"What, they still published stuff like that in the 21st century? Achtung Schweinhund!"
This was TheEditor's reaction to recent news that the German World War II themed pulp fiction series "Der Landser" was going to be discontinued by the publisher. This Wikipedia page (in German) provides a great history of this publication and others in the same vein.
The 1950s were the golden decade of "Der Landser" and its siblings, with the re-militarization of Germany and a good deal of whitewashing of the regular military. Criticism accompanied these series from the beginning, for instance, this "Spiegel" article of 1959 (in German). According to the Wikipedia entry, "Der Landser" went from around 500 000 copies a month to around 60 000 a month in the 1990s.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center praised the decision of the publishing house to drop the series.
One brief look at the Wikipedia list of known authors and the faux, whiny justification of publishing such trash is enough: good riddance.
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