EDITED: Forgot my sources! EDITED: Phrasing.

Hello,

First post on AH, so before I provide you with a theory (as I don't think this is 'answerable') I'll post a small blerb. My name's Victor Rinaldi, I'm a graduate of the University of Toronto, specializing in Criminology, but with an avid and amateur interest in military history. I'm a specialist in particular to the aspects of mounted warfare, that is Cavalry and what most modern military thinkers would consider as their 'spiritual successors' (Armored Reconnaissance, Armored Formations and Mechanization of Rifle units). While I'm not an expert in any one period, I can speak with some authority and with an appropriate amount of background reading for the Napoleonic era through to contemporary warfare.

Now, to posit a theory. First off, what you're describing is something approaching 'apologism', and this is largely a result of more balanced and honest approach to WWII History that began to come about after the 1970s. Authors like Max Hastings and Antony Beevor have made great pains to study the accounts of both sides and have begun to investigate numbers we have before taken for granted. A prime example is the number of tank losses at Prochorovka, Kursk. Traditional history has lauded this as 'the greatest tank battle of all time' and so on and so forth, but astute historians have largely dispelled that myth. It was, in essence, a suicide run by the RKKA's 1st Tank Army against a single (with elements of others) SS Division.

So...to put it more colloquially, the military skill of Germany has become far more apparent than ever before with less chauvinistic accounts being produced. Now, this is not to lay the blame on all historians, there are many books that do have a disastrously apologist or even blatantly pro-Nazi tone if you dig deep enough. I was unfortunate enough to read a book on the 33SS division (made up almost entirely of French ex-pats) where the author repeatedly made references of their 'defense of Europe from the true enemies' and had the gall to refer to them as Martyrs.

No, however, the new lean towards putting German soldiery and equipment on a pedestal is, if I had to take an educated guess, is a result of people reading these more honest histories and playing the Armchair general, the 'what-ifs' and 'if-it-were-not-for-Hitler' games of strategy in their heads. Men like Beevor and Hastings make it very clear that the German Army was hardened, determined and made of consumate professionals. Hastings refers to the German, not untruthfully, as 'the greatest army of the century' and lauds their personal weaponry and the tactical skill that even the most junior of leaders showed. However, he goes out of his way to contrast this with how they were defeated by a motivated and equally well equipped army of citizens - the British and American armies, who lacked the experience and military tradition of their foes, but were able to learn from their mistakes and overcome an enemy with an edge in tactical engagements.

The message Hastings is going for is that we should honor the 'reluctant dragons', these citizen-soldiers for fighting in the face of much experienced and hardened enemies. Many people, I feel, choose to let that get lost in translation and paint the picture black-and-white of the German professionals being betrayed by their regime as they hold back hordes of bumbling incompetents.

I could write a very impassioned and angry essay on this, but I think I'll cut this here. I'll be glad to elaborate further. It pains me to see people lose this message and actually believe Germany stood a chance, strategically and operationally, at winning the Second World War. They were doomed for the same reasons they were doomed strategically in World War One. Finally, while a healthy respect for their soldering abilities should be noted, no amount of tactical skill should blind someone to the political ends the German regime were aiming to achieve. Slipshod reading of modern histories often lead to such apologism.

Sources: "SS CHARLEMAGNE: The 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS", Tissier, Tony Le. Pen and Sword Military, South Yorkshire, 2010.

"OVERLORD: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy" Hastings, Max. Touchstone Publishing, 1984, New York, New York.

"Stalingrad" Beevor, Antony. Viking Press, Penguin Books, 1999. London Press.

"Decision in the Ukraine...", Nipe Jr., George M. Stackpoole Books, 1996.

Yes! And no.

Especially among amature historians, the German Army (the Wehrmacht more so than the SS, which was the militant arm of the Nazi Party) is often glorified for its early successes and its seeming technological and strategic superiority. This is reinforced by popular culture, which generally reinforces this idea.

There is some validity to this idea, which is why its become so popular. I think this idea has been further reinforced by America's experience against the Germans, as well as the British and French. Even in 1944, the Armies in the west were largely equipped equipment which was inferior to the enemies equipment. The Germans had advanced rifles, like the MP 44, as well as tanks like the Tiger, Panther, and King Tiger, which all obviously outclassed the lighter M4 Shermans, Easy 8s, and Jumbo Shermans. This gave many in the west the impression that the German military were just light years ahead of American design and technology.

Then theres a historiographic question. Historiography, for the layman, is the history of writing history. In other words, it asks the question "what have people written before me?" In terms of the western historiography of World War Two, many of the sources used were either German (located in the FRG), or captured sources brought back to the US. Obviously western historians also had access to American, British, and French sources, as well as the memoirs and recollections of German officers located in the FRG. What was missing were sources located in the GDR (East Germany) as well as those in the USSR. That made for a biased story. Many of the first hand sources which were created really focused on the Western Front, and the very early years of the Eastern Front. And in terms of the East, the only sources which historians had access to were German sources, which were obviously biased towards their own success, and either downplayed, missrepresented, or misinterpreted Soviet actions. This helped build up the myth of the German Army. Obviously, many Germans downplayed their major defeats after 1943 (and thus focused on the victories of '39-41), and American and British historians focused on their battles in '44. While this trend is changing, thanks to men like David M. Glantz, this trend has had profound effects on how historians, both amature and professional, have remembered the German Army.

So I think there has been this myth and glorification of the German military, and the Wehrmacht. The war was important for Europe, and really the world, so its reasonable that we have interpreted and analyzed the war. It also makes sense that we glorify the military which seemed to oppose the entirety of the west. Only a major, competent, power could do this, and Germany played the part well.

But I dont think that the glorification of the Wehrmacht is comparable to that of the Confederacy. For starters, the Nazi state is generally considered (rightly) to be abhorrent. The Nazy party and its military arm, the SS, are likewise abhorred. While the Wehrmacht, the Kriegsmarine, and the Luftwaffe, are exempted to a greater or lesser extent, they still receive a far more negative treatment than the CSA and especially the Army of Northern Virginia receives. In popular culture, the Wehrmacht is often portrayed as the enemy, and innately evil. Even those people who "exempt" the Wehrmacht from the conduct of the larger Nazi state have to do so with caveats. This really doesnt exist with the Lost Cause. Many LCers will even deny that Slavery played a role in the cause and conduct of the war. The Confederate army and the Confederate state are not rejected in the same way that the Nazi state is. For me, a major component of the Lost Cause is the whole nobility of the attempt. Thats not possible when the Wehrmacht's main purpose was to defend a racist and genocidal regime. As much as we could play the "they didnt participate" game, that fact is undeniable. But for LCers that problem doesnt exist; they glorify much of Southern society, and downplay the issue of slavery in the larger conflict.

So I think that there is definately a "cult of the Wehrmacht". But its not as pervasive, or as complete as the "cult of the Confederacy.

I would say that there are parallels, but the differences between the Lost Cause of the Confederacy and the Third Reich far outweigh their commonalities. While they share the "overwhelmed but not outfought" narrative, this was only one component of these respective memories of war and defeat.

An integral component of the Lost Cause was that the Confederacy, both its military and civilian population, fought nobly for a political cause that enjoyed a degree of validity. Edward Pollard, the historian who first coined the term Lost Cause in 1866, spent the first hundred pages of his The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates justifying secession. This often entailed a soft-pedaling of slavery by presenting it as a dying or benign institution. For example, Pollard wrote that:

Slavery established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilization. It was not without its attendant vices; but the virtues which followed in its train were numerous and peculiar, and asserted the general good effect of the institution on the ideas and manners of the South.

While other panegyrics of the Confederacy would not go as far as Pollard, slavery is depoliticized within the Lost Cause narrative. Often this depoliticization is related to the romanticizing the gallantry and martial skill of the Confederate Army. One extreme example is the cover of the children's book Stonewall Jackson's Black Sunday School has Jackson in full CSA regalia reading to a bunch of happy black children. Robert E. Lee Commemorative License Plates which can be obtained through the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans feature Lee's visage with the phrase "The Virginia Gentlemen 1807-1870." The cumulative intent of the Lost Cause is to conflate the Confederacy with a noble image of its military, to the exclusion of narratives that run counter to this.

Although German memoirists would try to construct a picture of an apolitical Wehrmacht after the Second World War, this served as an exculpation of the military, not the regime or its goals. Manstein and Guderian's memoirs quite noticeably omitted their complicity with Hitler's regime. Manstein falsified history when he asserted in memoirs:

An order like the Commissar Order was utterly unsoldierly. To have carried it out would have threatened not only the honor of our fighting troop but also their morale. Consequently I had no alternative but to inform my superiors that the Commissar Order would not be implemented under my command. My subordinate commanders were entirely at one with me in this, and everyone in the corps area acted accordingly.

Unlike Confederate Lost Cause memory, which intimately connected its soldiers with the Confederacy, the accentuation of German military skill served the opposite function: it decoupled the German veterans from the previous regime. Extolling the German military as the acme of operational and tactical excellence served a further purpose of distinguishing the armed forces from an amateurish Nazi leadership. This dovetailed with the needs of West German rearmament that sought to rebuild on a sanitized German military tradition in which Second World War heroes like Rommel and Mölders become double victims who had to contend both with the Allied enemy and a criminally incompetent Nazi leadership.

To a certain degree, the line about German military effectiveness has found an amount of popular currency among "armchair generals" but has largely been rejected by current military historians like Robert Citino, David Glantz, Williamson Murray, and Gerhard Weinberg. The latter is particularly fond of noting that quipping that German generals' memoirs run "if only the Führer had listened to me..." and forget to add, "the war would have lasted three more months and then the Americans would have dropped the atomic bomb on us." However, the attempt to completely denazify the German military within popular historical consciousness has largely failed. The most collectable German militaria tends to be that associated with the SS, which are often considerably more expensive than their Heer analogues. Within films and documentaries, German military effectiveness frequently is part of the aesthetic of an ascendant Nazism (often uncritically duplicating from German propaganda whose intent was to create just such an impression).

To focus only on the military aspects of both German and Confederate memory obscures the important political aspects that lie behind the creation and propagation of this memory. In fact, partisans for both Lost Causes rely upon a strict focus only upon military history to the exclusion of any serious examination of the total wartime experience.

Sources

Biess, Frank. Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Davis, William C. Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America. New York: Free Press, 2002.

Gallagher, Gary W. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Moeller, Robert G. War Stories The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Smelser, Ronald M., and Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Due to a variety of reasons, there is the perception that Germany was close to winning the Second World War.

Germany was never close to winning the Second World War it was rather close to win "German-Sovjet War" ( Eastern Front ) but didn't for a variety of reasons.

All of this is similar to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the idea that the South lost only because numbers and industry defeated the South's skill and bravery.

There seems to be a tendency to avoid stating that one side won due to numerical strenght rather than strategic genius or combat ability of the troops. I have read plenty of books about normandy, a lot of historians seem to have trouble to talk about the obivious. Examining the raw data certainly leaves no doubt.

Or do people think that Germany was superior to the world in respect to military equipment and tactics?

Ignoring tactics and equipment for the moment. There is one certainty when it comes to troop quality, an indoctrinated unit will pretty much always outperform other units under comparable circumstances. This effect is vastly underestimated when discussing german combat performances. The Wehrmacht had the advantage of a huge pool strongly motivated soldiers who were willing to go to combat and risk their life. This culminated in units like the 12th SS. Fanatic soldiers, indoctrinated since childhood unable to understand the reality around them many of them had an entirely different view of life and death. A big part of success of a unit is not how good the individual soldier is when it comes to marksmanship, the biggest casualties are done by artillery, mortas and mg fire, the important part is that soldiers just do as they got told, don't lie on the ground when a shell hits somewhere don't stop moving, and don't surrender. If a battalion surrenders it can destablize the entire front and cause a lot of damage. The combat value of a division is very reliant on the ability of soldiers to stay calm and just do what they got told. If you got soldiers who were exposed to propaganda for a long time, who think the enemy only wants to destroy your country, then this is what they will do, they will obey. Macabre as it sounds this is the kind of soldier you want. Countries like USA and England could not produce the same amout of such "fanatics". This is not only true for the notorius Waffen SS units but also for many regular Heer units to a certain degree. A lot of soldiers on the Ostfront for example thought if they fail the enemy will wipe out their country, this together with superb equipment and tactics was the reason for...

... todays historical perception.

I don't think your comparison with the lost cause is good, nobody in their right mind thinks the Nazis should have successed. That said i think i know where you are comming from, there is without a doubt a strong interest in World War 2 which is mainly result of the performance of the german army. To put it blant world war 2 is very interessting as military enthuisast. An underdog army led by a maniac vastly outnumbered tries its hardest to conquer the world. Sounds like a film thats why World War 2 is the hottest historical topic. But no, Germany will not be the next "lost cause", there is no way it will become mainstream to romanticise what happened, there is just no possible view point to think it was a bad thing Germany lost.

To illustrate my point about indoctrination a quote from "D-Day the Battle for Normandy":

"Fraser examined this SS soldier, who was in such a serious condition that he needed a blood transfusion. 'But once the needle was in, the passionate young Nazi suddenly demanded: "Is this English blood?" When told that it was, he pulled it out, announcing: "I die for Hitler." Which is what in fact he did."