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Active 1935 – 1945
Country  Nazi Germany
Role Armed Forces of Nazi Germany
Size 18,200,000
Garrison/HQ Zossen
Patron Adolf Hitler
Colors Feldgrau
Engagements Spanish Civil War
World War II
Adolf Hitler
Karl Dönitz

Wehrmacht About this sound (listen) (German: "defence force") 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, the combat arm of the SS (the Nazi Party's paramilitary organization), became the de facto fourth branch of the Wehrmacht, as it expanded from three regiments to 38 divisions by 1945. The SS was autonomous and existed in parallel to the Wehrmacht; Waffen-SS field units, however, were under the operational control of the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) or the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH)


Origin and use of the term

Before the Nazi Party assumed German government in 1933, the term Wehrmacht generically described a nation’s “home defence” forces, analogous to the German Streitmacht foreign war forces, thus, Britische Wehrmacht denoted “British defence forces”. The term wehrmacht is in Article 47 of the 1919 Weimar Constitution, establishing that: Der Reichspräsident hat den Oberbefehl über die gesamte Wehrmacht des Reiches (“The National President holds supreme command of all armed forces of the nation”). From 1919, Germany’s national defence force was known as the Reichswehr, until its Wehrmacht renaming in 1936.

After World War II (1939–45), the Allies abolished the Wehrmacht. In 1955, when the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) re-militarized, its armed forces were named the Bundeswehr ("Federal Defence"). In 1956, upon formal establishment, the armed forces of the Communist, east German Democratic Republic (GDR) were named the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army), some of whom, with matériel, were incorporated to the Bundeswehr when the German reunification consolidated the Germanies in 1990.[1]

In German and English usage, Wehrmacht denotes the armed forces of Nazi Germany. Using Wehrmacht to only denote the Heer (land army) is inaccurate, never the less, it is a misusage common to English writing. For branch-of-service identification, Wehrmacht vehicles bore alpha-numeric identity licence plates: WH for the Heer, WL for the Luftwaffe, WM for the Kriegsmarine, and SS for the Waffen-SS.




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 organization 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.


The total number of soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during its existence from 1935 until 1945 is believed to have approached 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 1.3 million Wehrmacht soldiers were killed in action; 250,000 died from non-combat causes; 2.0 million missing in action and unaccounted for after the war; and 359,000 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 perfection.

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.

  • OKW—the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces
Chief of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces—Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel (1938 to 1945)
Chief of the Operations Staff (Wehrmachtführungsstab)—Generaloberst Alfred Jodl
  • OKH—the Supreme Command of the Army
Army Commanders-in-Chief
Generaloberst Werner von Fritsch (1935 to 1938)
Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch (1938 to 1941)
Führer and Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler (1941 to 1945)
Generalfeldmarschall 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)
Generaloberst Heinz Guderian (1944 to 1945)
General Hans Krebs (1945, committed suicide in the Führer Bunker)
  • OKM—the Supreme Command of the Navy
Navy Commanders-in-Chief
Grossadmiral Erich Raeder (1928 to 1943)
Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz (1943 to 1945)
Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg (1945)
  • OKL—the Supreme Command of the Air Force
Air Force Commanders-in-Chief
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (until 1945)
Generalfeldmarschall Robert Ritter von Greim (1945)


War years




The German Army furthered concepts pioneered during World War I, 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 World War II, prompting foreign journalists to create a new word for what they witnessed: Blitzkrieg.


After Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, Germany and other Axis powers found themselves engaged in campaigns against three 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 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 40% of all units were motorized, baggage trains often relied on horse-drawn trailers and many soldiers went by foot or used bicycles (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'. However, their integrity was compromised by war crimes, especially those committed on the eastern front. They were over-extended and out-maneuvered before Moscow in 1941, and in North Africa and Stalingrad in 1942, and from 1942/3 onwards, were in constant retreat. Other Axis powers fought with them, especially Hungary and Romania, as well as many volunteers from other nations.

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

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 vital 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 crack infantry, the 1st Fallschirmjäger Division fought in all the theatres of the war. Notable actions include the bloody Monte Cassino, the last ditch defense of Tunisia and numerous key battles on the eastern front. A Fallschirmjäger armored division, the Fallschirm-Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring, was also formed and was heavily engaged in Sicily and at Salerno.

Separate from the elite Fallschirmjäger, the Luftwaffe also fielded regular infantry in the Luftwaffe Field Divisions. These units were basic infantry formations formed from Luftwaffe personnel. Lacking competent officers and composed in the main of recruits for the air-force unhappy with their unexpected use as infantry, they understandably lacked in morale. By Göring's personal order they were intended to be restricted to defensive duties in quieter sectors to free up front line troops for combat. The Luftwaffe, being in charge of Germany's anti-aircraft warfare, also used thousands of teenage Luftwaffenhelfer to support the Flak units.[2]


The German Navy (Kriegsmarine) played a major role in World War II 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.[citation needed]

Theaters and campaigns


The Wehrmacht directed combat operations during World War II (from 1 September 1939 to 8 May 1945) as the German Reich's Armed Forces umbrella command organization. After 1941 the OKH became the de facto Eastern Theatre higher echelon command organization 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.

  • North African Campaign in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt between the U.K. and Commonwealth (and later, US) forces and the Axis forces.
  • The Italian "Theatre" (1943–45) was in fact a continuation of the Axis defeat in North Africa, and was a Campaign for defence of Italy.

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:

  • Czechoslovakian campaign
  • Austrian Anschluss campaign
  • Battle of Poland campaign (Fall Weiss)—a joint invasion of Germany, Soviet Union and Slovakia.
  • Balkans and Greece (Operation Marita)
  • Operation Barbarossa Campaign, also known as the Eastern Front, was the largest and most lethal campaign that the Wehrmacht Heer fought in during World War II. The Campaign against the Soviet Union was strategically the most crucial for Germany and its allies during World War II because of the economic and political repercussions defeat of the Soviet Union would have had on the outcome of the war, including that of the conflict with the United Kingdom and the United States in the Western Theatre. The Eastern Front was also the Theater that demanded more resources than any other Theater throughout the war. The large area covered by the Eastern Front necessitated the division of the Theatre in to four separate Strategic Directions overseen by the Army Group North, Army Group Centre, Army Group South, and the Norwegian Army. These commands would conduct their own interdependent strategic campaigns within the Theater.
  • Battle of the Caucasus.
  • A subset of the Eastern Front was a number of anti-partisan operations against guerrilla units and counter-insurgency operations largely by Waffen-SS units behind Axis lines.

However, Hitler demanded that the Wehrmacht had to fight on other fronts, sometimes three simultaneously, thus stretching its resources too thin. By 1944, even the defense of Germany became impossible.

Western theatre

German soldiers marching past the Arc de Triomphe
  • Phony War (Sitzkrieg).
  • The Denmark campaign as Operation Weserübung
  • The Norwegian Campaign.
  • The largest campaign in the Western Theatre involving combat was conducted against the Netherlands, Belgium, etc. and France (Fall Gelb) in 1940. This predominantly land campaign evolved into two subsequent campaigns, one by the Luftwaffe against the United Kingdom, and the other by the Kriegsmarine against the strategic supply routes linking the United Kingdom to the rest of the World.
  • The strategic air campaigns the Luftwaffe won in 1939 and 1940 in Poland and France ended with the Battle of Britain. From 1941 to the end of 1943, the Luftwaffe entered a long and bloody air battle with the Red Air Force that affected its participation in the campaign against the RAF. Allied air forces enjoyed aerial superiority on all three Theatres by the summer of 1944. In respect to the Battle of Britain, had the Luftwaffe pursued its early goal of bombing the RAF airfields and fighting a war of attrition, it is likely they would have been victorious. However, in response to a string of events beginning with a small-scale air raid on Berlin by British bombers, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe bomber forces to attack British cities. These reprisal attacks shifted the weight of the Luftwaffe away from the RAF and onto British civilians, allowing the RAF to rebuild its fighting strength and, within a few short months, turn the tide against the Luftwaffe in the skies above England.


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.[3]

Politics of the Wehrmacht

Foreign volunteer battalion in 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 invigorated 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. In general, the Luftwaffe was heavily Nazi-influenced, as was the navy to a lesser extent; on the other hand, the army (especially amongst the enlisted men) was quite indifferent and even quietly critical of Nazism, although from 1943 onwards the influx of officers and conscripts who had been mainly educated under the Nazis began to strongly dilute this institutional skepticism[4]. 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.[citation needed]

War crimes

In World War II, the Wehrmacht was involved in a number of war crimes. While the principal perpetrators of the civil suppression behind the front lines amongst German armed forces were the Nazi German political armies (the SS-Totenkopfverbände and particularly the Einsatzgruppen), the traditional armed forces represented by the Wehrmacht committed and ordered (e.g. the Commissar Order) war crimes of their own, particularly during the invasion of Poland in 1939 [5] and later in the war against the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg Trials of the major war criminals at the end of World War II found that the Wehrmacht was not an inherently criminal organization, but that it had committed crimes in the course of the war. Several high ranked members of the Wehrmacht like Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl were convicted for their involvement in war crimes.

As a result of the Cold War, along with the rearmament of the GDR, the Wehrmacht's past tended to be overlooked, so the public view was that the Wehrmacht was "unblemished" by the crimes allegedly committed exclusively by the SS and the political police forces. The finding at Nuremberg that the Wehrmacht was not an inherently criminal organization 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 reactions and debates to an exhibition on these issues in the mid-1990s[6].

Resistance to the Nazi regime

Major General Henning v. Tresckow

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 what extent the German military forces opposed or supported the Hitler regime is nevertheless highly disputed amongst historians up to the present day.

Some members of the Wehrmacht did save Jews and Non-Jews 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 Władysław 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.[7] 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.

See also


  1. ^ The predecessor army of the eastern National People’s Army was the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (KVP; Barracked People's Police, est. 1952), which — wherein the police name — disguised its military nature in post-war demilitarised Germany.
  2. ^ One of whom was Josef Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI
  3. ^ Rűdiger Overmans (2000). Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Wikipedia. p. 335. ISBN 3-486-56531-1. 
  4. ^ Beevor, Antony (1998). "Stalingrad" or "Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942–1943" (In the US). New York: Viking, 1998 (hardcover, ISBN 0-670-87095-1); London: Penguin Books, 1999 (paperback, ISBN 0-14-028458-3).
  5. ^ Böhler, Jochen (2006) (in German). Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg. Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. ISBN 3596163072. 
  7. ^ 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


  • Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 1944, 1985, reissued 1999, Pan, ISBN 0-330-39012-0
  • Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1945, 2004, Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-90836-8
  • Anthony A Evans, World War II: An Illustrated Miscellany, 2005, Worth Press, ISBN 1-84567-681-5
  • Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation. Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941, 2006, Rowman & Littelefield, ISBN 0-7425-4481
  • Geoffrey P. Megargee, Inside Hitler's High Command, 2000, University Press of Kansas, ISBN 978-0700611874
  • W.J.K. Davies, German Army Handbook, 1973, Ian Allen Ltd., Shepperton, Surrey, ISBN 0-7110-0290-8
  • Fest, Joachim; Plotting Hitler's Death—The Story of the German Resistance, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996. ISBN 0-8050-4213-X
  • Former Waffen-SS soldiers, Wenn alle Brueder schweigen (When all our brothers are silent), Munin Verlag GmbH, Osnabrueck, 3rd revised edition 1981, ISBN 3-921242-21-5
  • U.S. National Archives, Captured German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Virginia, Microfilm publications T-77 and T-78, 2,680 rolls
  • U.S. War Department, Handbook on German Military Forces, 15 March 1945, Technical Manual TM-E 30-451

External links


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