The memoirs of Hitler’s generals, especially those published shortly after the war, are staples of military history but have never been evaluated in their basic form: as memoirs. Military historians focus on the more reliable descriptions of battles, troop movements, and operational plans but discard the rest of these works’ content. Scholars of war writing, also, have paid them little attention, preferring to focus on more “front-line” experiences. Such neglect occurs because large parts of these works are notoriously unreliable since their authors used them to exonerate themselves and the conduct of the German Army in World War II. This study focuses on the unreliable aspects of these memoirs, not simply to expose falsehoods but also to understand how these falsehoods shaped West German narratives of World War II and factored into Germans’ struggles to fit the Third Reich into a useable past. “The War Inside Their Heads” analyses five memoirs by German generals from World War II through a new critical lens. These memoirs are Memories of a Soldier by Heinz Guderian, Soldier to the Last Day by Albert Kesselring, Adolf Galland’s The First and the Last, Lost Victories by Erich von Manstein, and Walter Warlimont’s In the Headquarters of the German Wehrmacht, 1939-1945. This study argues that the first wave of memoirs from Hitler’s generals influenced West Germans’ efforts to make sense of the Nazi past, reinforced the popular belief that Germans, too, had been victims of the war and the Third Reich, and added new tropes that could be employed to normalize, or at least comprehend, the Nazi past. The authors’ efforts were not limited to reinforcing the myth the Wehrmacht fought a “clean” war, but their insistences of innocence and victimhood could also be transferred onto Germans at large.