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The SS regiments "Deutschland" and " Leibstandarte" participated in the 1936 occupation of the Rhineland , and parts of them were among the invading force in March 1938 during the Anschluss of Austria. Subsequently, the Austrian SS regiment "Der Führer" was formed. By the late 1938 the units of the SS-VT were in part subordinate to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht and on October 10 they were combined into the SS-Verfügungsdivision (short: V-Division) under the command of SS-Brigadeführer Paul Hausser.
Under Hausser, the V-Division was trained into an effective and skilled combat fighting force, it took part in the invasion of Sudetenland in 1938 and Poland in 1939. V-Division never fought as a single unit, but was instead divided into smaller regiments dispersed among the various regular Army units. In 1940, after the invasion of France, V-Division was given the name "Das Reich", at the same time, "Das Reich" and other SS-VT units along with Theodor EickeTheodor Eicke ( October 17 1892 February 26, 1943) was a Nazi official, SS- Obergruppenfuhrer commander of the Totenkopfdivision of the SS and one of the key figures in the establishment of concentration camps in Nazi Germany. His Nazi Party number was 11's Totenkopf-Standarten were subordinated to the new Kommandoamt der Waffen-SS and from then on called the Waffen-SSThe Waffen-SS was the armed wing of the Schutzstaffel. Its roots lay with various German right-wing paramilitary organizations that formed the Freikorps and those of the Nazi party such as the SA and that were later absorbed into the SS-Verfugungstruppe a.