Prussia Secretly Trained Massive Reserve

After Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806, a peace agreement limited its standing army to 42,000 men. Scharnhorst responded with the Krumpersystem, under which each company regularly placed three to five trained soldiers on extended leave and replaced them with inexperienced recruits. Once trained, those recruits could also leave and make room for another group, allowing Prussia to build a reserve without exceeding the official limit. By 1813, the system had helped create hundreds of thousands of additional trained soldiers who could be recalled for war.

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