The Nazis Exploited Sherman’s March To The Sea

Lost Cause myths made their way into Hitler’s Germany

An engraving depicting Sherman’s campaign through the Confederacy. Alexander Hay Ritchie illustration via the Library of Congress

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

In the months before the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, the Wehrmacht’s propagandists warned those living under German occupation that America’s armies would not be as forgiving.

In the pages of Signal, a bi-weekly magazine funded by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and intended for foreign audiences, the Nazis invoked William Tecumseh Sherman’s march across the Confederacy during the American Civil War as a sign of what to expect.

Sherman was, according to the Nazis, the quintessential American general. “The cruelties of the Marquis de Sade and the atrocities perpetrated by Jack the Ripper have never led to mass suggestion,” Signal editor Walther Kiaulehn wrote. “Sherman’s strategy, however, has been acclaimed as classical.”