Quick Disclaimer: the future additions discussed in this dev diary, as ever, are a work in progress and not guaranteed to make it in to final release.
Hi all, I’m Jamor, and my day job is project lead on Stellaris, the contemporary of @KimchiViking on the HOI team. I hope you'll enjoy my guest Dev Diary while the office shuts down for a bit of a holiday break. I work on a space game, but like a lot of Paradoxians, for most of my conscious life I’ve been a massive history nerd. It’s why I’ve been a fan of this company for ten years, and why I work here now. The vast, nuanced complexity of the Second World War, in which both my grandfathers served (one with I Canadian Corps, the other in the RCN), has always particularly fascinated me. I got my history degree in 2005 and am constantly amazed that there are still new things to learn every day about the biggest human event ever. Emotionally and intellectually I am obsessed with it. Basically I got a fever, and the only prescription is more Sturmgeschütz.
So, with that background, when I heard that HOI was implementing a more detailed divisional naming scheme, I jumped at the chance to help out. I’m massively interested in orders of battle and KStN (Kriegsstärkenachweise, the German equivalent of a military table of organization and equipment...see http://www.wwiidaybyday.com/kstn/kstnmain.htm or http://www.niehorster.org/000_admin/000oob.htm for an example of what this means). When I play games like these, I love to compare the exploits of units in the game to their famous real-world counterparts, and in so doing create a really compelling internal narrative for myself. Thus, it only seemed natural to turn my hand to fine-tuning the German list, largely inherited from previous HOI titles, with as much of the weird historical idiosyncrasies represented as possible. In many ways Germany is the most unique and frankly bizarre major combatant of the war, and I wanted a name list that reflects that.
First, some background: A popular view of the German armed forces in WW2 is one of a massive, uniform, well-drilled machine. The reality, for those who study in a more than casual way, is that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, far from being the monolithic mechanized juggernaut of propaganda, was in fact a vast cobbled-together jumble of military improvisations. There exists a wide range of views among people with an interest in the period, from the full Wehraboo extreme that seems to hold the belief that every German soldier was a 2 meter blonde stereotype with an MP40 and a personal halftrack, who could only be defeated by crushing numerical superiority, to the opposite pole which maintains that they were generally rather bad at organizing and fighting, and apparently won a continental hegemony which they held against almost the entire industrialized world for six years only by some odd fluke of history. Both are fanciful distortions that have more root in people's emotional needs than in fact, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's difficult to maintain objectivity about a conflict both so recent and so emotionally charged. The reality is that due to the way they were build and the conditions they were forced to operate in, German units were incredibly heterogenous in composition. Some units like Großdeutschland, Das Reich, 7. Flieger-Division, etc, were of legendarily high fighting power, while others wearing almost the same uniform were catastrophically bad.
The German war production system, scattered all over occupied Europe and often staffed by unenthusiastic or outright slave labour, was a virtual medieval cottage industry with the added complication of day and night bombardment from the air. Look at the “uniformity” of this selection of Feldbluse from a friend’s collection:
With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that the organizational history of German divisions is similarly complex. The background to all of it comes from the interwar army of the Reichswehr, limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 men. While the treaty was formally repudiated and the formation of the Wehrmacht announced in 1935, Germany had been building up its armed forces in secret well before that date. A number of divisional equivalents existed using cover names that implied they were benign training/depot-type formations. When Versailles was formally rejected, these were renamed to more accurately reflect their function: for example, Artillerieführer IV in Dresden became the staff of the new 4. Infanterie-Division. The immediate objective was to expand the army to 36 divisions organized in 12 army corps, one for each Wehrkreis (military recruitment district) in the Reich at that time. For the first while, the raising of new divisions proceeded in a fairly logical way, with each new infantry division getting a consecutive number.
So far, so good, right? Building of the first fifty or so divisions proceeded in a fairly regular, consecutive way.
Then things start to go plain crazy.
What’s happening here? When I started to dig in to the unit list, using sources such as Nafziger, Niehorster, Tessin, etc, I found literally hundreds of cases where divisions were given a number completely out of sequence with the others. For example, 82. Infanterie-Division was a 6. Welle (sixth mobilization wave) unit raised using newly seized Czech small arms and artillery in December 1939, while the 253. Infanterie-Division was formed fully four months earlier as part of the 4. Welle, part of the general call-up of reservists for the Polish campaign.
Why did they do this? Basically, the Wehrkreis would be issued the orders to raise a certain number of divisions and would be assigned a block of numbers for them. After the first 50 or so divisions there was almost no effort to make these numbers consecutive with units already built. Although they just barely managed to avoid duplicating divisional numbers, the Germans were not at all concerned to have a list that skipped numbers, put larger ones in front of smaller ones in the raising order, etc. Sometimes a block of units would be formally ordered raised on the same date, but due to vagaries of available supply and manpower, a higher numbered one would start actually forming before a lower one in the same series. In the case of the third and fourth mobilization wave divisions, it might have been a conscious decision to use high numbers since these formations of activated Kriegsdauer (for the war’s duration) reservists were not intended to be permanent, and they didn’t want to take a lower divisional number that might be earmarked for a unit of the future peacetime permanent standing army. It’s also possible they felt the chaotic numbering scheme would confuse Allied intelligence as to the true extent of German warmaking potential. Whatever the causes, it did lead me to an interesting conclusion: rather than putting them simply in numerical order as had been done in previous HOI titles, the units in the German name list should be ordered by the date they were formed historically. That’s why you’ll see crazy things like 41. Infanterie-Division, a unit cobbled together from fortress and garrison units in Croatia in January 1945 using a previously unused number, put near the end of the name list after hundreds of units with higher numbers. The reason is the chaotic and improvised way the Germans raised and sustained their forces in WW2. This wonderful, perplexing chaos is part of what makes the Germans so fascinating to study, even if it’s not really an ideal way to run a war.
Of course, I know this may be confusing and unsatisfying for some people not as concerned with the minutia of period organizational history as I; that’s why we of course made it a priority to be able to turn this naming scheme off if you don’t like it. I’m sure the poor staff planners at OKW wished they could do the same during the real war.
Here’s some choices and discoveries I made redoing the biggest part of the unit list, the infantry divisions:
A big thing you have to account for with any historical German name list is the way numerous units changed their names, sometimes multiple times. In order to handle this, I made a “Late/Alternate Infantry Divisions” name list. This includes things like 22. and 91. (Luftlande) IDs, normal infantry units that were converted to an air-portable role with lighter artillery, etc. Even though in the real war both units spent their lives fighting entirely as conventional infantry, it was a cool little touch that I wanted to be reflected. 44. Infanterie-Division was originally Austrian, brought in to the Heer via the 1938 Anschluss, and after its destruction at Stalingrad it was rebuilt with the honourific title “Hoch- und Deutschmeister” reflecting the Hapsburg imperial past. Also, despite innumerable infantry divisions with hundreds of successful assaults to their name, a single one, the 78th, was designated a “Sturm-Division” in 1943 for mysterious Teutonic reasons. All of these, despite being 100% conventional infantry in every respect, have characterful names and histories and I felt they must be available in the game for those who are in to that. A thing we did was link their numbers to the infantry list, so you won’t have both a 78. Infanterie-Division and a 78. Sturm-Division at the same time. The late war Volksgrenadier Divisions in the Alt list work in the same way. Here you can see greyed out names that will not be used, as that division is already deployed using the regular infantry name list:
Motorized Infantry units started the war as part of the infantry inspectorate, and as such were part of the same numbering order for their regiments and divisions as the leg units. Most of them started as regular foot marching infantry before being upgraded to motorized status. In previous versions of HOI, you could have both 29. Infanterie-Division and 29. Infanterie-Division (mot.) at the same time, even though they were in fact the same division, just at different points in its life. By linking the motorized and mechanized unit lists to the infantry numbers, we will prevent this. I did a bit of adjusting here as well: while Großdeutschland did certainly exist before 90. ID (mot.), it comes later in the name list because it was only upgraded to a full division, the scale of units presented in the game, on 16. May 1942. Prior to that it was the size of a strong regiment or brigade. Of course, if you really want, you can act like wartime Germany and make a single mini-division with a ton of support companies of your own and call it “GD”, because that sort of costly one-off high prestige unit seemed to be a WW2 German specialty. The tools are in your hands to play it your way.
While the prewar aim of armoured theorists was a fully mechanized division with cross-country mobility for all arms, in reality the equipment situation in Germany meant that the name switch from Infanterie (mot.) (Schützen for the motorized infantry organic to the Panzer Divisions) to the new title "Panzergrenadier" was largely symbolic. The most typical case was only one out of the four to six Panzergrenadier battalions in a Panzer Division being mounted on halftracks, along with possibly elements of the engineer and reconnaissance battalions.The vast majority of "mechanized" infantry rode to battle in soft-skinned trucks and dismounted to fight for the duration of the war. However, if you can leverage your resources and production in such a way to fulfill Guderian's dream of a fully tracked division, go for it. I certainly know how I'd rather be delivered to work in a commuter environment filled with flying shards of metal. Having the name lists selectable means you can switch the motorized template to the Panzergrenadier namelist in 1942/43, keep the same basic divisional structure, and duplicate history. Or not, as you prefer.
Certain compromises had to be made here: I put Panzergrenadier Division “GD” and Brandenburg in the Panzergrenadier list, even though with a full armoured regiment in their organization they were closer in actual strength to a Panzer Division. We felt that having a few units called “Panzergrenadier” due to weird historical quirks being put in the armoured name list would massively confuse people. Again, the tools to rename are yours, if you choose.
Mountain troops used the infantry numbering list for their regiments, but unlike motorized units, got their own series of divisional numbers. For this list, I was super happy to get the one-off, rather strange 1. Ski-Jäger-Division in at long last. The basic mentality here is that mountain troops are light infantry specialized at operating in high and cold places, so the most logical place for this unique division, much like the Gebirgs units that served up in Lappland with nary a mountain in sight, was in the mountaineers list.
Marines presented a very interesting conundrum. WW2 Germany, as a continental power for whom the navy was always a secondary arm of service, never bothered to produce a large, dedicated assault landing force equivalent to the US Marines or the Japanese SNLF. There were some small naval landing units called "Seebataillone" in imperial times, but with the loss of Germany's overseas colonial possessions these passed out of use. However, we do give the player the tools to make alternative, ahistorical choices and have German marines in the game if they want. Previously, to handle this, we had used the names of the small number of Marine-Infanterie-Divisions that existed. However, historically, these were nothing like a naval forced entry unit with landing craft, naval gunnery support, etc: they were ad hoc late war emergency ground combat units composed of shore duty sailors.
As such, I felt their use in the marine name list was incorrect. I moved them to the end of the infantry list, and tried to create a historically plausible-sounding title for this class of unit, should the player decide to invest in it:
The story of German airborne troops is of great personal interest to me, so I put a lot of thought and love in to that part of the list. Because it was a very small arm of service (~10 divisions, about 230,000 men), it was also way less chaotic in its naming scheme than the other types. One immediate problem was the very first name on the list: 1. Fallschirm-Jäger-Division. This division which achieved such fame at Ortona and Cassino actually started its life as 7. Flieger-Division, under which name it fought in Norway, the Low Countries, Corinth Canal, Crete, and the east. It was renamed during the massive expansion of the parachute arm in 1942-43, which meant that a new numbering scheme had to be adopted as there was now more than one airborne division. However, to give an alternate name list for parachute troops with only one entry was judged to be cluttering up the interface too much, so I had to go with 1. FJD even though it only acquired this title in April 1943 after a very eventful war using its original name. At the very least, I put it first in the list so it is raised right away, rather than in the historical position where it was only renamed thus after the official formation of 2. Fallschirm-Division.
I also considered the rather more radical step of making all of the parachute divisions after the fourth actually part of the infantry list; the reasoning for this is that although the first four divisions raised had a quite high percentage of trained jumpers, the latter ones were titled “Fallschirmjäger” more for reasons of prestige and morale than because they had any real airborne capability. Basically, due to the disastrous strategic situation from 43 onward, the opportunity to give the men in these units jump training constantly dwindled, but the daring mystique attached to the FJ title was used to bolster the morale of new units destined entirely for conventional infantry use. However, in the end we ended up moving away from this as the player may create entirely different situations in game than was historical, and they may choose to have a larger than life parachute arm which the name list should support.
The garrison list got the most massive changes: entire swathes of non-combat training/holding units that had no recorded combat or occupation service history were deleted. This includes outfits that spent their whole lives at depots inside Germany, were only used to train and hold recruits before forwarding them to field units, etc. In their place came a ton of Divisionsstab z.b.V., Sicherungs, Küsten-Abwehr-Infanterie, Feldausbildungs, and Reserve Divisions that had some recorded history of garrison duty in occupied territory or being drawn in to the fighting as the front line came closer. These all got put in, in the order they were raised, which involved a ton of cross-checking across multiple divisional type lists. I enjoyed it, though, because I’m not normal:
Also, I’m proud to announce the HOI debut of the leichte-Division, a small series of early war 'light' armoured divisions raised as an attempt by the cavalry branch to remain relevant in modern war. With one armoured battalion and a single truck/motorcycle-mounted "cavalry rifle" brigade on strength, they were found to be too light to fight after Poland and converted in to full Panzer Divisions. I linked their numbers to the Panzer Division number they got when upgraded in this way, so you won’t have ahistorical cases where 1. leichte-Division exists at the same time as 6. Panzer.
Panzer Divisions, as you’d expect, got the full treatment. I deleted Panzer Division Kurmark because it was an erroneous description of Panzergrenadier Division Kurmark in some postwar literature. Similarly, Panzer Division Kempf got the axe because it was basically an unusually large Kampfgruppe with Heer tanks and SS infantry, raised for the Polish campaign and disbanded right after to form 10. Panzer. Tatra, Jüterbog and Schlesien went in the bin because they were training units that did not see service in the line, and Norwegen depends on a German occupation of Norway that may not occur every game. Plus, it was no more than a brigade in size despite the grandiose name, so yeah, so long. I had to settle on a single representative name for the Hermann Göring Division despite it changing titles half a dozen times, to avoid another alt list with one entry. Sadly there was no way to reflect units like 1. Kavallerie becoming 24. Panzer, 13. Panzer becoming Panzer Division Feldherrnhalle 2, etc, due to the same limitation. You can rename them at the conversion dates, though. I probably will because I clearly know how to party on a Friday night.
Then came the SS. This is an interesting case because we wanted to support spawning those by event (to be confirmed, this was written while dev work was still ongoing), so they shouldn’t be part of the normal lists. Also, in certain alternate history gameplay paths with a non-fascist Germany, the existence of the Waffen-SS would be highly anachronistic, so we couldn’t just integrate it in to the general name lists. Instead, what we did was produce a single SS name list with all 38 divisions raised or planned, of all types (Panzer, Panzergrenadier, Mountain, Cavalry, etc). The divisional types were removed from their names, so it’s just SS-Division “Das Reich”, etc, the idea being that you can raise the SS divisions using whatever template you like, including ahistorical choices. If you want to build the “Totenkopf” division with a airborne or garrison template, go wild. This also allows you to have both highly elite, lavishly equipped "classic" SS divisions like the Leibstandarte, as well as the scandalously bad/outright mutinous fiasco divisions like Skanderbeg, by using different divisional templates in whatever way you like. Here again the limitations on bloating the name list for single odd units came in to play: “Das Reich” existed with no less than SIX alternate names during the war, starting as the SS-Verfügungstruppe. I tried to settle on the one that felt most representative and recognizable to enthusiasts of the time period.
And now, the most sweeping and dramatic addition of all: when we got the idea to support a monarchist revival playthrough, we immediately realized that a ton of units like the entire Waffen-SS, Feldherrnhalle, Führer-Begleit, etc, would have no place in that world. We decided it would also be super interesting to have a naming scheme that referenced the old imperial past, from WWI and before.
So, I dug up a list of literally all the regiments in the Kaiser’s army, with their grandiose sounding names referencing their state of origin and honourary colonels in the European nobility, and converted them en masse to infantry divisions for the monarchist list. I took their Imperial regimental number, converted that to a divisional number (sadly the state/provincial numbers they kept for traditional reasons, ie, ‘2. Wurttemburgisches’, had to go), and then added the Imperial honour titles they had. Thus, “Infanterie-Regiment Großherzog Friedrich Franz II von Mecklenburg-Schwerin (4. Brandenburgisches) Nr. 24” becomes “24. Division “Großherzog Friedrich Franz II von Mecklenburg-Schwerin”.
These names have such old world, Imperial character, I felt it would be a massive waste of free immersion opportunities not to use them. I mean, come on, just look at this glorious monstrosity:
Surely the grand champion of the monarchist divisional name list must be "13. Kgl. Bayer.-Division 'Franz Josef I., Kaiser von Österreich und Apostolischer König von Ungarn'" (arrived fashionably late for this screenshot). If I can’t have a 13th Royal Bavarian Division ‘Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary’, the filthy democratic mob rule populists have already won.
Speaking of Bavarians, they alone in Imperial Germany retained their own regimental and numbering scheme for field use despite serving in the Prussian-dominated national army. So, there would be both a 7th infantry division and a 7th Royal Bavarian infantry division. To ensure the largest non-Prussian component of the Empire has their units show up somewhere other than the end of the list, I inserted them in a block after about a hundred entries representing all the other states of Germany. Altogether you have over 200 Imperial infantry divisions with some of the most glorious unit names anywhere. I’m so happy with it in all its anachronistic splendor.
Then, having gone this far, I figured I might as well go full Fin de Siecle and take the guards and line regiments of cavalry...dragoons, hussars, cuirassiers, uhlans, the whole flamboyant, almost Napoleonic array of them, and produce a mobile divisions list in the same way. So, yes, you can have an armoured division named 38. Leib-Husaren-Division 'Königin Viktoria von Preußen' and rock out however you want with that.
So hey, as you can see, we are pretty massive nerds over here and we always try to strike the best balance between historical fidelity and something that is actually playable as a video game. We hope this addition adds a bit of extra historical flavour for those, like me, who love to mentally time travel while playing these kind of games. Feel free to hit me up with any questions you may have.
Hi all, I’m Jamor, and my day job is project lead on Stellaris, the contemporary of @KimchiViking on the HOI team. I hope you'll enjoy my guest Dev Diary while the office shuts down for a bit of a holiday break. I work on a space game, but like a lot of Paradoxians, for most of my conscious life I’ve been a massive history nerd. It’s why I’ve been a fan of this company for ten years, and why I work here now. The vast, nuanced complexity of the Second World War, in which both my grandfathers served (one with I Canadian Corps, the other in the RCN), has always particularly fascinated me. I got my history degree in 2005 and am constantly amazed that there are still new things to learn every day about the biggest human event ever. Emotionally and intellectually I am obsessed with it. Basically I got a fever, and the only prescription is more Sturmgeschütz.
So, with that background, when I heard that HOI was implementing a more detailed divisional naming scheme, I jumped at the chance to help out. I’m massively interested in orders of battle and KStN (Kriegsstärkenachweise, the German equivalent of a military table of organization and equipment...see http://www.wwiidaybyday.com/kstn/kstnmain.htm or http://www.niehorster.org/000_admin/000oob.htm for an example of what this means). When I play games like these, I love to compare the exploits of units in the game to their famous real-world counterparts, and in so doing create a really compelling internal narrative for myself. Thus, it only seemed natural to turn my hand to fine-tuning the German list, largely inherited from previous HOI titles, with as much of the weird historical idiosyncrasies represented as possible. In many ways Germany is the most unique and frankly bizarre major combatant of the war, and I wanted a name list that reflects that.
First, some background: A popular view of the German armed forces in WW2 is one of a massive, uniform, well-drilled machine. The reality, for those who study in a more than casual way, is that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, far from being the monolithic mechanized juggernaut of propaganda, was in fact a vast cobbled-together jumble of military improvisations. There exists a wide range of views among people with an interest in the period, from the full Wehraboo extreme that seems to hold the belief that every German soldier was a 2 meter blonde stereotype with an MP40 and a personal halftrack, who could only be defeated by crushing numerical superiority, to the opposite pole which maintains that they were generally rather bad at organizing and fighting, and apparently won a continental hegemony which they held against almost the entire industrialized world for six years only by some odd fluke of history. Both are fanciful distortions that have more root in people's emotional needs than in fact, and the truth is somewhere in the middle. It's difficult to maintain objectivity about a conflict both so recent and so emotionally charged. The reality is that due to the way they were build and the conditions they were forced to operate in, German units were incredibly heterogenous in composition. Some units like Großdeutschland, Das Reich, 7. Flieger-Division, etc, were of legendarily high fighting power, while others wearing almost the same uniform were catastrophically bad.
Yes, the Ritterkreuzträger and the 40-something Obergefreiter in a Sicherungs-Regiment on occupation duty both make 35RM a month.
The German war production system, scattered all over occupied Europe and often staffed by unenthusiastic or outright slave labour, was a virtual medieval cottage industry with the added complication of day and night bombardment from the air. Look at the “uniformity” of this selection of Feldbluse from a friend’s collection:
M36, M40, M42, M44, converted Waffenrock, Dutch conversion, company tailor alterations, officer's private purchase Gabardine, Italian wool, early, mid, and late type insignia...the menagerie is endless.
Forced to massively expand their forces to deal with the demands of explosive prewar mobilization and then the necessity of controlling the continent-wide empire they had suddenly acquired, the Germans were obliged to use a wild array of captured equipment, introducing chaos in to their supply and maintenance systems in a way the Allies would never have tolerated. Take this example: one of the new Panzer Divisions raised after the French campaign (by the simple expedient of reducing the panzer regiments per division from two to one, and doubling the infantry) had more than 40 (!) different makes of trucks. One can well imagine the challenges this presented the divisional workshops trying to keep all of these running in field conditions.
With all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that the organizational history of German divisions is similarly complex. The background to all of it comes from the interwar army of the Reichswehr, limited by the Treaty of Versailles to 100,000 men. While the treaty was formally repudiated and the formation of the Wehrmacht announced in 1935, Germany had been building up its armed forces in secret well before that date. A number of divisional equivalents existed using cover names that implied they were benign training/depot-type formations. When Versailles was formally rejected, these were renamed to more accurately reflect their function: for example, Artillerieführer IV in Dresden became the staff of the new 4. Infanterie-Division. The immediate objective was to expand the army to 36 divisions organized in 12 army corps, one for each Wehrkreis (military recruitment district) in the Reich at that time. For the first while, the raising of new divisions proceeded in a fairly logical way, with each new infantry division getting a consecutive number.
So far, so good, right? Building of the first fifty or so divisions proceeded in a fairly regular, consecutive way.
Then things start to go plain crazy.
Apparently the Ersatzheer didn't lead the class in third year math.
What’s happening here? When I started to dig in to the unit list, using sources such as Nafziger, Niehorster, Tessin, etc, I found literally hundreds of cases where divisions were given a number completely out of sequence with the others. For example, 82. Infanterie-Division was a 6. Welle (sixth mobilization wave) unit raised using newly seized Czech small arms and artillery in December 1939, while the 253. Infanterie-Division was formed fully four months earlier as part of the 4. Welle, part of the general call-up of reservists for the Polish campaign.
Why did they do this? Basically, the Wehrkreis would be issued the orders to raise a certain number of divisions and would be assigned a block of numbers for them. After the first 50 or so divisions there was almost no effort to make these numbers consecutive with units already built. Although they just barely managed to avoid duplicating divisional numbers, the Germans were not at all concerned to have a list that skipped numbers, put larger ones in front of smaller ones in the raising order, etc. Sometimes a block of units would be formally ordered raised on the same date, but due to vagaries of available supply and manpower, a higher numbered one would start actually forming before a lower one in the same series. In the case of the third and fourth mobilization wave divisions, it might have been a conscious decision to use high numbers since these formations of activated Kriegsdauer (for the war’s duration) reservists were not intended to be permanent, and they didn’t want to take a lower divisional number that might be earmarked for a unit of the future peacetime permanent standing army. It’s also possible they felt the chaotic numbering scheme would confuse Allied intelligence as to the true extent of German warmaking potential. Whatever the causes, it did lead me to an interesting conclusion: rather than putting them simply in numerical order as had been done in previous HOI titles, the units in the German name list should be ordered by the date they were formed historically. That’s why you’ll see crazy things like 41. Infanterie-Division, a unit cobbled together from fortress and garrison units in Croatia in January 1945 using a previously unused number, put near the end of the name list after hundreds of units with higher numbers. The reason is the chaotic and improvised way the Germans raised and sustained their forces in WW2. This wonderful, perplexing chaos is part of what makes the Germans so fascinating to study, even if it’s not really an ideal way to run a war.
Of course, I know this may be confusing and unsatisfying for some people not as concerned with the minutia of period organizational history as I; that’s why we of course made it a priority to be able to turn this naming scheme off if you don’t like it. I’m sure the poor staff planners at OKW wished they could do the same during the real war.
Here’s some choices and discoveries I made redoing the biggest part of the unit list, the infantry divisions:
- Included the previously omitted leichte-Infanterie Divisions, small two-regiment units with reduced artillery and divisional services, intended to fight in rough terrain but not at the level of full mountain troops. These have an alternate name list for when they became known as Jäger divisions shortly after.
- Put the sad, lonely story of the Luftwaffen-Feld-Divisions in to HOI at last: this series of 20 infantry divisions was raised from surplus Luftwaffe ground crew to meet the crisis of the first winter in the east. In any logical military system they would have been transferred to the army and retrained for land fighting, but in the tortured quasi-feudal atmosphere of the Third Reich, with Hitler’s cronies constantly battling each other for power and influence, Göring refused to countenance any move that would take men off the Luftwaffe payroll. So, these poorly equipped, almost untrained airfield, flak, and maintenance personnel went in to the line, led by air force officers with little notion of infantry combat, and paid the predictable price. Most of these units were destroyed within a year, and the survivors eventually folded in to the Heer. There were 20 divisions like this, amounting to hundreds of thousands of men, and now they are finally in HOI.
- Some 1943 infantry divisions were raised as “Grenadier Divisions”: it was felt by referencing the elite infantry of the army of Frederick the Great, it would be beneficial for morale. They were organized on a “many weapons, few men” basis in which each rifle squad lost a man, regiments went from three battalions to two, but newer, heavier weapons like the 12cm GrW 42 heavy mortar were brought in to try to compensate for the manpower shortage. This name change lasted only a few months before they were retitled “Volksgrenadier”, but they are in the base name list with the names they had on foundation. You can rename them with the alternate name list that I’ll describe shortly.
- I removed units whose existence is predicated upon certain historical events that might not occur in game, such as 162. (Turk.) Infanterie-Division, that depends on a German occupation of large areas of the Caucasus, or the 250. ID (Division Azul), dependent upon a Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War. Sturm-Division-Rhodos got the same axe despite its theatrical name. The principle here is to have maximum fidelity with real history that is consistent with supporting branching paths and alternate history playthroughs.
- “Shadow” Divisions that were used as holding depots for recruits then either renumbered for the field army, or disbanded, were removed. Landesschützen, training and depot divisions with no recorded combat or antipartisan history were removed from the list. Also divisional sized Kampfgruppe like Division von Broich were removed as they depend on certain historical emergencies not guaranteed to be replicated in every playthrough.
A big thing you have to account for with any historical German name list is the way numerous units changed their names, sometimes multiple times. In order to handle this, I made a “Late/Alternate Infantry Divisions” name list. This includes things like 22. and 91. (Luftlande) IDs, normal infantry units that were converted to an air-portable role with lighter artillery, etc. Even though in the real war both units spent their lives fighting entirely as conventional infantry, it was a cool little touch that I wanted to be reflected. 44. Infanterie-Division was originally Austrian, brought in to the Heer via the 1938 Anschluss, and after its destruction at Stalingrad it was rebuilt with the honourific title “Hoch- und Deutschmeister” reflecting the Hapsburg imperial past. Also, despite innumerable infantry divisions with hundreds of successful assaults to their name, a single one, the 78th, was designated a “Sturm-Division” in 1943 for mysterious Teutonic reasons. All of these, despite being 100% conventional infantry in every respect, have characterful names and histories and I felt they must be available in the game for those who are in to that. A thing we did was link their numbers to the infantry list, so you won’t have both a 78. Infanterie-Division and a 78. Sturm-Division at the same time. The late war Volksgrenadier Divisions in the Alt list work in the same way. Here you can see greyed out names that will not be used, as that division is already deployed using the regular infantry name list:
Motorized Infantry units started the war as part of the infantry inspectorate, and as such were part of the same numbering order for their regiments and divisions as the leg units. Most of them started as regular foot marching infantry before being upgraded to motorized status. In previous versions of HOI, you could have both 29. Infanterie-Division and 29. Infanterie-Division (mot.) at the same time, even though they were in fact the same division, just at different points in its life. By linking the motorized and mechanized unit lists to the infantry numbers, we will prevent this. I did a bit of adjusting here as well: while Großdeutschland did certainly exist before 90. ID (mot.), it comes later in the name list because it was only upgraded to a full division, the scale of units presented in the game, on 16. May 1942. Prior to that it was the size of a strong regiment or brigade. Of course, if you really want, you can act like wartime Germany and make a single mini-division with a ton of support companies of your own and call it “GD”, because that sort of costly one-off high prestige unit seemed to be a WW2 German specialty. The tools are in your hands to play it your way.
While the prewar aim of armoured theorists was a fully mechanized division with cross-country mobility for all arms, in reality the equipment situation in Germany meant that the name switch from Infanterie (mot.) (Schützen for the motorized infantry organic to the Panzer Divisions) to the new title "Panzergrenadier" was largely symbolic. The most typical case was only one out of the four to six Panzergrenadier battalions in a Panzer Division being mounted on halftracks, along with possibly elements of the engineer and reconnaissance battalions.The vast majority of "mechanized" infantry rode to battle in soft-skinned trucks and dismounted to fight for the duration of the war. However, if you can leverage your resources and production in such a way to fulfill Guderian's dream of a fully tracked division, go for it. I certainly know how I'd rather be delivered to work in a commuter environment filled with flying shards of metal. Having the name lists selectable means you can switch the motorized template to the Panzergrenadier namelist in 1942/43, keep the same basic divisional structure, and duplicate history. Or not, as you prefer.
Certain compromises had to be made here: I put Panzergrenadier Division “GD” and Brandenburg in the Panzergrenadier list, even though with a full armoured regiment in their organization they were closer in actual strength to a Panzer Division. We felt that having a few units called “Panzergrenadier” due to weird historical quirks being put in the armoured name list would massively confuse people. Again, the tools to rename are yours, if you choose.
Mountain troops used the infantry numbering list for their regiments, but unlike motorized units, got their own series of divisional numbers. For this list, I was super happy to get the one-off, rather strange 1. Ski-Jäger-Division in at long last. The basic mentality here is that mountain troops are light infantry specialized at operating in high and cold places, so the most logical place for this unique division, much like the Gebirgs units that served up in Lappland with nary a mountain in sight, was in the mountaineers list.
These guys clearly need to be in HOI.
Marines presented a very interesting conundrum. WW2 Germany, as a continental power for whom the navy was always a secondary arm of service, never bothered to produce a large, dedicated assault landing force equivalent to the US Marines or the Japanese SNLF. There were some small naval landing units called "Seebataillone" in imperial times, but with the loss of Germany's overseas colonial possessions these passed out of use. However, we do give the player the tools to make alternative, ahistorical choices and have German marines in the game if they want. Previously, to handle this, we had used the names of the small number of Marine-Infanterie-Divisions that existed. However, historically, these were nothing like a naval forced entry unit with landing craft, naval gunnery support, etc: they were ad hoc late war emergency ground combat units composed of shore duty sailors.
Couldn't find a suitable late war pic of Kriegsmarine guys on shore duty, so picture this, but more haggard and less well armed, with a general aura of "I miss my U-Boot. This sucks."
As such, I felt their use in the marine name list was incorrect. I moved them to the end of the infantry list, and tried to create a historically plausible-sounding title for this class of unit, should the player decide to invest in it:
Ooh-rah, Teufelshunde.
The story of German airborne troops is of great personal interest to me, so I put a lot of thought and love in to that part of the list. Because it was a very small arm of service (~10 divisions, about 230,000 men), it was also way less chaotic in its naming scheme than the other types. One immediate problem was the very first name on the list: 1. Fallschirm-Jäger-Division. This division which achieved such fame at Ortona and Cassino actually started its life as 7. Flieger-Division, under which name it fought in Norway, the Low Countries, Corinth Canal, Crete, and the east. It was renamed during the massive expansion of the parachute arm in 1942-43, which meant that a new numbering scheme had to be adopted as there was now more than one airborne division. However, to give an alternate name list for parachute troops with only one entry was judged to be cluttering up the interface too much, so I had to go with 1. FJD even though it only acquired this title in April 1943 after a very eventful war using its original name. At the very least, I put it first in the list so it is raised right away, rather than in the historical position where it was only renamed thus after the official formation of 2. Fallschirm-Division.
I also considered the rather more radical step of making all of the parachute divisions after the fourth actually part of the infantry list; the reasoning for this is that although the first four divisions raised had a quite high percentage of trained jumpers, the latter ones were titled “Fallschirmjäger” more for reasons of prestige and morale than because they had any real airborne capability. Basically, due to the disastrous strategic situation from 43 onward, the opportunity to give the men in these units jump training constantly dwindled, but the daring mystique attached to the FJ title was used to bolster the morale of new units destined entirely for conventional infantry use. However, in the end we ended up moving away from this as the player may create entirely different situations in game than was historical, and they may choose to have a larger than life parachute arm which the name list should support.
The garrison list got the most massive changes: entire swathes of non-combat training/holding units that had no recorded combat or occupation service history were deleted. This includes outfits that spent their whole lives at depots inside Germany, were only used to train and hold recruits before forwarding them to field units, etc. In their place came a ton of Divisionsstab z.b.V., Sicherungs, Küsten-Abwehr-Infanterie, Feldausbildungs, and Reserve Divisions that had some recorded history of garrison duty in occupied territory or being drawn in to the fighting as the front line came closer. These all got put in, in the order they were raised, which involved a ton of cross-checking across multiple divisional type lists. I enjoyed it, though, because I’m not normal:
(this is about a third of my chicken scratching on this project. All of it wouldn't fit in frame.)
Also, I’m proud to announce the HOI debut of the leichte-Division, a small series of early war 'light' armoured divisions raised as an attempt by the cavalry branch to remain relevant in modern war. With one armoured battalion and a single truck/motorcycle-mounted "cavalry rifle" brigade on strength, they were found to be too light to fight after Poland and converted in to full Panzer Divisions. I linked their numbers to the Panzer Division number they got when upgraded in this way, so you won’t have ahistorical cases where 1. leichte-Division exists at the same time as 6. Panzer.
1. leichte-Division became 6. Panzer, 2. leichte = 7. Panzer, 3. leichte = 8. Panzer, 4. leichte = 9. Panzer, 5. leichte = 21. Panzer.
Panzer Divisions, as you’d expect, got the full treatment. I deleted Panzer Division Kurmark because it was an erroneous description of Panzergrenadier Division Kurmark in some postwar literature. Similarly, Panzer Division Kempf got the axe because it was basically an unusually large Kampfgruppe with Heer tanks and SS infantry, raised for the Polish campaign and disbanded right after to form 10. Panzer. Tatra, Jüterbog and Schlesien went in the bin because they were training units that did not see service in the line, and Norwegen depends on a German occupation of Norway that may not occur every game. Plus, it was no more than a brigade in size despite the grandiose name, so yeah, so long. I had to settle on a single representative name for the Hermann Göring Division despite it changing titles half a dozen times, to avoid another alt list with one entry. Sadly there was no way to reflect units like 1. Kavallerie becoming 24. Panzer, 13. Panzer becoming Panzer Division Feldherrnhalle 2, etc, due to the same limitation. You can rename them at the conversion dates, though. I probably will because I clearly know how to party on a Friday night.
Then came the SS. This is an interesting case because we wanted to support spawning those by event (to be confirmed, this was written while dev work was still ongoing), so they shouldn’t be part of the normal lists. Also, in certain alternate history gameplay paths with a non-fascist Germany, the existence of the Waffen-SS would be highly anachronistic, so we couldn’t just integrate it in to the general name lists. Instead, what we did was produce a single SS name list with all 38 divisions raised or planned, of all types (Panzer, Panzergrenadier, Mountain, Cavalry, etc). The divisional types were removed from their names, so it’s just SS-Division “Das Reich”, etc, the idea being that you can raise the SS divisions using whatever template you like, including ahistorical choices. If you want to build the “Totenkopf” division with a airborne or garrison template, go wild. This also allows you to have both highly elite, lavishly equipped "classic" SS divisions like the Leibstandarte, as well as the scandalously bad/outright mutinous fiasco divisions like Skanderbeg, by using different divisional templates in whatever way you like. Here again the limitations on bloating the name list for single odd units came in to play: “Das Reich” existed with no less than SIX alternate names during the war, starting as the SS-Verfügungstruppe. I tried to settle on the one that felt most representative and recognizable to enthusiasts of the time period.
And now, the most sweeping and dramatic addition of all: when we got the idea to support a monarchist revival playthrough, we immediately realized that a ton of units like the entire Waffen-SS, Feldherrnhalle, Führer-Begleit, etc, would have no place in that world. We decided it would also be super interesting to have a naming scheme that referenced the old imperial past, from WWI and before.
So, I dug up a list of literally all the regiments in the Kaiser’s army, with their grandiose sounding names referencing their state of origin and honourary colonels in the European nobility, and converted them en masse to infantry divisions for the monarchist list. I took their Imperial regimental number, converted that to a divisional number (sadly the state/provincial numbers they kept for traditional reasons, ie, ‘2. Wurttemburgisches’, had to go), and then added the Imperial honour titles they had. Thus, “Infanterie-Regiment Großherzog Friedrich Franz II von Mecklenburg-Schwerin (4. Brandenburgisches) Nr. 24” becomes “24. Division “Großherzog Friedrich Franz II von Mecklenburg-Schwerin”.
These names have such old world, Imperial character, I felt it would be a massive waste of free immersion opportunities not to use them. I mean, come on, just look at this glorious monstrosity:
Surely the grand champion of the monarchist divisional name list must be "13. Kgl. Bayer.-Division 'Franz Josef I., Kaiser von Österreich und Apostolischer König von Ungarn'" (arrived fashionably late for this screenshot). If I can’t have a 13th Royal Bavarian Division ‘Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary’, the filthy democratic mob rule populists have already won.
Speaking of Bavarians, they alone in Imperial Germany retained their own regimental and numbering scheme for field use despite serving in the Prussian-dominated national army. So, there would be both a 7th infantry division and a 7th Royal Bavarian infantry division. To ensure the largest non-Prussian component of the Empire has their units show up somewhere other than the end of the list, I inserted them in a block after about a hundred entries representing all the other states of Germany. Altogether you have over 200 Imperial infantry divisions with some of the most glorious unit names anywhere. I’m so happy with it in all its anachronistic splendor.
Then, having gone this far, I figured I might as well go full Fin de Siecle and take the guards and line regiments of cavalry...dragoons, hussars, cuirassiers, uhlans, the whole flamboyant, almost Napoleonic array of them, and produce a mobile divisions list in the same way. So, yes, you can have an armoured division named 38. Leib-Husaren-Division 'Königin Viktoria von Preußen' and rock out however you want with that.
So hey, as you can see, we are pretty massive nerds over here and we always try to strike the best balance between historical fidelity and something that is actually playable as a video game. We hope this addition adds a bit of extra historical flavour for those, like me, who love to mentally time travel while playing these kind of games. Feel free to hit me up with any questions you may have.
Last edited:
