There are two major tenets to the whitewashing of the Wehrmacht, one more reprehensible than the other. The first and worst is that the Wehrmacht was by and large the German army but was never a Nazi army, and did not participate in the crimes against humanity that was the bedrock of Nazi governance and expansion. This was false: Particularly on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht worked fist-in-glove with the SS to round up and exterminate Soviet Jews, Romani, and other groups the Nazis systematically persecuted and murdered. Whatever the different experiences and actions of the millions of soldiers (volunteer and conscript) who served in the Wehrmacht, the institution of the Wehrmacht was both complicit and participant in Nazi atrocities on a wide scale.

The German commanders’ position after World War 2 was not unlike that of Confederate generals after the Civil War. They had fought hard and well and still lost in service to a disgraceful cause, but they sought to deny that they were ever beaten. This wasn’t just about pride, but also about regaining respect. What they had been a part of was irredeemable, if they could just change the subject to professional skill, they could rehabilitate themselves as admirable professionals. The position of senior German commanders, in particular, was that the real wellspring of German defeat was Hitler himself, with his amateurish meddling in the masterful workings of his professional officer corps. This narrative also allowed them to highlight their own deviations from the Nazi party line, turning debates about means into something like opposition. But what they opposed most vehemently were things like his refusal to allow German forces to withdraw from dangerous positions, or his insistence on keeping personal control of reserve troops rather than releasing them to officers in the field. Trying to distance themselves postwar from the workings of a monstrous, genocidal regime in which they had been highly placed, the surviving leadership of the Wehrmacht said in their defense that they had always thought their boss was an asshole.