LogFAQs > #962573116

ScazarMeltex posted...

To be fair here though I would like to point out that there are far more sources and books from the German perspective which is why people's views get skewed in this direction. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is the Allies perpetuation of the clean Wehrmacht myth after the war.
There is also the fact that Russian isn't an easy language to translate, the books that did get translated saw smaller print runs and are thus harder to find, and the cold war left people in the west with little interest in the trials and tribulations of the people who were now their enemy.

This is a problem in most military history really. There are so many interesting conflicts in Africa and Asia that people never get to learn about because none of the primary sources ever get translated and thus very few books ever get translated.

David Glantz has written extensively about the Eastern Front, with information taken from the Soviet archives. It does a lot to challenge and dispel the myths that were spread by the Germans during and after the war.

This is also the reason why Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword is probably my favorite work of military history, because they went directly to the Japanese war histories and found that a good deal of the stuff we knew about the Battle of Midway was bunk based on the accounts of someone who was notorious for, shall we say, creatively interpreting his experiences. They found that western understanding of Midway had basically been stuck in place for 50 years because no one had bothered to consult the Japanese, and they turned the whole thing on its head.