Wehrmacht (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, however, was
autonomous and existed in parallel to the Wehrmacht; the Waffen-SS,
however, did conduct joint operations with the German Army.
Origin and use of the term
Before the rise of the
NSDAP, the term
Wehrmacht generically described the domestic armed forces,
of any nation, being used as the "home defence" version of the
German
Streitmacht or foreign war forces, thus,
Britische Wehrmacht denoted "British defence forces". The
term 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
until its renaming to
Wehrmacht in 1936, the German armed
force had been known as the
Reichswehr ("National Defence").
After
World War II, and under Allied
occupation, the
Wehrmacht was abolished in Germany.
In 1955,
when the western Federal Republic of Germany
re-militarized, its armed forces were named the
Bundeswehr ("Federal
Defence"). In 1956, upon formal establishment, the armed
forces of the eastern German Democratic Republic
(GDR) were named the Nationale Volksarmee
(National People's Army),
some of whom, with materiel, were incorporated to the
present-day Bundeswehr when the GDR
was
incorporated to the Federal Republic of Germany in the German reunification of
1990.
In German and English usage,
Wehrmacht customarily refers
to Germany's
NSDAP-era and
World War II armed forces. Using
Wehrmacht to refer only to the
Heer (land army), while technically inaccurate, is
common in English writing. As branch-of-service identification,
Wehrmacht vehicles had an alpha-numeric identity license plate
reading WH for the
Heer, WL for the
Luftwaffe, and WM for the
Kriegsmarine, plus, SS for the
Waffen-SS.
History
After
World War I ended with the
armistice of 11
November 1918, the armed forces were dubbed
Friedensheer (peace army) in January 1919. In March 1919,
the national assembly passed a law founding a 420,000 strong
preliminary army as
Vorläufige Reichswehr. The terms of
the
Treaty of Versailles were
announced in May, and in June Germany was forced to sign the
contract which, among other terms, imposed severe constraints on
the size of Germany's armed forces. The army was limited to one
hundred thousand men with an additional fifteen thousand in the
navy. The fleet was to consist of at most six
battleships, six
cruisers,
and twelve
destroyers.
Submarines,
tanks and heavy
artillery were forbidden and the air force
was dissolved. A new post-war military (the
Reichswehr) was established on 23 March
1921.
General conscription was
abolished under another mandate of the Versailles treaty.
By 1922, Germany had begun covertly circumventing these conditions.
A secret
collaboration with the Soviet Union
began after the treaty of Rapallo.
Major-General Otto Hasse traveled to Moscow
in 1923 to
further negotiate the terms. Germany helped the Soviet Union
with industrialization and Soviet officers were to be trained in
Germany. German tank and air force specialists could exercise in
the Soviet Union and German chemical weapons research and
manufacture would be carried out there along with other projects.
Around
three hundred German pilots received training at Lipetsk
, some tank
training took place near Kazan
and toxic
gas was developed at Saratov
for the
German army.
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.
Numbers
The total number of soldiers who served in the
Wehrmacht
during its existence from 1935 until 1945 is believed to approach
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 excellence.
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.

Flag for the Commander-in-Chief of the
German Armed Forces (1935–1938).
- 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)
The OKW was also tasked with central economic planning and
procurement, but the authority and influence of the OKW's war
economy office (
Wehrwirtschaftsamt) was challenged by the
procurement offices (
Waffenämter) of the single branches
of service as well as by the Ministry for Armament and Munitions
(
Reichsministerium für Bewaffnung und Munition), into
which it was merged after the ministry was taken over by
Albert Speer in early 1942.
War years
Army
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.
The
Heer entered the war with a minority of its formations
motorized; infantry remained approximately 90% foot-borne
throughout the war, and artillery 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).
With the entry of 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.
Navy
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"
and 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 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 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.
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 campaign 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

Soldiers of German
Wehrmacht
in front of the
Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in the
occupied Paris, 1940.
- 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 Western Front
resumed in 1944 against the Allied forces with the Battle of Normandy.
- 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.
- The Battle of the
Atlantic resulted in early Kriegsmarine successes that
forced Winston Churchill to confide after the war that the only
real threat he felt to Britain's survival was the "U-Boat
peril."
Casualties
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.
Politics of the Wehrmacht

250px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-177-1465-16,_Griechenland,_Soldaten_der_"Legion_Freies_Arabien".jpg"
style='width:250px' alt="" />
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. 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.
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 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.
Resistance to the Nazi regime

Major General Henning v.
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/or
Gentiles 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. 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
Notes
- The eastern National People's Army had a predecessor, the
Kasernierte Volkspolizei (KVP; Barracked People's Police, est.
1952), which – using the term police – disguised as
non-military entity under the condition of German post-war
demilitarisation.
- One of whom was Josef Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict
XVI
- 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).
- 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
References
- 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
- Lubbeck, William; Hurt, David B. At Leningrad's Gates: The
Story of a Soldier with Army Group North. Philadelphia, PA:
Casemate, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 1-932033-55-6).
- 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