German Order of Battle
The military forces at the disposal of Nazi Germany reached their numerical peak during 1944. By D-Day, 157 German divisions were stationed in the Soviet Union, six in Finland, 12 in Norway, six in Denmark, nine in Germany, 21 in the Balkans, 26 in Italy and 59 in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. However, these statistics are somewhat misleading since a significant number of the divisions in the east were depleted due to the intensity of the fighting; German records indicate that the average personnel complement was at about 50% in the spring of 1944.
Read more about this topic: Normandy Landings
Famous quotes containing the words german, order and/or battle:
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”
—Victoria Gray, African American civil rights activist. As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 3, by Hay Mills (1993)
“Above the bayonets, mixed and crossed,
Men saw a gray, gigantic ghost
Receding through the battle cloud,
And heard across the tempest loud
The death cry of a nation lost!”
—Will Henry Thompson (1848–1918)