Wehrmacht

Wehrmacht
Balkenkreuz.svg
The straight-armed Balkenkreuz, a stylized version of the Iron Cross, the emblem of the Wehrmacht.
Active 1935–1945
Country Flag of Germany 1933.svg Nazi Germany
Size 18.2 Million
Patron Adolf Hitler
March Goose-Step
Engagements Spanish Civil War, World War II
Commanders
Current
commander		 they are pooths
Notable
commanders		 Adolf Hitler
Insignia
Identification
symbol		 Balkenkreuz
A decal for the helmets of the Wehrmacht (model 1942).

Wehrmacht (listen) (translated "German Armed Forces (c1935-1945)"[1], transliterated "army makes") was the name of the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy) and the Luftwaffe (air force). The Waffen-SS, an initially small paramilitary section of Heinrich Himmler's Allgemeine SS that grew to nearly a million strong during World War II, was not officially part of the Wehrmacht, but subject to OKW, OKH, as well as Field Command. Thus, the Waffen-SS was, de facto, a fourth branch of the Wehrmacht.

Although it is technically incorrect, the word Wehrmacht is often used to refer specifically to the German Army of the Second World War, as opposed to the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe.

Contents

Origin and use of the terms

Before the rise of the NSDAP, the term Wehrmacht was used in a generic sense to describe armed forces of any nation, being utilized as the "home defense" version of the more general Streitmacht. For example, the term 'Britische Wehrmacht' would identify the British armed forces. Article 47 of the Weimar Constitution of 1919 declared "Der Reichspräsident hat den Oberbefehl über die gesamte Wehrmacht des Reiches" (meaning: "The Reichspräsident holds supreme command of all armed forces of the Reich"). To make a distinction, the term Reichswehr was commonly used to identify the German armed forces.

In 1935, the Reichswehr was renamed Wehrmacht. After World War II and under the Allied occupation of Germany, the Wehrmacht was abolished. When West Germany remilitarized in 1955, its newly-created armed forces became known as the Bundeswehr ("Federal Defence Force"). East Germany's armed forces, formally established in 1956, were known as the National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee). When East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) was incorporated into West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany) in 1990, much of the Volksarmee property and some of the staff were also incorporated into the Bundeswehr.

Hence the term Wehrmacht customarily refers to Germany's armed forces during the NSDAP era and World War II, both in German and English. It is incorrect to equate Wehrmacht with only the army (Wehrmacht Heer), although this is the most common usage of the term. For Service identification all Wehrmacht vehicles used by Heer, Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine units had license plates with WH, WL or WM.

History

After World War I ended with the armistice of 11 November 1918, the armed forces were dubbed Friedensheer (peace army) in January 1919. In March 1919, the national assembly passed a law founding a 420,000 strong preliminary army as Vorläufige Reichswehr. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were announced in May, and in June Germany was forced to sign the contract which, among other terms, imposed severe constraints on the size of Germany's armed forces. The army was limited to one hundred thousand men with an additional fifteen thousand in the navy. The fleet was to consist of at most six Pre-dreadnought battleships, six cruisers, and twelve destroyers. Submarines, tanks and heavy artillery were forbidden and the air force was dissolved. A new post-war military (the Reichswehr) was established on 23 March 1921. General conscription was abolished under another mandate of the Versailles treaty.

By 1922 Germany had begun covertly circumventing these conditions. A secret collaboration with the Soviet Union began after the treaty of Rapallo. Major-General Otto Hasse traveled to Moscow in 1923 to further negotiate the terms. Germany helped the Soviet Union with industrialisation and Soviet officers were to be trained in Germany. German tank and air force specialists could exercise in the Soviet Union and German chemical weapons research and manufacture would be carried out there along with other projects. Around three hundred German pilots received training at Lipetsk, some tank training took place near Kazan and toxic gas was developed at Saratov for the German army.

After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg on 2 August 1934, Hitler assumed the office of Reichspräsident, and thus became commander in chief. All officers and soldiers of the German armed forces had to swear a personal oath of loyalty to the Führer, as Adolf Hitler now was called. By 1935, Germany was openly flouting the military restrictions set forth in the Versailles Treaty, and conscription was reintroduced on 16 March 1935. While the size of the standing army was to remain at about the 100,000-man mark decreed by the treaty, a new group of conscripts equal to this size would receive training each year. The conscription law introduced the name Wehrmacht, so not only can this be regarded as its founding date, but the organisation and authority of the Wehrmacht can be viewed as Nazi creations regardless of the political affiliations of its high command (who nevertheless all swore the same personal oath of loyalty to Hitler). The insignia was a simpler version of the Iron Cross (the straight-armed so-called Balkenkreuz or beamed cross) that had been used as an aircraft and tank marking in late World War I. The existence of the Wehrmacht was officially announced on 15 October 1935.

Numbers

The total number of soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during its existence from 1935 until 1945 is believed to approach 18.2 million. This figure was put forward by historian Rüdiger Overmans and represents the total number of people who ever served in the Wehrmacht, and not the force strength of the Wehrmacht at any point. About 2.3 million Wehrmacht soldiers were killed in action; 550,000 died from non-combat causes; 2.0 million missing in action and unaccounted for after the war; and 459,000 POW deaths, of whom 77,000 were in the custody of the U.S., UK, and France; POW dead includes 266,000 in the post war period after June 1945, primarily in Soviet captivity.

Command structure

Legally, the Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht was Adolf Hitler in his capacity as Germany's head of state, a position he gained after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934. In the reshuffle in 1938, Hitler became the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and retained that position until his suicide on 30 April 1945. Administration and military authority initially lay with the war ministry under Generalfeldmarschall Werner von Blomberg. After von Blomberg resigned in the course of the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair (1938) the ministry was dissolved and the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW) under Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel was put in its place. It was headquartered in Wünsdorf near Zossen, and a field echelon (Feldstaffel) was stationed wherever the Führer's headquarters were situated at a given time. Army work was also coordinated by the German General Staff, an institution that had been developing for more than a century and which had sought to institutionalize military excellence.

The OKW coordinated all military activities but Keitel's sway over the three branches of service (army, air force, and navy) was rather limited. Each had its own High Command, known as Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, army), Oberkommando der Marine (OKM, navy), and Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL, air force). Each of these high commands had its own general staff. In practice the OKW had operational authority over the Western Front whereas the Eastern Front was under the operational authority of the OKH.

Flag for the Commander-in-Chief of the German Armed Forces (1935–1938).
Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces - Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (1938 to 1945)
Chief of the Operations Staff (Wehrmachtführungsstab) - Colonel-General Alfred Jodl
Army Commanders-in-Chief
Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch (1935 to 1938)
Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch (1938 to 1941)
Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler (1941 to 1945)
Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner (1945)
Chief of Staff of the German Army
General Ludwig Beck (1935 to 1938)
General Franz Halder (1938 to 1942)
General Kurt Zeitzler (1942 to 1944)
General Oberst Heinz Guderian (1944 to 1945)
General Hans Krebs (1945, committed suicide in the Führer Bunker)
Navy Commanders-in-Chief
Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (1928 to 1943)
Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz (1943 to 1945)
General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg (1945)
Air Force Commanders-in-Chief
Reich Marshal Hermann Göring (until 1945)
Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim (1945)

The OKW was also tasked with central economic planning and procurement, but the authority and influence of the OKW's war economy office (Wehrwirtschaftsamt) was challenged by the procurement offices (Waffenämter) of the single branches of service as well as by the Ministry for Armament and Munitions (Reichsministerium für Bewaffnung und Munition), into which it was merged after the ministry was taken over by Albert Speer in early 1942.

War years

Army

Main article: Heer (1935-1945)

The German Army furthered concepts pioneered during the First World War, combining ground (Heer) and Air Force (Luftwaffe) assets into combined arms teams. Coupled with traditional war fighting methods such as encirclements and the "battle of annihilation", the German military managed many lightning quick victories in the first year of the Second World War, prompting foreign journalists to create a new word for what they witnessed: Blitzkrieg.

The Heer entered the war with a minority of its formations motorized; infantry remained approximately 90% foot-borne throughout the war, and artillery primarily horse-drawn. The motorized formations received much attention in the world press in the opening years of the war, and were cited as the reason for the success of the German invasions of Poland (September 1939), Norway and Denmark (April 1940), Belgium, France and Netherlands (May 1940), Yugoslavia (April 1941) and the early campaigns in the Soviet Union (June 1941).

With the entry of the United States in December 1941, the Wehrmacht found itself engaged in campaigns against two major industrial powers. At this critical juncture, Hitler assumed personal control of the Wehrmacht high command, and his personal failings as a military commander arguably contributed to major defeats in early 1943, at Stalingrad and Tunis in North Africa.

The Panzerjäger-Abteilung 39 ('Tank-hunter battalion 39', part of "Kampfgruppe Gräf", part of the 21. Panzer Division) of the Afrika Korps on the move.

The Germans' military strength was managed through mission-based tactics (rather than order-based tactics) and an almost proverbial discipline. In public opinion, the German Army was, and sometimes still is, seen as a high-tech army. However, such advanced equipment, while featured much in propaganda, was often only available in small numbers or late in the war, as overall supplies of raw materials and armaments ran low. For example, only forty percent of all units were motorised, baggage trains often relied on horse-drawn trailers and many soldiers went by foot or used bicycles (de:Radfahrtruppen).

Some historians, such as British author and ex-newspaper editor Max Hastings, consider that "...there's no doubt that man for man, the German army was the greatest fighting force of the second world war". Similar views were also explained in his book "Overlord: D-Day and the battle for Normandy", while in the book World War II : An Illustrated Miscellany, Anthony Evans writes: 'The German soldier was very professional and well trained, aggressive in attack and stubborn in defence. He was always adaptable, particularly in the later years when shortages of equipment were being felt'.

Among the foreign volunteers who served in the Heer during World War II were ethnic Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians along with people from the Baltic states and the Balkans. Russians fought in the Russian Liberation Army or as Hilfswilliger. Non-Russians from the Soviet Union formed the Ostlegionen. These units were all commanded by General Ernst August Köstring and represented about five percent of the forces under the OKH.

Air Force

Main article: History of the Luftwaffe during World War II

The German Air Force, led by Hermann Göring, contributed many units of ground forces to the war in Russia as well as the Normandy front. In 1940, the Fallschirmjäger paratroops conquered the Belgian Fort Eben-Emael and took part in the airborne invasion of Norway, but after suffering heavy losses in the Battle of Crete, large scale airdrops were discontinued. Operating as ordinary infantry, the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division took part in the defense of Tunisia and ultimately surrendered there. Recreated as an extra-large armored division, the Fallschirm-Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring, it was heavily engaged in Sicily and at Salerno and Monte Cassino.

The Luftwaffe Field Divisions were eventually considered by historians to be a drain on manpower and resources that would have been better used in Army formations, and are used as an example of how poorly co-ordinated the three branches of the Wehrmacht were. This was partly due to the rivalry between the branches in general, but mainly due to Göring's ambitions. The Luftwaffe, being in charge of Germany's Anti-aircraft warfare, also used thousands of teenage Luftwaffenhelfer to support the Flak units.[2]

Navy

Main article: Kriegsmarine

The German Navy (Kriegsmarine) played a major role in the Second World War as control over the commerce routes in the Atlantic was crucial for Germany, Britain and later the Soviet Union. In the Battle of the Atlantic, the initially successful German U-boat fleet arm was eventually defeated due to Allied technological innovations like sonar, radar, and the breaking of the Enigma code. Large surface vessels were few in number due to construction limitations by international treaties prior to 1935. The "pocket battleships" Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer were important as commerce raiders only in the opening year of the war. No aircraft carrier was operational as German leadership lost interest in the Graf Zeppelin which had been launched in 1938. Following the loss of the Bismarck in 1941, with Allied air superiority threatening the remaining battlecruisers in French Atlantic harbours, the ships were ordered to make the Channel Dash back to German ports. Operating from fjords of Norway, which had been occupied in 1940, convoys from the USA to the Soviet port of Murmansk could be intercepted even though the Tirpitz spent most of her career as Fleet in being. After the appointment of Karl Doenitz as Grand Admiral of the Kriegsmarine, Germany stopped constructing battleships and cruisers in favour of U-boats.

Theaters and campaigns

The Wehrmacht directed combat operations during the Second World War (from 1 September 1939 to 8 May 1945) as the German Reich's Armed Forces umbrella command organisation. After 1941 the OKH became the de facto Eastern Theatre higher echelon command organisation for the Wehrmacht, excluding Waffen-SS except for operational and tactical combat purposes. The OKW conducted operations in the Western Theatre.

For a time the Axis Mediterranean Theatre and the North African Campaign was conducted as a joint campaign with the Italian Army, and may be considered a separate theatre.

The operations by the Kriegsmarine in the North and Mid-Atlantic can also be considered as separate Theatres considering the size of the area of operations and their remoteness from other Theatres.

Eastern Theatre

The Eastern Wehrmacht campaigns included:

However, strategic mistakes by Hitler demanded that the Wehrmacht had to fight on other fronts, sometimes three simultaneously, that stretched its resources too thin. By 1944, even the defence of Germany became impossible.

Western Theatre

Soldiers of German Wehrmacht in front of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in the occupied Paris, 1940.

War crimes

Main article: War crimes of the Wehrmacht

The Wehrmacht was widely employed as a tool of state policy in the Second World War, being used for both military and political objectives. The Wehrmacht was found to be complicit in the Holocaust. It also implemented its own plans to loot the occupied territories to supply its needs, with the resulting deprivation and famine. In the Soviet Union this policy, the Hunger Plan, was planned in advance.

The Wehrmacht ordered and participated in numerous war crimes during World War II — massacres of civilians, rapes[3] executions of POWs, summary executions of Soviet political officers as sanctioned by the Commissar Order, and executions of civilian hostages as punishment for partisan activities in occupied territories. Though the massive exterminations associated with the Holocaust were primarily committed by the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, the Wehrmacht was also involved, as there are cases in which German Army officers and soldiers cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen, rounding up Jews and others for internment or execution.

As the extent of the Holocaust became widely known by the end of the war, many former members of the Armed Forces promoted the view that it was "unblemished" by the crimes allegedly committed exclusively by the SS and the political police forces, which both were not, officially, part of the Wehrmacht. Though it convicted OKW chief Wilhelm Keitel and chief of operations Alfred Jodl for war crimes, the Nuremberg tribunal did not declare the Wehrmacht to be a criminal organization, as it did with party organizations such as the SS. This was seen by many Germans as an exoneration of the Wehrmacht. Among German historians, the deep involvement of the Wehrmacht in war crimes, particularly on the Eastern Front, became widely accepted in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Public awareness in Germany has been lagging behind - as exemplified by controversial and often emotionally charged reactions to an exhibition on these issues in the mid-1990s[4] Polish historians also want the German public to become more aware of the Wehrmacht's atrocities regarding the Polish September Campaign.[5] In 2007 a book was published containing research regarding secretly recorded conversations of captured German generals and other senior officers, all without their knowledge or even suspicion. The 64,427 conversations were recorded by the British Secret Service in POW camps. Most of the officers, up to High Command, knew about the Holocaust and atrocities against Russians, Poles, Gypsies and others targeted by the NSDAP.[6]

Casualties

German Wehrmacht soldier killed by U.S. soldiers in April 1945.

Approximately 5,533,000 German soldiers and from other nationalities fighting for the German army are considered killed or MIA in World War II. The number of wounded surpasses 6,000,000, and the number of prisoners of war reaches 11,000,000, making a total of 22 million casualties from all causes during that conflict.[7]

Politics of the Wehrmacht

Due to the constitution of the Weimar Republic no soldier of the Reichswehr was either allowed to become a member of a political party or to vote in an election because there was a strict separation between politics and the armed forces. The same applied later to the Wehrmacht. Most of its leadership was politically conservative but after Adolf Hitler gained power he had promised to rebuild Germany's military strength and thus some officers became envigorated towards the National Socialist movement. In addition, many soldiers had previously been in the Hitler Youth and Reichsarbeitsdienst and had thus been subjected to intensive Nazi indoctrination; as a result, many newly-commissioned officers were committed Nazis. Political influence in the military command began to increase later in the war when Hitler's flawed strategic decisions began showing up as serious defeats for the German Army and tensions mounted between the military and the government. When Hitler appointed unqualified personnel such as Hermann Göring to lead his Air Force failure ensued. He also gave to his commanders impossible orders, such as to shoot all officers and enlisted men who retreated from a front line later in the war.

Resistance to the Nazi regime

Main article: German Resistance

From all groups of German Resistance those within the Wehrmacht were the most condemned by the NSDAP. There were several attempts by resistance members like Henning von Tresckow or Erich Hoepner to assassinate Hitler as an ignition of a coup d'état. Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff and Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst even tried to do so by suicide bombing. Those and many other officers in the Heer and Kriegsmarine such as Erwin Rommel, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Wilhelm Canaris opposed the atrocities of the Hitler regime. Combined with Hitler's problematic military leadership, this also culminated in the famous 20 July plot (1944), when a group of German Army officers led by von Stauffenberg tried again to kill Hitler and overthrow his regime. Following this attempt every officer who approached Hitler was searched from head to foot by his SS guards. As a special degradation all German military personnel were ordered to replace the standard military salute with the Hitler salute from this date on. To which extent the German military forces were in opposition to the Hitler regime or supported it is nevertheless highly disputed amongst historians up to the present day.

Some members of the Wehrmacht did save Jews and/or Gentiles from the concentration camps and/or mass executions. Anton Schmid, a sergeant in the army, helped 250 Jewish men, women, and children escape from the Vilnius ghetto and provided them with forged passports so that they could get to safety. He was court-martialed and executed as a consequence. Albert Battel, a reserve officer stationed near the Przemysl ghetto, blocked an SS detachment from entering it. He then evacuated up to 100 Jews and their families to the barracks of the local military command, and placed them under his protection. Wilm Hosenfeld, an army captain in Warsaw, helped, hid, or rescued several Poles, including Jews, in occupied Poland. He most notably helped the Polish Jewish composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was hiding among the city's ruins, by supplying him with food and water and didn't reveal him to the Nazi authorities. Hosenfeld later died in a Soviet POW camp.

Prominent members

Prominent German officers from the Wehrmacht era include:

After World War II

Following the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht which went into effect on 8 May 1945, some Wehrmacht units remained active, either independently (e.g. in Norway), or under Allied command as police forces.[8] By the end of August 1945, these units had been dissolved, and a year later on 20 August 1946, the Allied Control Council declared the Wehrmacht as officially abolished (Kontrollratsgesetz No. 34). While Germany was forbidden to have an army, Allied forces took advantage of the knowledge of Wehrmacht members like Reinhard Gehlen.

It was over ten years before the tensions of the Cold War led to the creation of separate military forces in the Federal Republic of Germany and the socialist German Democratic Republic. The West German military, officially created on 5 May 1955, took the name Bundeswehr, meaning Federal Defence Forces, which pointed back to the old Reichswehr. Its East German counterpart, created on 1 March 1956, took the name National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee). Both organizations employed many former Wehrmacht members, particularly in their formative years.

Wehrmacht re-enactors recreate the battle of Molotov Line at the San River in Sanok-Olchowce. (Poland) 2008. 22 June

See also

References

  1. ↑ http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed&sectHdr=on&spellToler=on&chinese=both&pinyin=diacritic&search=wehrmacht&relink=on
  2. ↑ One of whom was Josef Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI
  3. ↑ "55 Dni Wehrmachtu w Polsce" Szymon Datner Warsaw 1967 page 67 "Zanotowano szereg faktów gwałcenia kobiet i dziewcząt żydowskich"(Numerous cases of rapes made upon Jewish women and girls were noted)
  4. ↑ "Crimes of the German Wehrmacht" (PDF publisher=Hamburg Institute for Social Research). Retrieved on 2008-11-28.
  5. ↑ [1]
  6. ↑ ,http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=469883&in_page_id=1879
  7. ↑ Rűdiger Overmans (2000). Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Wikipedia. p. 335. ISBN 3-486-56531-1. http://books.google.com/books?. 
  8. ↑ Alexander Fischer: „Teheran – Jalta – Potsdam“, Die sowjetischen Protokolle von den Kriegskonferenzen der „Großen Drei“, mit Fußnoten aus den Aufzeichnungen des US Department of State, Köln 1968, S.322 und 324

External links