The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture Book

This book attempts to explain how and why, there came to be in the United States, a culture or rather a sub-culture that romanticizes to bizarre extremes the armed forces of the most notorious regime of the 20th century, the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. A regime and army against which the United States struggled.

To do this, the authors put forth that it is a combination of three phenomena, not all of which are related to the Second World War. Those being:

The appeal of the "lost cause" sentiment, which emerged following the end of the American Civil War, the Cold War, and the self-serving and apolagetic literature penned by various German generals and other ex-German soldiers in the years soon after the end of World War Two. To which extent the Cold War enabled them to so, or they in turn enabled the romanticizing phenomena is not that significant, but it is certain that both played an important role.

Overall, this is a book as much about the Cold War in America as it is about World War II. The main drawback of the book is that it is easily misunderstood, and suffers a little from a "preaching to the choir" style of writing, in this case the choir being the progressive reader.

But it is a book that needed to be written, and is the first that I know of that tackles this phenomenon directly. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Sociology, World War II, the Cold War and sub-cultures.