Germany and World War II: The Official History?

Abstract

ASSYRIAN kings had their armies> accomplishments at war LX chiseled in stone; twentieth-century governments have adopted 1 V the medium ofthe multivolume official history. After World War II, the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force published one apiece, for a total of well over a hundred volumes. The Soviet Union, where history is alive in more than a figurative sense and therefore has to be kept abreast of the times, has so far published one in the Khrushchev and one in the Brezhnev era, eighteen volumes altogether. The British History ofthe Second World War runs to forty-one volumes. The Military History Research Office of the German Bundeswehr has now published three volumes of a projected ten-volume set, The German Reich and the Second World War, which may (or may not) be the Ger? man official history. Whether it is that or not, The German Reich and the Second World War has a lineage in the genre second to none. Official war history is as