My story is based around a German Lieutenant and I'm having some difficulty finding information about the training that officers where put through (e.g I keep seeing varying dates about how long each stage was?). I'm already fairly clued up about the general outline of the training -- trained with the other enlisted men, frontline service, officer schools etc.. but if anyone has any more detailed info about the training that was involved and how the officer candidates were chosen, that would be amazing. Alternatively, I could also do with some book/paper/article recommendations (I'm planning on reading Siegfried Knappe's Soldat but unfortunately I won't be able to do so until after Christmas). One thing I'm particularly interested in is where would officers get their 'front line service' prior to the war? My character enlists in 1937 (although this can be changed if I need to) and I would ideally like him to have been given the rank of Oberleutnant (second Lieutenant) by the invasion of Poland. Thanks in advance to anyone who actually read all of that waffle and decides to help me out
Will you have him attend the NaPolA, or is he older than that when the events of the story cross with his life?
I don't know about WWII, but there are some book from Eric Flint. The first one is titled '1632' and the series involves a lot about training soldiers in the events of the thirty-years war. Maybe they could give you some pointers?
@Wreybies Originally I did consider having him attend a NaPolA, but I ended up changing it, mostly because I would have wanted to included a lot more about his school life than would be relevant to the book (plus it would have made it way too long -- it's already pretty lengthy as it is), so I decided to save that for another plot in another novel lol. @Lifeline Ohh sounds like it could be useful in learning about the general mentality of soldiers during training and the sort of tasks they were set. Thanks!
Your character could have got his front line service in the Spanish civil war, as I believe Germany provided men to the nationalists.
