Volume 56, Number 3 · February 26, 2009
Germans Confront the Nazi Past
By Max Hastings
Germany and the Second World War, Volume IX/I: German Wartime Society, 1939–1945: Politicization, Disintegration, and the Struggle for Survival
edited for the Research Institute for Military History, Potsdam, Germany, by Jörg Echternkamp, translated from the German by Derry Cook-Radmore and others
Clarendon Press/ Oxford University Press, 1,035 pp., $330.00
It became a twentieth-century custom for nations to produce, under the auspices of government, official histories of their roles in great conflicts. The US and British studies of World War II are voluminous and uneven. Some contributions, like Samuel Eliot Morrison's chronicle of the US Navy's operations and Michael Howard's and John Ehrman's examinations of British strategy, are outstanding. Anglo-American campaign narratives suffer, however, from the fact that most were written within a decade of the war's conclusion, and were subject to the exercise of varying degrees of influence and interference by former senior commanders who were still very much alive and holding high positions in government and in the armed forces.
Review, 3735 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |