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Wehrmacht

Ch. 1 of 7
— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Contents

Wehrmacht

7 sections

  • The Wehrmacht was the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, created on the 21st of May 1935 when the old Reichswehr was officially renamed and conscription was reintroduced in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. About 18 million men served in its ranks across the decade of its existence. It fought on three simultaneous fronts, swept through Poland in weeks, and stood at the gates of Moscow before the tide turned against it. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, approximately 5,318,000 soldiers from Germany and other nationalities fighting under the German flag had been killed, gone missing, or died in captivity. And yet for decades after the war, a carefully cultivated myth claimed this force had fought cleanly, separate from the crimes of the Nazi regime. How was the Wehrmacht built so quickly from a hollowed-out peacetime force? How did it achieve such stunning early victories, and why did those victories unravel so completely? What was the relationship between the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust? Those questions take this documentary from the ruins of World War I to the dissolved institution the Allied Control Council formally abolished on the 20th of August 1946.

  • In January 1919, just weeks after the armistice of the 11th of November 1918, Germany's armed forces were renamed the Friedensheer, the peace army, as if a new name might soften the humiliation of defeat. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced, the conditions were severe: the army was limited to one hundred thousand men, the navy to six battleships, six cruisers, and twelve destroyers, and submarines, tanks, and heavy artillery were forbidden outright. The air force was dissolved entirely.

    General Hans von Seeckt was handed the task of building something useful from these ruins. He chose ruthlessly. American historians Alan Millet and Williamson Murray wrote that Seeckt selected the new leadership from the best men of the general staff "with ruthless disregard for other constituencies, such as war heroes and the nobility." The officers he kept spent the 1920s developing doctrines that emphasized speed, aggression, combined arms, and the initiative of lower officers to seize fleeting opportunities. Seeckt retired in 1926, but his influence was still visible when the army went to war in 1939.

    Seeckt also broke the letter of the treaty in secret. Germany began covertly circumventing Versailles by 1922, entering a clandestine collaboration with the Soviet Union after the Treaty of Rapallo. Major-General Otto Hasse traveled to Moscow in 1923 to negotiate the details. German tank and air-force specialists trained in Soviet territory, and in 1924 a fighter-pilot school opened at Lipetsk, where several hundred German air force personnel received instruction over the next decade. The Germans finally departed Lipetsk in September 1933, by which time Hitler had come to power and the whole operation had broad political backing.

  • German rearmament was announced on the 16th of March 1935 with the Edict for the Buildup of the Wehrmacht, and the word Wehrmacht itself entered law with that conscription order. Hitler's proclamation projected no fewer than 36 divisions from the start, and General Ludwig Beck added 48 tank battalions to the program in December 1935. Hitler had originally set a ten-year timetable for remilitarization; he soon shortened it to four years.

    Between 1935 and 1939, 1.3 million men were drafted and 2.4 million volunteered. Germany and annexed Austria were divided into 18 military districts called Wehrkreise, and registration lists held by local police were used to call up every man who reached the age of 20. From the moment recruits arrived, the pace was relentless. A typical training day began at 5:00 AM, when corporals physically roused men from their beds. Breakfast, consisting of coffee and bread, was scheduled for 6:45 AM, with about 15 minutes to eat, though this meal was frequently unavailable if recruits were being drilled for mistakes from the day before. Recruits averaged around 30 drill sessions per week during the 16-week initial period.

    Officer training went deeper still. After reforms under Seeckt, officer candidates spent almost four years preparing, starting with two years in the troops, followed by nearly eleven months each at the infantry school and weapons school. The curriculum covered tactics, weapons technology, pioneer service, terrain studies, communications, vehicle technology, military history, and subjects like mathematics, physics, and chemistry. From the fall of 1942, proven soldiers without an original officer's career path could also receive commissions on the recommendation of their commanders, allowing tens of thousands of non-commissioned officers to become officers during the war.

  • Foreign journalists who watched the invasion of Poland in September 1939 reached for a new word to describe what they were witnessing: Blitzkrieg, lightning war. The tactic combined light tanks with close air support and motorized infantry to punch through weak points, isolate enemy formations, and collapse resistance before it could reorganize. The campaigns in France in 1940, the Soviet Union in 1941, and North Africa in 1941 and 1942 are regarded by historians as acts of boldness.

    The Heer entered the war with a minority of its formations motorized. Infantry remained approximately 90% foot-borne throughout the conflict, and artillery was primarily horse-drawn. Much of what the world saw in newsreels was atypical; only 40% to 60% of all units on the Eastern Front were motorized. The gap between the image and the reality would widen as the war lengthened.

    The advance into the Soviet Union outran the Wehrmacht's own supply lines. Germany's first major defeat came at the Battle of Moscow in 1941, and by late 1942 Germany was losing the initiative in every theatre. Defeats at Moscow, Stalingrad, the Siege of Leningrad, Tunis, and the Battle of Kursk followed in sequence. After Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, the Wehrmacht found itself fighting several major industrial powers while Germany was still converting to a war economy. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld later concluded that the Wehrmacht was "a superb fighting organization" in terms of morale and cohesion, and that it regularly inflicted higher losses than it received while fighting outnumbered. Yet strategic thinker Colin S. Gray observed that following its successful early campaigns, German policy developed what amounted to victory disease, asking the Wehrmacht to accomplish what was not possible. The Soviets also studied Blitzkrieg carefully and turned the tactic back against the retreating Wehrmacht from 1943 onward.

  • The Luftwaffe was officially established in 1935 under Hermann Goring, built partly from the clandestine cadre Seeckt had assembled in the early 1920s. Its first real test came in the Spanish Civil War. The planes it favored were fighters and tactical bombers, particularly the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber. Because the army held sway with Hitler, the Luftwaffe was often subordinated to a tactical support role, reducing its strategic capabilities. The Western Allies' round-the-clock Combined Bomber Offensive forced the Luftwaffe into a war of attrition, and following the losses of Operation Bodenplatte in 1945, it was no longer an effective fighting force.

    The Kriegsmarine was the weakest of the three branches, having been prioritized last in the rearmament scheme. Under the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, Germany was permitted to build its navy up to 35 percent of the Royal Navy's tonnage and was allowed to construct U-boats again. The navy's most significant contribution to the German war effort came from the deployment of nearly 1,000 submarines to attack Allied convoys. Karl Doenitz, as U-Boat Chief, ran an unrestricted submarine campaign that cost the Allies 22,898 men and 1,315 ships. The campaign remained costly for the Allies until the early spring of 1943, when Hunter-Killer groups, airborne radar, and other countermeasures shifted the balance. The submarine war cost the Kriegsmarine 757 U-boats and more than 30,000 crewmen killed.

    By 1945 the Wehrmacht also struggled with a fundamental personnel crisis. After the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, fitness standards for recruits were drastically lowered. The regime created special diet battalions, such as the 70th Infantry Division, for men with severe stomach ailments. Between 15,000 and 20,000 anti-communist White emigres who had fled Russia after the Russian Revolution joined the ranks of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, and formations were raised from Caucasian Muslims, Turkestan, Crimean Tatars, ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, and Cossacks.

  • Nazi propaganda told Wehrmacht soldiers to wipe out what the regime variously called Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood, and the red beast. According to historian Ian Kershaw, most of the three million Wehrmacht soldiers who invaded the Soviet Union participated in war crimes. The majority of those crimes took place in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy.

    Cooperation between the Wehrmacht and the SS Einsatzgruppen was systematic. The armed forces supplied the death squads with weapons, ammunition, equipment, transport, and housing. Army Chief of Staff General Franz Halder issued a directive stating that in the event of guerrilla attacks, German troops were to impose collective measures of force by massacring entire villages. With the implementation of the Hunger Plan, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of Soviet civilians were deliberately starved as German forces seized food. Thomas Kuhne estimated that 300,000 to 500,000 people were killed during the Wehrmacht's security warfare in the Soviet Union alone. Between the launch of Operation Barbarossa in summer 1941 and the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million Soviet prisoners taken died in German hands.

    Soon after the war, former Wehrmacht officers, veterans' groups, and far-right authors began promoting what historians later called the clean Wehrmacht myth, portraying the armed forces as an apolitical professional organization with only a few bad actors. Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, a leading expert on the Wehrmacht, wrote in 2003 that this was untrue and that the Wehrmacht was a willing instrument of genocide. Historian Richard J. Evans called it a genocidal organization outright. Only a handful of the Wehrmacht's upper leadership faced trial for war crimes despite evidence implicating far more.

    Within the Wehrmacht, some individuals did resist. Sergeant Anton Schmid helped between 250 and 300 Jewish men, women, and children escape from the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania. He was court-martialed and executed. Reserve officer Albert Battel blocked an SS detachment from entering the Przemysl ghetto and evacuated up to 100 Jews and their families to military barracks. Army captain Wilm Hosenfeld, stationed in Warsaw, helped and hid several Poles, including the Polish-Jewish composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, supplying him with food and water while he hid among the city's ruins. According to historian Wolfram Wette, only three Wehrmacht soldiers are known to have been executed for rescuing Jews: Schmid, Friedrich Rath, and Friedrich Winking.

  • The unconditional surrender took effect on the 8th of May 1945, but isolated Wehrmacht units remained active for months after. The last unit to come under Allied control was a weather station in Svalbard, which formally surrendered to a Norwegian relief ship on the 4th of September. The Wehrmacht was officially dissolved by Allied Control Council Law 34 on the 20th of August 1946, which declared the OKW, OKH, the Ministry of Aviation, and the OKM disbanded, liquidated, and illegal.

    Germany was divided, and the Cold War drove former adversaries to rearm former enemies. The West German military, the Bundeswehr, was officially created on the 5th of May 1955. Its East German counterpart, the National People's Army, followed on the 1st of March 1956. Both organizations employed many former Wehrmacht members in their early years, though neither considered itself a successor. As of a recent count, of the 50 military bases in Germany named after Wehrmacht soldiers, only 16 had changed their names.

    Wehrmacht veterans in West Germany received pensions through the Federal Pension Act, passed in 1950 to support war victims, whether civilians, veterans of the Wehrmacht, or veterans of the Waffen-SS. The 20th of July plot of 1944, when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and a group of officers attempted to assassinate Hitler, resulted in the execution of 4,980 people after the attempt failed. That number stands as a measure of how costly internal dissent had become by the war's final year, and it remains one of the most concrete figures tied to resistance inside the institution that the Allied Control Council permanently abolished the following year.

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German Army (1935–1945)

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Common questions

What was the Wehrmacht and when was it created?

The Wehrmacht was the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, comprising the Heer (army), Kriegsmarine (navy), and Luftwaffe (air force). It was officially created on the 21st of May 1935, when the Reichswehr was renamed and conscription was reintroduced in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.

How many soldiers served in the Wehrmacht during World War II?

About 18 million men served in the Wehrmacht over its existence from 1935 to 1945. Between 1935 and 1939 alone, 1.3 million were drafted and 2.4 million volunteered.

What was the clean Wehrmacht myth?

The clean Wehrmacht myth was the post-war claim by former officers, veterans' groups, and far-right authors that the Wehrmacht was an apolitical fighting force largely innocent of Nazi war crimes. Holocaust historian Omer Bartov wrote in 2003 that this was untrue and that the Wehrmacht was a willing instrument of genocide.

What war crimes did the Wehrmacht commit?

The Wehrmacht committed war crimes including massacres of civilians, cooperation with SS Einsatzgruppen death squads, deliberate starvation of Soviet civilians under the Hunger Plan, and the killing of Soviet prisoners of war. Between the launch of Operation Barbarossa and the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million Soviet prisoners taken died in German hands. Thomas Kuhne estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people were killed during Wehrmacht security warfare in the Soviet Union.

What was Blitzkrieg and how did the Wehrmacht use it?

Blitzkrieg, meaning lightning war, was a combined-arms tactic that used light tanks, close air support, and motorized infantry to break through enemy lines, isolate formations, and collapse resistance quickly. The Wehrmacht employed it to devastating effect in Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and the early stages of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Soviet forces studied the tactic and turned it against the retreating Wehrmacht from 1943 onward.

When was the Wehrmacht officially dissolved?

The Wehrmacht was officially dissolved by Allied Control Council Law 34 on the 20th of August 1946, which declared the OKW, OKH, the Ministry of Aviation, and the OKM disbanded, liquidated, and illegal. The last Wehrmacht unit had surrendered on the 4th of September 1945, when an isolated weather station in Svalbard yielded to a Norwegian relief ship.

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