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During World War II, a total of about 13.6 million volunteers and conscripts served in the German Army. Only 17 months after Adolf Hitler announced the German rearmament programme in 1935, the army reached its projected goal of 36 divisions. During the autumn of 1937, two more corps were formed.
German-occupied Europe (or Nazi-occupied Europe) refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly militarily occupied and civil-occupied, including puppet governments, by the military forces and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 1939 and 1945, during World War II, administered by the Nazi regime under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler.
From the time of the Nazi Party's rise to power until the regime's collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, mass surveillance, and state terrorism within Germany and German-occupied Europe. The two main constituent groups were the Allgemeine SS (General SS) and Waffen-SS (Armed SS).
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. Foreign volunteers were generally not accepted in the German armed forces prior to 1941. [47]
Between 4 and 8 May 1945, most of the remaining German armed forces unconditionally surrendered. The German Instrument of Surrender was signed 8 May, marking the end of the Nazi regime and the end of World War II in Europe. [147] Popular support for Hitler almost completely disappeared as the war drew to a close. [148]
During World War II, the German military had thousands of its members executed, often for the most trivial violations of discipline. [75] In World War I, the German Army had executed only 48 of its soldiers; in World War II between 13,000 and 15,000 German soldiers were executed for violations of military code. [76]
The Waffen-SS (German: [ˈvafn̩ʔɛsˌʔɛs]; lit. ' Armed SS ') was the combat branch of the Nazi Party's paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation. Its formations included men from Nazi Germany, along with volunteers and conscripts from both German-occupied Europe and unoccupied lands. [3]
During World War II, the Waffen-SS recruited or conscripted significant numbers of non-Germans. Of a peak strength of 950,000 in 1944, the Waffen-SS consisted of some 400,000 “Reich Germans” and 310,000 ethnic Germans from outside Germany’s pre-1939 borders (mostly from German-occupied Europe), the remaining 240,000 being non-Germans. [1]