Wehrmacht (Ger.: Wehrmacht, defence power) refers to the German armed forces of WW II. In 1935 Hitler announced the existence of the air force and the reintroduction of conscription, both prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. The Wehrmacht thereafter comprised the army (Heer), the navy (Kriegsmarine), and the air force (Luftwaffe). Each had its own headquarters, OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres) for the army, OKM (Oberkommando der Marine) for the navy, and OKL (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe) for the air force.
On Hitler's birthday, 22 April 1936, the army C-in-C Col Gen Werner von Blomberg was promoted field marshal and appointed war minister and head of the Wehrmacht. He proposed the creation of an Armed Forces General Staff, based on the nucleus of the existing Wehrmachtsamt (Armed Forces Office), but ran into opposition from single services who feared loss of authority, and was forced to resign in January 1938 after contracting an unsuitable marriage.
Something of his scheme bore fruit. In February the war ministry was abolished and the Wehrmacht high command, OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), was established. Hitler became C-in-C, and Gen Wilhelm Keitel, who had headed the Wehrmachtsamt, became its chief, a post he was to hold throughout the war. Keitel was promoted field marshal in July 1940 after victory over France, something to his embarrassment. He proved a tireless executor of Hitler's wishes, although personal notes confess to much inner tribulation. Never fully trusted by Hitler, he was known as ‘Lakeitel’ (from lakei, lackey) by many brother officers. The OKW operations staff was headed by another gunner, Alfred Jodl, an energetic staff officer who gave substance to many of Hitler's schemes. The main body of OKW was based at Zossen, on the outskirts of Berlin, though it provided staff for Hitler's headquarters, Wolfschanze, (wolf's lair) in East Prussia, and Werwolf in the western Ukraine. Jodl described life there as a mixture of cloisters and concentration camp: smoking and drinking were taboo, and women out of the question.
OKW was never really a proper joint planning headquarters. It only functioned as such once, for Operation Weserubung, the invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940. After the invasion of Russia Hitler took personal command of the army, and distributed responsibilities so that OKH was responsible for the eastern front while OKW dealt with all other matters. Single-service commanders were amongst those who had right of personal access to Hitler, and generally championed the vested interests of their own services. Göring, Reich aviation minister as well as head of the Luftwaffe, enjoyed a wide measure of independence. It was in Hitler's nature to divide and rule, in defence as in much else, and he never allowed OKW to co-ordinate or evaluate the views of individual services. As the war went on Hitler became increasingly involved in the day-to-day conduct of military operations, using OKW as his mouthpiece. His conviction that he understood war better than his generals (reinforced by successes achieved in the face of military advice in 1939-41), together with the progressive effects of strain and ill health, made him increasingly disinclined to take advice, and his conferences often became little more than ranting monologues.
Not only was the Wehrmacht's command structure fatally flawed, but its expansion, from the 100, 000 men allowed by the Treaty of Versailles to the 4.5 million men under arms in 1939, imposed an enormous strain on trained manpower. The procurement system could never keep pace, and exhibited the same lack of strategic consistency which characterized the command structure itself, with fashionable projects consuming resources better diverted elsewhere. It was not until 1942 that Speer was given control over the war economy, and only in 1944 that Germany was fully mobilized for total war. Thus although Germany led the way with development of armoured warfare (see blitzkrieg), she retained a two-tier army, with panzer divisions fighting alongside infantry who retained horse-drawn transport until the war's end.
Given these disadvantages the Wehrmacht's achievements are all the more astonishing. The army generated a combat performance which was consistently 20-30 per cent better than that of British and American units facing it. Martin van Creveld called it ‘a superb fighting organisation … [which] probably had no equal among twentieth-century armies’. Because of Hitler's strategic errors, from 1942 Germany fought an increasingly attritional struggle against powerful opponents, but even after the tide of war had turned against them German armed forces continued to astonish their opponents by dogged defence sprinkled with rapid counter-attacks. In April 1945 a single German tank destroyed fourteen Russian tanks in a day while covering the evacuation of the Vienna bridgehead, and the most surprising thing about the battle of the Bulge, the Ardennes offensive of December 1944, is not that it failed, but that it did such damage in its first dew days.
Cultural factors like national character and the status enjoyed by the armed forces within society played their part in promoting a performance which, in victory and defeat, remains remarkable. There were also a number of specifically military factors. Until the training and replacement system broke down under the impact of defeats in east and west in mid-1944 German soldiers were not simply better trained than their opponents, but were delivered from the Replacement Army to the front line by way of ‘marching battalions’ which gave regiments a strong incentive to polish the training of their own replacements, who were often trained by the officers and NCOs who would lead them in battle. Officer and NCO training was well ahead of that in Allied armies: in Normandy it is no exaggeration to say that the average German senior NCO was better trained than the average Allied junior officer, while German officer training routinely incorporated periods of front-line service.
Military organization was designed to maximize combat power at the expense of logistic support. In a given theatre, combat troops represented 84.5 per cent of the total in the German army but only around 50 per cent in the US army. Troop indoctrination played its part in maintaining morale, especially on the eastern front, where, as Omer Bartov has shown, there is good reason for doubting the primacy of the standard view of the primary group as the foundation of combat morale. There the impact of casualties was such that these groups were constantly disrupted, and indoctrination helped meet the perceived need for the war to have some purpose. Both stick and carrot—the efficient distribution of awards and (see below) draconian punishment for failure all helped. And even though the Wehrmacht eventually incorporated a wide variety of non-German auxiliaries, as well as, latterly, the very old and the very young, at its core lay a notion of soldierly honour which helped sustain it to the very end of what was evidently an unwinnable war. It was as well for the Allies that this formidable machine was not directed by a better co-ordinated command structure or a wholly rational brain.
There was unquestionably a darker side to all this, sometimes neglected by those historians dazzled by the glitter of the Wehrmacht's performance on the battlefield. The Reichswehr had slipped easily from showing ‘benevolent neutrality’ to anti-communist Nazi brutality into overt support for Nazism. In July 1933 Blomberg declared that it was the army's task ‘to serve the national movement with the utmost dedication’, and national socialist symbols were speedily incorporated into military insignia. Greater compliance soon followed. Hitler saw the struggle against Russia as a carefully planned war of extermination, and demanded that the armed forces share his world-view encompassing race, autarky, and living space. In December 1938 the army's C-in-C, Col Gen von Brauchitsch, had demanded an officer corps which would be unsurpassed ‘in the purity and genuineness of its National Socialist Weltanschauung’. In 1941 Halder, the army's CGS—who himself harboured significant doubts about its relationship with Hitler—wrote that ‘Bolshevism equals antisocial crime … We must get away from the standpoint of soldierly comradeship … It is a war of extermination.’ Jürgen Förster concludes that ‘the armed forces did not confine themselves to ‘normal’ warfare … Total exoneration of the army is no more of an aid towards the understanding of this chapter in German history than is total condemnation.’
The armed forces involved in this process were not only politicized but rigorously invigilated. As Manfred Messerschmidt has observed, ‘military justice became a strong link between the National Socialist system and its armed forces’. During WW I 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death by military courts, and only 48 were actually executed. Messerschmidt suggests that in WW II at least 17, 000 were executed, and to these must be added the thousands sent to penal battalions, which suffered very heavy casualties. The Wehrmacht's motivation was in part traditional, and its members fought for victory, survival, comrades, and families: but they also fought for Nazism and all it meant. ‘The transformation of Germany's workers into Hitler's soldiers, ’ writes Bartov, ‘was a measure of the regime's success in mobilising the whole nation to fight its war of conquest and destruction.’
Bibliography
- Bartov, Omer, Hitler's Army (Oxford, 1991).
- Diest, Wilhelm (ed.), The German Military in the Age of Total War (Leamington Spa, 1985).
- Kitchen, Martin, A Military History of Germany (London, 1975).
- van Creveld, Martin, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance 1933-1945 (London, 1982)
— Richard Holmes
