During the 1950s and 1960s, a plethora of historical memoirs, editions, and documentary publications on the Nazi regime and the Second World War flooded the market.. As Magnus Brechtken has recently shown in the case of Albert. Speer, some of these works developed under the interpretative influence of the former actors themselves and served a widely shared exculpatory mentality. In light of these current research trends, Paul Frohlich investigates the publication history of Franz Halder's War Diary. He reveals the extraordinary influence of the former Chief of the Army General Staff (1938-1942) and his exculpatory narrative on the practice of historical research since the late 1940s and also poses the question as to how close historians were to historical actors during this period.
