In short, the opening of the archives had an enormous impact on the historiography of the Second World War. In the case of the Eastern front, access to Soviet archives clarified a great many issues surrounding the conduct of the war and the organization of it. One of the problems the Cold War created was that it made it very difficult to study the USSR in a thorough fashion. The number of scholars who made a serious studies of the Eastern Front during the Cold War was quite limited; John Erickson and Earl Ziemke being some of the few counter-examples. This meant a good deal of material on the Eastern Front came from German sources or was curated by German generals and other veterans with a vested interest in tailoring a narrative that was exculpatory. Not only did these German sources often rationalize their defeat in ways that shifted the blame either onto Hitler or to Soviet numbers, but they also minimized the Wehrmacht's involvement in war crimes and other aspects of a very violent war. Nor was the situation much better for military history on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Soviet writing on the war varied from politicized hagiography that often side-stepped issues of mistakes made between 1941-42 as well as other facets of the war that did not show the Red Army in the best light. The result was that with a few exceptions, Western understanding of the Eastern Front was often superficial and recapitulated a number of tropes that did not mesh up with historical events.

The collapse of communism meant that archives were now available for scholars, both Western and Russian. The archival revolution did not so much reverse or upend prior historiography, but rather made it much more complicated and nuanced. It is a bit of a misnomer to say that Russian archives are completely open. The system is still quite byzantine and some archival sources are less accessible than others. Richard Harrison's lecture on the Red Army theorist G.S. Isserson recounts some of the hoops and obstacles in the Russian archives, including having to transcribe material by hand because of strict photocopying rules. Harrison's monograph is emblematic of this type of post-archival scholarship which shows the intellectual sophistication of the Red Army's elite, as well as the consequences of operating within a paranoid state that could turn on its own. Both of these themes- acknowledging the intelligence of the Soviets and examining the Purges- were quite difficult to explore rigorously during the politicized conditions of the Cold War.

In the case of the GDR, the archival impact of the SED's collapse was that it meant that it filled in a number of holes in the archives that war and division had created. While there still remains significant gaps in the German archives, the post-Wende archival landscape allowed for a more differentiated picture of the Eastern Front to emerge in the 1990s. One of the more salient examples of this is the works of Omer Bartov on the involvement of regular troops in war crimes in the East. In addition to GDR materials on war crimes- which the SED preserved for both prosecution or blackmail purposes -Bartov had access to Eastern European and Russian archives to show how the Wehrmacht was anything but clean during the war. This was only one example of how the end of the Cold War impacted historiography on Germany's war.

David Glantz, one of the doyens of historiography on the Red Army, published a paper The Soviet-German War 1941-1945: Myths and Realities: A Survey Essay that methodically explains major issues in Eastern Front historiography and how archival evidence complicates or clarifies major issues in the field.