Reichswehr

The Reichswehr was the official name of the German armed forces during the Weimar Republic and the first two years of Nazi Germany. After the First World War the Imperial German Army was dissolved, a provisional Reichswehr was formed in March 1919, and the force was officially formed on 1 January 1921 once the limits of the Treaty of Versailles had been met: a professional army of 100,000 men plus a 15,000-man navy, with no general staff, air force, submarines or heavy weapons. Although ostensibly apolitical, it acted as a state within a state and sponsored illegal paramilitary groups such as the Black Reichswehr. It kept its name until Adolf Hitler's 1935 proclamation of the restoration of military sovereignty, when it became part of the new Wehrmacht.