Myth of the Eastern Front records, 1930s-2006

The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. Davies and Smelser state that their book "is the story of how the Germans, through a network of former high Wehrmacht officers and Bundeswehr officers who had served in World War II, created in the minds of the American military, then journalists and popular writers, an interpretation of World War II in the East disturbingly similar to that projected by Hitler's regime during the war itself and that left the Wehrmacht with a largely 'clean' reputation as to its conduct of that war. This view, which the Americans gradually absorbed during the 1950s, continues in the popular literature and part of the media to this day, and indeed delineates a broad subculture of general readers, German military enthusiasts, war game aficionados, military paraphernalia collectors, and reenactors."

Edward J. Davies and Ronald M. Smelser are professors at the University of Utah.