1st Panzer Division (Wehrmacht)
Wehrmacht unit during World War II
The 1st Panzer-Division (short: 1. Pz.Div. German: 1. Panzer-Division, English: 1st Tank Division) was an armoured division in the German Army during World War II.
The division was one of the original three tank divisions established by Germany in 1935. It took part in pre-war occupations of Austria and Czechoslovakia and the invasions of Poland in 1939 and Belgium and France in 1940. From 1941 to 1945, it fought on the Eastern Front, except for a period in 1943 when it was sent for refitting to France and Greece. At the end of the war, the division surrendered to US forces in Bavaria.
History
The 1st Panzer Division was formed on 15 October 1935 from the 3rd Cavalry Division, and was headquartered in Weimar. It was one of three tank divisions created at the time, the other two being the 2nd and 3rd Panzer Division. Earlier in the year, Germany had renounced the Treaty of Versailles, which had forbidden the country, among other things, from having tank forces, a treaty Germany had violated almost from the start by secretly developing tanks and operating a covert tank school in the Soviet Union.
“1st Panzer Division (Wehrmacht)” enters the record as wehrmacht unit during World War II. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Panzer, Division and Wehrmacht can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q163385. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 1939, 1940 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “1st Panzer Division (Wehrmacht)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.