As hardly anybody is posting anything anywhere on this board lately, I might as well nitpick to see if I’ve got it wrong.
It seems that Wehrmacht is used, often in this forum and invariably elsewhere as by journalists etc, to mean the German army in WWII.
My understanding is that Wehrmacht was the overall command of the three branches:
Heer = Army
Luftwaffe = Air force
Kriegsmarine = Navy
Hmm… I may be wrong but I thought The Heer was the overall armed forces (im not sue about Waffen SS) and the Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Wehrmacht and so on(?) was under the Heer.
The Heer is the army, Wehrmacht the name of the entire armed forces, like Bundeswehr today and Reichswehr before it.
My understanding is that the overall command of Germany’s armed forces, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), and the overall command of the Heer the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), at various times exercised control over the Waffen SS and that at times it fell under field command and at times just did whatever it felt like and pissed off the Heer no end*, but that it was essentially a Party rather than military arm and not formally a military branch under the Wehrmacht (OKW) or Heer (OKH).
Don’t include the W-SS into the Heer! The W-SS had been a NSDAP party organisation, like the SS itself!
Even though the party mixed their organisations with those of the state (like the police), in the end there had been the state and there had been the more powerful party organsiation.
Most obviously to show that: In the HEER, the Wehrmacht, one said e.g. ‘Herr Oberst’, and in the SS/W-SS just ‘Obersturmführer’ etc.
I think the German Army on the Eastern Front was referred to as the “Ostheer?”
Yeah, but to my knowledge not as an official name and in this case it imho also included the Luftwaffe. Ostheer literally translates to eastern army, so it’s pretty much a description of the overall position as much as a name. If you’re in a staff meeting it’s probably a matter of convenience to have a phrase to adress the entire picture on the eastern front.
There was a section in the Abwehr (Army Intelligence) which was called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East).
Wehrmacht (literally “defense force”) was the name of the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Wehrmacht Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy) and the Luftwaffe (air force). The Waffen-SS, an initially small paramilitary section of Heinrich Himmler’s Allgemeine SS that grew to nearly a million strong during World War II, was not officially part of the Wehrmacht, but subject to OKW, OKH, as well as Field Command. Thus, the Waffen-SS was, de facto, a fourth branch of the Wehrmacht.
You have on several occasions in various threads posted comments which are just lifted from Wiki etc, without attribution. As in this case:
Wehrmacht (listen) (help·info) (literally “defense force”) was the name of the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Wehrmacht Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy) and the Luftwaffe (air force). The Waffen-SS, an initially small paramilitary section of Heinrich Himmler’s Allgemeine SS that grew to nearly a million strong during World War II, was not officially part of the Wehrmacht, but subject to OKW, OKH, as well as Field Command. Thus, the Waffen-SS was, de facto, a fourth branch of the Wehrmacht.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht
Please conform to the normal standards of attribution for posts which aren’t your own.
Getting more lazy these days, reference used to be 100%, has slipped to about 90% lately, must get back to 100%
Thanks, and thanks for taking my comment as it was meant rather than as personal criticism.
Links or references are always handy for people who don’t know much about the subject as the links often lead into more detail about a topic, or may stimulate more discussion and references to other links or references.
Wehrmacht= all armed forces
Heer is just the army i think
Just to add to the confusion, OKW (Wehrmacht Headquarters) wasn’t always treated as superior to OKH (Heer Headquarters) - on more than one occasion Hitler ran the war from OKH.
And to further add to the confusion, the army on the Eastern Front was the Ostheer, and conversely, the Westheer…
Even though the party mixed their organisations with those of the state (like the police), in the end there had been the state and there had been the more powerful party organsiation.
Indeed, my dear Mr. Splinter 54. However, I think that official status of the Waffen SS represents a little bit more complicated legal issue.
Although officially “original and most important duty” of the Waffen SS was “to serve as the protector of the Führer”, in 1935 it was officially confirmed by Hitler that “in time of war the SS Verfügungstruppe will be incorporated into the Army (Wehrmacht).”
Himmler was not happy with this, and in 1936 he stated that the role of the SS was to “guarantee the security of Germany from the interior, just as the Wehrmacht guarantees the safety of the honour, the greatness and the peace of the Reich from the exterior”.
Since these two statements were clearly contradictory, Hitler was forced in 1938 to clarify the situation by ordering that “in time of national emergency the SS-VT would be used for two purposes: By the Commander-in-Chief of the army within the framework of the Army. It will then be subject exclusively to military law and instructions; politically, however, it will remain a branch of the NSDAP” – adding “at home, in accordance with my instructions, it will be under the orders of the Reichsführer SS”.
Consequently, and strictly from the legal point of view, it seems to me that the Waffen SS actually represented a formal and certified nation-state military appendage. 
On the basis of the latter quote, it all depends upon whether or not a given action was under the umbrella of a ‘time of national emergency’.
Common sense might suggest that a war fitted into that category, but as the full quote is a slippery political statement it might be unwise to apply common sense to it.
There is also the curious reservation and distinction that ‘politically, however, it will remain a branch of the NSDAP’. I doubt that a similar distinction was ever applied to the Heer etc, which leaves unresolved the question of whether the Waffen SS was primarily a military unit acting as a military unit or primarily a political unit acting militarily.
If the latter, it seems to be more an appendage of the Nazi Party than the German state which was subverted by the Nazi Party.
I do see your point, my dear Mr. Rising Sun. However, I think that certain additional elucidations will be able to clear this fairly knotty legal issue. Therefore, allow me to draw your attention to the following essentials.
First of all, previously mentioned order, issued by Adolf Hitler as the Führer and Chancellor of the Reich in August of 1938 represented an example of the so called Führererlass – kind of a executive order, or edict, provided by officially elected omnipotent Head-of-State and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, which has the force of law even without confirmation of the national legislature. For that reason, as well as due to its subsequent legal consequences regarding factual deployment of the Waffen SS, it was much, much more then a slippery political statement.
Although Hitler was under an obvious political necessity to prove to the Army that the SS would not challenge it’s right to be the state’s armed protector, the entire Waffen SS actually was integrated into the German army. As directly stated by renowned SS Gruppenführer Paul “Papa” Hausser, who was the first head of the Inspectorate of the SS Verfügungstruppe in Nuremberg… “all divisions of the Waffen SS were incorporated into the Army and fought under the command and, in the final analysis, under the responsibility of the army. I personally, in the five and a half years of the war, received orders only from the armed forces offices and agencies.”
Original statement is available here:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-20/tgmwc-20-195-09.shtml
On the other hand, highly intriguing legal validity represents the fact that members of the Waffen SS were paid directly - in accordance to their rank and years of duty - by the payment section of the German Army, that is, from the official, state-approved budget of the Wehrmacht. As far as I know members of the non-governmental organizations are never paid in such a manner.
Thanks for that elucidation.
It’s not an area I know anything about (which allows me to comment uninhibited by any constraints of knowledge :D) in detail, apart from your posts.
I’m still inclined to think that the Waffen SS was, like various other elements in Nazi Germany such as concentration camps, essentially an arm of the Party rather than of the state, regardless of the formal or administrative arrangements under which the Waffen SS and other elements operated. If the State had suitable elements, the Party would not have needed to invent them.
The perversion of the State by the Party subverting the State’s organs to the Party, such as the appalling conduct of those members of the judiciary who represented the interests and principles of the Party rather than the State, resulted in the boundaries between State and Party being blurred.
What is often laid at the feet of the German people was really actions of the Party which hijacked the German State and, when it suited the Party, fused itself with that State, while carefully maintaining its own apparatus as a state within a state.
The same confusion usually exists about the Holocaust, which invariably is regarded as part of WWII when it was a separate event springing from a different source which happened to occur during the same time, albeit greatly aided by the circumstances of the war.
These distinctions generally fall into the class of form versus substance. Even if in form they were the State, in substance they were the Party.
Yes, my dear Mr. Rising Sun, you are right – the law indeed is many paradoxes. The law must be known, although most of ordinary people are ignorant of it. The law must be certain, although it is usually written with convenient vagueness. The law must be uniform, but it classifies dissimilar things for different treatment. Law is what a reasonable man would think just. But when this is translated from the ideal to the practical, it means that the will of the dominant political group always will prevail. 
Law is nominally prerequisite of liberty, but laws always promote liberty by the exercise of authority. Law is necessary to keep the peace, but law is ialways upheld by force. Law is all the rules of government which determine our conduct in society. It forbids us to do this – it requies us to do that. But it never tells us what we ought to do, nor what would be good or wise , or even decent for us to do.
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe the Lord Chancellor sang:
The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that’s excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I , my Lords, embody the Law!
Almost a perfect verse for the start of our next thread The Rule of Law in the Third Reich. And please – don’t worry: I shall prepare the Plaidoyer.
On the other hand – and yet again strictly legally! – Waffen SS officially was a formal part of the Super-state.
Till our next meeting, my dear Mr. Rising Sun, as always – all the best!