Some World War II-related myths are propaganda and others are simply misconceptions. Either way,
it's hard to know what to believe, especially because you didn't see the events in question
with your own eyes. Even then, the brain like to play tricks on us, and it likes to forget.
Of all World War II-related myths, those surrounding the Germans and the Nazis are often
the most scandalous, and there are so many that we can make a whole video just on those relating to
the German Army or the Heer. Let's see how many of the following six myths come as a surprise to you.
Firstly, everyone's favourite German general Irwin "The Desert Fox" Rommel was not the chivalrous,
honourable man both German and Allied propaganda claimed he was, and the North Africa Campaign,
fought largely by Rommel's Afrika Korps, was not a clean war. Rommel did, in fact,
contribute to a variety of war crimes both before and during the North Africa Campaign. In France,
he ordered his men to burn civilian houses and bait French troops into a slaughter by pretending
to surrender. In Africa, Rommel's Afrika Korps massacred Jews in the Libyan City of Benghazi;
helped the Italians move Jews to Italian camps, where many of them perished; plundered Jewish
ghettos; and helped notorious Nazi war criminal Walter Rauff commit genocide. The Afrika Korps
even murdered some 500 POWs from the Jewish Brigade, a Jewish unit of the British Army. The
chivalrous, honourable image of Rommel, his Korps, and the North Africa Campaign is a product of Nazi
propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels and other propagandists, including Allied propagandists.
Rommel was sold as a hero when the Germans were winning and a distraction when they were losing.
When the Nazis were finished with him, they implicated him in a plot to assassinate Hitler,
blaming their late-war defeats on the man. While Rommel was painted in a nice light by
Allied propagandists during the war, it was doubly thick after it. The governments of
the West wanted to use the West German Army as a shield against the Soviets in the Cold War,
and in order to do so, they needed to convince the people that not all Germans were Nazis and
that there were indeed "good" Germans. Rommel, while dead, became the face of this effort.
While the image of a meth-fuelled German Army and Blitzkrieg through the Ardennes into France
might seem pretty "metal," and while it might have made your skin crawl when you watched The
Greatest Events of WWII in Colour, meth, in the form of Pervitin, was not so vital to the German
war machine as you might think. The success of Germany's early operations was largely due to
the element of surprise and the speed with which they advanced. Even if the German Army did have an
unlimited supply of meth, it was still limited by other factors, such as limited fuel supplies and
the very need to refuel. And yes, the meth itself was finite, and as the war went on, it became
less and less prevalent, as it suited less and less the type of war the Germans were fighting.
Sitting in the rubble of a broken building high on meth in the Russian winter is not
conducive to anything, for instance. In reality, meth was more prevalent in Germany herself,
where German housewives were munching meth-infused chocolates and obliterating their housework,
and if the men of the mid to late-war German Army were getting it from anywhere, it was from them.
The German Armed Forces and its constituents are often referred to
as the German war machine — I even referred to the *Heer* as such in this very video.
In reality, it was not so much a machine as an organic force of humans and beasts.
But in saying this, there are two ways this myth can slide.
Firstly, the *Heer* was not made up primarily of Panzer units and other motorised units. At
its peak, only around 20% of all *Heer* units were mechanised. Men got by on their legs, and horses
were the locomotive forces behind two-thirds of all German land vehicles and most artillery.
Of course, these figures varied throughout and in different theatres of the war. In North Africa,
for instance, when Rommel was plundering Jewish settlements and getting his picture taken,
German units were fully mechanised, as horses sucked too much water and trucks could carry more
of anything. We must be careful, however, not to liken the Germans to steppe-riders of the Mongol
Empire. To spread this notion would be to give rise to yet another myth. In reality, the Germans
were limited in the number of vehicles they could produce, so they concentrated it in mechanised
forces and in places they deemed best. The *Heer* was less motorised than its opponents — the UK,
the USA — but it was by no means a backwards force; pretty much *everyone* used horses.
Continuing on this train of thought, it is also a myth that the tanks used by those
Panzer units were superior to the tanks of other participating armies. While German tanks, such
as the famous Tiger, boasted firepower and armour equal to if not slightly better than the tanks of
other nations, they were not leagues and bounds superior; they were certainly pervious to enemy
tank fire; and they were, overall, overengineered, meaning they were difficult and expensive to build
and maintain and prone to mechanical issues. In terms of armour specifically, German Tigers were
even vulnerable to the 75 mm guns of Sherman tanks, and 76 mm guns could certainly deal
with both Tigers and Panthers. To put things in perspective, the German Panther was one of
the better medium tanks of the Second World War, yet only around 6,500 of these things were made.
Compare this to some 50,000 Sherman tanks and some 80,000 T34s. The Germans simply could not
keep up with production nor maintenance, and their complicated designs certainly weren't helping.
One other myth which sort of relates to the previous two is that the German Army made good use
of "crazy Nazi inventions and weapons." While the Germans *did* experiment quite a bit, especially
when things started to turn south for them, few death-ray-esque weapons were used to effect on the
battlefield. Not to say that the Germans weren't inventive nor that they haven't paved the way
for many modern technologies, but leviathans such as the *Karl-Gerät,* the Great Gustav,
and the *Landkreuzer* P 1500 were wastes of time and metal. In reality, the most effective weapons
wielded by the German Army were those which could be carried by a single man, such as the MG-42
machine gun and the tank-killing *Panzerfaust.* If introduced earlier, the *Sturmgewehr 44 —* the
first ever successful assault rifle — may have changed the outcome of the war too,
but you can forget all about death-rays, Nazi UFOs, and undead mechanical soldiers and all that.
Perhaps the greatest myth relating to the German Army is the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, which
pretty much infers that the men of the Wehrmacht, which of course included the men of the Heer,
did not commit or were not responsible for German atrocities and war crimes in the Second World
War — primarily the Holocaust. According to the purveyors of this myth, these atrocities and war
crimes were solely or at least largely conducted by the SS, who, along with the party itself,
were the only true Nazis. As with the mechanised German Army myth, this one can sort of slide both
ways. While German officers may have started the myth, the powers of the West — exactly how it had
happened with the myth of Rommel — took it and ran with it. They believed they needed the West German
Army as an additional shield against the USSR and communism in the Cold War, and pinning German
atrocities and war crimes on just the SS — just "the Nazis" — was one big step towards painting
the Germans in a new light and gaining the people's trust. Turning this on its head, we would
also be proliferating pretty much the opposite myth by saying that every soldier in the Germany
Army committed atrocities and war crimes and that every German was a Nazi. This, of course, was not
the case, as we evinced in one of our previous videos. In fact, German officers had no legal
right to threaten their men with death if they didn't participate in atrocities and war crimes.
By the books, these officers would have faced a court-martial if they were caught doing so.
Some soldiers did refuse, and most of them were relieved from the hideous duty.
But in that same breath, many committed atrocities and war crimes voluntarily.
So those are just six myths relating to the German Army in the Second World War. But how many came as
a surprise to you? Do you think any of them aren't a myth? Can you think of any other myths about the
German Army? What about Germany in general? Please share your thoughts in the comments.