Ernst Klink

Born in 1923, Ernst Klink grew up in Weimar and Nazi Germany; his mother was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, head of National Socialist Women's League. In 1941 Klink joined the SS and was commissioned to the SS Division Leibstandarte, with which he fought in Joachim Peiper's regiment against the Soviet Union. Reaching the rank of SS-Unterscharführer (sergeant) he participated in the Third Battle of Kharkov and was so severely wounded on the first day of the Battle of Kursk that he was permanently disabled from military service.

After the war Klink studied history, German language, philosophy and English language and submitted his Ph.D. thesis on the Åland Islands dispute 1917 to 1921 at the University of Tübingen in 1957. During the 1950s, Klink joined HIAG, a Waffen-SS veteran's association and lobby group, set up in West Germany in 1951 by former high-ranking Waffen-SS personnel.

Klink joined the Military History Research Office (MGFA) at Freiburg in 1958. In the same year, he became the spokesperson for the Tübingen branch of HIAG. Klink's tenure at MGFA was controversial, especially in recent assessments. According to Jens Westemeier in his biography of Jochen Peiper, Klink was "one of the most important lobbyists for the in-house historical falsification" by HIAG. He gave lectures at veterans' meetings, assisted with documentation and "cultivated the image of the clean Wehrmacht".

Klink worked with HIAG and its in-house historian Walter Harzer to screen materials donated to the German Federal Military Archive (de) in Freiburg for any information that may have implicated units and personnel in questionable activity. In the 1960s and 70s, Klink maintained a friendship with Peiper; one of the last two letters that Peiper wrote before his death was to Klink. According to the researcher Danny Parker, Klink "pretended to be a politically neutral historian at the MGFA", but his bias, especially towards the Waffen-SS, was obvious from the personal papers of Klink that Parker had examined.

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. The volume appeared in 1983, and focused on Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. In what historian David Stahel describes as "groundbreaking research" that (as of 2009) was "unsurpassed", Klink was the first to provide a comprehensive account of the military planning for Barbarossa. Klink was also 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. Stahel commends Klink on the operations study of the Battle of Smolensk, despite over-reliance on the files of the OKW and the OKH, which were at times at odds with diaries of the combat units and did not fully reflect the difficulties on the ground.

Klink's colleague at the MGFA, Gerd R. Ueberschär, remarks that Klink based his study solely upon military records and attempted to portray the operations as "apolitical". Ueberschär criticises Klink for portraying Hitler as an excellent military leader, contrasting Hitler's decisions favorably to the "poor decisions" by the Chief of General Staff Franz Halder. According to Ueberschär other researchers denied this notion and it is not supported by the available records. "Klink's narrow military view," Ueberschär writes, "also enticed him into sidling up to the long disproved Nazi claim that this was a preventive war".

In English

• Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IV: The Attack on the Soviet Union, with Horst Boog, Joachim Hoffmann, Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär

In German

• Das Gesetz des Handelns. Die Operation »Zitadelle« 1943, 1966, MGFA