Captured Russian tank modeling

[JasonC]

Perhaps I am not following all your pronouns and negatives, but certainly Hitler favored the SS throughout the war, and did so in an accelerating fashion in the last year and a half. It grew from a few motorized brigades to a couple corps at midwar, half equipped far above standard. Later it grew to over 25 divisions and over half a million men. The foreign SS - a third of the total before the end - was not particularly well equipped but the German SS certainly was, particularly the mobile divisions, which made about half of the total.

[Andreas]

They were not favoured in terms of weapons until the second half of the war. The first field formations had to procure their weapons outside the Wehrmacht channels, so they did e.g. not have the MG34, but instead had Czech MGs.

The first Panthers, Tigers, and Kingtigers went to Heer formations. The same for the first L43 equipped Stugs and Panzer IV. OTOH SS armoured divisions had individual Tiger companies in 1943, something which Heer divisions did not have. SS-HJ did have an organic rocket battalion, again unheard of for the Heer.

I think the decline of Hitler's trust in the Heer is directly related to the growing favourisation of the Waffen-SS.

As I said, it is not a straightforward story.

All the best

Andreas

[Inola]

I have some ideas about 80mm stug plates and 82mm tiger plates. At the beginning, Stug 3s plates were 50mm face-hardened. Face-hardened armor is known to have better perfomance nearly 20-30%. Then, these plates were replaced with 80mm homogen plates(and 50+30). They were easier to construct and use.

Tiger plates were "cemented" (sharp-nosed projectiles requered for better perfomance), so they were not the same as stug plates. Perhaps, this is a key to get the point.

[Hammer-n-Sickle]

My understanding is yes, it could only be a professional army since consription wasn't allowed under the Versailles treaty but all the elements were still there with exception of the airforce..officially. I'm sure germany was already finding ways to circumvent the treaty. Hitler just flaunted it.