According to military experts, by 1941 the Wehrmacht was the strongest army in the world. How did Germany manage to create a powerful armed force after a heavy defeat in the First World War?
Systems approach
The German historian Werner Picht believed that it was the Treaty of Versailles, according to which Germany had no right to have an army of more than 100 thousand people, that forced the Berlin generals to look for new principles for the formation of the armed forces. And they were found. And although Hitler, having come to power in 1933, abandoned the "norms of Versailles", the ideology of military mobility of the new army has already won the minds of the German military leaders.
Later, the transfer of German soldiers to Spain to protect the Franco regime made it possible to test in real conditions 88-mm anti-aircraft guns, Me-109 fighters and Stuka-87 dive bombers.
There, the young Hitlerite aviation created its own school of air combat. The Balkan campaign of 1941, however, showed how important it is to coordinate a large number of equipment. As a result, the German staff officers in front of the Russian company had a successful experience in the use of mobile connections, reinforced by aviation. All this allowed them to create a military organization of a new and, most importantly, a systemic type, optimally tuned to carry out combat missions.
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Special training
In 1935, the concept of special training for Wehrmacht soldiers arose in order to make a soldier out of a kind of "motorized weapon". For this, the most talented young men were selected from among the youth. They were trained in training camps. To understand what the German servicemen were like in 1941, you should read Walter Kempowski's multivolume "Sounder". The books contain numerous testimonies explaining the defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, including the soldiers' correspondence. For example, there is a story about a certain corporal Hans, who at a distance of 40-50 meters could hit a small window with a grenade.
“He was an unsurpassed master of urban combat,” writes Hannes, a participant in the Battle of Stalingrad. “It was not difficult for him to destroy the machine-gun nest, even if they were shooting from the other side of the street. If he was alive, we could easily have taken this damn house, which killed half of our platoon. But in August 1941, a captured Russian lieutenant killed him with a shot in the back. It was ridiculous, because there were so many surrendered that we did not even have time to search them. As he died, Hans shouted that it was not fair."
According to official figures, in 1941, the Wehrmacht lost 162,799 soldiers killed, 32,484 missing and 579,795 wounded, most of whom died in hospitals or became disabled. Hitler called these losses monstrous, not so much because of the numbers, but because of the lost quality of the German army.
In Berlin, they were forced to state that the war would be different - war by all available means. Russian soldiers in the summer and autumn of 1941 showed active resistance. As a rule, these were attacks by desperate and doomed Red Army soldiers, single shots from burning houses, self-explosions. In total, in the first year of the war, 3138 thousand Soviet soldiers died, most often in captivity or in "cauldrons". But it was they who bled the Wehrmacht elite, which the Germans had been preparing so carefully for six years.
Massive military experience
Any commander will tell you how important it is to have fired soldiers under the command. The German army that attacked the USSR had this invaluable experience of military victories.
In September 1939, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, easily defeating 39 Polish divisions of Edward Rydz-Smigly, felt the taste of victory for the first time. Then there was the "Maginot Line", the seizure of Yugoslavia and Greece - all this only strengthened the self-awareness of their invincibility. No country in the world then had so many fired fighters motivated for success.
Retired Infantry General Kurt von Tippelskirch believed that this factor was the most important in the first victories over the Red Army. Describing the concept of lightning wars, he emphasized that, unlike the anxious hours of waiting for a war with Poland, confident German conquerors entered the territory of Soviet Russia. By the way, the many-day defense of the Brest Fortress is largely due to the fact that the 42nd Infantry Division of the Red Army, which has the combat experience of the Finnish War, was stationed on its territory.
Precise Destruction Concept
The Germans also made an emphasis on the prompt destruction of pockets of resistance, no matter how firmly they were protected. In the opinion of the German generals, in this case, the enemy has a feeling of doom and uselessness of resistance.
As a rule, precise, almost sniper shelling was used. This was achieved through the successful use of visual optical observation posts, with the help of which, at a distance of 7-10 km from our positions, the shelling was adjusted. Only at the end of 1941 did the Red Army find an antidote to the all-seeing fascist artillery, when it began to build defensive structures on the reverse slopes of the hills, out of the reach of German optics.
Quality communication
The most significant advantage of the Wehrmacht over the Red Army was high-quality communications. Guderian believed that a tank without reliable radio communication would not show even a tenth of what it was capable of.
In the Third Reich, from the beginning of 1935, the development of reliable ultra-short-wave transceivers was intensified. Thanks to the appearance in the German communications service of fundamentally new devices designed by Dr. Grube, the generals of the Wehrmacht were able to quickly manage a huge theater of operations.
For example, high-frequency telephone equipment served German tank headquarters without any interference at distances of up to one and a half thousand kilometers. That is why on June 27, 1941, in the Dubno region, Kleist's grouping of only 700 tanks was able to defeat the mechanized corps of the Red Army, which included 4,000 combat vehicles. Later, in 1944, analyzing this battle, Soviet generals bitterly admitted that if then our tanks had radio communications, the Red Army would have turned the tide of the war at the very beginning.