"East German Motorised Infantry Squad Organisation " Topic

Hi,

I am wondering if there was a difference in the organisation of the troops carried in the BTR vs BMP units. Specifically did they have the same number of troops, MGs and RPGs per vehicle.

How does this compare with the Soviet units with these two vehicle types?

Thanks for your help.

Yes, SPW and SPz units were identical in this regard. See my posts here and here.

Thank you very much for the reply. So it seems the East Germans have 2 RPKs per vehicle. I believe this might be a point of difference with their Soviet comrades who only have 1 RPK per vehicle. Is this correct?

As far as I know, Soviets sometimes had 1 machine-gun per squad and sometimes 2. East Germans had 2 LMGs, as you note. I can find the year they adopted that… I think it was the late 60's, but I can confirm if you are interested. Also, the size of the East German dismount team is smaller… if I recall correctly, the Soviets had 8 in the dismount group and the East Germans definitely have 7. To be honest, there were a lot of little differences… the platoon sniper is not there with the East Germans, for instance, and East Germans didn't use the underslung grenade launchers.

That is very interesting. I am working on 28mm scale models and I want to show this level of detail. Just having some general guidelines of how the units were generally organized is a good start.

East Germans in 28mm would be terrific. Please let me know if you need any book recommendations on personal kit or other information.

I became interested in the East German NVA a few years ago but found there was an absolute dearth of information on them in English (and what was available was frequently outdated and factually incorrect). I've spent the last year doing extensive research using primary texts written in German (mainly East German soldier handbooks and first hand accounts from veterans) as well as secondary sources (modern books also written in German). I'm happy to share what I've learned.

I really appreciate people like you that do the hard research and share your findings for those of us who are not very savvy with military knowledge. I will post some photos of some of my models soon. I do have an East German sniper model which you suggest was possibly not part of a typical platoon after 1972. I assume they still had a role for snipers after this date but just not as an integral part of the platoon.

There was a sniper on the company level through the 60's and early 70's (never in the platoon). There had always been soldiers in the company troop to perform different tasks and typically one had received sniper training (if I recall, all the battalion snipers trained together in a workshop and you would get a little bump on your pay check for completing sniper training). The Strela-2 began to be introduced in 1972, which in effect reassigned the Kompanieschützen to this weapon, as this training was mandatory. There remained an SVD in many company lockers until the end of the DDR (with or without ammo!), but there was rarely enough time or resources to provide official training (which now fell on the Company CO or another leader under his command). The soldiers were already stretched in so many training programs as it was (one module for each weapon, a module for each major piece of equipment, tactics and survival, NBC protocol etc.). Troops were in too many programs as it was, so the sniper training became optional. Thus some companies had snipers, some didn't.

That said, I have a few different decades of infantry handbooks, and while snipers aren't called out as a fixed role in the company organization, they are talked about explicitly in the company tactics at least as late as 1976 (with illustrations showing, no joke, a soldier with an SVD firing from the top of a BTR-60PA). Snipers are, according to the manual, under the direct control of the company commander with the mission of engaging and destroying enemy targets of interest.

That is good info. Here is a photo of some East Germans (Underfire Miniatures) alongside their "rides".

They look great! As far as I know, the NVA only used the PKM as a vehicle mounted weapon on the BTR-50 (although I've seen pictures of KdA training with a PKM as well), and the BTR-50 was removed from frontline service by the early 1970's (although it was still used by technical service platoons). The squad LMG was the RPK from its introduction in the 1960's (and I think RPD before that, and RP-46 and DP-28 before the RPD).

I love the NBC suit on the back (colloquially referred to as the "Ganzkörperkondom" in the NVA). I've carried one of these and it is as bulky and heavy as it looks like on those models.