Why Was General Earl Van Dorn Murdered?

 

In some ways, historians are like anyone else: they hate to make mistakes. But if you write enough, sooner or later, you will make a mistake—I assure you. I certainly have, but I have been more fortunate than most. Sometimes, mistakes benefit you. What I suppose are my two most significant errors to date came more than two decades apart, and both had overall positive results.

In the late 1980s, I wrote a book entitled Hitler’s Legions. In it, I accepted as fact a U.S. Army intelligence report which stated Generalleutnant Josef Folttmann was killed near Belfort Gap in November 1944. (I was just starting out as a historian in those days and the report was written by the same intelligence officers who gave us the Battle of the Bulge three weeks later, but I did not take that into consideration.) Shortly after Legions was published, Friedrich-Theodor von Stauffenberg wrote to me, corrected me, and informed me that Hans Oschmann was the general who was killed in the battle in question. When I asked him if he was sure, Stauffenberg sent me a copy of a book General Folttmann wrote in 1957—13 years after I killed him off. It listed Oschmann as killed on the date I cited.

More @ The Abbbeville Institute