How can the truth about the devastating atrocities committed by the German army on the Eastern Front in the Second World War be reconciled with the propaganda of their heroism and their victories? And how did a simple soldier, caught up in the turmoil of a vast conflict, make sense of the actions he had taken and the ruthlessness he had seen? Luis Raffeiner's plain and simple account of his direct experience of the Nazi war of annihilation in the Soviet Union records in graphic detail circumstances which made him a victim and perpetrator at the same time. Raffeiner describes his family life in a remote village in the Tyrol in the 1930s, his military service in Italy, his transfer to the Wehrmacht and his training as a mechanic on assault guns, and then his march into the Soviet Union in 1941\. There he experienced, as he himself says, war in its brutal and cruel reality'. He was captured by the Red Army, barely survived as a prisoner of war and, many years later, he recounted his vividly remembered experiences in order to produce this insightful -and thought-provoking -book. His recollections are dramatic, honest and concise. He shatters the myth of the clean conduct of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. He can testify to the vicious actions of his fellow soldiers, including some in which he himself was involved. His memoir is not a heroic tale -it shows how a man from an ordinary background can become acquainted with, and a participant in, the horrors of war.

How do democratic and pluralistic societies cope with traumatic events in their past? What strategies and taboos are employed to reconstruct wars, revolutions, torturing, mass killings and genocide in a way to make their contradiction to basic human rights and values invisible? This interdisciplinary volume analyzes in detail for the first time, in multiple genres, the history and image of the "German "Wehrmacht"" and the debates in Austria and Germany surrounding two highly contested exhibitions about the war crimes of the German "Wehrmacht" during WWII.

Among the many myths about the relationship of Nazism to the mass of the German population, few proved more powerful in postwar West Germany than the notion that the Wehrmacht had not been involved in the crimes of the Third Reich. Former generals were particularly effective in spreading, through memoirs and speeches, the legend that millions of German soldiers had fought an honest and "clean" war and that mass murder, especially in the East, was entirely the work of Himmler's SS. This volume contains the most important contributions by distinguished historians who have thoroughly demolished this Wehrmacht myth. The picture that emerges from this collection is a depressing one and raises many questions about why "ordinary men" got involved as perpetrators and bystanders in an unprecedented program of extermination of "racially inferior" men, women, and children in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Those who have seen these terrible photos of mass executions and other atrocities, currently on show in an exhibition in Germany and soon to be in the United States, will find this volume most enlightening.

Among the many myths about the relationship of Nazism to the mass of the German population, few proved more powerful in postwar West Germany than the notion that the Wehrmacht had not been involved in the crimes of the Third Reich. Former generals were particularly effective in spreading, through memoirs and speeches, the legend that millions of German soldiers had fought an honest and "clean" war and that mass murder, especially in the East, was entirely the work of Himmler's SS. This volume contains the most important contributions by distinguished historians who have thoroughly demolished this Wehrmacht myth. The picture that emerges from this collection is a depressing one and raises many questions about why "ordinary men" got involved as perpetrators and bystanders in an unprecedented program of extermination of "racially inferior" men, women, and children in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Those who have seen these terrible photos of mass executions and other atrocities, currently on show in an exhibition in Germany and soon to be in the United States, will find this volume most enlightening.

Hannes Heer is a historian and film director. Klaus Naumann is a historain and journalist; both are Fellows of the Hamburg Institute for Social Studies.