German Army (1935–1945)

• 1. Introduction

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  In the span of just 17 months after Adolf Hitler announced Germany's rearmament programme in 1935, the German Army reached its projected goal of 36 divisions. That pace of expansion was staggering, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Over the next decade, a force that began as a rapid rebuild of shattered post-World War I institutions would grow to absorb roughly 13.6 million volunteers and conscripts. It would sweep across Poland, France, and deep into the Soviet Union. It would also commit atrocities on a scale that shattered the postwar myth of a "clean Wehrmacht." How was this army organized, trained, fed, and commanded? And how did the men who served in it move from morning drills at 5:00 AM to participating in some of the most destructive military operations in recorded history?

• 2. Command and Control

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  The Oberkommando des Heeres, known by its abbreviation OKH, served as Army High Command from 1936 to 1945. Hitler regarded the army as the most critical of the three Wehrmacht branches and was determined to dominate it directly from the moment war broke out. The OKH's field headquarters were always positioned in immediate proximity to his own command post. When the Moscow offensive collapsed in December 1941, Hitler dismissed Brauchitsch as Commander-in-Chief and assumed personal command himself. He never relinquished that role. The consequence was a creeping merger of the OKH and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the overarching armed forces command. Keitel, who remained Chief of the OKW, simultaneously acted as Hitler's executive officer on army matters. The OKH itself was divided into twelve departments, each responsible for a specific function. One of those, the Army Administration Office, handled rations, billets, pay, and clothing, but notably not munitions. It was staffed by a distinct corps of specialists called Wehrmachtbeamten, attached to field units down to company level, wearing uniforms and holding officer ranks, yet managing careers entirely separate from regular army channels. After May 1944, even their limited autonomy contracted, as promotions and transfers shifted to the Army Personnel Department.

• 3. Layers of Force

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  A full Field Army numbered around 200,000 soldiers and was typically commanded by a Colonel general. Below it, a Corps of roughly 65,000 men usually comprised three divisions, commanded by a Lieutenant general. The Infantry division, fielding between 16,860 and 17,895 soldiers, grouped three regiments under a Major general. At the base of this pyramid, the infantry battalion was the smallest tactical unit, with 860 officers and men and 131 horses; by 1944, combat attrition had reduced that to 708. The rifle company, initially 201 strong, shrank to 142 by 1944. A rifle squad held one squad leader and nine riflemen, though as the war ground on, squads often operated with six or five. The mountain forces, organized as Gebirgs divisions, carried a nominal strength of 13,056 officers and men but relied on 3,056 pack animals for transport. That dependence on mule trains made them slower and less flexible than standard infantry formations whenever they operated in open terrain. The Panzerdivision was a different creature entirely. At the outbreak of war there were only five of them, growing to ten by 1940 and reaching 27 by the war's end. The original design included two full tank regiments with roughly 400 tanks, but the 1940 French campaign exposed structural weaknesses, prompting a reorganization into a single tank regiment paired with motorized infantry and reinforced support units.

• 4. Blitzkrieg and Its Limits

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  Blitzkrieg, translated as lightning war, was never formalized as official Wehrmacht doctrine. Historians have traced its conceptual roots to theorists including Fuller, Liddell Hart, and Hans von Seeckt, and some have pointed to ancient prototypes in the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon. What actually shaped the first archetype of it in practice were the battlefield decisions of Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian during the Battle of France, both of whom had already contributed to its theoretical development before the war. They ignored the more cautious plans of their superiors and pushed ahead in ways no one above them had anticipated. The strategy gained its fearsome reputation retrospectively, and only a small portion of the Wehrmacht was ever trained to execute it fully. Key leaders at the highest levels either grasped only certain aspects of it or failed to understand it at all. The core offensive concept, called Keil und Kessel, meaning Wedge and Cauldron, relied on narrow front penetrations by fast-moving forces, diversionary attacks to prevent reinforcements from arriving, and the sealing of flanks to trap enemy formations. As German air superiority waned after 1943, this approach became unsustainable. Hitler's insistence on holding ground and his preference for old-style counterattacks cost the army heavily in both personnel and equipment.

• 5. Training a Soldier

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  Recruits woke at 5:00 AM, often roused physically by corporals. They stripped beds, organized lockers, washed, shaved, and dressed before a breakfast of coffee and bread scheduled at 6:45 AM, a meal that was frequently unavailable if drills were running. The first 16 weeks of training were governed by the section, and recruits were assigned rooms by their Korporalschaft, or section. During this period, formal political affiliations were prohibited; Nazi Party members were required to build bonds with non-party comrades regardless of preference. Drill occupied roughly 30 sessions per week across the 16-week cycle. Punishments did not involve menial tasks but were designed as additional training: long runs in full field gear, crawling through mud, wading through streams. Boot care received particular emphasis, as foot injuries from negligence were treated as disciplinary offenses. Specialized Panzer training followed basic infantry training at schools in Wunsdorf-Zossen, Bergen, and Potsdam-Krampnitz, with additional courses for Panther crews at Erlangen and Tiger crews at Paderborn. After an intense six-month infantry phase, trainees were divided: approximately 45 percent became anti-tank gun crew members, 40 percent trained as vehicle drivers and mechanics, and the remaining 15 percent became signalmen. Officer candidates for Panzer units attended the Fahnenjunker-Schule der Panzertruppen in Gross-Glienicke near Berlin.

• 6. Feeding the Army

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  Seven distinct ration types governed what German soldiers ate, divided into four normal types and two special categories. Type I, the heaviest allocation, was issued to troops in active combat or extreme cold; it weighed 1.698 kilograms per day and included seven cigarettes. Type IV, the lightest, went to office-based personnel and nurses inside Germany and totaled 1.483 kilograms with two cigarettes. The iron ration, an emergency reserve not to be opened without orders, contained biscuits, preserved meat, preserved vegetables, coffee, and salt, totaling 650 grams or 825 grams with packaging. Daily meals followed a fixed proportion: one-sixth for breakfast, half for lunch, and one-third for the evening meal. In the field, divisional butchery platoons could process 40 beef cattle in a single day, yielding 40,000 meat rations. Field bakery companies produced between 15,000 and 19,200 bread rations daily. Horse-drawn wood-burning field kitchens, called Gulaschkanone by the troops, served non-mechanized units. Panzer and Panzergrenadier units used equivalent ranges mounted on trucks. The army's policy was to supplement or replace military rations by foraging, confiscating, or purchasing food in occupied territory wherever possible.

• 7. Medical Chain

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  At its peak, the German medical service employed 341,760 men and women. Between 1939 and 1943, the share of qualified doctors serving with combat troops rose from 48.4 percent to 54.5 percent of all medical officers, meaning trained physicians were pushed closer to the front while nurses and auxiliary personnel shouldered more responsibility in the rear. The evacuation chain began at a Verwundetennest, a forward treatment point staffed by a medical non-commissioned officer, where first aid, splinting, pressure bandages, and tourniquets were applied. Patients moved from there to the Truppenverbandplatz, equivalent to an American battalion aid station, where the first medical officer administered tracheotomies, occlusive chest dressings, shock therapy using injections of Periston and physiological saline, and anti-infection measures including tetanus antitoxin and sulfa pyridine. The Hauptverbandplatz, positioned roughly four miles behind the combat line and designed for 200 patients, regularly handled 300 to 400 in heavy fighting. Primary surgeries for abdominal and non-transportable cases were performed there when possible. Patients with brain trauma, major compound fractures, and severe chest wounds were sent further back to the Feldlazarett or the Kriegslazarett, the latter assigned at Army Group level. An Ersatzkompanie in each division received lightly wounded soldiers for rehabilitation, returning most to duty within a week.

• 8. War Crimes

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  Nazi propaganda had instructed German soldiers to treat their eastern enemies as, in the regime's own language, Jewish Bolshevik subhumans and Mongol hordes. The German Army carried out that ideology in practice. Before Operation Barbarossa began in 1941, the High Command issued the Commissar Order, directing troops to execute Soviet political commissars on sight, in direct violation of the laws of war. Tens of thousands were killed under that order. Of approximately 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war captured during the war, an estimated 3.3 million died from deliberate starvation, forced marches, neglect, and outright execution. In occupied Greece, Wehrmacht troops massacred nearly all the male inhabitants of the village of Kalavryta in December 1943, burning the village in retaliation for resistance attacks. Similar scorched-earth reprisals swept through the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The postwar claim of a "clean Wehrmacht," suggesting that such crimes belonged only to the SS, has been widely rejected by historical scholarship. The army was not a bystander to the regime's policies of extermination and racial domination. It was, on the Eastern Front and across occupied Europe, an active participant.