The Reichswehr's plan for expansion and rearmament centered around ensuring that the 100000 man army was fully trained and that Germany exploited any loopholes or lax enforcement of the Versailles Treaty. Given its small size, the interwar Reichswehr could afford to be highly selective in its recruits. Although the Versailles Treaty limited the number of officers, the Truppenamt (a shadow general staff) ensured that the ranks had a massive number of NCOs, which the Treaty did not prohibit. It operated under the aegis of Hans von Seeckt for most of the Weimar period. Von Seeckt instituted a training regime which incorporated many of the lessons of the last war. For example, the Reichswehr built many of its infantry formations around portable machine gun troops, the same type that found success in the late war Stoßtruppen. Officers and NCOs in the Reichswehr often thought and trained for the duties and responsibilities one or two grades above them, so that when expansion came, the German army would not lack for trained officers.

The Reichswehr also used a variety of means to evade the strictures of the Versailles Treaty. They fostered and maintained a Security Police of about 70000 men, often recruited from the paramilitary Freikorps. In order to develop experience with equipment forbidden by Versailles (namely aircraft and tanks), Reichswehr officers developed a clandestine relationship with the USSR. The state airline Lufthansa was also something of a shadow organization to get officers experienced with flying. Finally, German military advisers were active in China to gain direct experience with military operations and put theory into practice.

To sum up, the Weimar era Reichswehr developed a solid foundation for a quick expansion. They kept this readiness throughout the entirety of the Republic. Hitler however expanded the Germany army far beyond anything von Seeckt or the Reichswehr planned. There is a peculiar irony in this. The Reichswehr at its inception had two competing answers to how it would respond to Versailles. Competing with von Seeckt's vision of a professional shadow army was a national Volksarmee of militias and paramilitaries. Eventually the professionals won out, but Hitler's expansion rekindled ideas of a national army based on conscription. The numbers of men under arms was far in excess for what von Seeckt and the Truppenamt planned for. Although the preparation of the Reichswehr paid dividends, the swift expansion often meant the Wehrmacht still suffered from a shortage of officers and its training regime suffered accordingly. Upper level strategy and logistics tended to be downplayed in von Seeckt's formulas since it was so focused upon expansion. The interference of Hitler and the politicization of the army only compounded the poverty of thinking on logistics and strategy.

Sources

Corum, James S. The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans Von Seeckt and German Military Reform. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Murray, Williamson, and Allan Reed Millett. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.