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Among higher-ranking officers, 29.2% were NSDAP members by 1941. [58] The Wehrmacht obeyed Hitler's criminal orders for Barbarossa not because of obedience to orders, but because they, like Hitler, believed that the Soviet Union was run by Jews and that Germany must completely destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism". [59]
The Wehrmacht was the combined armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945, the Army (), Navy (Kriegsmarine) and Air Force totaling about 18 million men, created on 16 March 1935 with Adolf Hitler's Defence Law introducing conscription. [6]
As early as March 1933, two months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Sturmabteiling began to attack trade union offices without legal consequences. Several union offices were occupied, their furnishings were destroyed, their documents were stolen or burned, and union members were beaten and in some cases killed; the police ignored these attacks and declared itself without jurisdiction ...
Foreign volunteer battalion in the Wehrmacht. Soldiers of the Free Arabian Legion in Greece, September 1943. Spanish volunteer forces of the Blue Division entrain at San Sebastián, 1942 The Ukrainian Liberation Army's oath to Adolf Hitler Ingrian Wehrmacht volunteers of the 664th Eastern Battalion, 1943
The attempt failed, resulting in the execution of 4,980 people [145] and the standard military salute being replaced with the Hitler salute. [146] Some members of the Wehrmacht did save Jews and non-Jews from the concentration camps and/or mass murder.
Paul Schäfer – Hitler Youth member and Wehrmacht corporal, subsequently convicted for multiple charges of child sex abuse in Chile. Gustav Adolf Scheel – Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter of Reichsgau Salzburg (1941–1945) and a Nazi "multifunctionary."
After the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, a photo was taken of an unidentified man in Wehrmacht attire being processed as a prisoner of war. The official caption does not give his name, and instead refers to him as "young Japanese". [5] The current description on the US National Archives refers to him as a "young Japanese man". [6]
After the war, members of Baltic Waffen-SS units were considered separate and distinct in purpose, ideology and activities from the German SS by the Western Allies. [ 34 ] [ e ] During the 1946 Nuremberg trials, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who were drafted into the Waffen-SS were determined not to be criminals for having been "wedged ...