How many people served in the Wehrmacht during World War II?

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Wehrmacht German soldiers fighting in the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa, 1941.

By the end of World War II, more than 17 million troops had served in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich.1

The distribution of these personnel across the primary branches was as follows:

Heer (Army): 13 million1
Luftwaffe (Air Force): 3 million1
Kriegsmarine (Navy): 1.5 million1

In addition to these figures, as many as 1 million men, including foreign conscripts and auxiliaries, served in the Waffen-SS. While the Wehrmacht was a conscript force, it is important to note that its leadership was fully complicit in the Nazi Party's racist agenda and the atrocities committed during the war, effectively dispelling the postwar myth of a "clean Wehrmacht" that operated independently of the regime's crimes.1