In March 1919, the national assembly passed a law founding a 420,000-strong preliminary army, the Vorläufige Reichswehr. In January 1919, after World War I ended with the signing of the armistice of 11 November 1918, the armed forces were dubbed Friedensheer (peace army). Reichswehr soldiers swearing the Hitler oath in August 1934 For instance, the German-aligned formations of Poles raised during the First World War were known as the Polnische Wehrmacht ('Polish Wehrmacht', 'Polish Defense Force') in German. While the term Wehrmacht has been associated, both in the German and English languages, with the German armed forces of 1935–45 since the Second World War, before 1945 the term was used in the German language in a more general sense for a national defense force. From 1919, Germany's national defense force was known as the Reichswehr, a name that was dropped in favor of Wehrmacht on. In 1919, the term Wehrmacht also appears in Article 47 of the Weimar Constitution, establishing that: "The Reich's President holds supreme command of all armed forces of the Reich". The Frankfurt Constitution of 1849 designated all German military forces as the "German Wehrmacht", consisting of the Seemacht (sea force) and the Landmacht (land force). It has been used to describe any nation's armed forces for example, Britische Wehrmacht meaning "British Armed Forces". The German term "Wehrmacht" stems from the compound word of German: wehren, "to defend" and Macht, "power, force". According to Ian Kershaw, most of the three million Wehrmacht soldiers who invaded the USSR participated in war crimes.
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Only a few of the Wehrmacht 's upper leadership went on trial for war crimes, despite evidence suggesting that more were involved in illegal actions. By the time the war ended in Europe in May 1945, German forces (consisting of the Heer, the Kriegsmarine, the Luftwaffe, the Waffen-SS, the Volkssturm, and foreign collaborator units) had lost approximately 11,300,000 men, about 5,318,000 of whom were missing, killed or died in captivity. The majority of the war crimes took place in the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy, as part of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, the Holocaust and Nazi security warfare.ĭuring World War II about 18 million men served in the Wehrmacht. Ĭlosely cooperating with the SS and the Einsatzgruppen, the German armed forces committed numerous war crimes (despite later denials and promotion of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht). The German operational art proved no match to the war-making abilities of the Allied coalition, making the Wehrmacht's weaknesses in strategy, doctrine and logistics apparent. At the same time, the far-flung advances strained the Wehrmacht's capacity to the breaking point, culminating in its first major defeat in the Battle of Moscow (1941) by late 1942, Germany was losing the initiative in all theatres. Its campaigns in France (1940), the Soviet Union (1941) and North Africa (1941/42) are regarded by historians as acts of boldness. In the early part of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht employed combined arms tactics (close-cover air-support, tanks and infantry) to devastating effect in what became known as Blitzkrieg (lightning war). The Wehrmacht formed the heart of Germany's politico-military power. This required the reinstatement of conscription and massive investment and defense spending on the arms industry. Īfter the Nazi rise to power in 1933, one of Adolf Hitler's most overt and audacious moves was to establish the Wehrmacht, a modern offensively-capable armed force, fulfilling the Nazi régime's long-term goals of regaining lost territory as well as gaining new territory and dominating its neighbours. The designation " Wehrmacht" replaced the previously used term Reichswehr and was the manifestation of the Nazi regime's efforts to rearm Germany to a greater extent than the Treaty of Versailles permitted. It consisted of the Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy) and the Luftwaffe (air force). 'defence force') were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. The Wehrmacht ( German pronunciation: ( listen), lit.
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