Hi. I'm about to start writing a large historical research paper for one of my classes, and I'm looking into writing about the "Clean Wehrmacht" Myth.
I'm asking for some resources about anything involving the myth (support, criticism, literature, reading, scholarly articles). I picked up the book "Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying" recently and I have a couple of primary sources from the Wehrmacht such as "Seven Days in January" and "Black Edelweiss", so I think that reading these would be a good place to start.
Any relevant sources, primary, secondary, or commentary by historians would help tremendously.
One type of source that would be interesting would be a primary source from a member of the Wehrmacht that openly admits to war crimes in the organization.
Thank you!
Omer Bartov's Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich and Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland deal exactly with the subject, and offer excellent historiographies to build off of. I would also suggest Wendy Lower's Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields as it helps create a much more complete picture of the reality of the Eastern Front.
All three are very well written, accessible, and well reputed. That being said, all three can be rather disturbing at times - so consider yourself forewarned.
Our booklist should have several works which you'll likely find useful!
Aside from the Wette Wolfram book on the booklist linked by our all-mighty moderator /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov , there are several other recommendations.
Norbert Frei's Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past is an important book on this topic, but also a very challenging one (he is a very dense writer). Frei is one of the major names in the field for West German history and the Adenauer period was when the Germans laid the foundation for the clean Wehrmacht myth (CWM) both for broader normalization of the country and for rearmament.
Valerie Genevieve Hebert's Hitler's Generals on Trial is a recent monograph on the (failed) attempt to hold various military generals in the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings.
Much of the historiography of the CWM is intertwined with rearmament issues. Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament, 1949-1959 by Alaric Searle is one tome that is representative of this facet of the scholarship. Reforging the Iron Cross: The Search for Tradition in the West German Armed Forces by Donald Abenheim is another example. Patrick Major's article "‘Our Friend Rommel’: The Wehrmacht as ‘Worthy Enemy’in Postwar British Popular Culture" is like most of Major's writing: clear and highly informative.
For the development of the CWM among the common soldiers, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany by Robert Moeller examines the selective histories at a more personal level away from the generals. A good compliment to Moeller is Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany by Frank Biess. The University of Michigan has also translated Svenja Goltermann's Die Gesellschaft der Überlebenden as The War in Their Minds: German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany and is an attempt to integrate trauma studies into this strand of historiography.
Ronald Smelser's The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture is a rewarding but somewhat frustrating book that overstretches its thesis (is wanting to build an Eduard BF-110 romanticizing the Third Reich, especially since the profipack comes with resin dachshunds? Myth argues so, but I am not entirely convinced). Still the book's demerits are digestible given it does explore a salient aspect that perpetuates the CWM: popular culture. Count Not the Dead: The Popular Image of the German Submarine by Michael L. Hadley likewise has some interesting insights into the CWM outside of the horrific events on the Eastern front.
The GDR's own variation on the CWM and the role of veterans in its society is very understudied. Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 by Christina Morina is one recent attempt to bridge the gap between the FRG and GDR with a compartive angle. Returning Memories: Former Prisoners of War in Divided and Reunited Germany by Christiane Wienand is another book in this style. While Wehrmacht veteran memoirs are (too) common in the anglosphere, With Paulus at Stalingrad is one of the few memoirs published in the GDR to receive an English translation.
While the GDR's place in the CWM is understudied compared to FRG studies, then the scholarship on Austrian veterans and their exculpatory mythologies is positively anemic. Like Frei's book, Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity, and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria by Peter Utgaard is a good background primer for the overall political context of this selective memory. There are also several interesting articles in the anthology The Discursive Construction of History Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation on Austria and Austrian memory of the war. But other than those, it is a pretty blank field in English- /u/commiespaceinvader might know more on the Austrian CWM in English and German.