It can certainly be recognized as one of the greatest achievements of a scientist when his work has contributed significantly to making the work of his successors easier.

The military historian Manfred Messerschmidt was able to do this because he settled conflicts with his research and decided in favor of scientific truth, which have not had to be settled since then.

The progress in knowledge that has been gained needs to be safeguarded by institutions that are publicly commissioned to do so, but those who deny it can only do so at the price of ignorance that cannot be concealed.

So anyone who still talks about the "decency" and "cleanliness" of the German Wehrmacht and demands public pride for their achievements in the war must put up with the question of whether they are only playing historically stupid or really are.

77 years after the end of the war, it may seem self-evident that such attitudes are at best marginal in Germany today.

It is easy to forget that it is the result of meticulous research.

Manfred Messerschmidt stands for all of this.

Born in Dortmund in 1926, he was drafted towards the end of the war as an anti-aircraft helper.

His law studies brought him to Freiburg because he wanted to study there with Gerhard Ritter.

He later said he felt the need to understand what had happened to him and his generation under National Socialism.

Messerschmidt had been researching the Wehrmacht since the 1960s.

His study on their indoctrination by the Nazi state, published in 1969, and a second degree in law led him to his life's work, Wehrmacht justice.

From 1970 to 1978 he headed the Military History Research Office (MGFA) of the Bundeswehr in Freiburg as its senior historian.

For Messerschmidt it was clear that a German military history after 1945 also had to be a social history.

The citizens in the uniform of the still young Bundeswehr should be able to draw on a military history that had to meet the high demands of the soldier’s “internal leadership”: being able to distinguish between what was traditional and what was not traditional.

The controversy surrounding the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 and the so-called “preventive war thesis” in the fourth volume of Messerschmidt’s series “Das Deutsche Reich and the Second World War".

The fact that German military history is internationally regarded today as a model for