Georgy Zotov, in his recent Telegram post explains, using a hands-on example, how the history of the Second World War was distorted.

Read also Nazi-gold in the Swiss Banks and Nazi-officers in NATO. Connecting the Dots.

In 1950, a so-called “Himmlerod Memorandum” was created in West Germany. It was signed by top officers of the Wehrmacht, gathered by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in the Himmlerod Abbey.

As is well known, in August 1945 in Potsdam, the USSR, the USA, and the UK decided that the military officers of Hitler’s Germany should be subjected to denazification, and the former Reich should be demilitarised so that it could not create its own army. However, after the start of the Korean War, the Americans changed their opinion: they thought it was time to revive the German army to resist the Soviet Union.

After the discussions from October 5 to 9, 1950 in Himmlerod, the following was established:

• It was necessary to “let off steam” on the criminal cases of military criminals.
• To stop the “slander” against German soldiers in the media.
• To take measures to change public opinion about the Reich army.

The Return of Hans Speidel
A biting caricature by the Soviet art collective “Kukryniksy”, drawn in 1957, depicts Hans Speidel, who has medals for “War against France” and “War against England” on his chest.
He is the perfect candidate for the hat of NATO’s European Army with these allegiances: German Empire, Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, West Germany, NATO

In January 1951, Dwight Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of the Allied forces in Europe, held a meeting with former Wehrmacht generals – Heusinger and Speidel, saying:

“I learned that there was a real difference between the German soldier and Hitler’s criminals. And I don’t think the German soldier lost his honour.”

Soon, many Wehrmacht officers were granted pensions, and Adenauer declared in the Bundestag – “The Germans fought honestly”.

Thus, the “myth of the pure Wehrmacht” was born – the myth that only the SS, SD, and Gestapo committed atrocities, and the regular German army did not burn villages. This narrative was picked up by the media of Germany, the USA, and the UK. Nazi officers, who had served their sentences for five years, were released from prisons early. Everyone was concerned about the growing dominance of the USSR in Eastern Europe, not the facts of how many people these murderers had killed. Publications of memoirs by Hitler’s generals and marshals (like Guderian and Manstein), which deliberately distorted the facts and published outright fiction, were encouraged. The US Army’s historical department, which was overseen by Nazi general Franz Halder, published 700 such memoirs. Germans enthusiastically read them, commenting – “We were slandered, we’re not that bad”.

The myth of the Wehrmacht, supported by the German population, asserted – our hands are clean, there’s no blood of Soviet civilians and prisoners of war on them, we didn’t exterminate hundreds of thousands of Jews and Roma en masse. Masses of evidence and documents about the Wehrmacht’s atrocities against women, children, and the elderly, cold-blooded mass killings were simply ignored. The military generation of Germans refused to believe this, saying it was “Bolshevik and Jewish propaganda”, and the Allies were silent because they needed the Bundeswehr. After all, American General William Donovan of the Office of Strategic Services reported – the USSR was the main threat to world peace, and it needed to be stopped. Soon, battalions of the democratic German army were commanded by officers who had hanged children in Belarus, the RSFSR, and Ukraine just a few years earlier.

In 1955, 600 former Wehrmacht members, released from Soviet captivity, took an oath to the FRG, saying – “We swear that we did not commit murders and did not rob”. This was a lie, and it didn’t bother anyone. Soon, a large number of Western historians declared – it’s unthinkable that the Wehrmacht was involved in genocide, and the statements of Soviet researchers were communist propaganda. What’s the big deal – in general, there were opinions that the Holocaust was caused by the Wehrmacht’s desire to save itself and defend itself against the “Russian hordes rushing to conquer Europe”.

The myth of the “pure Wehrmacht” collapsed after the collapse of the USSR, when there was no one to fear any more. In 1995, at an exhibition in Hamburg, 1,380 photos of killings of civilians by Wehrmacht soldiers appeared: they were posing, smiling. It turned out that the Wehrmacht also killed in Babi Yar alongside the Ukrainian police, and the Wehrmacht hanged and burned children. A stream of other documents and evidence flooded in. The propaganda machine, so carefully built and funded by Germany, the USA, and the UK for half a century, collapsed literally in a couple of years.

So, I don’t see anything new in what’s happening now.

They have experience.

They know how to do it.

Adolf Heusinger:
Chief of Operations of the Wehrmacht General Staff.
1961-1964 Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

Hans Speidel:
Former Nazi lieutenant general and the chief of staff of one of the most important field marshals, Erwin Rommel.
1957-1963 Supreme Commander of NATO Allied Ground Forces in Central Europe.