After '' Verlorene Siege '' was published , the West German newspaper '' Die Zeit '' asked about Manstein 's account : " What would it have signified for the world and for Germany , what would it have signified for a Christian and gentleman like Manstein if these victories had not been lost ? " German historian Jürgen Förster wrote in 1998 that for too long , most Germans accepted at face value self-serving claims by generals such as Manstein and Siegfried Westphal in their memoirs that the Wehrmacht was a professional , apolitical force who were victims ( not followers ) of Adolf Hitler ; these evaded the issue of Wehrmacht war crimes . In 2004 , historian Volker Berghahn called Manstein 's memoirs " totally unreliable " ; if more had been known about his war crimes during the 1940s , he might have been hanged . According to Berghahn , " By the time Christian Streit published his book '' Keine Kameraden '' about the mass murder of Red Army prisoners of war at the hands of the Wehrmacht , professional historians firmly accepted what Manstein and his comrades had denied and covered up , i.e. , that the Wehrmacht had been deeply involved in the criminal and genocidal policies of the Nazi regime " . Historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies noted that nowhere in his memoirs or other post-war writings did Manstein explicitly condemn National Socialism . Max Egremont called the memoir " arrogant " and " self-serving " in '' Literary Review '' , Andrew Roberts wrote in '' The Storm of War '' that it has " rightly been condemned "
Wehrmacht war crimes
War crimes of the Wehrmacht
Lost Victories