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World War II was the greatest conflict man has ever known; and ever since its conclusion vast amounts of time and effort have been poured into chronicling and interpreting it. Unsurpisingly, disagreements have arisen over what interpretation is 'correct', and this article attempts to chronicle them below: EASTERN FRONT It is commonly said that history is written by the victors; but the exact opposite occurred in the chronicling of the Eastern Front , particularly in the West. Soviet secrecy and unwillingness to acknowledge events that might discredit the regime lead to them revealing little information, always heavily edited - leaving western historians to rely almost totally on German sources. While still valuable sources, they tended to be self-serving; German generals in particular tried to distance themselves and the Heer as a whole away from the Nazi Party, while at the same time blaming them for their defeat (individuals supporting these arguments are commonly called part of the 'Hitler Lost Us The War' group). While this self-serving was noticed at the time (see Barbarossa by Alan Clark), it was still generally accepted as the closest version of the truth. The end result was a commonly held picture of the Heer being the superior army, ground down by the vast numbers of the 'Bolshevik horde' and betrayed by the stupidity of its leader (ie Hitler). Not only did this ignore Hitler's talent as a military leader (something the West, and Germany, is generally loathe to acknowledge), it also severely undervalued the remarkable transformation of the Soviet armed forces (and in particular the RKKA, the Red Army ) from the timid, conservative force of 1941 to the greatest operational-level military the world has ever seen. After the fall of the wall, Western historians were suddenly exposed to the vast number of Soviet records of the time. This has lead to an explosion of the works on the subject, most notably by Richard Overy , David Glantz and (perhaps infamously) David Beevor . These historians emphasised the brutality of Stalin's regime, the recovery of the USSR and the RKKA in 1942 and the courage and abilities of the average Russian soldier, relying heavily on Soviet archival material to do so. |
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