‘Untarnished Regiment’? Divergent Perspectives on the Wehrmacht's 9th Infantry, 1939–1941

We know more about 9th Infantry than about other regiments in the Wehrmacht. Its ‘Prussian’ officer cadre produced two wartime field marshals, 27 generals, and a president of Germany in 1984–94. Several erstwhile officers conspired ahead of the putsch on 20 July 1944. Traditional accounts suggested that the regiment was ‘untarnished’ and not implicated in National Socialist crimes. This paper tests this by drawing on unexplored or little-known German, Polish, Jewish, and ex-Soviet sources. It finds that 9th Infantry did not differ from peers in supporting and joining illegalities in 1939–41. Moreover, in facilitating repression and Jewish ghettos in Poland and in shooting Soviet POWs it exceeded ‘typical’ criminality. Distortions seen in the traditional accounts are deconstructed. Some persist today in Germany's public sphere.