Almost unnoticed by the public, on July 12 the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) issued “Supplementary information on the guidelines for understanding and maintaining traditions in the Bundeswehr.” The document was signed by Lieutenant General Kai Rohrschneider, head of the Department for Operational Readiness and Support of the Armed Forces in the Defence Ministry. It explicitly names top officers of the Nazi Wehrmacht as “tradition-forming” and “identity-creating” for the Bundeswehr, today’s German army.

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    a founding principle of the bundeswehr in 1955 was “the conduct displayed by members of the military resistance against Adolf Hitler, especially the attempt of Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow to assassinate him”.

    stauffenberg and friend’s problem with hitler wasnt that he was a nazi. it was that he was losing the war.

    so this is just making something foundational even more explicit. they’re founded on and worship nazi losers. ostensibly not hitler (would’ve been bad optics in 1955 i guess) but nevertheless nazis, who got got by hitler. EVEN BIGGER LOSERS THAN HITLER.

  • CyberMonkey404@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Wehrmacht traditions, eh? Soo inflating and fudging numbers, feeding troops drugs, giving fat contracts to private industries coincidentally owned by friends and supporters of the political leadership to the point of parts of the same model vehicles not fitting together, overfocus on fashion and propaganda and being largely only good at indiscriminate murder of defenseless civilians and then whitewashing said crimes?

    Sounds about right or am I forgetting anything?

  • Mzuark@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 months ago

    Germany is telling us to our faces that they’re just waiting until it’s socially acceptable to kick off the 4th Reich

  • OrnluWolfjarl@lemmygrad.ml
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    3 months ago

    Well, you know, the Wehrmacht did nothing wrong! They didn’t know! They were clean!

    Or at least there was a reason we’ve been hearing this stuff all these decades.

    The American project of restoring Germany’s military and industrial might that can start world wars, as a tool in their pocket has been completed.

    • multitotal@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 months ago

      Or at least there was a reason we’ve been hearing this stuff all these decades.

      Yes, and that reason is Franz Halder.

      Franz Halder (30 June 1884 – 2 April 1972) was a German general and the chief of staff of the Army High Command (OKH) in Nazi Germany from 1938 until September 1942. During World War II, he directed the planning and implementation of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Halder became instrumental in the radicalisation of warfare on the Eastern Front. He had his staff draft both the Commissar Order (issued on 6 June 1941) and the Barbarossa Decree (signed on 13 May 1941) that allowed German soldiers to execute Soviet citizens for any reason without fear of later prosecution, leading to numerous war crimes and atrocities during the campaign. After the war, he had a decisive role in the development of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.

      Halder denied any knowledge of the regime’s atrocities and claimed to be outside the decision-making process; he was found not guilty.[50]

      As the Cold War progressed, the military intelligence provided by the German section of the US Army Historical Division became increasingly important to the Americans.[55] Halder oversaw the German section of the research program which became known as the “Halder Group”.[56] His group produced over 2,500 major historical manuscripts from over 700 distinct German authors detailing World War II.[51] Halder used the group to reinvent war-time history using truth, half-truth, distortion and lies.[52] He set up a “control group” of trusted former Nazi officers who vetted all the manuscripts and, if necessary, required authors to change their content.[57] Halder’s deputy in the group was Adolf Heusinger who was also working for the Gehlen Organization, the United States military intelligence organisation in Germany.[58] Halder expected to be addressed as “General” by the writing teams and behaved as their commanding officer while dealing with their manuscripts.[59] His aim was to exonerate German army personnel from the atrocities they had committed.[60]

      tl;dr: US employed one of the top Nazis to rewrite history.