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The myth of the clean Wehrmacht is the false notion that the German armed forces (the Wehrmacht) were not involved in The Holocaust or other war crimes during World War II. The myth denies the culpability of the German military command in the planning and preparation of war crimes. Even where the perpetration of war crimes and the waging of a war of extermination, particularly in the Soviet Union—where the Nazis viewed the population as "subhumans" ruled by "Jewish Bolshevik" conspirators—has been acknowledged, they are ascribed to the "Party soldiers", the SS, and not the regular German military.
The myth's formation began at the International Military Tribunal held between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946 in Nuremberg. Franz Halder and other Wehrmacht leaders signed the Generals' memorandum entitled "The German Army from 1920 to 1945", which laid out its key elements. The memorandum was an attempt to exculpate the Wehrmacht from war crimes. Western powers were becoming increasingly concerned with the growing Cold War and wanted West Germany to begin rearming to counter the perceived Soviet threat. In 1950, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer met with former officers to discuss West Germany's rearmament and the Himmerod memorandum was agreed. This memorandum laid out the conditions under which West Germany would rearm: their war criminals must be released, the defamation of the German soldier must cease, and foreign public opinion of the Wehrmacht must be transformed. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had previously described the Wehrmacht as Nazis, changed his mind to facilitate rearmament. The British became reluctant to pursue further trials and released already convicted criminals early.
Adenauer courted the votes of veterans and enacted amnesty laws because there was a great deal of German sympathy for their war criminals. The British High Commissioner felt compelled to remind the West German public the criminals involved had been found guilty of participating in the murder of Allied citizens. Halder began working for the US Army Historical Division. His role was to assemble and supervise former Wehrmacht officers to write a multi-volume history of the Eastern Front. He oversaw the writings of 700 former German officers and disseminated the myth through his network. Wehrmacht officers and generals produced memoirs that followed the myth, which proved enormously popular. Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein produced best-selling memoirs. Manstein's contributed to the myth as his defence attorney defended the shooting of civilians and other war crimes. After Manstein was convicted, his attorney enlisted celebrities to secure his release on the basis that the needs of the Cold War should predominate.
The year 1995 proved to be a turning point in German public consciousness. The Hamburg Institute for Social Research initiated a touring exhibition called Wehrmachtsausstellung (German for "Wehrmacht Exhibition") that exposed the war crimes of the Wehrmacht to a wider audience and created a long-running debate and reappraisal of the myth. The exhibition showed 1,380 graphic pictures of "ordinary" Wehrmacht troops complicit in war crimes. Hannes Heer wrote that the war crimes had been covered up by scholars and former soldiers. The German historian Wolfram Wette called the clean Wehrmacht thesis a "collective perjury". The wartime generation maintained the myth with vigour and determination. They had suppressed information and manipulated government policy; after their passing, there was insufficient pressure to maintain the deceit that the Wehrmacht had not been a full partner in the regime's industrialised mass murder.