A couple of people have already said it, so I'll just try to add rather to what they said. The first is that, by nature, the German military was the first to apply the doctrines of truly modern war. The means that if you want to talk about modern war, especially the development of modern war, you simply have to talk about them whether you want to or not. There is also the very real interest in it from the perspective of trying to figure out how much the average German soldier knew of what was going on. Which continues to hold fascination.But beyond that, you can make a very real argument that in a lot of ways, the Wehrmacht in particular, was the last of it's kind. The culture and nature of the British army had been irrevocably changed by the first world war, to the point that even had the empire gone on, the army would never be the same again. It would never be as aristocratic, it would never have that same flavor again. And of course, the French army even more so, when the horrific price of Elan was realized after the war. But more than that, it consumed much of the best and brightest of the traditional military establishment and changed the culture of French military culture. And the Russians, do I even need to explain that?In the second world war, it's really only the Germans that took the field with an army still steeped in the traditions, bloodlines and mentality of the traditional European army. And for better or worse, it went out with a hell of a bang. But as the various flaws of the German army, especially strategically proved, however much the Germans had advanced tactically, warfare had advanced beyond the worldview of the traditional European army.And I think in a lot of ways, that's why it's so interesting to Americans, maybe more so than some Europeans. It's the last march of a culture, that we never really knew. The American military culture was always a very different beast, one that ultimately prove more well suited to industrial warfare once you get to the American civil war and later on the first world war. So we don't have that connection, that cultural memory. It's the same reason why there are so many Americans that are fascinated by the British army, it's something we never had. The traditional army of British regulars that we think of, ceased to exist in any meaningful capacity by 1915.And before anyone decides to jump up and down and bitch at me about the American military culture as nothing more than America Supreme, it wasn't. American military culture was by and large ill-suited to the standards of warfare throughout the first half of the 19th century, it only really changed with the American civil war. And even then, we did our damnedest to undo that as quickly as possible after the war. But the difference was, we never had that very strong unified military culture that existed in some many European states which to some degree, always hampered mass mobilization and mechanization. Certainly not the same military establishment that you see in the western European states.And the American army that came to France in a lot of ways, was very much a sponge for ideas and thoughts. And in many ways, this was still true in the second world war, especially in the European front. Many of the problems that the British and French army experienced in the first world war were due to the inherent difficultly of overcoming institutional inertia in many of their militaries. And the armies that came out of those wars, were very different animals than what went into them. The US military culture by contrast, was only really born in the US civil war and would only really come into it's own in the aftermath of the first world war.So we missed that whole stage of development within armies and as a result, it's intruging. It speaks to something we've never seen, but that still affects us to this day.