Reliability of Paul Carell

[Cult Icon]

What is the reasoning behind this?

And,everything was written with the aim of blame Hitler/or a specified general)for the loss of the war :Carell said : if Reichenau and not Paulus commanded 6th Army,Stalingrad would not have happen;something which is not only a lie,but also a proof that his military knowledge was inexistent .

[sandeepmukherjee196]

Everything he did write was fiction,popularized,on the level of the H CH,the Christian Science Monitor,for a target group with the intelligence of a 10 years boy.

Reading Carell about WWII,is the same as reading Karl May about the Indians .

And,everything was written with the aim of blame Hitler/or a specified general)for the loss of the war :Carell said : if Reichenau and not Paulus commanded 6th Army,Stalingrad would not have happen;something which is not only a lie,but also a proof that his military knowledge was inexistent .Carell was only a ghost-writer ,writing popularized fiction about WWII,using information offered by anonymus retired German military .

Still not a sentence.. not a word on any instance of non-history..fiction writing on the part of Carell, on Normandy.

[sandeepmukherjee196]

Everything he did write was fiction,popularized,on the level of the H CH,the Christian Science Monitor,for a target group with the intelligence of a 10 years boy.

Reading Carell about WWII,is the same as reading Karl May about the Indians .

And,everything was written with the aim of blame Hitler/or a specified general)for the loss of the war :Carell said : if Reichenau and not Paulus commanded 6th Army,Stalingrad would not have happen;something which is not only a lie,but also a proof that his military knowledge was inexistent .Carell was only a ghost-writer ,writing popularized fiction about WWII,using information offered by anonymus retired German military .

From Gary Komar in "H-Net discussion Networks-Reply:Works of Paul Carell"

"While the identification of the various units,their location at any given time,and their action as portrayed in his books may be relatively accurate,his narrative is pure fiction.

His conclusions on most points are,in my opinion,totally biased and,for the most points,quite unsound ."

What Carell was writinng was not only crap,but dangerous crap .

Lets, for a moment, go beyond the name calling / general trashing and juxtapose the above two quotes. " ..While the identification of the various units,their location at any given time,and their action as portrayed in his books may be relatively accurate..." .

This doesn't appear to sit well with : " Reading Carell about WWII,is the same as reading Karl May about the Indians "..


" And,everything was written with the aim of blame Hitler/or a specified general)for the loss of the war " .

Well that appears to be part of the mainstream post WWII literary wisdom ? No ?
However, are there any instances of his going out of his way to blame everything on Hitler ( beyond the standard "official" wisdom) about Normandy?

" if Reichenau and not Paulus commanded 6th Army,Stalingrad would not have happen;something which is not only a lie,but also a proof that his military knowledge was inexistent ".

A lie? Are you sure you got the right word to convey what you meant? Since there are no comparable facts involved here .. just speculation on the part of Carell, would you say that its a "lie", if someone speculates that General Patton would have succeeded with Market Garden if he was in place instead of Gen Montgomery?

" ..His conclusions on most points are,in my opinion,totally biased and,for the most points,quite unsound ."

Well that can be said on a whole lot of authors on any historical subject without them being called liars and fiction peddlers.

For instance lets compare Carell with someone like Anton Joachimsthaler. The latter too had solid facts and accurate information on the Bunker episode at Berlin during Hitler's last days. But certain conclusions he arrived at were far far off the mark. Like he puts his stamp on the jealous secretarial bitching against Frau Eva Braun Hitler by agreeing that she had an affair with Fegelein and the motivation behind her suicide was Fegelein's betrayal and execution !

" What Carell was writinng was not only crap,but dangerous crap " ..

Well, though no specific instance has been provided by you to substantiate this .. won't you agree that the "crap" peddled by Joachimsthaler on Frau Hitler was libellous crap? But still no one has called him out and called him names .. have they?

[Michael Kenny]

Still not a sentence.. not a word on any instance of non-history..fiction writing on the part of Carell, on Normandy.

That is because the list is far too long. I will give you just one example because my life is too short to do them all.

Pge 159 ( Hardback Schiffer)Chapter IV The Battle For Tilly. 'One Tiger Against An Entire Brigade.

Firstly a Brigade of tanks is 3 Regiments of c.200 Tanks. Wittmann did not engage 200 tanks. 10 possibly. It was not even a Squadron of tanks he fought. There are 9 Sabre Squadrons in a Brigade. Wittmann 'fought' against Artillery spotter tanks, Stuart light tanks, a HQ Group (a Troop) and possibly 2-4 Tanks from one of the 9 Sabre Squadrons in a Brigade. At best he engaged elements from 3 Troops of tanks (a full brigade is at least 40 Troops).
He states 191 men were 'dead' when in fact the total of dead was 12.
It would seem Carell has improved every 'fact' by at least a factor of 10 in order to peddle his lies.
Nearly every detail he gives about the engagement is completely wrong but like I said earlier life is too short.
Please do not bother doing an internet search to find 3rd rate sources that reinforce the Carrel version of history. His account on June 13 1944 is total fiction


Carrell 's books were published in the early 1960's and as such is the standard 'we were never beaten in a fair fight' excuse for the German humiliation in 1945. He makes up facts about individual German Units/Soldiers performing superhuman feats of arms and thus his works are a magnet for gullible people like you. It amazes me that anyone can seriously put forward his books as a refences.

[ljadw]

He is deliberately falsifying history : in "Scorched Earth " he claims that the plans of Citadel were betrayed to the Soviets,that this was the cause of the German defeat,and he added that he knew the name of the traitor (von Heydebreck)but that he could not name him,because he would be condemned by the German justice for slander.

For Stalingrad : every serious historian knows that it was irrelevant who commanded 6Army : Paulus,Reichenau,Manstein etc...Thus,his claim that with Reichenau,the defeat of Stalingrad would not have happen .......

[Marcus]

For more details on the famous Wittmann battle see this thread: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 0&t=151479, that thread is also the place discuss it further.

/Marcus

[maarten swarts]

What a complete useless discussion. Of course was Carell everything for what you blame him. But who wasn t in 1960 in Germany? Everybody was in some way connected with the nazi regime, with or against their will. If not, you were not a part of the German society. Germany had lost the war, POWs were just returning from russian camps. The only experience they had in life were war and camps. Nobody wanted to hear their stories, so the Landser Hefte and Carell s books fell on fertile ground. But what s more there wasn t anything else. Yes some division stories but those were not for the average soldier unless they were part of that unit. And Carell could surely write. In 1960 I was in Köln on holiday (bike&tent) and there I bought the magazine "Kristall"
They put every fortnight a piece of his (then) new book "Barbarossa") in it. It was completely new to me. On the first four pages were nothing but letters from readers who said "at last, somebody noted there was a war fifteen years ago". It was then the only book you could read about the war in the east.
So you never thought about the credibility or from where he got his information. You were lucky you had something. Later I recognized how he didnt write of a lot of episodes, especially in Sorched earth. And years later when came up what the Germans did in Russia- killing jews and other people on an enormous scale and the Russian behaviour the books of Carell lost their attraction and credibility.
That Carell s books were dangerous is nonsense, They filled a gap when there was nothing else. They were a good read and didnt turn me in a die hard Nazi. Nowadays there is not a serious historian that uses his books as a reference.

Maarten Swarts

[Cult Icon]

I meant, what was 'his' reasoning behind this, as it sounds presumptuous. The only way to win at Stalingrad was to seize it by coup de main by clearing the great bend of the don with the greatest possible speed.

For Stalingrad : every serious historian knows that it was irrelevant who commanded 6Army : Paulus,Reichenau,Manstein etc...Thus,his claim that with Reichenau,the defeat of Stalingrad would not have happen .......

[Marcus]

What a complete useless discussion. Of course was Carell everything for what you blame him.

Nowadays there is not a serious historian that uses his books as a reference.

The problem is that his books are still easily available and if read by someone without knowledge of the background (as you explained it) they will get wrong information and get the wrong understanding as we have seen examples of here in the forum.

/Marcus

[sandeepmukherjee196]

What a complete useless discussion. Of course was Carell everything for what you blame him. But who wasn t in 1960 in Germany? Everybody was in some way connected with the nazi regime, with or against their will. If not, you were not a part of the German society. Germany had lost the war, POWs were just returning from russian camps. The only experience they had in life were war and camps. Nobody wanted to hear their stories, so the Landser Hefte and Carell s books fell on fertile ground. But what s more there wasn t anything else. Yes some division stories but those were not for the average soldier unless they were part of that unit. And Carell could surely write. In 1960 I was in Köln on holiday (bike&tent) and there I bought the magazine "Kristall"
They put every fortnight a piece of his (then) new book "Barbarossa") in it. It was completely new to me. On the first four pages were nothing but letters from readers who said "at last, somebody noted there was a war fifteen years ago". It was then the only book you could read about the war in the east.
So you never thought about the credibility or from where he got his information. You were lucky you had something. Later I recognized how he didnt write of a lot of episodes, especially in Sorched earth. And years later when came up what the Germans did in Russia- killing jews and other people on an enormous scale and the Russian behaviour the books of Carell lost their attraction and credibility.
That Carell s books were dangerous is nonsense, They filled a gap when there was nothing else. They were a good read and didnt turn me in a die hard Nazi. Nowadays there is not a serious historian that uses his books as a reference.

Maarten Swarts

Thanks. Its a very useful and well reasoned post.

However I would like to add that the Landser Hefte..Der Landser series et al..did not appear in West German society just to satiate the curiosity of lay readers in the 50s and 60s. In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was apathy and hostility towards war in general and anything to do with Germany's role in warfare. This suited the Occupation authorities, met their concerns about werewolf and other forms of NS revival etc.

However when the time came to hustle up German cannon fodder during the cold war, this Kriegsmüdigkeit suddenly became a hindrance. In the run up to the formation of the Bundeswehr, a new enthusiasm needed to be created towards warfare. Here the Landser hefte came in handy to the Allies who had enough war fatigue back home and didn't relish the prospect of repeating a Korean War in Europe with their own boys all over again !

Once the Bundeswehr was in place and a new German military mechanism had been institutionalised, the likes of Carell and der hefte became irritants again. In fact with the turn of the decade of the 50s, the Federal authorities and their Western masters were actively frowning upon this genre.

The Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien started throwing its weight around when they thought that German youth had been "martialised " enough! Carell bashing is not just about historical inaccuracies and hyperboles on his part. He didn't toe the "line"..that needed to be toed ! Many other historians and chroniclers have had their facts challenged later with the emergence of new research... but their entire body of works have not been trashed perhaps like in his case.

[Marcus]

A post by sandeepmukherjee196 dealing with Wittmann was moved following the above moderator post.

/Marcus

[ljadw]

I meant, what was 'his' reasoning behind this, as it sounds presumptuous. The only way to win at Stalingrad was to seize it by coup de main by clearing the great bend of the don with the greatest possible speed.

For Stalingrad : every serious historian knows that it was irrelevant who commanded 6Army : Paulus,Reichenau,Manstein etc...Thus,his claim that with Reichenau,the defeat of Stalingrad would not have happen .......

The only way to prevent the disaster of Stalingrad was to prevent the execution of Uranus,and to seize or not to seize the city would change nothing .

[Cult Icon]

This is off-topic, but I think to rigidly assume this is actually wrong.

The only way to prevent the disaster of Stalingrad was to prevent the execution of Uranus,and to seize or not to seize the city would change nothing .

[Sheldrake]

What a complete useless discussion. Of course was Carell everything for what you blame him.

Nowadays there is not a serious historian that uses his books as a reference.

The problem is that his books are still easily available and if read by someone without knowledge of the background (as you explained it) they will get wrong information and get the wrong understanding as we have seen examples of here in the forum.

/Marcus

I think this illustrates why the discipline of history matters. The public should be taught to ask questions about the reliability and bias of sources. Approached from this angle Paul Carell is clearly biased and was imaginative in his sources.

I use his account of Omaha beach as an example of a highly coloured but very unreliable source. He quotes dialogue which can at best have been reconstructed from Serveloh alone.

[sandeepmukherjee196]

What a complete useless discussion. Of course was Carell everything for what you blame him.

Nowadays there is not a serious historian that uses his books as a reference.

The problem is that his books are still easily available and if read by someone without knowledge of the background (as you explained it) they will get wrong information and get the wrong understanding as we have seen examples of here in the forum.

/Marcus

I think this illustrates why the discipline of history matters. The public should be taught to ask questions about the reliability and bias of sources. Approached from this angle Paul Carell is clearly biased and was imaginative in his sources.

I use his account of Omaha beach as an example of a highly coloured but very unreliable source. He quotes dialogue which can at best have been reconstructed from Serveloh alone.

Which dialogue pl? Anything which is of material value to history? Anything which changes facts? "Are we not going to have any breakfast today?" Or maybe "The big one is coming inshore" ...How about "hold your fire till the enemy is coming up to the waterline.."

Which part of his account of Omaha is "highly coloured" or "unreliable"?