Revision of history as a strategy of war preparation

Everywhere in the world there are people who like to talk or write about subjects they have no clue about. Usually, such people pursue careers in politics or journalism. Currently their favourite topic is the war in the Donbass. Notwithstanding that they know neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor war, they keep propagating their views about these. Facts are just annoying to them.
  Ever since my retirement from service in the Swiss army I have been preoccupied with two themes: military operations and history. For five years I myself have been in charge of planning military operations in my capacity as chief of operational planning in the Swiss Army. The required professional training I had received from the Swiss Army and NATO, both of which had left much to be desired, but also at the military academy of the general staff of the armed forces of Russia, which was much better. Towards the end of my career in the Swiss Army I taught operational planning at the staff of operational training. Which should illustrate that I know what I am talking about when I use the term “military operation”. History I studied at Zürich University. In summary: I am a professional when it comes to military history.

Revisionist Nonsense

Ever since I took up my research in military history again, I have had to deal with revisionist theories about the Second World War. Recently I heard people asserting that the Soviet partisans in occupied Belarus had been militarily useless, a bunch of criminals and deserters, more dangerous for the civilian population than for the Wehrmacht. The existing body of literature about them was supposedly half Soviet propaganda and half romanticism. I took this allegation as a starting point for my own research and I came to the conclusion that the partisans in Belarus had indeed been militarily effective from the summer of 1943 onwards, at least as effective as the French resistance.¹
  During my six year period of work in Vienna at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe the Estonian delegation issued a statement, according to which the Estonian members of the Waffen-SS were freedom fighters against the Soviet occupation of Estonia. Regrettably they had been wearing the same uniform as all other members of the Waffen-SS, but still they should be regarded as freedom fighters. When I heard this, I was surprised: the thought that the Waffen-SS could have been engaged in a fight for freedom was utterly new for me.
  I remember vividly an elderly gentleman from Austria who claimed that the invasion of the Wehrmacht – he didn’t mention their European allies – into Soviet territory on 22 June 1941 had been necessary to pre-empt the planned Soviet aggression against Western Europe.²
  Oh my, I remember thinking, this man wants to convince me that the National Socialist Third Reich was engaged in an legitimate act of self-defence against the Soviet Union. From this standpoint it is not far to the theory that the Nazis had fought bolshevism on behalf of Western Europe. Years previously, this theory had been elaborated to me by a young man in a bookstore in Kiev – who also tried selling to me a portrait of Adolf Hitler. I had saved the money and spent it for a cool beer instead, definitely a better investment.
  These are just three examples for a whole lot of similar events which I remember.

Ignorance and Surprise

As it turns out, many Westerners have never heard of the suffering the Belarusians, for example, had to endure between 1941 and 1945. Many know neither the tragedy of Ozarichi³ nor have they heard of Khatyn⁴ or the Operation Bagration⁵.
  The countless crimes of the Wehrmacht – not just the SS and Gestapo – are also unknown to them. Being a military historian, it is clear to me why this should be the case: After 1945 a great number of Wehrmacht generals were hired by the US army department of military history and charged with the documentation of the history of the recently finished war.⁶ Those gentlemen used the opportunity to not only whitewash their own personal roles but also to invent what I call the fairy-tale of the honourably fighting Wehrmacht and to provide an explanation for their being defeated by the supposedly inferior soldiers of the Red army.⁷ Many of them had never changed their National Socialist convictions and still regarded the officers and men of the Red army as “subhuman beings”. Their lines of self-defending argument have shaped the way history is narrated in the High Dutch language area for decades. And it is the same spirit again which inspires Western reports about the Russian army and the war in the Donbass.

Strategy of history revision

There is a perfidious strategy behind all this: the West is currently trying to revise the post-war status quo as it had been created in San Francisco in 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations. Not only the USA, the United Kingdom and France, but also Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union and China should be the custodians of this status quo. Instead, the West has been trying to get rid of it and replace it with a “rule-based order”, the rules of which they want to define themselves without consulting those countries who have already been declared to be enemies of this order. Therefore, the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of National Socialism needs to be down-played. And since European Neo-Nazis serve as useful, but fanatic idiots in the war against Russia criticism of the Nazis is carefully avoided.⁸
  The aim for all this is clear: Russia is to be discredited, isolated and sanctioned. But it goes even further: The Russians as a people are to be demonized in general, their contribution to the culture of mankind is to be denied and they are to be pictured not as human beings but aggressive monsters always threatening to attack the civilized West. The creators of this theory know very well that the borders of several member states of the former Soviet Union were drawn at the Yalta conference in 1945. One of those Soviet republics was Belarus. To this day there are many Russians living in the republics of the post-Soviet area and these republics have to face the task of defining their national identities. These people also know that the legacy of the Great patriotic war means a lot to many people and plays an important role for the national identities of these countries. Weakening the national identities and coherence of these societies is part of a bigger strategy: divide and conquer is the ultimate goal.
  The Wehrmacht had waged war on foreign territory for five years, from autumn 1939 until autumn 1944. The USA in alliance with the Western European colonial powers has been waging wars for 45 years on foreign continents since 1945. And since 1991 NATO, originally an instrument of self-defence, has waged several wars outside their own territory. Many people don’t know what war in one’s own country means and therefore seem not to care a lot about war. History revision is preparation of war, one needs to decisively resist it before it is too late.  •

¹ see «Lernen aus der Geschichte: Können Partisanen kriegsentscheidend sein?», at Global Bridge, 18 May 2023, online at https://globalbridge.ch/lernen-aus-der-geschichte-koennen-partisanen-kriegsentscheidend-sein/
² Crown witness to this theory is the Soviet dissident Wladimir Bogdanowitsch Resun (i.e., Владимир Богданович Резун), who published his view on this topic under the title Der Eisbrecher: Hitler in Stalins Kalkül under the alias Viktor Suworow in 1989.
³ In a swamp near Ozarichi North of the town Mosyr the Wehrmacht ran a camp for civilians who were unable to work between 12–19 March 1944 and left at least 9,000 people to freeze and starve to death within one week, in freezing cold without food, sanitation or medical aid. The camp had been ordered by general Josef Harpe, commander of the 9^th army of the Wehrmacht, who has never been charged for this crime. See Dieter Pohl. Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht: deutsche Militärbesatzung und einheimische Bevölkerung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1944, München 2008, p, 328
⁴ The inhabitants of the village of Khatyn (Chatyn) North of Minsk were murdered on 22 March 1943 by the notorious SS special unit Dirlewanger and Ukrainian collaborators as a retaliation for partisan attacks, the buikdings were burned down. See “Massenmord aus Gewohnheit”, by Global Bridge, 5 June 2023, online at https://globalbridge.ch/massenmord-aus-gewohnheit-siehe-dazu-auch-den-redaktionellen-nachsatz/
⁵ For Operation Bagration, in which the Red army defeated the Wehrmacht group “Heeresgruppe Mitte” and drove them out of Belarus, see “Operation Bagration – Die erfolgreichste Operation der Alliierten im Zweiten Weltkrieg” by Global Bridge, 7 June 2024, online at https://globalbridge.ch/operation-bagration-die-erfolgreichste-operation-der-alliierten-im-zweiten-weltkrieg/ and “Operation Bagration – wie die Sowjets die Wehrmacht austricksten”, by Global Bridge, 1 July 2024, online at https://globalbridge.ch/operation-bagration-wie-die-sowjets-die-wehrmacht-austricksten/
⁶ The history department at the general staff of the US army was founded in July 1943, headed by Lieutenant colonel John M. Kemper. He hired a team of historians, translators and cartographers who were tasked to write down the offical history of the Second World War. The department published a series of 78 books titled United States Army in World War II. For some time the High Dutch section was led by former Wehrmacht chief of general staff General Franz Halder. One of the few Wehrmacht generals who after the war refused to participate in the Postwar Historical Debriefing Program of the US army was general Hermann Balck. Contributing former Wehrmacht generals include Franz Halder (Hitler als Feldherr, 1949), his successor Heinz Guderian (Erinnerungen eines Soldaten, 1951) Admiral Karl Dönitz (Zehn Jahre und zwanzig Tage, 1958), Albert Kesselring (Soldat bis zum letzten Tag, 1953) and Erich von Manstein (Verlorene Siege, 1955), Erwin Rommel (Krieg ohne Hass, 1950), Adolf Heusinger (Befehl im Widerstreit. Schicksalsstunden der deutschen Armee 1923–1945, 1958), Walter Warlimont  (Im Hauptquartier der deutschen Wehrmacht, 1939–1945, 1964), Siegfried Westphal (Heer in Fesseln. Aus den Papieren des Stabschefs von Rommel, Kesselring und Rundstedt, 1964) (Das Deutsche Heer von 1920–1945), Heinrich Greiner (Kampf um Rom, Inferno am Po, 1968), Hans Speidel (Invasion 1944. Ein Beitrag zu Rommels und des Reiches Schicksal, 1949), Günther Blumentritt.
⁷ Chaired by Halder the High Dutch department of the military-historical service developed into a major source for the myth of the «clean» Wehrmacht in the United States. See also Ronald Smelser/Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. New York, S. 65, online at https://dokumen.pub/the-myth-of-the-eastern-front-the-nazi-soviet-war-in-american-popular-culture-0521833655-9780521833653.html
⁸ Contrary to constant denials Neonazis do in fact play a role in volunteer units of the Ukrainian army. The author has encountered such units during his numerous business trips through the Ukraine, for-instance in Kiev, Kramatorsk and Mariupol.

* Ralph Bosshard studied general history, Eastern European history and military history, completed the military leadership school at ETH Zurich and general staff training for the Swiss Army. This was followed by language training in Russian at Moscow State University and training at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Army. He is familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from his six years at the OSCE, during which he also worked as special advisor to the Permanent Representative of Switzerland.