‘The German Army is the German people under arms’ was the proud boast which had guided and inspired the soldiers of that Army since the creation of the Empire in 1871. As a declaration of faith it was as true under Hitler as it had been under the Kaisers.

The German Army which fought the Second World War was one of three armed services. Under the unity of command policy which Hitler introduced, these were not so much individual forces as partners in a tripartite organization. The Army still considered itself primus inter pares (‘first among equals’), but was forced to accept that it was just a partner. Later, another service would be created, adding another partner to the tripartite group: the Waffen-SS. As that organization, which was not a national but a Nazi Party body, rose in numbers and influence, so did the Army diminish.

The Army, Navy and Air Force were under the authority of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – OKW) whose component parts were the High Commands of the Army (Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH), of the Navy (Oberkommando der Marine – OKM) and of the Air Force (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe – OKL). The Waffen-SS, although under the aegis of Himmler’s party organization, was also subordinate to both the OKW and OKH when its own divisions and corps were in the field.

The unified structure of the armed forces made it not only possible but very easy to transfer whole units from one service to another. In the section dealing with the 9th Mountain ‘Gebirgs’ Division, it will be seen that that division received reinforcements of men from the Luftwaffe’s disbanded ‘Boelcke’ fighter squadron. In like fashion, the depleted ranks of the 7th SS Mountain Division in Jugoslavia were filled out with drafts taken from German Navy units in the Aegean, who had previously served with another SS Gebirgs Division. There were many similar examples of cross-service postings, particularly towards the end of the war. This was a very flexible system of operating, and indeed flexibility can be seen as one of the chief characteristics of the Wehrmacht. It was that flexibility which enabled commanders conducting operations to create battle groups (Kampfgruppen) to meet any military need which might arise. The commanders knew that the rank and file would fight with as much elan in a hastily created Kampfgruppe as they would in their parent units. The confidence of the generals was justified because the soldiers considered themselves to be not so much Prussian infantry, Saxon engineers, Austrian Panzermen or Bavarian gunners, but rather soldiers in the common cause of service to the German Fatherland.

That they had been conscripted into the service was less important to them than the fact that in the armed forces they had the opportunity to serve Germany and, for the overwhelming majority of them, this was an opportunity which was eagerly grasped. From Napoleonic days, conscription had been the means by which the ranks of the Army’s regiments had been filled, and over the course of decades the average German man no longer saw the few years spent in the Army as servitude – which had been the case in feudal days – but as an honourable duty to his Fatherland. Conscription was abolished during the period of the post-Imperial Republic of Weimar (1918-33), and was replaced by a professional force of volunteers. These were soldiers in a weak Army whose potency had been eroded by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Those conditions not only forbade the Army to have tanks or heavy artillery, but also ordered the disbanding of its general staff, the Army’s brain. Another Allied edict was that the Army’s brawn, its soldiers, had to be reduced in number to just 100,000 men. That weakness in numbers coupled with lack of suitable weapons had forced the military leaders of Weimar Germany to rethink national strategy and to see their Army’s future role as being wholly defensive. It is the measure of Hitler’s success that within a few years he had eradicated the defeatist attitudes which those commanders had accepted as irrevocable for more than a decade.

Not that the Nazi Party had been alone in its efforts. Earlier than its attempts, Hans von Seeckt, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army from 1920 to 1926, sought covert ways through which the Army’s potency could be increased and the restrictions of Versailles evaded. He realized that although the treaty limited the number of men who could serve in the Army, nothing had been laid down about the type of training they were to be given. From the volunteers who came forward to serve in the Army he selected the best, and set out to create from this body of hand-picked soldiers a force of leaders. To achieve this, each member of the rank and file was trained to take over the duties of the man immediately senior in rank to him, and the officers were sent to technical institutes and to universities, where they became familiar with modern techniques which _could be adapted for 4 military purposes. During Seeckt’s period of office he created links with the Soviet Communist government, and in a secret agreement, the German Army and the embryo Luftwaffe were able to develop and practise on Soviet territory those battlefield techniques which later became known as ‘Blitzkrieg’.

When Hitler and the National Socialist Party which he led came to power on 30 January 1933, the first moves were made towards fulfilling one of the main parts of the Nazi programme: ‘We [the Nazi Party] demand the abolition of the mercenary army [of the Weimar republic] and its replacement by a national army of the people [one made up of conscripted soldiers]‘. Hitler made good this pledge within two years and, by reintroducing conscription, convinced the German people that under him the Reich would be made strong again and its Army restored to its former place among the great military powers of Europe. With impressive speed, the Fuhrer raised the Army from the weak Weimar force of seven infantry divisions in 1933 to a mighty body of fifty-one divisions by 1939. That total consisted mainly of infantry formations, but also included five Panzer, four Light or Motorized and three Gebirgs Divisions.

To aid the expansion of the Army which Hitler demanded, the OKW relied upon an existing nationwide military framework. The Reich was organized territorially into Military Districts (Wehrkreise or Wehrbezirke – see map opposite, each of which was an administrative body for the corps, usually two in number, which were raised in its district. Those corps contained field and depot divisions as well as replacement regiments of infantry and artillery. In peacetime, the Wehrkreis was the highest level In the military hierarchy, and the corps was the senior military body within the Wehrkreis.

Following the outbreak of war, two major levels of Army hierarchy were set up: a Field Army, usually made up of two corps; and an Army Group, containing two Field Armies. Those major bodies had existed in peacetime, but only in embryo form. To support those major formations when they were raised for active service there were cadres of units, known as Army or Army Group Troops, which included heavy artillery, engineers, service units and similar administrative formations. Those various bodies were not on permanent attachment to any particular major formation, but lay in suspended animation until the OKW decided which Armies/Army Groups were to fight in a new war. Then, from the reservoir of support formations, the OKW would make a selection and appoint them to their new parent unit.

In the years preceding the Second World War, there were fifteen Wehrbezirke, each of which had a territorial affiliation. For example, Wehrkreis I In Konigsberg controlled the I and XXVI Corps, which between them raised and administered a number of divisions.

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With the reintroduction of conscription in 1935, plans were drawn up so that the confusion which had arisen in 1914 when General Mobilization was proclaimed could be avoided. When the mobilization orders of 1914 were issued, so many men reported in the early days that their numbers swamped the Army induction process. By 1938, the Third Reich had worked out its mobilization plans, and these were ready to be implemented. The most important was that Germany’s future soldiers were to be inducted in ‘waves’ or annual classes: men of the same age who had acquired the same standard of pre-military training, either in the Hitler Youth or in the National Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst – RAD).

In the final year of peace, the mobilization plans were gradually introduced. Among the first groups to be conscripted were men of the oldest classes, who had already completed some form of military service and whose call-up was intended to give them a refresher training course. As the result of this slow and carefully controlled conscription, the Army was built up to fighting strength, both in men and formations, with no disruption to national life. The conscription scheme ran so well that in the first years of the war it was possible for men to be discharged from the service because of their occupation or on medical grounds. It had always been an accepted practice in Imperial times that students and others who were in reserved occupations could have their call-up deferred or even cancelled. The Nazi government continued that practice, and at the end of the campaign in France in 1940, Hitler even found it possible to demobilize a number of the men in the older ‘waves’. That flexible system of conscription remained unchanged until Germany suffered a series of serious defeats on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. Thereafter, not only were those men who had already been demobilized recalled to the colours, but both the lower and upper age limits to conscription were amended. In 1943, the failure of the German summer offensive at Kursk (Operation CITADEL) forced the Army onto the defensive, and the severe manpower losses which had been suffered compelled the en bloc transfer of Luftwaffe and Navy units into the Army and also into the SS, in order to maintain the strength of the Field Army.

These measures, stringent though they were, were not enough to cover the continuing losses, and the deteriorating situation forced Hitler to abandon earlier directives on exemptions. Even men who had been excused front-line service because they were the last sons of families or were the fathers of large families became eligible for conscription. Men who in earlier years would have been discharged on medical grounds were kept in the service and formed into battalions or even regiments of men with the same medical complaint or disability. Thus, Allied troops who invaded Normandy in June 1944 found whole formations of German soldiers with stomach complaints, and others who had hearing difficulties. Later in the war, increasingly stringent comb-outs of rear echelon military formations and of the civil population were able to produce a limited number of men for the front line, but the shortage could not be resolved even when the Volkssturm (the Nazi Party’s levee en masse of civilians) was raised late in 1944.

It had been one of the German Army’s most strongly held policies that only German citizens were eligible to serve in it, but in a dramatic change of policy, it was decided late in 1942 that foreign volunteers would also be permitted to enlist. This was a move that had already begun In the Waffen-SS, an organization which, not being bound by the Army’s restrictive policy, had recruited aliens as early as 1940. The extent of that SS recruiting campaign can be seen in the fact that thirty-nine Waffen-SS divisions were raised. In this context, mention must be made of the differences in nomenclature of Waffen-SS units. The SS divisional titles described three types of men: national Germans (Reichsdeutsche – those born within the 1938 borders of the Reich); ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche – those living in foreign countries outside the 1938 borders); and foreign volunteers.

Reichsdeutsche formations had a simple description of name and type – Jager or Panzer. Volksdeutsche units carried the term ‘Freiwillige’ (‘volunteer’) in their titles (for example, the 7th SS Freiwillige Gebirgs Division ‘Prinz Eugen’), while foreign units bore the description ‘Waffen’ (‘weapon’) in theirs. An example of this was the 13th Waffen Gebirgs Division of the SS ‘Handschar’ Croatian No.1. There was an exception to that rule in the 5th SS Panzer Division ‘Viking’, which was made up of neither Reichsdeutsche nor Volksdeutsche, but of foreigners (Norwegians, Danes and Dutch), and did not bear the distinction ‘Freiwillige’. When the Army began to recruit foreigners, it restricted itself chiefly to the Asiatic and non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union, who were formed into infantry divisions. Later in the war, a Cossack cavalry division was raised by the Army authorities. To some extent, the decline in the numbers of men holding the battle line could be overcome by arming the soldiers with newer weapons which had faster firing capabilities, so that the same volume of fire could be achieved using fewer soldiers. The advantage gained by equipping front-line units with those fast-firing guns was short-lived, for the Red Army’s high command ordered massive increases in the weight and number of Soviet partisan attacks. To combat this uprising in the Army’s rear area, whole divisions of German soldiers had to be taken from the battle line and put into action, a loss of manpower for which no faster-firing machine guns could compensate.

At this point it is necessary to explain one aspect in the wartime structure of the OKH. That force, which had been a single body in peacetime, divided upon mobilization, with one branch forming the Field Army and the second making up the Replacement Army (Ersatzheer). The tasks of the latter included training replacements for the Field Army, administration and unit documentation. This separation into field and replacement formations began at the level of regiment and extended up to that of corps. There was no such separation in the case of the largest formations: Armies or Army Groups. When hostilities commenced, the operational or fighting sections of the high command accompanied the Field Army, leaving behind in Germany the officers and the organization of the Replacement Army.

Each formation in the Field Army had its own smaller replacement unit (Ersatzeinheit). For example, an infantry regiment had as its Ersatzeinheit an infantry battalion which carried the same number as its own. That battalion gave long and thorough training to 12 the new intakes of men, and despatched them to the field unit when replacements were called for. In addition, it was to the Ersatzeinheit that the regiment’s wounded, convalescents and those discharged from hospital were returned. The system of combat formations in the Field Army and a replacement unit in Germany to train the new soldiers worked very well until a period in the war was reached when, because of the manpower shortage, the partly trained men of Ersatz units were sent out on active service to fight in anti-partisan operations.

There was another administrative division in the Field Army. The German Army made a great distinction between the combat zone (Operationsgebiet), the home area (Heimatsgebiet) and a buffer zone known as the military administrative zone (Gebiet der Kriegsverwaltung), whose alternative name was the Occupied Territory. In addition, the Operationsgebiet was itself divided into a combat zone (Gefechtsgebiet) and the Rear Area (Riickwartiges Gebiet). To remove the burden of day-to-day administration from the senior commanders of fighting formations, the Rear Area was administered by units over whom the battle commander had little if any control. This separation of responsibilities demonstrated the clear distinction drawn by the German Army between the tasks and authority of the commander in the field and the tasks and responsibilities of the rest of the Army, particularly the Replacement Army.