how free to lie anticommunist expats were before the internet.
If you graduated high school before 2010ish, basically everything you heard about the Eastern Front in WWII was wrong. That's because most accounts we had came from Germans, who made up all kinds of reasons for why they lost, which was then taught to your history teachers as fact. Straight-up Holocaust denial, even.
Around 1991 with the Soviet Archives being opened up to western historians was when neo-nazi and Holocaust denier David Irving was finally caught red-handed. It wasn't until the 2000s that schools finally pulled his books from their libraries. There's still a ton of stuff, however, written by German officers about Judeo-Bolshevik hordes, Hitler didn't listen to his generals, "the Holocaust siphoned away too many resources and we totes didn't know it was happening," etc. etc.