Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-71231-6 - The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies ll Excerpt More information Introduction For most Americans, the Western Front – defined as North Africa, Italy and France, and western Germany – was decisive in defeating Nazi Germany dur- ing World War Two. After all, this was the arena in which our military dom- inated in terms of manpower, material, and planning. It was the front that received the most exhaustive coverage in the media, despite thorough wartime reporting from Russia. It was from this front that the names, which would highlight our struggle, echo down through several generations – Kasserine Pass, Anzio, Normandy, Huertgen Forest, the Bulge. And it was this long series of military engagements that would figure most dramatically in postwar pre- sentations – right down to today. Television series such as Combat during the 1960s featured American soldiers defeating Germans on a weekly basis. Movies, most notably The Longest Day, Patton, and The Battle of the Bulge, reminded Americans dramatically of the triumphs of U.S. arms. A stream of books from Company Commander to Eisenhower’s Lieutenants gave the general public detailed accounts of our wartime exploits. Media fascination with World War Two gained renewed impetus in the 1990s, as we commemorated various fiftieth anniversary events. Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation celebrated and romanticized in print and on television those rapidly disappearing men and women who saved the world from Hitler. Saving Private Ryan brought the same message to movie audiences and Band of Brothers continues to do so on television as we enter the twenty-first century. A controversial monument in Washington, DC, enshrines our wartime triumphs in stone. But one looked in vain during those celebrations for any mention of the Soviet contribution to victory in Europe. Even the D-Day fiftieth commemorations in 1994, appro- priate in their extensiveness, largely failed to mention that a gigantic Soviet offensive unleashed on June 22, 1944, took enormous pressure off Americans, who still had not broken out of the Normandy Pocket. This omission is all the more unfortunate in light of the fact that it was Soviet arms that really broke 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-71231-6 - The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies ll Excerpt More information 2 The Myth of the Eastern Front the German army, no less than 80 percent of which was fighting on the Eastern Front. Even those Americans with a passing familiarity with the war in Russia have insisted that the Red Army only triumphed because of enormous supplies sent to them by America through the Lend Lease program. Only recently have the widespread awareness of the Holocaust and reve- lations about the barbaric depredations of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and its Ein- satzgruppen altered this fundamental misunderstanding. Still, the legacy of the Cold War and all it entailed – fighting the evil empire with the Germans as our friends and allies – continues to cast its spell on American perceptions of World War Two in the East. Those who have taken the trouble to learn about that titanic struggle, ironically enough, tend to view it, not as the agony and eventual triumph of an important ally, but rather through the lenses of our common enemy. The thesis of this book is that from the early 1950s on, Americans were uncommonly receptive to a view of World War Two as it was fought in Russia that was remarkably similar to that of many Germans, particularly leading circles of former German military and even National Socialists. In fact, this view of the war in the East in many respects contained elements of the Nazi worldview as applied to this theater of the war. That it was possible for Americans to adopt the outlook of their late enemies on a crucial theater of World War Two to the detriment of their former allies derives in part from the imperatives of the Cold War. After all, if the Germans were not only to be our friends, but also our armed allies, it was important to erase at least some aspects of the recent war from the public memory and to revise the terms of discussion of other aspects, particularly with regard to our new enemy – and former ally – the Soviet Union. Many Germans stood ready to help us in this regard, and they had certain advantages in doing so. For one, we had a long record of anti-Communism, which pre-dated World WarTwo, and therefore an established antipathy toward the Russians, which was easily revived after that conflict was over. Toward the Germans, Americans had always had a deeply ambivalent attitude. Dur- ing wartime, negative sentiments readily emerged. In more normal times, the wellspring of positive attitudes was just as easily recalled and used to shape the public outlook (with the surviving negative ones attaching themselves exclu- sively to Hitler and the Nazis). Large segments of the American public also harbored certain attitudes, among them cultural, economic, racial, and aes- thetic, which bore a disturbing similarity to those of fascism in general and Nazism in particular, which could be tapped in shaping a new view of the war in the East. Finally, by the 1950s, Americans, who, during the war, had followed events in Russia on a day-to-day basis, remembered little about the © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-71231-6 - The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies ll Excerpt More information Introduction 3 Eastern Front and were thus open to new interpretations, which faced little competition in becoming established. These factors permitted opinion-making members of the former German military, busy creating their own mythologies about World War Two, to take advantage of the Cold War climate to work on their receptive American “friends” and colleagues. This book is the story of how the Germans, through a network of former high Wehrmacht officers and Bundeswehr officers who had served in World War Two, created in the minds of the American military, then journalists and popular writers, an interpretation of World War Two in the East disturbingly similar to that projected by Hitler’s regime during the war itself and that left the Wehrmacht with a largely “clean” reputation as to its conduct of that war. This view, which the Americans gradually absorbed during the 1950s, continues in the popular literature and part of the media to this day, and indeed delineates a broad subculture of general readers, German military enthusiasts, war game aficionados, military paraphernalia collectors, and reenactors. Clearly, academic scholarship in America has always studied the war in Russia. During the past thirty years, scholars have gradually exposed the role of all the agencies of Nazi Germany, including the military, in Hitler’s war of racial enslavement and extermination in the East. Still, mainstream academic scholarship has focused on a narrow spectrum of professorial readers and has ignored the general public, whose views were shaped by German writers and their sympathizers. To be sure, awareness of the Holocaust is quite widespread today. Yet this awareness seems to be compartmentalized in the minds of many Americans, who continue to admire the German performance in Russia during World War Two despite the obvious involvement of the German military in the crimes of the regime. As our research reveals, a more specific American subculture composed of military officers, historians employed by the military, and popular historians has really succeeded in shaping the broad popular view of the German military. This view makes the German army appear as if it had operated independently of the genocidal policies and practices of the Nazi regime in the East and only played the traditional role of a military force fighting honorably for its country. Indeed, given our view of the Russians, which quickly emerged early in the Cold War, the Wehrmacht is often viewed on a heroic scale, as if its role in Russia were only a prelude to our own struggle against Soviet Communism. In this context, the defeat of the German army in 1945 on the Eastern Front shapes up to have been something approaching a tragedy. Indeed, one can observe in this popular literature something very close to a “lost cause” romanticism that, in © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-71231-6 - The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies ll Excerpt More information 4 The Myth of the Eastern Front many respects, parallels that which appeared in the United States decades after the Civil War with respect to the Confederate cause. The South lost the Civil War on the battlefield, but, in many ways, won it in the history books and in the popular imagination. With regard to a sizable number of Americans, this also appears to be the case with the Nazi war against the Soviet Union. Given the dramatic change in historical memory initiated during the Cold War, it is necessary to look at how familiar Americans were with the war on the Eastern Front during World War Two itself. In Chapter 1, we review the very extensive, indeed ubiquitous, coverage aimed at Americans of the war in Russia. This coverage ranged from newspapers, magazines, books, and movie newsreels to popular radio programs and mass rallies and collections.