personnel, a key
concern was the “prevention of legends” about the non-complicity of the German military in war crimes, lest
they again retain their reputation, as after WW1, as “gracious, old, highly educated fine gentlemen”.
Ironically, this is exactly what happened in the 1950’s.
Many Americans found it hard to rationalize German atrocities. The original US GI’s who liberated Western
Europe were replaced by new soldiers who hadn’t fought Germans, loved the German hospitality, generally
held them blameless and even accused their superiors of anti-German propaganda. This fed into deep-seated
American attitudes, which were common to much of the West, of anti-semitism, antislavism, and cultural
prejudices against the East in general. Germans with their Church, families and similar material culture
looked more wholesome than the Russians, who were perceived to be arrogant and crude unlike the newly
subservient Germans. The Germans reinforced these perceptions with stories of Russians as cruel, bestial
sexual predators. Policies on interacting with German civilians were gradually loosened in the US, whereas
in the Soviet occupied zone they were tightened from 1947 when Red Army soldiers in East Germany were
confined to their barracks.
With the Cold War heating up, first with the Berlin airlift and then with the Korean War, the Americans
realized they needed the Germans as friends instead of as prostrate slaves or even clients. Similarly, the
former Wehrmacht officers wanted to rescue their careers, continue the good struggle against Bolshevism to
preserve Western civilization, and to salvage the reputation of the German officers corp. Under American
auspices they started re-writing history with three main goals – 1) establish a “lost cause” myth of the
German military as honorable, apolitical and supremely competent, serving Fatherland not Führer, 2) advise
the Western Alliance on how to win a land war with the USSR and 3) dehumanize Russians in the interests
of Cold War solidarity.
This process can be illustrated in the life story of Franz Halder, a German general who became chief of the
Operational History (German) Section, a project that collated some 2,500 lengthy manuscripts from 700
former Wehrmacht officers that were tightly edited to fit the three goals above. In his 1949 work Hitler als
Feldherr, Halder made the following points: a) he didn’t support war against the USSR, b) didn’t lay plans
for an attack on the USSR before Hitler ordered him to, c) was concerned about a pre-emptive Soviet strike,
d) was unaware of the racial nature of the war as envisaged by Hitler, e) didn’t participate in POW or

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civilian genocide and f) was skeptical about Hitler’s assumptions of easy, early victory. Yet his personal war
diaries tell a somewhat different tale.
a) The German military had been thinking of expansion and continental hegemony since at least the middle
of the First World War. See the “Great Plan” of 1924-25 which called for Teutonic hegemony in Europe,
albeit it had not yet been based on explicitly racialist terms. It was resurrected after the Sudetenland crisis of
1938.
b) After the defeat of France in May 1940, Hitler was considering large-scale demobilization, but Halder
wanted a war with the USSR and had his staff draft “Operation Otto”, a precursor to Barbarossa, on his own
initiative in June 1940.
c) In February 1941, Halder felt a Soviet attack was “completely improbable”.
d) Under a heading in his diary tellingly entitled “Colonial tasks”, he wrote, “We must forget the concept of
comradeship between soldiers. A Comrade is no friend before or after the battle. This is a war of
extermination. If we do not grasp this, we shall still beat the enemy, but 30 years later we shall against have
to fight the Communist foe…This war will be very different from the war in the West. In the east, harshness
today means lenience in the future. Commanders must make the sacrifice of overcoming their moral
scruples.” In the margin, he added, “embody in the ObdH (Army High Command) order”.
e) The reality of the war in the East became clear after the invasion of Poland, when the SS and Security
Police started annihilating the Polish intelligentsia. Though many German officers expressed reservations,
non were forthcoming from Halder or von Brauschitsch. Later, he actually negotiated responsibilities for
maintaining order in the front and rear with Einsatzgruppen commanders, and knew of and was completely
indifferent to Soviet POW deaths. His own staff drafted the aforementioned Commissar Order and
Jurisdictional Order – in effect, the German military high command translated the views of leading Nazis
into policy. Though some officers like Hassell objected, the vast majority went along with the generals.
f) Halder more than shared Hitler’s optimism, considering the Germans would need just 80-100 divisions
against an estimated 50-75 Soviet. (Ultimately, 152 German divisions were unleashed in Barbarossa against
what were actually more than 300 Soviet divisions). Since progress was initially smooth, he constantly
revised the timescale of victory down – “not even Hitler was as confident as his generals”.
You can tell you’re damning yourself when you give off such a strong impression of mendacious duplicity
that you almost portray Hitler in a good light. And funnily enough the Führer presumably shared this
impression – he bribed his generals by secretly doubling their salaries, conditional on their loyalty and
obedience. Though a mitigating factor is that Halder was arrested for suspected involvement in the July
1944 bomb plot against Hitler, it should be noted his accommodations and provisions were quite OK
(certainly far from death camp rations) and it was only in January 1945 that he was formally dismissed from
the military. One gets the idea that the opportunist was simply hedging his bets, for by that time the war was
already obviously lost. According to Smelser / Davies, “Franz Halder embodies better than any other high
German officer the dramatic difference between myth and reality as it emerged after World War Two,
particularly with regard to the war in the east”.
Though under suspicion of being a war criminal, he was officially released from Western Allied custody in
1947. He ingratiated himself with the US Army and was made chief of Operational History (German)
Section in summer 1948 – the aforementioned project to rewrite history by rehabilitating the Wehrmacht and
cementing Germany into the Western alliance (not to mention rescuing the careers of former Wehrmacht
officers). In October 1948 he was tried by a German denazification court and was cleared. The prosecution
then got hold of his incriminating war diaries and demanded a retrial, but by then the Americans had taken
him under their wings, claiming him as indispensable. The court was forced to throw out all further charges
in 1950.
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As director of this project, he solicited and vetted some 2,500 manuscripts from 700 former Wehrmacht
officers, by now a mix of serving Bunderwehr officers, celebrity veterans and suspected war criminals.
Many of them transliterated Nazi mythology on Russians for an American audience – Halder himself wrote,
“frequent insensate cruelty is found coupled with attachment, fidelity and good nature under proper
[presumably Germanic?] handling”; many were worse, citing the supposed bestial, cruel, morose, instinctual
and primitive nature of the Red Army soldier (though they lauded him for bravery). The more important part
of the project however was teaching how to win, or at least not lose, a land war to the Soviet Union. German
officers criticized American plans to mount a line defense on the Rhine, instead stressing the “mobile
defense” concept developed by von Manstein in 1943-44. They also pointed to the importance of military
education, training and officer independence to their military successes.
Given such valuable information and propaganda material, the Americans gave the former Wehrmacht
officers leeway to further their careers and whitewash their war records. Einsenhower flip-flopped from
writing things such as “the German is a beast” to his wife in 1944, to apologizing to Wehrmacht officers for
defamation, claiming by the early 1950’s that “I do not believe the German soldier as such has lost his
honor”. General Matthew Ridgeway urged pardons for war crimes committed on the Eastern Front (only!),
with the curious justification that he had issued the same orders in Korea for which the German generals
were rotting in jail for. And although the Red Scare was passing away by the mid-1950’s, by this time the
myth of the “lost cause” – patriot Germans fighting for family and Heimat against the Bolshevik hordes –
was fast becoming entrenched.
German officers networked with Americans. German generals, gracious, old, highly educated fine
gentlemen like Guderian and von Manstein (both of whom knew of Hitler’s plans for the Soviet peoples),
published self-serving memoirs. From the 1970’s, they would be further supplemented by popular accounts
of the Eastern Front from ordinary German soldiers, showing their human side. Reenactments became
popular, in which enthusiasts combined a painstaking attention to historical detail like uniforms and ranks
with a plain painful minimal attention to placing their heros in the larger historical context of Wehrmacht
complicity in Nazi crimes.
Though academic historians from the 1970’s increasingly challenged this narrative, the popular culture was
unaffected, having long since been taken hostage by images of Stuka dive-bombers and Tiger tanks and the
writings of the German generals. It took until the last ten years or so, with the popularization of this more
academic work, as well as the opening of the Soviet archives and accounts from the Russian side, to add
greater perspective. Yet as the myths above prove, there is still lots of work to do – not least, fully exposing
the distorted historiography of the Great Patriotic War to the general public.
To close this with an idea – there are many, many Russian accounts and memoirs of the war, but too many
of them remain untranslated into English. This is unacceptable and we should look into ways to change this
state of affairs. Suggestions?
Sources
R. Overmans. Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg
G. I. Krivosheev. Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses
R. Smelser & E.J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular
Culture.