Beyond that, Operation Barbarossa had been portrayed in Germany as a "preventive war" forced on Germany by Soviet attack alleged to be planned for July 1941. This claim was widely believed in the "Reich" during the war, and indeed was so popular that as late as the 1950s some West German historians were still arguing Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war". As a result of this view of Operation Barbarossa, for many Germans, violence inflicted by the Wehrmacht on Soviet civilians and POWs was seen as something that the Soviets had brought down on themselves, hence the absence of any guilt on the part of many Germans. Cold War priorities and taboos about revisiting the most unpleasant aspects of World War II meant that the "Wehrmacht"'s role in war crimes was not seriously re-examined until the early 1980s.