Wehrmacht
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Wehrmacht was the name of the armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It replaced the old Reichswehr and was succeeded by the current Bundeswehr.
The German word Wehrmacht (literally defence force) predates the 1930s and originally meant the entirety of the armed forces of a given country (or another entity, e.g. Christianity). For instance, "Englische Wehrmacht" meant all English forces. Since World War II, the term is almost as closely associated with the Third Reich in German as it is in English.
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History
After World War I ended with a capitulation of the German empire the treaty of Versailles imposed severe restrictions on Germany's military strength. The army was limited to 100,000 men with an additional 15,000 in the navy. The fleet was to consist of at most six battleships, six cruisers, and twelve destroyers. 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.
Germany immediately began 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 Soviet Russia with industrialisation and Russian officers were to be trained in Germany. German tank and air force specialists would be trained in Russia and German chemical weapons research and manufacture would be carried out there along with other projects. Around 300 German pilots received training at Lipetsk, some tank training took place near Kazan and toxic gas was developed at Saratov.
After the death of president Paul von Hindenburg on 2 August 1934 all soldiers were ordered to take a personal oath to Adolf Hitler. This process went smoothly for the most part, since National Socialist ideology was popular among German citizens and the military. Germany began openly ignoring the Versailles provisions. Conscription was reintroduced on 16 March 1935 and while the size of the standing army was to remain at about 100,000, another 100,000 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 signed personal loyalty oaths to Hitler). The insignia was a stylised version of the Iron Cross (the so-called Balkenkreuz, or beamed cross) that had first appeared as an aircraft and tank marking in late World War I.
The number of soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during its existence from 1934 until 1945 is believed to approach 18.2 million (a number put forward by historian Rüdiger Overmans), but these were not simultaneous enlistments. About 5.3 million died on battlefields and approximately 11 million were captured by enemy forces (it is not known how many died in captivity).
Command structure
Legally, the Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht was the German Chancellor, a position Adolf Hitler held from 1933 until his suicide in late April 1945. Administration and military authority initially lay with the war ministry under 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 Wilhelm Keitel was put in its place.
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.
War years
Powerful tank and air forces enabled quick successes during early stages of the war when nation after nation was overrun and occupied within weeks (Blitzkrieg). This convinced military leaders that a new concept of broad armament (rather than deep armament) made sense. However, when their powerful adversaries (the United Kingdom, Soviet Union and United States) began offering tenacious resistance the Blitzkrieg tactics could not be applied and the relatively low state of armament became a problem for the Wehrmacht.
The Wehrmacht's military strength was managed through assignment-based tactics (rather than order-based tactics) and an almost proverbial discipline. Today the Wehrmacht is sometimes seen as a high-tech army since new technologies were introduced during World War II including the reprisal weapons, the Me 262 jet fighter and the submarine force, but overall armament levels were low. For example only 40 percent of all units were motorised, baggage trains often relied on horses and many soldiers went by foot or (sometimes) used bicycles.
Among the foreign volunteers who served in the Wehrmacht 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 and non-Russians from the Soviet Union formed the Ostlegionen. These units were all commanded by General Ernst August Köstring and represented about 5 percent of the Wehrmacht.
Rebellion
The military evaded political meddling during most of the Third Reich's history. Most of its leadership was politically conservative, nationalistic and hoped to reconquer territories that had broken away from Imperial Germany. Hitler had promised to rebuild Germany's military strength and officers were mostly sympathetic towards the National Socialist movement. 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. These culminated in the July 20 plot (1944), when a group of Wehrmacht officers led by Claus von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government. Following the attempt, Hitler distrusted the Wehrmacht and many officers were killed.
War crimes
It was long popularly believed that war crimes were for the most part committed by the Nazi party's paramilitary SS organisation. However during the 1990s a Wehrmachtausstellung (Wehrmacht exhibition), mostly based on photographs, toured through Germany claiming the Wehrmacht had participated heavily in the war crimes. Although some photographs were out of context, the exhibition provided documention that any notion of a "clean" Wehrmacht was a post-war fiction. In the book Keine Kameraden (No Companions), Christian Streit asserted that while the Wehrmacht indeed fought the western allies mostly according to the rules of war it regularly committed atrocities in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Wehrmacht commander Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was hung for war crimes in 1946.
Examples include:
- September Campaign in Poland Wehrmacht firing squads shot at least 16,000 Poles by early October 1939.
- Wehrmacht POW-camps POWs from the USSR suffered immensely in these, due to lack of food, clean water, medicine and brutality by Wehrmacht guards. Although many POWs from the eastern fronts ended up in death camps run by the SS, the POW camps were run by the Wehrmacht.
- The Komissarbefehl The comissionar-order provided for the immediate execution of political comissars of the Red Army, a definite war crime. The order was formulated on Hitler's behalf by the Wehrmacht command and distributed to units among usual command channels.
- Destruction of Warsaw Up to 250,000 civilians were killed. Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting.
It should be noted that the regular armed forces of the allies have also been accused of war crimes during WWII, such as the Dachau Massacre and the Katyn Massacre.
Prominent members
Prominent German officers from the Wehrmacht era include:
- Ludwig Beck
- Fedor von Bock
- Walther von Brauchitsch
- Karl Dönitz
- Wilhelm Flicke
- Werner von Fritsch
- Heinz Guderian
- Franz Halder
- Erich Hoepner
- Hermann Hoth
- Alfred Jodl
- Wilhelm Keitel
- Ewald von Kleist
- Albert Kesselring
- Hans Günther von Kluge
- Erich von Manstein
- Friedrich Olbricht
- Friedrich Paulus
- Erich Raeder
- Erwin Rommel
- Gerd von Rundstedt
- Claus von Stauffenberg
- Erwin von Witzleben
After World War II
Following the unconditional German surrender on 8 May 1945 Germany was forbidden an independent modern army. 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 German Democratic Republic. The West German military, officially created on 5 May 1955, took the name Bundeswehr, meaning Federal Military, 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). Neither side could do without experienced soldiers so each army initially had substantial numbers of officers who were former Wehrmacht members.
See also
External Links
- kamouflage.net > global search: Europe > Germany (German Reich) > index (http://www.kamouflage.net/camouflage/00136/en_index.php) – examples of, and information about, camouflage uniforms used by the Wehrmacht Heer, Wehrmacht Luftwaffe and Waffen-SS during the Second World Warde:Deutsche Wehrmacht
fr:Wehrmacht he:וורמאכט hu:Wehrmacht nl:Deutsche Wehrmacht ja:ドイツ国防軍 pl:Wehrmacht pt:Wehrmacht ru:Вермахт sl:Wehrmacht fi:Wehrmacht