A comment over at Sailer's blog:
There is a Youtube channel called Visualizing History that had a presentation on why the Wehrmacht did not collapse in 1944 like the Allies expected it to, whereas the German Imperial Army essentially collapsed in July 1918 and fought only defensively thereafter. The answer was the cohesion of the Wehrmacht was much much higher than that of the Kaiser.
While the Imperial Army suffered something like only a 1/4 of the casualties of the Wehrmacht and lost cohesion, the Wehrmacht kept it until January 1945. Despite suffering a combined nearly 800K casualties on both the West (around 140K) and the East (the balance) during the Summer of 1944. That’s more than 2.8 Stalingrad’s worth of casualties. The secret was that the Army units until quite late were comprised of people from the same region, who if they did not personally know each other likely knew mutual acquaintances and relatives. They spoke the same dialect. Military competence was rewarded and officers were more likely to die in combat than soldiers. Even Generals had only a few percentage points less casualty rates than soldiers. Each unit had its own decorations and distinctiveness, and medals were awarded not to the Aristocracy only but mostly to ordinary soldiers and not for kamikaze stuff but ordinary bravery where the soldiers survived at least the initial encounter. This was in marked contrast in every way to the Imperial Army where none of these conditions held. It is why to Ike’s astonishment the Wehrmacht did not simply collapse but kept fighting on until April 1945.
