soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Feb 24, 3:55 pm, "Andrew Clark"
wrote:

Hi Andrew,

First I have to ask the source for your comment that "It has fairly
recently come to light that the SS employed a bunch of statisticians
from 1942 specifically to revise and edit the SS statistical returns
from the field, which I think also includes Waffen SS returns."? That
seems odd on a number of levels, for one, what would they be revising
and why? For another, how would they do it?

You see the Waffen-SS in the field remained administratively under the
SS, but the reporting chain still passed to **both** the SS and the
Heer, like most military documentation reports were prepared in
multiple copies to be passed to multiple agencies. In the case of
Kursk, the SS-Panzer Korps records were filed for operational purposes
with 4. Panzerarmee, while a copy was kept by the corps, while the
divisional reports were filed by the division, corps, and armee (in
some cases reports might be filed to the army group as well). Then,
every six months (June and July, which is a source for the late war
lack of documentation, they were all in the "field", so when the
headquarters destroyed documents everything - usually - got destroyed)
in the German system a file copy of records was to be sent to Potsdam
for archiving. So for SS statisticians to "edit" a record would
require that they chase down each record copy to make the correction,
which seems an awful lot of work for not much purpose?

Now following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact it was revealed that the
main SS archive that was thought destroyed at the end of the war was
in fact mostly intact and on Prague. That is still being catalogued as
far as I know, but perhaps someone has dug into them? However, I do
know a researcher who has looked into the Findbucher for those and
there is nothing unusual in the Kursk-related documents that he could
see?

> That's not impossible. The Heer was not beyond a little archival forgery
> itself. Bartov wrote a paper pointing out that two different sets of returns
> existed in the archives for lots of Heer divisions - one he concluded the
> original return and the other a more favourable edited version prepared
> after the event for the unit history.

Er, either Bartov is talking through his hat - possible - or there is
some confusion in that his second hand comments are being further
filtered through you? Multiple returns are **not** automatically a
sign of "archival forgery", they are a sign of....multiple
returns. :) In a like manner I could comment that I have located two
sets of tank state returns for Eighth Army at El Alamein in Kew, which
are subtly different....does that mean that one was forged? Of course
not, one is that prepared **by** Eighth Army, while the other was
prepared by British Forces Egypt, they are similar, but not exactly
the same, but both are quite obviously unforged. That kind of
disconnect between reporting offices occurred all the time.

Over and over again I run into historians or researchers bitching
about the quality of records or how they were kept, while oddly enough
they always seem unaware that those records were usually **not**
written for historical purposes or by historians. :) I've noticed that
**all** records from World War II are usually riddled with minor math
errors, do you think those were deliberate as part of an attempt to
adjust the figures?

> I think you have misunderstood me. I was referring to post-action (usually
> six months at least afterward) revision of archived documents, not to
> altering operational records while they were still in use. This had no
> impact on current operations, merely on the perception of the past.

Again, how and why? And in this case the simpler way of doing it -
which **has** been practiced in the past, and not just by the Germans
- is to rewrite the history the way you wish and ignore the
documentation....excuse me, ignore selected bits of the documentation.
Fundamentally forging government documents is a difficult thing to get
clerks to do, and it is even more difficult a thing to get military
men to do, too often it comes back and bites you in the ass, re-
writing history is a much simpler thing, just look at Ramses.

> The question was for both of you. I'd be interested to learn anything he has
> to say.

I'm not sure what more I can say except that I remain skeptical?
Especially until I get some kind of reference to this story that I can
check against my own experience?