51Michael Geyer, “German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914–1945,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 534 ff.
52Cf. inter alia Jack Snyder, “Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1914,” in Psychology and Deterrence, ed. R. Jervis, R. N. Lebow, and J. G. Stein (Baltimore, 1985), 153–179; and Stephen Van Evera, “Why Cooperation Failed in 1914,” World Politics XXXVIII (1985), 80–117.
53Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story II, 583 passim.
54Cf. Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York, 1986), 166 ff.; and Shanafelt, Secret Enemy, 67 ff.
55Fritz Fischer, Juli 1914: Wir sind nicht hineingeschlittert (Berlin, 1983), 20–21.
56Reichenau to foreign office, Aug. 20, 1914, in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Krieg 1914, Unternehmungen und Aufweigelung gegen unsere Feinde, WK 11c Geheim (hereafter cited as PAAA).
57Lemberg Consulate to Tschirsky; Tschirsky to foreign office, Aug. 11, 1914, PAAA, Krieg 1914, WK 11 a, Ukraine.
58Tschirsky to foreign office, Oct. 11, Oct. 13, 1914; Jagow to Zimmermann, Aug. 31, 1914, ibid.
59Szogeny to Jagow, Aug. 15, 1914; Tschirsky to foreign office, Aug. 21, 1914, PAAA. Krieg 1914, WK 14 a, Verwaltung besetzten Gebiet in Russland.
60Steenbiss to Prussian ministry of public works, Aug. 11, 1914; Worysch to 8th Army command, Aug. 12, 1914, ibid.
EPILOGUE
1Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia, 1918–1925: The Unlikely Rock of Democracy (Pittsburgh, 1986), 241; Andreas Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1964).
2The design and its history are summarized in George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975), 69 ff. Cf. also Erich Maschke, “Die Geschichte des Reichsehrenmals Tannenberg,” and Johannes Kruger, “Bau-liche Gedanken um das Reichsehrenmal Tannenberg und seine Einfügung in die Landschaft,” in Tannenberg. Deutsches Schicksal, deutsche Aufgabe, ed. Kuratorium für das Reichsehrenmal (Oldenburg, 1935), 199–247.
3Konrad Wagner, ed., Tannenberg und seine Heldengraber. Ein Lesebuch von deutscher Grösse, 2nd ed. rev. (Osterode, 1936).
4For Ludendorff’s postwar career see particularly Richard Piazza, “Ludendorff: The Totalitarian and Völkisch Politics of a Military Specialist” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1969).
5August von Mackensen, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. W. Foerster (Leipzig, 1938), 363 passim.
6Lyncker to François, Jan. 1, 1916; letters of Aug. 7 and Aug. 10, 1917, by two of VII Corps’ regimental commanders, in Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Nachlass François, NL 274/16.
7Information on the wartime experiences of the Tannenberg divisions is drawn from the specific entries in Histories of the Two Hundred and Fifty-One Divisions of the German Army which Participated in the War (1914–1918), ed. by General Staff, AEF (Washington, D.C., 1920), supplemented from regimental histories.
8Quoted in Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1918–1939 (Princeton, 1984), 149.
9Cf. inter alia Klaus-Jürgen Müller, General Ludwig Beck (Boppard, 1980); Robert J. O’Neill, “Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1918–1939,” in The Theory and Practice of War, ed. M. Howard (New York, 1965), 143–165; and Charles Messenger, The Art of Blitzkrieg (London, 1976).
10Hans Gatzke, “Russo-German Military Collaboration During the Weimar Republic,” American Historical Review LXIII (1958), 565–597.
11Erich Wagner, “Gedanken über den Wort von Kriegserfahrung,” Militär-wissenschaftliche Rundschau II (1937), 231–245.
12Most particularly in the work of Jürgen Förster. Typical is “New Wine in Old Skins? The Wehrmacht and the War of ‘Weltauschaungen,’ 1941,” in The German Military in the Age of Total War, ed. W. Deist (Dover, N.H., 1985), 304–322. Cf. also Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (New York, 1986).
13Cf. Heinz Burger, Bei Tannenberg zwei Schlachten. Ritter und Feldherren aufWacht im Osten (Stuttgart, 1935); Rudolf van Wehrt, Tannenberg (Berlin, 1934); Rolf Bathe, Tannenberg. Der Einsatz des letzten Mannes (Berlin, 1935).
14Andreas Hillgruber, Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944145 als Problem der deutschen Nationalgeschichte und der Europäischen Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 1985), 13; Michael Salewski, “Der Erste Weltkrieg-ein deutsches Trauma,” Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire LXII (1985), 184.
15Cf. inter alia Stefan Kuczynski, Wielka wojna z Zakonem Krzyzackim w latach 1409–1411 (Warsaw, 1955; rev. ed. 1960); and Spor o Grunwald rozpiawy polemiczne (Warsaw, 1972).
Bibliographical Essay
The nature of the chapter references in this volume make a full bibliography redundant. My principal archival sources were the holdings of the German foreign office in Bonn and the Bundesarvhiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg. From Bonn, the Deutschland, Russland, and Krieg 1914 files were particularly valuable. The BA-MA collection of private papers includes the Nachlässe of Max Hoffmann, Hermann von François, and Otto von Below. The latter is also a rich source of information on the prewar army. The Nachlässe of Wilhelm Gröner and Adolf Tappen helped reconstruct prewar planning for the defense of East Prussia, while the Nachlass of F. W. Foerster contains correspondence clarifying—or attempting to clarify—several controversial points of the campaign. The records of the Admiralstab der Marine in the German Navy Archive include a good deal of significant correspondence with the general staff, as well as the navy’s own analyses of German strategic and geographical positions.
The exhaustive and exhausting literature on specific aspects of the contributions of Russo-German hostility to the outbreak of World War I is best traced through the footnotes. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987), incorporates the most recent, and by far the most familiar, statement of Russia’s relative weakness. James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (New York, 1984), emphasizes Europe’s structural weaknesses; Volker Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York, 1973), differs from its companion volumes in the St. Martin series, The Making of the 20th Century, (Zara Steiner on Britain, D. C. B. Lieven on Russia, and John Keiger on France) in stressing the aggressive intentions of his subject. Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston, Toronto, 1965), deserves renewed attention, particularly in a current context stressing the possibilities of long-term German-Soviet rapprochement. The new translation of Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914 (Leamington Spa, 1987), establishes for an English-speaking audience the fence-moving nature of Russian expansionism prior to World War I, and how it differed essentially from imperialism’s more familiar forms, colonialism and economic penetration.
On the opposing armies, Bernd Schulte, Die deutsche Armee 1900–1914. Zwischen Beharren und Verändern (Düsseldorf, 1977); and Manfred Messerschmidt, “Preussens Militär in seinem gesellschaftlichen Umfeld,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 6, Preussen im Rückblick, ed. H-J Pühle, H-U Wehler (Göttingen, 1980), pp. 43–88; are the best examples of a currently dominant school of thought sharply critical of the German army’s social role and fighting power. David R. Jones, “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War,” in Military Effectiveness, Vol. I, The First World War, ed. A. R. Millett, W. Murray (Boston, 1988), 249–328, is the best readily-available survey of a subject treated at greater length in “Russia’s Armed Forces at War: 1914–1918: An Analysis of Military Effectiveness” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Dalhousie University, 1986). Bruce Menning’s forthcoming Bayonets Before Bullets is a definitive analyses of doctrine, training, and tactics in the Russian army of 1914. Allan Wildman’s two volumes on The End of the Russian Imperial Army (Princeton, 1979) stresses the impact of war on the army’s structure.
Operationally Tannenberg is most familiar to English-language readers from its Russian perspective. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, especially its revised and enlarged edition (New York,
1989), incorporates an historical dimension that makes its case more by weight than by scholarship. W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon (New York, 1986), and Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–17 (New York, 1975), include up-to-date summary accounts of Tannenberg. Lincoln focusses on the command aspects of Russia’s disaster; Stone emphasizes the army’s structural weaknesses. Of the older secondary accounts, N. N. Golovine, The Russian Campaign of 1914, tr. A. G. S. Muntz (Ft. Leavenworth, Kans., 1933) remains valuable for its copious excerpts from unpublished or obscure Russian accounts. British general Sir Edmund Ironside’s Tannenberg: The First Thirty Days in East Prussia (Edinburgh, 1933), is a professional soldier’s account containing translations of many of the Russian orders whose original texts are in Sbornik dokumentov mirovay voyni na russkom fronte. Manevrenni period 1914 goda: Vostochno-Prusskaya operasiya, ed. Generalny Shtab RKKA (Moscow, 1939), Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917, Vol. I (London, 1921), incorporates the most familiar description of the 2nd Army’s situation. Jean Savant, Épopée Russe (Paris, 1945), is an emigré apologia for Rennenkampf, nevertheless helpful in explaining the 1st Army commander’s behavior during the Tannenberg campaign.
Material from the German side of the battle line is at least as ample, though less accessible. Hindenburg and Ludendorff both left memoirs, published in English as Out of My Life (London, 1933) and Ludendorff’s Own Story (New York, 1929). Max Hoffmann’s War Diaries and Other Papers (London, 1929); and Hermann von François’s Marneschlacht und Tannenberg (Berlin, 1920), give their respective authors the best of every situation, but are useful retrospectives. Walther von Stephani, Mit Hindenburg bei Tannenberg (Berlin, 1919) offers a junior staff officer’s perspective.
Of the secondary accounts, the German official history, Die Befreiung Ostpreussens, Volume II of Der Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1925), is detailed and reliable on everything that can be verified, but glosses over the problems of command that played such a major role in the campaign. Walter Elze, Das Deutsche Heer von 1914 (Breslau, 1928), despite its title, is a sound analysis of Tannenberg by one of interwar Germany’s finest civilian military historians. The volume is particularly valuable because it reprints many orders whose originals were lost during World War II. Elze’s distaste for what he considers Ludendorff’s unjustified postwar pretensions are as clear as his admiration for Hindenburg.
Theobald von Schäfer, the archivist responsible for Volume II of the official history, used the anecdotal and descriptive material excluded from the larger work as a basis for Tannenberg (Berlin, 1927), a volume in the Reichsarchiv’s series Schlachten des Weltkrieges. This drum-and-trumpet narrative account, constantly contrasting German heroism with Russian incompetence, invites dismissal as Weimar revisionism at its worst. Its extensive citations of sources, since lost, nevertheless make it a rough equivalent of Golovine, at least for the operations against the Russian 2nd Army.
Almost every regiment of the kaiser’s army produced its own history of World War I. These range from simple précis of war diaries and stupefying lists of dates to well-researched, sophisticated accounts by academically trained historians who made full use of diaries, letters, and interviews. Given the extensive destruction of German military archives for the period, these volumes are the best remaining source of information on the wartime army’s domestic economy. Their authors on the whole strove for honesty. In their pages not all the comrades are valiant and not all the officers are above average. The most senior and socially acceptable regiments, those with the largest funds and the richest old comrades’ associations, tended to produce the most detailed, and correspondingly useful, works. For the 8th Army, Franz von Gottberg, Das Grenadier-Regiment Kronprinz (1. Ostpreussische) Nr. 1 im Weltkriege, Vol. I, Die Ereignisse von Kriegsbeginn bis zum 3l.Juli 1916 (Berlin 1927); Alfred Bülowius and Bruno Hippler, Das Infanterie-Regiment v. Boyen (5. Ostpreussisches) Nr. 41 im Weltkriege 1914–1918 (Berlin, 1929); and Wilhelm Reichert, Das Infanterie-Regiment Frhr. Hiller von Gaertringen (4. Posensches) Nr. 59 im Weltkriege 1914/18, Vol. I, 1914/15 (Berlin, 1930) stand out. Moritz Holzmann, Hanseatische Landwehr im Felde (Geschichte des L.I.R. 75), Vol. I, Bewegungskrieg (Hamburg, 1928), casts useful light on the fight of the Goltz Division; and Ernst Zipfel, Geschichte des Dragoner-Regiments König Albert von Sachsen (Ostpr.) Nr. 10 (Zeulenroda, 1933), gives a comprehensive picture of the patrols and skirmishes that made up the cavalry’s still-vital contribution.
Among the many works published since the original appearance of this monograph, in addition to those referred to in the introduction, four specific studies stand out. It is no exaggeration to say that Stig Foerster, “Der deutsche Generalstab und der Illusion des kurzen Krieges, 1871–1914,” Militaergeschicht-liche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995), 61–95; and Terence Zuber, Inventing the Schlieffen Plan (New York, 2003), have between them provoked a fundamental rethinking of German strategy. Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001), is an equally fundamental revision of the Chief of Staff’s role in war planning. And John Sweetman, Tannenberg 1914 (London, 2002), is a model general-audience narrative, complementing the present work rather than competing with it.
Index
Aehrenthal, Alois Lexa, 36, 38, 42, 47
Air reconnaissance, 152–53, 169, 189, 192, 267, 300, 311–12
Alexander III, Tsar of Russia, 19
Alieuv, Eris Khan, 137, 189
Army Bill of 1913 (German), 70–71
Army, French, compared with Germany, 31–32; strategy and tactics, 52–53
Army, German: and strategic planning, 20–22, 25–26, 30–35, 43–46, 59–60, 98, 335–46; and views on war, 58–59; military intelligence, 61–63, 95–98; officer corps, 108–11, 272–73; socialists and, 109–10; regimental system, 111–12, 113–14; as socializing institution, 112–13, 116–17; doctrine and training, 114–15, 124, 164–65; mistreatment in, 115–16; structure of, in 1914, 117–20; tactics, 121–23, 174; reservists in, 123–24, 142–43, 149–50; uniforms and equipment, 148–49; intelligence, 150–51; morale, 252–54; pioneers in, 272–73
Army, Russian: deployment, 25; and economy, 27; effectiveness, 62–63, 64–65 and possible Baltic invasion, 64; mobilization of, in 1914, 97–99 officer corps, 126, 134–35 doctrine, 126–27 strategic planning, 127–31 organization, 135; supply system, 215–16 communications, 216–17
Artamonov, Lt.-Gen., 233, 250, 252
Artillery, German: organization, 119–20 material, 119–20 communications, 176–77 tactics, 185
Artillery, Russian, 136, 151–60, 313
Austria-Hungary, foreign relations of, 20–21, 24, 36, 41, 54; new sick man of Europe, 75–76 and Serbia, 85–87 war plans, 143–44, 156–57 disaster of, in 1914, 326–27
Bakunin, Michael, 13
Balkan League, 48–51
Balkan Wars, 51–52, 56
Bartenwerfer, Capt., 287–88, 290
Bauer, Max, 330
Beck, Ludwig, 65
Below, Otto von, 108; commands I Reserve Corps, 188, 209–10 at Gumbinnen, 188–90 at Bischofsburg, 240–48 and advance on Allenstein, 265, 286–90, 298–99, 303–04; subsequent career, 349–50
Benecke, Capt., 271–73
Bennigsen, Adam, 147, 148, 160
Berchtold, Leopold von, 84, 86
Bernstein, Eduard, 16, 71
Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von: and Britain, 46–47 and Russia, 46, 69; and Balkans, 56–57 and Concert of Europe, 58–59 and military budget of 1913, 70–71 and Austria, 75–76 and July Crisis, 88–94 and prospects for a separate Russian peace, 337–44
Bismarck, Otto von, 2, 10; Russian policies, 16, 20–22 and Lombardverbot, 23–24 and Reinsurance Treaty, 23; resignation of, 26
Blagoveschensky, Lt.-Gen., 243–47, 315–17
Bloch, I. S., 34
Bosnian Crisis, 36–42
Brecht, Maj.-Gen., 151, 296
Brusilov, Alexei, 64
Buchanan, Sir George, 77
Bülow, Bernhard von, 333; on Rus
sia, 24–25, 29–30 and Weltpolitik, 29; and Bosnian crisis, 38–42
Bülow, Karl von, 67, 294
Cambon, Jules, 52
Caprivi, Leo von, 26, 32
Cavalry, German: doctrine, 151–52 at Gumbinnen, 180, 189, 210
Cavalry, Russian: organization, 136; doctrine, 146–48 and reconnaissance, 217
Congress of Berlin, 16
Conrad von Hötzendorf, Franz, 45, 67–68, 84, 327, 339
Conta, Richard von, 162–66, 174, 176, 234–37, 250–55, 279–80, 304–06
Crown Council (1912), 55
Danilov, Yuri, 129
De moribus Ruthenorum (Hehn), 17
Drechsel, Maj., 296
Durnovo, Pavel, 78
East Prussia: strategic geography of, 32–33, 145–46 ethnic tensions in, 106–07; Russian behavior in, 159–60
Einem, Karl von, 61
Elze, Walter, 240–41
Fabeck, Col. von, 201
Falk, Maj.-Gen. von, 165–66, 167, 172–73, 237, 250–55, 282
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