Friedrich von Mellenthin was a German general during World War II. A participant in most of the major campaigns of the war, he became known afterwards for his memoirs Panzer Battles, first published in 1956 and reprinted several times since then. Mellenthin's works were part of the exculpatory memoirs genre that fed the post-war revisionist narrative, put forth by former Wehrmacht generals. Panzer Battles was instrumental in forming the misconceptions that influenced the U.S. view of Eastern Front military operations up to 1995, when Soviet archival sources became available to Western and Russian historians.
Mellenthin's book Panzerschlachten, translated into English as Panzer Battles, documents Wehrmacht's campaigns that he participated in. The book was reprinted six times in the U.S. between 1956 and 1976 and continues to be popular among readers who romanticize the German war effort. The veracity of Mellenthin's Panzer Battles and other works has been called into question over the years. The historian Wolfram Wette lists Mellenthin in the group of German generals who authored apologetic, uncritical studies on World War II, alongside Ferdinand Heim, Kurt von Tippelskirch, Waldemar Erfurth and others. Critics point out that Mellenthin tends to downplay Wehrmacht's failures while extolling the fighting qualities of the German soldier. The historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies have characterized Mellenthin's works as part of the "exculpatory memoirs" genre that fed the post-war revisionist narrative, alongside books by Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, Hans Rudel and Hans von Luck. Mellenthin blames Wehrmacht's defeat solely on the Soviet advantages in men and materiel, describing the Red Army as a "ruthless enemy, possessed of immense and seemingly inexhaustible resources". As the result, according to Mellenthin, the "endless waves of men and tanks" eventually "submerged" the supposedly superior Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht's adversaries on the Eastern Front are consistently depicted in derogatory and racial terms, including in a section dedicated to the "Psychology of the Russian Soldier". According to Mellenthin, "Russian soldier" is a "primitive being", characterised by "mental sluggishness" and lacking a "religious or moral balance". He describes them as "primitive" "Asiatics". Panzer Battles was instrumental in forming the misconceptions which influenced the U.S. view of Eastern Front military operations up to 1995, when Soviet archival sources became available to Western and Russian historians. The historian Robert Citino notes the influential nature of Mellenthin's works in shaping the perceptions of the Red Army in the West as "a faceless and mindless horde" whose idea of military art was to "smash everything in its path through numbers, brute force and sheer size". Citino includes Panzer Battles among the German officers' memoirs that are "at best unreliable and at worst deliberately misleading".
Works
Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War. First Ballantine Books Edition. New York: Ballantine Books.
Schach dem Schicksal. Ein deutscher Generalstabsoffizier berichtet von seiner Herkunft, seinem Einsatz im 2. Weltkrieg und seinem beruflichen Neubeginn nach dem Kriege. In: Soldatenschicksale des 20. Jahrhunderts als Geschichtsquelle. Bd. 11, Osnabrück 1988,.
