Samuel W. Mitcham - Men of Barbarossa: Commanders of the German Invasion of Russia, 1941

When Adolf Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, the German Reichswehr (armed forces) had two branches: the Reichsheer (army) and the Reichsmarine (navy). According to the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, the army was limited to 100,000 men (4,000 of whom could be officers), while the navy was limited to 15,000 officers and men. Of the four innovative weapons of World War Itanks, airplanes, poisonous gas, and submarinesthe Reichswehr was denied all four.

Hitler began his secret military expansion almost as soon as he achieved power. On March 9, 1935, he announced the existence of the Luftwaffe, which his cronies Hermann Goering and Erhard Milch had been building for some time. The reaction of Germanys potential enemies (primarily the United Kingdom and France) was so tepid as to be almost nonexistent. This encouraged Hitler, who renounced the Treaty of Versailles (which the Germans called the Versailles Diktat ) a week later. He was now free to pursue his military buildup in even greater earnest.

Because he and his Nazi paladins considered themselves revolutionaries, he also tended to embrace revolutionary military concepts, such as terror bombing and the blitzkrieg (lightening warfare). The same day Hitler renounced the Treaty of Versailles, the German Army activated the first three panzer divisions.

The military entity Hitler used to expand, recruit, and train his armies was the Wehrkreis the German military district, which had served the Second Reich well. (Its counterpart in the Luftwaffe was the Luftgau or air district.) By August 26, 1939, when the Home or Replacement Army was created to control the Wehrkreise (also spelled Wehrkreisen ), four waves of divisions had been created. These Hitler used to conquer Poland. Thirty-one more waves would be formed and sent into action by January 1945, along with several divisions that did not belong to specific waves. By 1943, there were 18 Wehrkreise forming and/or training German divisions: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XVII, XVIII, XX, Bohemia and Moravia (in what had been Czechoslovakia), and the Wehrkreise General Gouvernement, in what had been Poland. Map 1.1 shows the Wehrkreise and their territorial responsibilities in 1939. Map 1.2 shows the Wehrkreise after the conquests of Poland, Belgium, and France.

In early 1938, it was discovered that Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the defense minister, had married a prostitute. He was forced to retire in disgrace. Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich chose this moment to bring trumped-up charges of homosexuality against the non-Nazi commander-in-chief of the army, Colonel General Baron Werner von Fritsch. Although later exonerated, Fritsch was also forced to resign. Hitler took advantage of this situation to end the corporate independence of the army, place it solidly under Nazi control, and simultaneously set up Germanys command structure for the next war. On February 4, 1938, he named himself Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces ( Wehrmacht ). His new chief executive officer would be General of Artillery (later Field Marshal) Wilhelm Keitel, who held the title commander-in-chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces ( Oberkommando der Wehrmacht or OKW).