The designation "Wehrmacht" replaced the previously used term Reichswehr (Reich Defence) and was the manifestation of the Nazi regime's efforts to rearm Germany to a greater extent than the Treaty of Versailles permitted.

[13] At the same time, the extent of 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.

[14] Closely cooperating with the SS and their Einsatzgruppen death squads, the German armed forces committed numerous war crimes (despite later denials and promotion of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht).

[16] 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 American historians Alan Millet and Williamson Murray wrote "In reducing the officers corps, Seeckt chose the new leadership from the best men of the general staff with ruthless disregard for other constituencies, such as war heroes and the nobility.

Following the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, fitness and physical health standards for Wehrmacht recruits were drastically lowered, with the regime going so far as to create "special diet" battalions for men with severe stomach ailments.

Rear-echelon personnel were more often sent to front-line duty wherever possible, especially during the final two years of the war where, inspired by constant propaganda, the oldest and youngest were being recruited and driven by instilled fear and fanaticism to serve on the fronts and, often, to fight to the death, whether judged to be cannon fodder or elite troops.

[47] Prior to World War II, the Wehrmacht strove to remain a purely ethnic German force; as such, minorities within and outside of Germany, such as the Czechs in annexed Czechoslovakia, were exempted from military service after Hitler's takeover in 1938.

[54] Legally, the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht was Adolf Hitler in his capacity as Germany's head of state, a position he gained after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934.

[64] The Western Allies' strategic bombing campaign against German industrial targets (particularly the round-the-clock Combined Bomber Offensive) and Germany's Defence of the Reich deliberately forced the Luftwaffe into a war of attrition.

[84][85] In the Battle of the Atlantic, the initially successful German U-boat fleet arm was eventually defeated due to Allied technological innovations like sonar, radar, and the breaking of the Enigma code.

[89][90][91] Operating from fjords along the coast of Norway, which had been occupied since 1940, convoys from North America to the Soviet port of Murmansk could be intercepted though the Tirpitz spent most of her career as fleet in being.

[92] After the appointment of Karl Dönitz as Grand Admiral of the Kriegsmarine (in the aftermath of the Battle of the Barents Sea), Germany stopped constructing battleships and cruisers in favor of U-boats.

The army feared the SS would attempt to become a legitimate part of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, and the two groups disagreed about how the limited supply of armaments should be divided.

The Wehrmacht fought on other fronts, sometimes three simultaneously; redeploying troops from the intensifying theatre in the East to the West after the Normandy landings caused tensions between the General Staffs of both the OKW and the OKH – as Germany lacked sufficient materiel and manpower for a two-front war of such magnitude.

[107] According to Frank Biess, German casualties took a sudden jump with the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad in January 1943, when 180,310 soldiers were killed in one month.

Yet even in the months following D-day, about 68.5 per cent of all German battlefield deaths occurred on the eastern front, as a Soviet blitzkrieg in response devastated the retreating Wehrmacht.

[110] Nazi propaganda had told Wehrmacht soldiers to wipe out what were variously called Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongol hordes, the Asiatic flood and the red beast.

[113] While the principal perpetrators of the civil suppression behind the front lines amongst German armed forces were the Nazi German "political" armies (the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Waffen-SS, and the Einsatzgruppen, which were responsible for mass-murders, primarily by implementation of the so-called Final Solution of the Jewish Question in occupied territories), the traditional armed forces represented by the Wehrmacht committed and ordered war crimes of their own (e.g. the Commissar Order), particularly during the invasion of Poland in 1939[114] and later in the war against the Soviet Union.

Prior to the outbreak of war, Hitler informed senior Wehrmacht officers that actions "which would not be in the taste of German generals", would take place in occupied areas and ordered them that they "should not interfere in such matters but restrict themselves to their military duties".

[118][119] The Army's Chief of Staff General Franz Halder in a directive declared that in the event of guerrilla attacks, German troops were to impose "collective measures of force" by massacring entire villages.

[117] Partisan fighters, Jews, and Communists became synonymous enemies of the Nazi regime and were hunted down and exterminated by the Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht alike, something revealed in numerous field journal entries from German soldiers.

[121] With the implementation of the Hunger Plan, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Soviet civilians were deliberately starved to death, as the Germans seized food for their armies and fodder for their draft horses.

[128] To combat German officials' fear of venereal disease and masturbation,[129] the Wehrmacht established numerous brothels throughout Nazi Germany and its occupied territories.

[132] While the Wehrmacht's prisoner-of-war camps for inmates from the west generally satisfied the humanitarian requirement prescribed by international law,[133] prisoners from Poland and the USSR were incarcerated under significantly worse conditions.

[142] The first major resistance began in 1938 with the Oster conspiracy, where several members of the military wanted to remove Hitler from power, as they feared a war with Czechoslovakia would ruin Germany.

"[155] The Wehrmacht was officially dissolved by the ACC Law 34 on 20 August 1946,[156] which proclaimed the OKW, OKH, the Ministry of Aviation and the OKM to be "disbanded, completely liquidated and declared illegal".

[158] However, historians have since reevaluated the Wehrmacht in terms of fighting power and tactics, giving it a more favorable assessment, with some calling it one of the best in the world,[159] partly due to its ability to regularly inflict higher losses than it received, while it fought outnumbered and outgunned.

To combat this, several prominent officers created a secret army, unknown to the general public and without mandate from the Allied Control Authority or the West German government.

[173][174] According to The Times of Israel, "The benefits come through the Federal Pension Act, which was passed in 1950 to support war victims, whether civilians or veterans of the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS.