Hitler s Secret World War II Weapon: Horses
Thousands of pack animals and cavalry horses in WWII labored in the German Army, and many were killed in combat or slaughtered by starving soldiers.
Here s What You Need to Know: Horsemanship was taught at SS academies.
By 1939 the German Reich possessed 3,800,000 horses to be used in WWII German cavalry while 885,000 were initially called to the Wehrmacht as saddle, draft, and pack animals. Of these, 435,000 horses were captured from the USSR, France, and Poland. Additional horses were purchased from Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Ireland.
Klaus Christian Richter, himself a member of the 1935 German cavalry class, commented in his book
Weeks of heavy fighting produced the first Red Army victory of the war on the Eastern Front.
Here s What You Need to Know: Although Yelnya became nothing more than a footnote in the history of the war on the Eastern Front, it showed what a determined Red Army could accomplish.
The smell of victory was in the air as the forces of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center continued to drive deep into the Ukraine during the final week of June 1941. To most of the young soldiers of the army group it seemed that this would be another unstoppable blitzkrieg. Their commander, however, saw things differently.