List of German divisions in World War II

This article lists divisions of the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces), including the Army, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine, active during World War II.

Upgrades and reorganizations are shown only to identify the variant names for what is notionally a single unit; other upgrades and reorganizations are deferred to the individual articles. Due to the scope of this list pre-war changes are not shown, nor are upgrades from units smaller than a division. Most of these divisions trained in Berlin which is also where new military technology was kept and tested.

Volks, Sturm, and Grenadier were sometimes used simply as morale-building adjectives, often without any significance to a unit's organization or capabilities.

The designation "Light" (leichte) had various meanings in the German Army of World War II. There was a series of 5 Light divisions; the first four were pre-war mechanized formations organized for use as mechanized cavalry, and the fifth was an ad hoc collection of mechanized elements rushed to Africa to help the Italians and organized into a division once there. All five were eventually converted to ordinary Panzer divisions.

Various other divisions were dubbed "Light" for other reasons, and are listed among the Infantry Series Divisions.

The backbone of the Heer (German Army) was the infantry division. Of the 154 divisions deployed against Soviet Union in 1941, including reserves, there were 100 infantry, 19 panzer, 11 motorised, 9 security, 5 Waffen-SS, 4 "light", 4 mountain, 1 SS police, and 1 cavalry. A typical infantry division in June 1941 had 17,734 men organized into the following sub-units:

German infantry divisions had a variety of designations and specializations, though numbered in a single series. The major variations are as follows:

Most of the size reductions listed above were by about a third, either by the removal of an infantry regiment or the removal of one infantry battalion from each of the three regiments.

Infantry divisions were raised in waves, sets of divisions with a standardized table of organization and equipment. In general the later waves (i.e., the higher-numbered divisions) were of lower quality than the earlier ones.

According to Davies, the Cavalry divisions were mounted infantry and the Cossack divisions were "true cavalry", modelled on the Russian cavalry divisions.

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