9th Army (Wehrmacht)

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9th Army

active May 15, 1940 to May 8, 1945
Country German Reich NSGerman Reich (Nazi era) German Empire
Armed forces Wehrmacht
Armed forces army
Type army
Second World War Western campaign
against the Soviet Union
Supreme command
list of Commander in chief

The 9th Army / Army High Command 9 (AOK 9) was a large 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.

Second World War

Lineup

The army was set up on May 15, 1940 by renaming the staff of the Commander-in-Chief East . The first commander in chief was Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz .

Calls

After the subordination of several previously at Western Wall inserted divisions, the 9th Army was now under the command of Colonel General Adolf Strauss , in the second phase of the campaign in the west as part of Army Group B involved. She then stayed in France for occupation purposes and was intended for the Sea Lion operation , which was later canceled . From April 1941 she was moved to Poland to take part in the campaign against the Soviet Union . For this she was subordinated to the Army Group Center .

After crossing the border, the 9th Army first fought in the Kesselschlacht near Białystok and Minsk and then advanced via Polotsk into the Velikiye Luki area. During the Battle of Moscow it covered the northern flank of Army Group Center, but had to withdraw after the onset of the Soviet counter-offensive. After Strauss had been released from his command for health reasons, General of the Armored Troop Walter Model took over command of the 9th Army on January 15, 1942 . At this time the army was engaged in heavy defensive battles in the Rzhev area , where a large front arch had formed. In the course of 1942 she had to fend off attempts at encirclement by the Red Army here several times (→ Battle of Rzhev ). The last and largest of these attempts, Operation Mars , took place in November and December 1942. In March 1943 she finally withdrew from the front arch in the "Enterprise Buffalo Movement". The Army High Command was then moved to Orel for a new purpose . From July 5, 1943, the army was deployed in Operation Citadel , the third and final summer offensive of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union; it formed the northern attack wedge. The German soldiers made slow progress due to heavy fighting. In the days between July 5 and 13, 1943, the largest tank battle in history to date raged as part of the Citadel company in the Kursk front arc, in which just over 1,000 tanks were used on the German side and several thousand tanks on the Soviet side. On July 12, 1943, Hitler ordered the offensive to be broken off. After the failure of the offensive, the 9th Army withdrew to the Panther position .

Beginning in June 1944, the army was exposed to heavy attacks from the 1st Belarusian Front in the Bobruisk area as part of the Soviet summer offensive, Operation Bagration . When General of the Panzer Troop Nikolaus von Vormann took over the command of the army on June 26th, the encirclement of the larger part of the army could no longer be prevented, so that Vormann only commanded the remnants of an army, with which he was called in July as the "Vormann group" relatively intact 2nd Army was subordinated. It was not until August that the 9th Army was re-established as a combat-ready unit through reinforcements. She then stood in defensive battles on the Vistula in the Warsaw area until the beginning of 1945 . For a time, the units used to fight the Warsaw Uprising were primarily subordinate to the SS . From December 1944 to January 1945 it belonged to the Army Group A on.

In January 1945, the Red Army's Vistula-Oder operation pushed the army back from Warsaw to the Oder . From the end of January 1945 until the end of the war she was assigned to the Vistula Army Group , where she was largely wiped out under General of the Infantry Theodor Busse in the battle of the Seelow Heights in mid-April. Remnants continued to fight in the Battle of Berlin and in the Halbe pocket until the surrender .

War crimes

During the occupation in the Rshew area from 1941–43, units of the 9th Army systematically committed crimes against the civilian population and prisoners of war; this continued with the departure of the "Buffalo Movement" company in March 1943. The 253rd Infantry Division of the Army was primarily involved in the looting and destruction of the cleared areas .

The AOK 9 for operation beginning in March 1944 along with the state police, the "collection and crossing over smuggling of about 20,000 sick and frail Russian civilians across the front in space Bobruisk ". The AOK went even further. Dieter Pohl , historian at the Institute for Contemporary History , sees a major joint responsibility of the AOK for "one of the most serious crimes of the Wehrmacht against civilians", because General Josef Harpe also ordered the forced recruitment and removal of workers for the withdrawal movement. At the same time he ordered “the evacuation of the unfit for work” in order to concentrate them in camps near Osaritschi . On the morning of March 12, 1944, the registration of civilians began in all divisions; the participation of the 35th Infantry Division (ID), the 36th ID , 110th ID , 129th ID , 134th ID , 296th ID , the 5th and the 20th Panzer Divisions is documented . In the Osaritschi camp, 9,000 civilians died of starvation, disease and shootings by the 35th Infantry Division under the 9th Army .

Commander in chief

structure

Subordinate army troops

  • Army News Regiment 511
  • Army Supply Leader 531
  • Higher Artillery Command 307 (from 1942)
  • Commander Rear Army Area 582 (until 1943)
  • Commander Rear Army Area 532 (from 1943)

Subordinate army corps

June 9, 1940
June 5, 1941
December 4, 1941
May 11, 1942
December 1, 1942
July 7, 1943
December 3, 1943
June 15, 1944
  • XXXV. Army Corps
  • XXXXI. Panzer Corps
  • LV. Army Corps
November 24, 1944
March 1, 1945

See also

literature

  • Günter Wegmann, Ed .: Formation history and staffing of the German armed forces 1815–1990 . Biblioverlag Osnabrück, Part I, Vol. 1 Wegner, Günter, The Higher Command Authorities, 1990, ISBN 3-7648-1780-1 .
  • Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. Volume 3: The Land Forces 6-14 . 2nd Edition. Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 1974, ISBN 3-7648-0942-6 .
  • Rolf Hinze: Eastern Front Drama 1944 - Army Group Center retreat fights , Motorbuchverlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-613-01138-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Richard Lakowski: Seelow 1945: The decisive battle on the Oder. ES Mittler & Sohn , Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8132-0911-2 .
  2. ↑ Paul Kohl: I am amazed that I am still alive: Soviet eyewitnesses report. Gütersloh 1990, ISBN 3-579-02169-9 , pp. 156-165 .
  3. ↑ Christoph Rass: "Human Material ". German soldiers on the Eastern Front. Interior views of an infantry division 1939–1945 (= War in History. Volume 17, also dissertation at RWTH Aachen 2001). Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2003, ISBN 3-506-74486-0 ), p. 210 (there Rass expressly refers to Paul Kohl's illustration) and P. 379f. (Here Rass focuses on the role of the 253rd Infantry Division belonging to the 6th Army in the plundering and destruction of the cleared areas).
  4. ↑ Dieter Pohl: The Rule of the Wehrmacht: German Military Occupation and Local Population in the Soviet Union 1941–1944 . Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-486-58065-5 , p. 328.
  5. ↑ Christoph Rass: "Human Material ". German soldiers on the Eastern Front. Interior views of an infantry division 1939–1945 Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2003, p. 395.
  6. ^ Dieter Pohl: Die Herrschaft der Wehrmacht , p. 328 f .; see. also: Hans Heinrich Nolte : Osarici 1944 . In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): Places of horror. Crimes in World War II. Primus, Darmstadt 2003, pp. 186-194.

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