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In 1957 many World War II military decorations, including the Honour Roll Clasp, were re-authorised for wear. Re-designed to remove the swastika symbol, the army version now displayed two crossed swords in the centre, with the Navy and Air Force clasps unchanged apart from the absence of the swastika.
A number of military awards were established pre-war, including Wehrmacht long service decorations, followed by awards for participation in the Spanish Civil War and for the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland, with the greatest number established after the start of World War II in 1939.
German personnel are also eligible to receive and wear civil service medals, sports and fitness awards, and certain marksmanship awards. The reunification of Germany saw new regulations concerning the status of East German awards introduced into the German military. These regulations typically stipulated that awards associated with the ...
The Reichsheer's shoulder-straps to enlisted men (German: Mannschaften) were very similar to those of World War I, made of feldgrau uniform cloth with pointed or "gable" button ends. In December 1934 the material was changed to grey badge-cloth ( Abzeichentuch ) and in September 1935 changed again to dark bottle-green ( flaschengrün ).
The Ritchie Boys, part of the U.S. Military Intelligence Service (MIS) at the War Department, were an organization of soldiers in World War II with sizable numbers of German and Austrian recruits who were used primarily for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe.
The 2nd Army was reestablished on 20 October 1939, with Generaloberst Maximilian von Weichs in command, by renaming the 8th Army, which had been moved from Poland to the west. After the beginning of the Battle of France the army was assigned to Army Group A in June 1940, when it fought across the Aisne and around Reims .
While the principal perpetrators of the killings of civilians behind the front lines amongst German armed forces were the Nazi German "political" armies (the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Waffen-SS, and the Einsatzgruppen), the army committed and ordered war crimes of its own (e.g. the Commissar Order), particularly during the invasion of Poland ...
While the term Wehrmacht has been associated, both in the German and English languages, with the German armed forces of 1935–45 since the Second World War, before 1945 the term was used in the German language in a more general sense for a national defense force.