Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)

by Dennis Showalter

  As Ludendorff and Hindenburg became involved with national issues, Max Hoffmann took over more and more of the operational and strategic planning for the eastern front. When his superiors left for Berlin in 1916, Hoffmann remained in Russia—partly because he had made himself indispensable there, partly because his confidence in his own abilities made him an increasingly uncomfortable subordinate. By denying Hoffman a wider field for the exercise of his talents, Hindenburg and Ludendorff may well have compounded their own problems later in the war.

  Hoffmann for his part emerged as the gray eminence of the east, recognized by superiors and subordinates as the brains of the theater. He was largely responsible for the plans that halted the 1916 Brusilov offensive, and for orchestrating the German breakthrough at Riga the next year. He was a key figure in negotiating the armistice at Brest-Litovsk. While as anti-Bolshevik as the rest of the officer corps, Hoffmann favored policies of limited territorial annexation—an attitude earning Ludendorff’s wrath. After the collapse, he performed a last service, coordinating the withdrawal of German troops from Russia. The postwar publication of his diaries and memoirs kept him before the public as a controversial figure until his death in 1927.

  Of the corps commanders, Mackensen’s career continued to flourish after Gorlice-Tarnow. With Seeckt at his elbow, he commanded the army group that overran Serbia in 1915. The next year he spearheaded the conquest of Rumania. By this time age had finally caught up with Mackensen; he spent the rest of the war commanding the occupation forces in Rumania. While evacuating his troops after the armistice, Mackensen was arrested by the Hungarians and turned over to the French.5 Interned for a year, he returned home a hero symbolizing Germany’s victimization. Scholtz rose unobtrusively and competently to army command by 1918. But the real success story among 8th Army’s corps commanders was Otto von Below. In November, 1914, he was promoted to army command—one of the most rapid advances in the history of the Second Reich. In Russia and the Balkans he continued to demonstrate the same energy and tactical skill that characterized him at Tannenberg, with fewer of the questionable command decisions. Sent to Italy in 1917, he led an improvised German-Austrian army to the victory of Caporetto. The next year he commanded a field army in Ludendorff’s March offensive. But perhaps the greatest tribute to Below’s abilities came at the war’s very end, when on November 8 he was assigned to command the expected last stand on Germany’s soil.

  Hermann von François was less fortunate. As 8th Army’s senior corps commander he took over when Hindenburg and Ludendorff were promoted to command of the eastern front. He remained a difficult subordinate. Relieved in November, 1914, for what amounted to persistent refusal to follow orders, François accepted demotion to a corps command on the western front and retired from that post in 1918. Ludendorff’s critics later suggested he wished to be rid of a man who knew too much about the shaky foundations of his reputation. But François’s personal papers for the war years are replete with complaints of his antagonistic behavior to colleagues and subordinates alike. “You still refuse to fit in,” wrote the director of the military cabinet in 1916. It was at once a description and an epitaph.6

  François was born too late, or too early. He could have commanded a corps under Napoleon, or a division of Stonewall Jackson’s foot cavalry. He was the type of man who might have reached distinction in 1940 or 1941 at the head of a panzer group. But a loose cannon like François was an unacceptably high risk in the days before the internal-combustion engine once more made possible the conduct of war from forward command posts.

  Conta ended the war as commanding general of the Carpathian Corps, and Heineccius of VII Corps in France. Staabs finished his career as commander of XXIX Reserve Corps, one of the formations raised in 1915. Emil Hell rose to become chief of staff of Army Group Kiev. Schmidt von Schmidtseck survived his ups and downs with François to command the 11th Infantry Division with distinction. Even the panic-stricken major of the 4th Grenadiers learned enough from his experiences to be trusted with an infantry regiment, albeit a wartime reserve formation.

  In the course of the war, Tannenberg’s rank and file were scattered across the battle fronts of Europe even more thoroughly than their commanders. Easier to trace are the formations. Six active and three reserve divisions bore the brunt of the Tannenberg campaign. They remained on the Eastern Front through 1915, the core of Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s hopes for decisive victory. As the fighting in Russia died down, their destiny lay in the west. First to go were the 35th and 36th Divisions, transferred in September, 1915, in response to the Allies’ fall offensive. The 1st Division fought at Verdun in 1916. Most of the others changed fronts in the first months of 1917, with the 41st briefly detoured into Rumania. The cavalry, the Landwehr, and the other garrison troops by and large remained in the east, their roles changing from combat to garrison and occupation duties as the war wound down. The strangest odyssey of any of 8th Army’s old formations was that of the 146th Infantry. War’s end found the regiment, originally part of the 37th Division, in Palestine, part of the forces sent by OHL to stiffen the Turkish defense. The Masurians were a long way from their peacetime garrison of Allenstein when they faced the British, Indian, and Anzac troops of Sir Edmund Allenby. But the regiment fought as well in Asia Minor as it had in East Prussia, sustaining the reputation of German arms in an unlikely setting and earning the ungrudging admiration of its enemies.

  In that the 146th was an exception. None of the Tannenberg divisions rose much above mediocrity in the war’s later years, being used primarily as sector-holding formations. For this the army’s personnel policies was largely responsible. Even before the war Germany’s eastern regiments needed recruits and reservists from outside their assigned recruiting districts. The unheard-of casualties of World War I rendered these formations even more dependent on outside sources of replacements. The war ministry and OHL initially provided them by transferring large numbers of men from Alsace-Lorraine, presumed to be less reliable in the west, to the eastern theater. The effect on morale and combat efficiency was obvious, with the Reichsländer too often nursing the grievances of second-class citizens and the old hands distrustful or contemptuous of their new comrades in arms. As 8th Army’s divisions were transferred westward, the Alsatians were often replaced by Poles whose dependability against the Russian army was challenged, and who responded much like the Alsatians. The effect of these transfers was to leave too many formations with little more than their numbers and their traditions. Of the Tannenberg divisions, only the 37th was rated by allied intelligence as a first-class division in 1918. Its price for the designation was a casualty list so high that by the armistice its regiments counted little more than 300 riflemen apiece. They had marched to war with a strength of over 3,000.7

  Long after its veterans had retired, Tannenberg continued to influence German military thinking. For the Imperial army’s successors, the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht, Tannenberg was a sign of hope—a sign that professionalism and its accompanying virtues of flexibility, mobility, and will power could bring victory without a wearing down an enemy’s resources. Despite its limitations it was the only nonattritional victory achieved in a major theater by any of the major combatants in World War I. The French and British could point to their triumphs in open warfare, but these had come only at the end of hard pounding that had exhausted the winners almost as much as the losers.

  Tannenberg became a benchmark of professionalism—proof of what a well-prepared peacetime army with a minimum amount of grit in its machinery might achieve. It was by no means a direct inspiration for the blitzkrieg. One Wehrmacht general, commenting on what he regarded as a casual attitude to orders during the 1938 occupation of Czechoslovakia, even asserted that “unconditional obedience” at Tannenberg had brought about one of Germany’s greatest victories!8 Nevertheless, if in the interwar years the Seeckts, the Guderians, and the Ludwig Becks focussed on tactical maneuver and operational art to a greater extent than elswhere in Europe, t
heir energies were to a significant degree inspired by memories of August, 1914, in East Prussia.9 And in the later years of World War II on the eastern front, the daring ripostes that kept the Russians at bay for so long similarly owed much to the legacy of an earlier war.

  Tannenberg epitomized a basic change in the German army’s attitude towards Russia. The caution with which generals and general staff alike viewed the eastern colossus before 1914 had long before 1941 been replaced by what amounted to open contempt. This owed something to the Reichswehr’s self-definition as Bolshevik Russia’s military mentor in the Rapallo years of the 1920s. At a time when the rest of the world was turning to France for inspiration, it was satisfying to have at least one power paying attention to German concepts and doctrines.10 But it owed even more to the mythology developed on the eastern front during World War I: a mythology stressing the Russian soldier as uniformed protoplasm, unable to respond to the demands of modern war, dangerous only in mass, and even then readily susceptible to defeat at the hands of an enemy that kept his head and used his skills.

  This myth focussed on Tannenberg rather than such later victories as Gorlice-Tarnow. Its limited correspondence to the facts tended to go unchallenged because of the relatively small number of German troops involved, and their relative lack of influence in the Reichswehr. The western front was the most common body of German military experience, the place where careers and reputations were made. Anyone presenting the French or British in terms too distant from reality faced prompt challenges from colleagues with different memories. The Russian front had been remote. Units fortunate enough to be transferred there regarded it as a rest cure. Their first encounters with the Russian army usually dispelled that illusion. But it was too comforting for their comrades in the west to abandon. Somewhere there had to be an easy enemy.11

  Recent West German research has established the relationship between Hitler’s and the Wehrmacht’s approaches to planning conflict with Russia as much closer than the generals wished to accept when they wrote their postwar memoirs. The Wehrmacht high command’s involvement in the atrocities accompanying Operation Barbarossa also has been demonstrated beyond question.12 To some extent this reflected the permeation of the military at all levels with Nazi racial and ideological ideals. But it was also, in its way, a consequence of the Tannenberg mythos—a mythos establishing the Russians as objects of suppression, so easily defeated that there was neither glory nor honor to be won in the process. The mythologizing of what had actually happened in East Prussia in 1914 thus facilitated both the careless planning and the moral indifference with which the Wehrmacht embarked on Operation Barbarossa. Within six months reality would exact the first installments of a bitter revenge.

  The Tannenberg myth also proved significantly useful to Adolf Hitler. Despite his bitter contempt for the old Prussian aristocracy, after becoming chancellor the Nazi leader missed no opportunity to link himself with Hindenburg and to appeal to those elements, particularly in the army, which looked to the aging Reichspräsident as a symbol of stability and honor in rapidly changing times. On March 21, 1933, the private first class took the hand of the field-marshal at a formal ceremony in the garrison church at Potsdam. On August 1, 1934, Hindenburg died at his country estate. The next day Hitler accepted a personal oath of allegiance from the armed forces. And on August 7, the Führer presided over Hindenburg’s burial, in the place of honor beneath the Tannenberg monument.

  Tannenberg played a wider role as well in National Socialist propaganda. Before 1933, rearmament and revision of the Versailles Treaty were for most Germans abstract concepts—worth another round of drinks as long as someone else paid the bill. Germans were by and large no more willing than the English to die for Danzig. Since World War I had left Germany essentially unscathed, the Nazis found it correspondingly difficult to conjure up emotionally effective threats. Tannenberg became the major exception. Between 1934 and 1939 the German book market was flooded with popular histories of a barbaric horde turned away in confusion by an outraged Volk. Unlike equivalent works set on the western front, the material built around Tannenberg was able to stress the defensive nature of German behavior in 1914. Here was no room for doubt about who was on whose territory. From general to private the victors were a band of brothers, and all the brothers were valiant in the defense of their violated Fatherland.13

  This interpretation, while popular enough, could hardly be said to have contributed directly to the attitudes the Wehrmacht took into Russia in 1941. But its outlines remained. The Tannenberg myth flared one last time in the last months of World War II. As Red Army spearheads drew ever closer to the German frontier, the eastern provinces’ frightened inhabitants comforted themselves with the notion that “last time” the Russians had not only been driven out of East Prussia, but eventually defeated. Somehow, everything would be all right again.14

  The end of that dream came in January, 1945, as the Russians broke out of their positions on the Vistula River and drove for the Oder and the Baltic. It was a final, unintentional irony that the Russian attack in the East Prussian sector resembled in outline that of 1914, with the Third White Russian Front performing Rennenkampf’s mission and the Second White Russian Front that of Samsonov. Only this time the pincers bit and closed.

  Rape and murder stalked the German east. What remained of the Third Reich’s navy evacuated thousands of refugees from the Baltic ports as the remnants of once-proud divisions held the Russians from their prey. Other civilians trekked west afoot, or in farm wagons. Some escaped. Some were shot, or crushed by T-34’s. Still others were overtaken by the Russian advance and forced to return, awaiting their conqueror’s pleasure in what remained of their homes.

  Between 1945 and 1947, East Prussia, already largely depopulated, was partitioned between Poland and Russia. Those Germans not deported to labor camps in the Soviet Union were expelled, making their way as best they might to the new frontiers. A thousand years of history had come to an end.

  In January, 1945, as the Red Army drew closer, the coffin of Field-Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was removed from its place in the Tannenberg monument and taken to the port of Königsberg. On a warship packed with refugees, place was made for a symbol. Hindenburg was brought “home to the Reich,” buried first in Marburg, ultimately at Burg Hohenzollern. The monument itself was destroyed by German engineers. Goebbels’ Rundfunk promised it would be rebuilt after the war.

  “After the war” the ground over which Tannenberg had been fought became instead part of the People’s Republic of Poland. New families, themselves often refugees from lands now part of the Soviet Union, moved into the empty houses and plowed the deserted fields. They gave the land a new identity. Allenstein is now Olsztyn. Neidenburg became Nidzica. Osterode was renamed Ostroda. In 1960 Poland celebrated the 550th anniversary of the Teutonic Order’s defeat by dedicating its own newly built monument on the site. Aircraft traced red and white smoke patterns in the sky to symbolize the “unity, strength, and readiness of the Polish people.” Anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people attended the ceremonies, which continued to be held annually at varying levels of pomp. Poland’s victory remained a frequent subject of study in the pre-Solidarity People’s Republic.15 Any celebrations of the Tannenberg of 1914 in either of the German successor states have remained private affairs.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1As in America’s First Battles, ed. C. E. Heller, W. A. Stofft (Lawrence, Kans., 1986).

  2Robert E. Doughty, The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–39 (Hamden, Conn., 1985).

  3Sven Ekdahl, Die Schlacht bei Tannenberg 1410. Quellenkritischer Untersu-chungen, Vol. I (Berlin, 1982), 12 ff.

  4Cf. inter alia and almost at random, James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (New York, 1984), Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Détente and Deterrence: Anglo-German Relations, 1911—14,” International Security XI (Fall, 1986), 121–150; M. R. Gordon, “Domestic Conflict and the Origins of the First Worl
d War: The Brtitish and the German Cases,” Journal of Modern History XLVI (1974), 191–226.

  5Patrick Glynn, “The Sarajevo Fallacy,” The National Interest IX (Fall, 1987), 3–32; and Donald O. Kagan, “World War I, World War II, World War III,” Commentary LXXXIII (March, 1987), 21–40, are recent, accessible summaries of the line of argument.

  6Paul W. Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,” Journal of Modern History XLIV (1972), 319–345.

  7Godfather of this thesis remains Fritz Fischer. See most recently, Juli 1914: Wir sind nicht hineingeschlittert (Berlin, 1983), a Streitschrift whose avowed polemical nature highlights Fischer’s essential arguments beyond misunderstanding.

  8As in Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980).

  9Holger H. Herwig, “Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in Germany After the Great War,” International Security XII (Fall, 1987), 5–44; and Ulrich Heinemann, Die Verdrängte Niederlage: Politische Öffentlichkeit und Kriegsschuld-frage in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1983).

  10William C. Wohlforth, “The Perception of Power: Russia in the Pre-1914 Balance,” World Politics XXXIX (1987), 353–381, is an up-to-date survey of this issue. Cf. also Risto Ropponen, Die Kraft Russlands (Helsinki, 1968) for the academic side. W. Bruce Lincoln, Passing through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914–18 (New York, 1986); and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, tr. H. Willetts (New York, 1989), are distinguished popular accounts with the same theme.

  11Cf. inter alia and from differing perspectives, John M. Joyce, “The Old Russian Legacy,” Foreign Policy LV (1984), 132–153; Andrew Cockburn, The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine (New York, 1983); and Dimitri K. Simes, “Gorbachev: A New Foreign Policy?” Foreign Affairs LXV (1987), 477–500.