I forget who it was, but, someone on YouTube did an absolutely brutal deconstruction of the notion that "History is written by the victors" and how flawed it is as a philosophy because history, being built of facts we agree upon though several different scientific disciplines, cannot be "fooled" by trying to shape it before it's happened. No serious historian just takes the word of one primary source and goes home...
That is, the Nazis could hypothetically have won WWII, and claimed they never killed six million Jews, but, no matter what they did, at some point in the future, someone is going to dig up one of those mass graves, and then that would encourage them to look for and find more. Anthropologists would identify the ethnicities of the dead, ballistics experts would identify the kinds of weapons used to kill them, historians would find at least one surviving version of a Russian Anne Frank's diary, talking about being invaded and hiding from liquidation squads committing genocide, old landfills would be found and, curiously, every one of them, at the 1940-1944 level would be stuffed full of Russian artifacts, books, clothing, guns, pieces of art, and most of it was apparently still intact when thrown away, why would they do that?
All this would be tracked and graphed alongside known movements of the Wehrmacht and we would eventually piece together the fact the Nazi conquest was NOT a peaceful liberation of the Soviets from communism, no matter what the Nazis wanted us to think of them when they wrote their own story, which would also be used against them as what they didn't mention would stand out.
I.E. - In the official record, you admit to being in the Soviet Union in 1942, and your glorious victories therein. Coincidentally, every "great victory" you had coincides with where these mass graves were found to date to, they're full of ethnic non-Germans, contain civilian artifacts like coat buttons and shoes that aren't military-issue, indicating they weren't just combat casualties, they were all shot by German weapons, but, you don't mention them? At all? In fact, you deny such things exist in all your surviving archives? And your court records from that era say people went to jail for insisting they did? Hummmmmmmm. That's odd... it's almost like you're.... hiding something..... and this paper we uncovered that is alleged to be from a German university in the late 20th Century, entitled "The Need for Further Genocide, Repeating the Soviet Success Worldwide"? Yes, for a long time we thought it was a joke, or a fraud out to smear the German nation, but, it matches up with all this other evidence... maybe it's the truth after all?
You can't fool history because it goes in blind, with enough time lapsed between event and current day scholars that there isn't a vested interest in keeping an ideology afloat or a person's legacy intact, and that only grows stronger as time goes on. It will find the truth, or the closest thing to it from available evidence no matter what you, the victor today, want your legacy to be. You can hide the truth short-term, but you can't dictate it long term.
