The Weight of History: Wehrmacht Officers, the U.S. Army Historical Division, and U.S. Military Doctrine, 1945–1956

From 1945 to 1961, the United States Army Historical Division collaborated with German officers to write a history of the Second World War. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated and the U.S. Army prepared for a war against the U.S.S.R., the Historical Division and other parties endeavored to exploit the operational knowledge of these German officers while ignoring their attempts at mythologizing the past. This article argues, however, that a substantial intellectual baggage of racist, Social Darwinist, and generally anti-Russian beliefs underpinned even the “purely operational” German lessons that shaped U.S. Army doctrine.