3rd Army (Wehrmacht)
|
3rd Army |
|
|---|---|
| active | September 1 to November 5, 1939 |
| Country |
.svg){kind=small} German Empire
|
| Armed forces | Wehrmacht |
| Armed forces | army |
| Type | army |
| Insinuation | Army Group North |
| Installation site | East Prussia |
| Second World War | attack on Poland |
| Supreme command | |
| Commander in chief | General of the artillery Georg von Küchler |
The 3rd Army / Army High Command 3 (AOK 3) was a major unit of the Army of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War . She was the high command of changing army corps and numerous special troops.
commitment
The 3rd Army was deployed on August 26, 1939 during the mobilization. Their commander in chief was the future General Field Marshal Georg von Küchler (1942–1944 Commander of Army Group North ).
At the beginning of the attack on Poland , the 3rd Army, together with Günther von Kluge's 4th Army, was part of Army Group North under Fedor von Bock . While the 4th Army had orders to take the Polish corridor and connect East Prussia with the Reich, the 3rd Army from East Prussia was to attack. One half of the 3rd Army was assigned to advance south to Modlin , to cross the river near the confluence of the Vistula and the Bug , and to take part in the attack on Warsaw . The other half was to attack on the Narew and advance towards Warsaw to encircle the retreating enemy.
With the beginning of the offensive, the right wing of the 3rd Army advanced to support the 4th Army in Graudenz , where it got into heavy fighting. Despite the German successes, the Wehrmacht leadership recognized that an enclosure of the Polish armies at the level of Warsaw was not possible due to their early withdrawal . Army Corps ( Heinz Guderian ) from the 4th Army to advance along the bow to Brest-Litovsk . The army corps crossed the Narew at Łomża and hunted in a tank attack to the operational target and on to Włodawa . From the south came the tank units of the XXII. Army Corps ( Ewald von Kleist ) from the 14th Army . This completed the encirclement of the enemy. The eastern part of Poland was occupied by Soviet troops on September 17, 1939 and a united German-Soviet victory parade was held in Brest-Litovsk.
On October 22, 1939, three weeks after the end of the invasion of Poland, the 3rd Army was disbanded; the staff was transferred as AOK 16 for use in the west to Bad Bertrich .
See also
- Schematic war organization of the Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939
- Executive power from September 1st in the Free City of Gdansk .
literature
- Corelli Barnett : Hitler's Generals . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1990, ISBN 0-297-82054-0 .
- Hellmuth G. Dahms: The History of World War II . Herbig Verlag, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-7766-1291-6 .
- Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. Volume 2. The Land Forces 1–5 . 2nd Edition. Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 1973, ISBN 3-7648-0871-3 .
Web links
- German 3rd Army. September 1, 1939 (PDF; 19 kB) Accessed September 15, 2011 (English).