16 Facts About Ernst Klink

Ernst Klink was a German military historian who specialised in Nazi Germany and World War II.

Ernst Klink was a long-term employee at the Military History Research Office.

In recent assessments, some of Ernst Klink's work has been questioned due to his support for the ahistorical notions of the "clean Wehrmacht" and that the German attack on the Soviet Union had been "preventive".

In 1941, Ernst Klink joined the SS and was commissioned to the SS Division Leibstandarte, fighting in Joachim Peiper's regiment against the Soviet Union Red Army.

Ernst Klink was so severely wounded on the first day of the Battle of Kursk that he was permanently disabled from military service.

Ernst Klink submitted his PhD thesis on the Aland Islands dispute 1917 to 1921 at the University of Tubingen in 1957.

Ernst Klink joined the Military History Research Office at Freiburg in 1958.

In 1958, Ernst Klink became the spokesperson for the Tubingen branch of HIAG, a Waffen-SS lobby group and a revisionist veterans' organisation.

Ernst Klink gave lectures at veterans' meetings, assisted with documentation, and in the words of the historian Jorg Echternkamp, "cultivated the image of the clean Wehrmacht".

Ernst Klink was approached by HIAG to write Peiper's biography, but declined; he was unwilling to stake his academic reputation on an attempt to rehabilitate Peiper.

Nonetheless, in 1990, Ernst Klink wrote an article sharply critical of the Malmedy massacre trial and favourable towards the Waffen-SS.

Ernst Klink was a contributor to the fourth volume, The Attack on the Soviet Union, of Germany and the Second World War, produced by historians of the MGFA.

In what the historian David Stahel describes as "groundbreaking research" that was "unsurpassed", Ernst Klink was the first to provide a comprehensive account of the military planning for Barbarossa.

Ernst Klink was the first to identify the German Army's independent planning for an attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940, known as Operation Otto.

Klink's colleague at the MGFA, Gerd R Ueberschar, remarks that Klink based his study solely upon military records and attempted to portray the operations as "apolitical".

Ueberschar criticises Ernst Klink for portraying Hitler as an excellent military leader, contrasting his decisions favourably to the "poor decisions" by the Chief of General Staff Franz Halder.