The prosecution of war crimes lost momentum during the 1950s as the Cold War intensified; both German states needed to establish armed forces and could not do so without trained officers and soldiers that had served in the "Wehrmacht". German historiography in the 1950s viewed war crimes by German soldiers as exceptional rather than ordinary; soldiers were seen as victims of the Nazi regime. Traces of this attitude can still be seen in some German works today, which minimize the number of soldiers who took part in Nazi crimes. This was especially the case as the German public in the immediate post-war period were more interested in seeing themselves rather than others as victims. Thus the subject of Red Army atrocities against German civilians in 1944–45 received vastly more popular and historical interest in the 1950s than did the subject of Wehrmacht atrocities against Soviet civilians in 1941–44.