The armed forces of Germany in the period from 1935-1945
The name was adopted when the military draft was introduced on March 16, 1935, replacing the name Reichswehr, which had been its designation under the Weimar Republic. In April 1938, the Wehrmacht's land forces consisted of twenty-eight divisions. By the beginning of World War II, this number had grown to seventy-five, consisting of 24,000 officers and 2.7 million men of other ranks on active service, as compared to the 100,000 military personnel, including 4,000 officers, that had been the official total of the Reichswehr. Structure. In 1938, Hitler established the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; Armed Forces High Command) under Wilhelm Keitel, as a consulting organisation. It was to co-ordinate the activities of the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres; Army High Command), the OKL (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe; Air Force High Command), and the OKM (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine; Navy High Command). When the war broke out, most of the actual fighting was in the hands of the OKH because the war was largely land-based. As the war progressed, Hitler transferred divisions from the OKH to the OKW, turning the latter into a combat high command. By the end of 1941, all the theatres of the land war were under the jurisdiction of the OKW except for the eastern front, which remained under the OKH. In 1943, when the Wehrmacht was past its prime, it still had 13,555,000 personnel under its command.
Nazification of the Wehrmacht
Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht gathered momentum in 1938 at the latest, after Hitler's spectacular successes in annexing territories without resorting to war, and the drafting of Nazi-trained age groups from the Hitlerjugend and the Reich labour services. Any disapproval of Nazi atrocities committed in the wake of the September 1939 campaign in Poland was, for the most part, silenced after the spectacular victory over France in May and June of 1940. Hardly any opposition was voiced to the criminal orders issued by Hitler in connection with the "ideological war" against the Soviet Union that he launched in June 1941. It was only in the fall of 1941 that objections were raised in the Wehrmacht to Hitler's policy, when it became apparent that the original timetable for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 could not be kept and that, at best, a drawn-out war was likely.
The Wehrmacht and the Murder of the Jews
The Wehrmacht was witness to the mass-murder actions committed by the Einsatzgruppen, and Wehrmacht units were employed in support of these actions. Some of the senior Wehrmacht commanders, such as Walter von Reichenau, justified the murder campaign against the Jews in their orders to the troops. Only a very small number of Wehrmacht officers opposed Hitler's destructive policy. Part of this group was demobilised at an early stage, while the rest made prolonged but futile efforts to create a broad-based military opposition to him. Even in 1943 and 1944, efforts to organise an action by the officers' corps against Hitler came to naught. Moreover, in the wake of the abortive July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler's life, the senior generals set up a court of honour and promptly dismissed those colleagues suspected of having had even the faintest connection with the attempt, handing them over to the Gestapo and to the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof). The claim made after the war that the Wehrmacht was unaware of the "Final Solution" and the other Nazi atrocities is largely unfounded, at least as far as the OKW and the OKH are concerned.
