E-Offizier

Machine-translated from the German article

E-Offizier was the common abbreviation and designation in the German Reichswehr and Wehrmacht for so-called supplementary officers (Ergänzungsoffiziere). They were recruited to meet the demand for officers of the army, which had been limited to 100,000 men by the Treaty of Versailles and which, from the late 1920s, first secretly and then (after the Nazi seizure of power) openly from 1935 onward, was rearming. Already in the early 1920s, the Reich government financed the organization of an illegal, militia-like border guard on the eastern borders of the Reich.