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West Germany joins NATO: Walter Hallstein (left) and Konrad Adenauer (centre) at the NATO Conference in Paris in 1954. West German rearmament (German: Wiederbewaffnung) began in the decades after World War II. Fears of another rise of German militarism caused the new military to operate within an alliance framework, under NATO command. [1]
The Heinkel He 111, one of the technologically advanced aircraft that were designed and produced illegally in the 1930s as part of the clandestine German rearmament. German rearmament (Aufrüstung, German pronunciation: [ˈaʊ̯fˌʀʏstʊŋ]) was a policy and practice of rearmament carried out by Germany from 1918 to 1939 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, which required German ...
Refugees moving westwards in 1945. During the later stages of World War II and the post-war period, Germans and Volksdeutsche fled and were expelled from various Eastern and Central European countries, including Czechoslovakia, and from the former German provinces of Lower and Upper Silesia, East Prussia, and the eastern parts of Brandenburg and Pomerania (Hinterpommern), which were annexed by ...
At the Potsdam Conference (17 July to 2 August 1945), after Germany's unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, [8] the Allies officially divided Germany into the four military occupation zones — France in the southwest, the United Kingdom in the northwest, the United States in the south, and the Soviet Union in the east, bounded on the east by ...
On 10 October the Soviet Military Administration in Germany was replaced by the Soviet Control Commission, although limited sovereignty was not granted to the GDR government until 11 November 1949. After the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, the Soviet Control Commission was replaced with the office of the Soviet High Commissioner on 28 May ...
The Treaty of Versailles placed several restrictions on German ownership of munitions and other arms and limited the army to just 100,000 men. Under the terms of the treaty, poison gas, tanks, submarines, and heavy artillery were prohibited to German forces, and Germany could not import or export "war material" (a vague term that was not clearly defined). [1]
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.
Before the Soviets withdrew, Germany would only deploy territorial defense units not integrated into the alliance structures. German forces in the rest of Germany were assigned to areas where Soviet troops were stationed. After the Soviets withdrew, the Germans could freely deploy troops in those areas, with the exception of nuclear weapons.