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The German term "Wehrmacht" stems from the compound word of German: wehren, "to defend" and Macht, "power, force". [c] It has been used to describe any nation's armed forces; for example, Britische Wehrmacht meaning "British Armed Forces".
As a rule, only graduates of the academy transferred to the General Staff, or could even exercise the Magisterium. Subjects were all military science, languages, and general historical and mathematical sciences. All Wehrmacht officers in World War II had passed through a Kriegsschule during their training.
The Himmerod memorandum (German: Himmeroder Denkschrift) was a 40-page document produced in 1950 after a secret meeting of former Wehrmacht high-ranking officers invited by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to the Himmerod Abbey to discuss West Germany's Wiederbewaffnung (rearmament).
The question of how much knowledge German (and other European) civilians had about the Holocaust whilst it was happening has been studied and debated by historians. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] In Nazi Germany , it was an open secret among the population by 1943, Peter Longerich argues, but some authors place it even earlier. [ 5 ]
The Ukrainian collaborationist forces were composed of an estimated number of 180,000 volunteers serving with units scattered all over Europe. [6] Russian émigrés and defectors from the Soviet Union formed the Russian Liberation Army or fought as Hilfswillige within German units of the Wehrmacht primarily on the Eastern Front. [7]
The German historians' Manfred Messerschmidt and Fritz Wüllner in a 1987 study of Wehrmacht justice have argued that the figure of 15,000 executed is too low, as it only records verdicts handed down by military courts and that in the last months of the war, the Wehrmacht abandoned even the pretence of holding trials, and simply executed ...
The Greater Germanic Reich (German: Großgermanisches Reich), fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation (German: Großgermanisches Reich der Deutschen Nation), [4] was the official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. [5]
The book was first published in German with a title that translates as The Wehrmacht: Images of the Enemy, War of Extermination, Legends.According to Benjamin Schwarz, "These works have conclusively demonstrated that the Wehrmacht—and not, as postwar accounts by German generals would have it, merely the SS—freely and even eagerly joined in murder and genocide".