Hello everyone! This is my first post and I hope to get some good answers! I am currently doing a history report on the Wehrmacht, mainly Heer, for my German and history teachers. I had some questions and I needed some help, they mainly have to do with battles and the homefront as well as maybe some "controversial" questions. Alright lets get started! How many soldiers did the Wehrmacht have? How many were in the Heer? What percentage of German soldiers served on the Eastern Front? How many divisions did the Heer have? Alright now for part two. What were most German soldiers fighting for? Was it for Germany, Nazism, military honor, etc, and were the majority "Nazis?"? I personally don't believe they all were, as in the majority, but I get argued at by people who really don't know their WWII history or only study the Holocaust. Thats all for now, I will come up with more later! Thanks!
You can start with doing a little research into the matter on your own. That way you will learn much more of what you seek by doing it the hard and old fashioned way. Nobody here is interested in doing your homework for you, but everyone will bend over backwards to help you in your quest. Everything you asked in your question can be easily found by utilizing any search engine, or by going to wiki and starting there. Good luck in your project, and if you need help in your assignment, feel free to come back. Please show some initiative first by doing a little research on your own. I'll give you one website that is very informative and interesting, Feldgrau.com - The German Armed Forces 1919-1945.
I've already gone and looked some of it up, and I've heard of feldgrau. I'm not trying to get others to do my homework, I'm trying to find out their different opinions on some questions I had so I can get a better understanding of what I'm looking up, I don't want to have anyone do my homework. Take that back, what I meant to say was I would rather discuss somethingo n Germany and them being "Nazis". That is what I really want to discuss, I can look everything else up on my own but this one is a bit different. Here what I would really like to know: were the majority of the Germans Nazis, did the majority know about the Holocaust, and was the Heer responsible for more POW deaths than German POW deaths in Russian captivity? This is what I would rather talk about, I can look everything else up, but it is generally hard for me to find anything on this as most people just call them all Nazis and leave it at that, I highly doubt that the majority were Nazis, but again, I need to hear everyones ideas in order to get the right picture. I'm willing to do research, but I've been looking for a place to discuss these 3 questions for a long time, and defending the Germans against the majority of people who are usually taught wrong makes it even harder. My history book doesn't even distinguish the SS and Wehrmacht, they just simply refer to the term Nazi, and it ticks me off everytime. Sorry for any inconvience.
Safe to say like 70% of the whermatch was on the eastern front and I can assure you they were not fighting for the nazies.
I would offer that you be more specific. Were you looking at total numbers for the entire war or for specific time frame? The numbers and percentages changed throughout the war. I would daresay that the majority of soldiers of the heer were fighting for the same reason that other soldiers did, because they had to and also to not let the men on their right and left down. The other things were secondary, in spite of what movies may or may not show you.
Hi S/P, id strongly suggest you start with the war on the Eastern Front as that will give you a great insight on what happened and why certhings happened the way they did which changed the outcome of the war.
Yup, everyone around here thinks D-Day won the war and I used to agree with it until maybe 3-4 years ago when I started learning about the Eastern Front. It was a whole different war and WAS the reason Germany lost, without Russia the Allies were most likely finished. 500,000 US soldiers died during WWII, thats on 2 fronts. Russia lost 30+ million on 1 front in a matter of 4 years, thats insane. Those numbers can definately tell you who won, why is something else that needs to be looked up. Stalingrad was the turning point by far, the 6th Army had been annihilated and I think it was around 100,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner, I've heard less than 1/3 came back and I believe it. I really need to brush up on my history after Stalingrad, Kursk and maybe a few others are the only battles I really know about, Seelow was another but I have yet to really dig into these battles. I'm reading a book on a German soldier who was outside of Stalingrad fighting at the Don and its amazing how anyone can go through something like that, survive it, and go on to write about it. The title of the book is Blood Red Snow by Gunter Koschorreck. Heres something to discuss, I know someone who is super pro-American and says all the Germans during WWII who died deserved it, and that the rest of them deserved to be punished for the acts of the SS during the Holocaust. Obviously not all Germans were Nazis, and I've always gone by Wehrmacht-good and SS-bad, and even I know there were good soldiers in the SS, but it seems like people want to stereotype to quickly and say that because the Wehrmacht killed prisoners and raped women and killed civilians that all of them were bad. Heres my question, were the majority of Wehrmacht soldiers involved in these things or was it only a minority that was doing it? Exclude the Einsatzgruppen because they were SS.
Quick thing alt of people were conscripted in to the ss late in the war and alot of the people in earlys years of the war who volunteered were not hard core nazies but simply boys who thought the ss was the elite arm of the millitary. They had cool uniforms and prapaganda made the very attrive much like the marine and army commercials you see. But they quikly found out they were wrong and the training was so intence some men comited siucied.
Several of the Waffen SS divisions were elite and the fact that some of the men could not endure the training further reinforces that fact.
