ABSTRACT
For many years after 1945 the history of World War II was written with the Holocaust left out. There were many reasons for this omission, some of which are outlined in this chapter. But the result was that the genocide of the Jews, along with the mass killing of other real or imaginary opponents of the Nazi regime, even when they gradually entered the mainstream of the war’s historiography, were rarely associated with the military context in which they occurred, or were linked to it in distorted and apologetic ways. What is important to recognize is that apart from the obvious reasons many Germans had to avoid associating the Wehrmacht with the crimes of the Third Reich, many other nations were reluctant to view the Holocaust as a central event in and of the war. It was one thing to indict top officials of the Nazi regime with crimes against humanity, quite another to identify the Wehrmacht as a criminal organization employed in mass murder. To do so would have made the postwar Germanies into unacceptable allies for both superpowers; it would have also greatly diminished the aura of having fought an honorable and “clean” war from the victor nations’ perspective, and would have raised questions regarding their failure to prevent genocide and their lack of enthusiasm in recognizing its postwar effects. In other words, identifying the Wehrmacht as a Nazi tool of genocide was tantamount to leveling an accusation of collective guilt at Germany at a moment when both its successor states were needed as allies in the Cold War, and would have highlighted the old Allies’ anything but altruistic conduct in Word War II.
