I understand this is probably a hard question to answer and depends on a lot of factors. The reason I ask and what I'm trying to understand is I have read various accounts of Germans on the Eastern front and even as early as December 1941 it seems like the Germans were struggling for supplies and food.
Lots of the memories are packed with them being in a house and the Russians sneaking up to the village and them being trapped inside the house etc.
Or being overran and 12 of them running back to the next village and setting up sentry positions.
I used to assume that a division would all be together. Able to cover each other. I expected a village to have thousands of men to defend and hold the perimeter.
But the accounts I'm reading make it seem like everything is very spread out. That you have maybe 20 Germans to a village.
Would a regiment be spread out over a vast area or would it be more likely to be closely together?
The picture painted by the books I have read is that apart from major battles at stalingrad or kursk etc. A German on the front line at the Eastern front is likely to have found themselves very exposed. Maybe 20 of so men covering a ridge with miles to the nearest friendly troops?
I've written about this several times before but I can't find the older posts, anyway, here's a reply from 9 months ago. I also highly recommend this post by /u/RoadRash2TheSequel which covers more about how much frontage a division could cover in offensive vs defensive operations (which what you might expect a division to do after it has been determined what the enemy is doing as per my post). Put very very simply, it depends on what the unit is doing. A division can cover hundreds of kilometers while simply patroling or guarding a relatively unimportant stretch of terrain down to only a few thousand meters when attacking an objective.