Was the luftwaffe really apolitical or not? Does a "clean luftwaffe" thing exist?

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The Third Reich was a highly politicized environment. Everyone would have been immersed in cleverly crafted propaganda and few people would have had access to alternative sources of information - among other things, the commonly available Volksradio could not easily receive foreign broadcasts, and, in any case, listening to foreign broadcasts was made a criminal offense with the start of the war.

Of the military services, the Army and Navy both had traditions of independence, though there were certainly officers, such as Von Reichenau, who were committed Nazis, and others who were willing to tolerate, or even take part in, atrocities. Interestingly, the belief by Hitler that the army was politically unreliable was exploited by Himmler and Goering to set up their own competing armies. Moreover, when military necessity forced the reallocation of surplus Luftwaffe personnel to ground combat, Goering was allowed to set up the Luftwaffe Field Divisions instead of allowing the Army to use the them to replenish the depleted infantry divisions. Aside from this, Goering was closely associated with the Nazi regime and other Luftwaffe officers such as von Richthofen and Gollob seem to have been Nazis even if they may not have been official party members. At the same time, some of the officers exhibited independent thinking at times, but, this mostly seems to have been limited to disagreements about military issues such as strategy and tactics.
 
"... Historians might quibble with some of Mosier's contentions, but it's safe to say that "Deathride" is a lively read, not to mention a provocative revisionist analysis of the war between Hitler and Stalin."
Hardly a thumbs down review

"... Having rabid anti soviet, or anti-German beliefs just perpetuates existing untruths, or adds new ones to the mix."
Mosier is completely dispassionate about both the Russians and the Germans .... not 'rabid; by my understanding of the term. Not a neo Nazi.
 
I had Mosier's Verdun book. It went in the bin quiet rapidly. I thought it was terrible and doing a bit of research afterwards showed it was inaccurate as well. It seems to me he started with a conclusion and picked the facts to fit that and was creative with the facts as well.

I have no problems with revisionism, I'm very interested in the Great War and it's a period where everything is being revisited but there's revisionism and there's complete codswallop and to me Mosier is codswallop.

You may like him, I'll never go near another of his books.
 
"... to me Mosier is codswallop"
Fair enough, I am no WWI 'enthusiast', but I just finished Verdun, and cannot comment on Mosier's accuracy but, what in the book recommended it to me was his description of the complete fabrication of the events of the war by the French GCG, his portrayal of General von Frankenheim (whom Winston Churchill considered one of the best German Generals), and how, ironically, it fell to the American ED to take on the never ending Verdun battle(s) with the successful Argonne Offensive.
By books end, I found my self asking the question "did the general public get sold a great tissue of lies by all governments involved at the time"? It would seem there was little truth in communiques.
The book Verdun has made me a much more cynical reader. If Mosier's claim of gov't fabrication is largely true, than his 'thesis' in Deathride, that the narrative of The Great Patriot War was Stalin's greatest accomplishment, while battlefield statistics do not support that narrative ... e.g. Kursk not a German loss but a withdrawl to support the Italian Front ... is a perfectly valid thesis.
The Western Democracies wanted to believe Stalin's narrative .... and today we still see the narrative, Mr Putin's now, colliding with the reality ... in the Ukraine .... and the Crimea.

[off thread]

I had just finished J.G. Meyer's "The World Remade: America in the First World War"when I read Verdun. It too casts all events surrounding WW1, as reported, in the deepest suspicion, and provides what I believe are truthful portraits of President Wilson, his backroom man, Colonel House, and General Perishing.

Wilson put America into a police state after entry into the war ... using the Espionage Act and then the Sedition Act to completely silence and crush any and all opposition to the way he was conducting the war ... the problem was that no one but Wilson (and his typewriter) knew how he was conducting the war.

Unlike FDR in 1941 and the years following, Wilson had utter contempt for Congress and the American people.
 
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So there you have it. I am prepared to call it at this point. It remains unproven that the Russians were incompetent to the end of the war and beyond. it is unproven that Russian casualties were higher in 1945 than they were in 1941. It is unproven that the Russians, having suffered 30million fatalities as a result of the war, were just coasting along letting the allies do the heavy lifting.

To me, winning the war against the Axis was coalition war. Everybody did something. It is quite probable that the Russians could not win without western assistance. it is even more true that without the Russians, the allies had no hope of defeating the Germans in a conventional war. Whether the injection of nuclear weapons could tip that balance is an open question.
 

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