There are a handful of books and sites that kept me from ever experiencing the kind of feeling of excessively hyping the World War II German military.

The first was Christoper Wilbeck’s Sledgehammers. Now, granted, that book has a massive flaw in that its author takes “questionable” claimed kill ratios at face value far too much, but it nonetheless sincerely tried to find the flaws in the Tiger and did not hesitate to point out lost battles. It got me on the right foot.

The second was Spacebattles and the very informed, very unbiased members of its “War Room” subforum. This was where I learned, among other things, about one of the biggest weaknesses of the German military-strategic intelligence. (Normandy is the most famous example, but I cannot emphasize enough how their blunders there were in the tide-turning 1942-3 period on the Eastern Front).

The third was simply the context that I grew up in. I was free of the “baggage” that dominated the debate and discussion of past decades. I was born long after the period where everyone from scholars like van Creveld and Dupuy to popular historians like Max Hastings put forth a near-consensus that the Wehrmacht was an absolute master of war that lost only due to superior Allied resources and Hitler’s antics. There are also some minor things-I didn’t play that many, if any, WWII video games, be they poppish or wargames. I was too busy in Advance Wars and the postwar Steel Panthers. (So I didn’t see that many of the low-end “why no my krupstall block the sherman shell” ‘Wehraboos’ that fill every WWII game forum with complaints that their wunderpanzers lost)

Then there’s more modern historians like Sovietologist David Glantz and Robert Citino, the latter of whom has specialized in the study of the German military in ways that contradict a lot of the 70s-80s theorizing. I proudly have books by both of them on my shelf.