At the height of its power, how big was the German army in WW2?

by KookyJawn
  1. How many troops did they have at one time? You know, at its peak.

  2. When did it peak? (what year?)

  3. How big was the armed SS?

  4. How many tanks, planes, and ships did Germany have? If you can go into more detail, how many of each type? It doesn't have to be the specific type of plane, tank, or ship but just like the category (light tank, medium tank, tanker, heavy tank, destroyer, orpedo boats, submarine, fighter, bomber, etc.)

ChristianMunich

1&2) The Wehrmacht peaked around 1943 and 1944 with having about 12 million people in 1944. This includes auxiliary personnel aswell. Then it had a drop in 1945 and finally the Wehrmacht surrendered mid 45. Frontline strenght ( Heer/Army) of the Wehrmacht was pretty consistent over the course of the war with about 4 million soldiers. Obviously the numbers decreased on different fronts when new allies entered the war. First with the opening of the Italian Campaign then with Normandy.

3) The Waffen SS was growing throughout the war and had its peak in 1945. The reason for this is that only a fraction of the Waffen SS units was participating in direct combat with the allies most of the higher numbered divisions were used for occupational duties and to fight partisans. Also the requirements were dropped to open up new potential manpower reserves in occupied countries or allied and neutral territories. There is considerable dispute about the numbers regarding the Waffen-SS but its safe to assume that the Waffen-SS formations peaked around 600.000 men

4) Germany produced about 50.000 tanks and Stug ( Sturmgeschütz, turretless self propelled guns and tank hunters and assault guns.

Of these were were about 2.000 TigerI & Tiger II and about 6.000 Panthers, all three types should be classified as "heavy" in terms of World War II

About 14.500 of these were the medium tanks Panzer III & Panzer IV or Panzer 38. The Panzer IV was the most nummerous German tank.

About 4-5 thousand obsolete tanks which hardly saw combat and were phased out or used for training et cetera. Panzer I & Panzer II.

These rest were various assault guns and self propelled guns. With the Stug III being the most numerous with about ~10.5000

All in all the Wehrmacht had "only" ~23.000 combat vehicle which would be classified as tanks. (Excluding PanzerI & II )

KookyJawn

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