Heer. (army)

Heer.

During the period of its rebuilding by Hitler the German Army continued to develop concepts pioneered during the First World War, combining ground (Heer) and air (Luftwaffe) assets into combined arms teams. Coupled with operational and tactical methods such as encirclements and the "battle of annihilation", the German military managed several quick victories in the two initial years of the World War II, prompting foreign journalists to create a new word for what they witnessed, Blitzkrieg.

 The Wehrmacht entered the war with a majority of its Army infantry formations relying on the horse for transportation while the infantry remained foot soldiers throughout the war, artillery also remaining primarily horse-drawn. The motorized formations received much attention in the World press in the opening years of the war, and were cited as the reason for the success of the German invasions of Poland (September 1939), Norway and Denmark (April 1940), Belgium, France and Netherlands (May 1940), Yugoslavia (April 1941) and the early campaigns in the Soviet Union (June 1941). However their motorized and tank formations accounted for only 20% of the Heer's capacity at their peak strength.

 The German Heer, or army, was formed in May of 1935. It was formed after the passing of the "Law for the Reconstruction of the National DefenseForces". This law brough back into existance a free standing German army, navy and airforce, something that had been essentially banned after the end of WW I.

           With the end of World War I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the Weimar Republic - the successor to Imperial Germany - was allowed only a small defensive military force known as the Reichswehr. The Reichswehr's size and composition was strictly controlled by the Allies in the hope that by restricting its constitution they could prevent future German military aggression. The Reichswehr consisted of 100,000 men divided between a small standing army, the Reichsheer, and a small defensive navy, the Reichsmarine.

           In 1933 the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) came to power and the infamous Third Reich was born. Two years later in 1935 the Treaty of Versailles was renounced and the Reichswehr became the Wehrmacht. The newly formed Wehrmacht would still consist of an army and a navy - the renamed Heer and Kriegsmarine, but a new airforce was born as well - the Luftwaffe.

           The Heer initially consisted of 21 Divisional sized units and 3 Army Groups to control them, as well as numerous smaller formations. Between 1935 and 1945 this force grew to consist of hundreds of Divisions, dozens of Army Groups and thousands of smaller supporting units. Between 1939 and 1945 close to 13 million served in the Heer. Over 1.6 million were killed and over 4.1 million were wounded. Of the 7361 men awarded the initial grade of the highest German combat honor of Second World War, the Knights Cross, 4777 were from the Heer making up 65% of the total awarded.

           The German Army was mainly structured in Army groups (Heeresgruppen) consisting of several armies that were relocated, restructured or renamed in the course of the war. Forces or allied states as well as units made up of non-Germans were also assigned to German units.

For Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Army forces were assigned to three strategic campaign groupings:

• Army High Command Norway (Armee-Oberkommando Norwegen)
• Army Group North (Heeresgruppe Nord) with Leningrad as its campaign objective
• Army Group Centre (Heeresgruppe Mitte) with Smolensk as its campaign objective
• Army Group South (Heeresgruppe Süd) with Kiev as its campaign objective

Later in the campaign Army Group South was divided into

·         Army Group A (Heeresgruppe A) with Caucasus as its campaign objective

·         Army Group B (Heeresgruppe B) with Stalingrad as its campaign objective

The troops sent to North Africa to support Italian forces were designated the Afrika Korps.

Among the foreign volunteers who served in the Wehrmacht during WW II were ethnic Germans, Dutch, Spanish and Scandinavians along with people from the Baltic states and the Balkans who were either volunteers or later conscripted for service. Russians recruited from prisoner of war camps 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 Wehrmacht.

 German operational doctrine emphasized sweeping pincer and lateral movements meant to obliterate the enemy as quickly as possible. This "strategy", referred to as Blitzkrieg, was an operational doctrine instrumental in the success of the offensives in Poland and France.

 The Wehrmacht's military strength was managed through mission-based tactics (Auftragstaktik) (rather than order-based tactics) and an almost proverbial discipline. In public opinion, the Wehrmacht was and is sometimes seen as a high-tech army, since new technologies that were introduced before and during Second WW influenced its development of tactical doctrine. These technologies were featured by propaganda, but were often only available in small numbers or late in the war, as overall supplies of raw materials and armaments became low. For example only 40% percent of all units were fully motorized, supply columns mainly relied on horses, and most soldiers moved by foot or used bicycles. 

German use of fortifications included the Siegfried Line which was intended for defence of the western borders, and the Atlantic Wall erected under command of General Rommel stretching from Denmark to France's border with Spain. The Germans also made great use of fortified cities (termed Festungen) such as Metz, Warsaw, and Poznań during the latter part of the war.

 When building temporary field defenses the Heer relied on the defensive tactics developed during the First WW. Infantry would occupy up to five lines of defence with the first being only lightly held advance posts. Further back would be pre-sited anti-tank and artillery positions preferably not registered by the enemy field artillery counter-battery fires. The armoured formations would stage behind these prepared positions to counter-attack any enemy breakthroughs. The armoured reserves would employ a range of counter-offensive tactics depending on the size of the breach and enemy strength. The most important consideration for the defenders would be to hold the flanks of any breach no matter how wide, and then attempt to close the breach.

 Max Hastings, British author, historian and ex-newspaper editor, said in a radio interview on WGN Chicago "...there's no doubt that man for man, the German army was the greatest fighting force of the second world war". This view was also explained in his book "Overlord: D-Day and the battle for Normandy". 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'.

 An often-overlooked characteristic of the late-war German Army was the liberal use of machine-guns with high rates of fire and medium- and heavy-caliber mortars. Although German battalions were often smaller than those of their opponents by 1944, they were still capable, in terms of organic weapons, of bringing substantially higher weights of fire to bear than those of their opponents. This discrepancy in relative weights of fire made the dislodgement of defending German units difficult, and often resulted in Western Allied and Soviet tendencies to 'even the odds' through the use of artillery and air support.

            Between 1939 and 1945 the Heer bore the majority of six years worth of fierce combat, some of which was so fierce - as on the Eastern Front - humankind will likely never again see such fighting. Although not immune to the overtones of politics and the occasional brush with questionable actions, the vast majority of German Heer units served with great distinction across many thousands of miles of battlefields.

           The Heer was defeated with the German capitulation on May 8th 1945, although some units continued to fight for a few days longer in fits of sporadic resistance, mainly against the Soviets in the East. The Allied Control Council passed a law formally dissolving the Wehrmach on the 20th of August 1946, the official "death" date of the German Heer.