The Wehrmacht.

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). For instance, "Englische Wehrmacht" meant all English forces. Since World War II, the term is almost as closely associated with the armed forces of the Third Reich in German as it is in English.

     On 16 March 1935 Adolf Hitler re-introduced conscription and announced to the world the formation of a German air force. Needless to say this brought the restrictions imposed on the size and the strength of the German armed forces to an abrupt end. The next four years saw the rapid expansion of the German Army, a transformation from General Seeckt's Reichswehr into Hitler's Wehrmacht.

     In March 1939 the operational control of the Armed Forces was unified under the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) whose chief was Generaloberst (Colonel-General) Keitel. The management of the Army was the responsibility of the Army High Command, the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), which included the General Staflf although it was the Supreme Commander, Adolf Hitler, who was increasingly to take over the day-to-day running of the war. During the crisis of the Battle of Moscow in December 1941 he took over the command of the Army from CinC von Brauchitsch.

     The Wehrmacht's military strength was managed through assignment-based tactics (rather than order-based tactics) and an almost proverbial discipline. 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).

     The Wehrmacht (German Army) had a simple and easy to understand command structure. At the top of the German Army was Hitler who had appointed himself Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. Though Hitler paid a keen interest in what the Wehrmacht did, at this stage in the war, he did not interfere in decision making once a campaign had started (though he had been the main force behind an attack on Western Europe). The commander-in-chief of the Army High Command was Field Marshall von Brauchitsch and under him, there were three generals commanding various army groups; Rundstedt (Army Group A), Bock (Army Group B) and Leeb (Army Group C).

    The high command of the army was the Oberkammando des Heeres (OKH). The Luftwaffe (air force) was similarly organised with the Oberkammando der Luftwaffe (OKL) and the navy had the Oberkammando der Kriegsmarine (OKM).One of the reasons for Germany’s success in May 1940 was that it had a unified command structure with each unit of the military acting to support the other – hence the importance of the Luftwaffe to the success of blitzkrieg.