As we have found with many of the family, her reputation is seriously smeared by the negative picture many contemporary historians have painted of the whole clan. What seems clear is that she was her brother Caligula’s favourite, and the scandalous tongues, of which there were many in Rome, credited her with having an incestuous relationship with her emperor brother – who apparently had more than brotherly feelings for all his sisters, whom he awarded the privileges of Vestal Virgins and had coins issued in their likenesses.
Statue of Iulia Drusilla at the Museo Gregoriano
Bust of Drusilla
Whether this is true or not, we cannot say. It is possible that Caligula, who was, as we know, of a somewhat disturbed mind, attempted to emulate the pattern of his Roman lineage after the Hellenisticmonarchs of the Ptolemaic dynasty where marriages between jointly ruling brothers and sisters had become generally accepted. His contempt for the Roman elite may have played a part in such a scheme. Since what happened in the royal bedchamber was not a matter of public knowledge, some observers registered that the emperor reserved the female position of honour at the imperial dinners always for Drusilla, not her sisters or his wives, which they took as a sure sign of his despotism.
She died of the one or other epidemic that frequently plagued Rome in these times. Her brother, who reportedly never left her sickbed, posthumously made her an Augusta and had the Senate enact a decree declaring her a Goddess, as Diva Drusilla, on a par with Venus (Aphrodite).
About this scandalous movie, there is a most extensive website, that delves deeply in the myths and legal troubles of the film at caligula.org, which informs in-depth and has never-before-published information and pictures galore.
STAVKA (the Russian High Command) had prepared two plans for the eventuality of war against the Central Powers, Plan G for Germany and A for Austria-Hungary. Although the mobilization of the troops stationed in Russia was somewhat delayed by G and A’s colliding railway schedules, the Russian army eventually appeared in its deployment areas faster than anticipated by the enemy.
STAVKA had established two Army Group commands for her western forces, north respectively south of the Bug – Vistula line. Army Group “Northwest” was in charge of First and Second Armies, earmarked to deploy against Germany while Army Group “Southwest” commanded Third, Fifth and Eight Armies, sharing the task of invading Galicia, the Austrian part of former Poland.
Fourth Army was the Russian version of a “swing option”: much like Joffre had originally intended for Lanrezac‘s Fifth Army in France, Fourth Army could be sent into action either at the Austrian front south of Lublin, or back up, “en echelon”, First and Second Armies on their way into Germany.
The Russian post-1905 modernization program had suffered much due to arthritic Russian bureaucracy; improvements were delayed, never implemented or simply ignored; in some respects the Russian army could not meet international standards.
[First and Second Armies deployed] … nine corps to Prittwitz‘ [the German C-in-C] four, and seven cavalry divisions, including two of the Imperial Guard, to his one. Rennenkampf, commanding First Army, and Samsonov, commanding Second, were moreover both veterans of the Russo-Japanese War, in which each had commanded a division, while Prittwitz had no experience of war at all. [Not true, see link above]
Their formations were very big, [Russian] divisions having sixteen instead of twelve battalions, with large masses of – admittedly often untrained – men to make up losses. Though they were weaker in artillery, particularly heavy artillery, than their German equivalents, it is untrue that they were much less well provided with shells; all armies had grossly underestimated the expenditure that modern battle would demand and, at an allowance of 700 shells per gun, the Russians were not much worse off than the French, fighting at the Marne. Moreover, the Russian munitions industry would respond to the requirements of war with remarkable success.
Nevertheless, Russia’s forces were beset by serious defects. The proportion of cavalry, so much greater than that in any other army, laid a burden of need for fodder on the transport service, itself inferior to the German, which the value given by mounted troops could not justify; forty trains were needed to supply both the four thousand men of a cavalry division and the sixteen thousand of an infantry division.
There were human defects as well. Russian regimental officers were unmonied by definition and often poorly educated; any aspiring young officer whose parents could support the cost went to the staff academy and was lost to regimental duty, without necessarily becoming thereby efficient at staff work. As Tolstoy so memorably depicts in his account of Borodino, the Russian officer corps united two classes which scarcely knew each other, a broad mass of company and battalion commanders that took orders from a narrow upper crust of aristocratic placemen. The qualities of the peasant soldier – brave, loyal and obedient – had traditionally compensated for the mistakes and omissions of his superiors but, face to face with the armies of countries from which illiteracy had disappeared, as in Russia it was far from doing, the Russian infantryman was at an increasing disadvantage. He was easily disheartened by setback, particularly in the face of superior artillery, and would surrender easily and without shame, en masse, if he felt abandoned or betrayed. The trinity of Tsar, Church, and Country still had power to evoke unthinking courage; but defeat, and drink, could rapidly rot devotion to the regiment’s colours and icons. (1)
To this litany a failed artillery policy and communication problems might be added. Russian artillery officers tended to view the main task of heavy guns in defending the chain of fortresses which secured the Russian border perimeter and were very much averse of schlepping big guns over a battlefield. Thus, Russian armies were chiefly equipped with small and medium calibre guns, of lesser firepower and diminished range. As in the naval gun race, lighter guns became the victims of the enemy’s heavier ones; for lack of range unable to return the fire. Radio communications suffered from a lack of trained cipher clerks, which forced the radiomen to transmit many message en clair, especially in the heat of battle.
Initial Deployment
In the event of August 1914, Fourth Army marched south, to the Austrian border, and Army Group Northwest dispatched First and Second Armies to East Prussia. The plan envisioned a two-pronged manoeuvre of enveloping 8th Army. STAVKA directed Rennenkampf to attack north of the lakes and the Angerapp River east of Königsberg and to proceed along the Baltic Sea Coast in westerly direction. Samsonov was ordered to invade from the south-east – from the direction of Warsaw – and to march in north-westerly direction until he would meet Rennenkampf, coming from the other direction, somewhere on the Vistula, perhaps in the vicinity of Marienwerder or Marienburg. The defenders would be surrounded and once the Vistula was gained, the way into West Prussia and Silesia lay open.
The plan had two weaknesses: it was obvious, as a tarantula on the cheesecake, and it depended upon close cooperation and communication of the two armies, conduct neither Rennenkampf nor Samsonov were renowned for. The German General Staff had actually based pre-war games upon the premise of such a two-pronged attack and had established that the correct counter-strategy was to delay one prong while attacking the other. Such a strategy necessitated rapid troop movements between the two sides of the Lakeland, the north-eastern part around Insterburg and Gumbinnen, and the south-western side from Allenstein in the centre of the province to Thorn on the Vistula. A direct railway was built traversing the Lakeland for this exact purpose, running along a line Gumbinnen – Insterburg – Allenstein – Osterode – Deutsch-Eylau – Thorn.
The map below shows the early stage of the East Prussian campaign. The Russians appeared three weeks earlier than anticipated, Rennenkampf’s vanguard crossing the border and reconnoitring in westerly direction on August 15. Two days later, his III, IV and XX Corps marched on Gumbinnen, eighty miles east of Königsberg. They were screened by his 1st Cavalry Division on their southern flank and the Guards Cavalry Corps on the northern one. Their counting on strategic surprise, however, was nullified as early as August 9 on account of the German 2nd Aircraft Observer Battalion and the services of two dirigibles stationed at Königsberg and Posen. They informed Prittwitz of the Russian presence, but what worked for the Germans failed, inexplicably, for the Russians: their cavalry could not find any trace of the enemy, and Rennenkampf’s aerial reconnaissance unit, consisting of a fleet of 244 aircraft, mysteriously failed to spot a single German unit.
Early Deployment and Russian Plan
The most important information for Prittwitz was that Second Army seemed to be late. The German staff began to believe that they might have a shot at Rennenkampf first and Samsonov later.
Geography was to disrupt the smooth onset of the Russian combined offensive in space. Less excusably, timidity and incompetence were to disjoint it in time. In short, the Russians repeated the mistake, so often made before by armies apparently enjoying an incontestable superiority in numbers, the mistake made by the Spartans at Leuctra, by Darius at Gaugamela, by Hooker at Chancellorsville, of exposing themselves to defeat in detail: that is, of allowing a weaker enemy to concentrate at first against one part of the army, then against the other, and so beat both.
The way in which geography worked to favour the Germans’ detailed achievement is the more easily explained. Though eastern East Prussia does indeed offer a relatively level path of advance to an invader from Russia, the chain of lakes that feeds the River Angerapp also poses a significant barrier. There are ways through, particularly at Lötzen, but that place was fortified in 1914.
As a result, a water barrier nearly fifty miles long from north to south confronted the inner wings of First and Second Army, so tending to drive them apart. Strategically, the easier option was to pass north and south of the Angerapp position rather than to force it frontally, and that was what the commander of the North-Western Front, General Yakov Zhilinsky, decided to direct Rennenkampf and Samsonov to do.
He was aware of the opportunity such a separation offered to the Germans and accordingly took care to provide for the protection of his two armies’ flanks. However, the measures taken enlargened the danger, since he allowed Rennenkampf to strengthen his flank on the Baltic coast, which was not at risk, and Samsonov to detach troops to protect his connection with Warsaw, equally not threatened, while arranging for one corps of Second Army [II Corps] to stand immobile in the gap separating it from First. The result of these dispositions was a diversion of effort which left both armies considerably weakened to undertake the main task. Having commenced the deployment with a superiority of nineteen divisions against nine, Rennenkampf and Samsonov actually marched to the attack with only sixteen between them.
Worse, critically worse, the two armies arrived at their start lines five days apart in time. First Army crossed the East Prussian frontier on 15 August, a very creditable achievement given that the French and Germans were then still completing their concentration in the west, but Second not until 20 August. As the two were separated in space by fifty miles of Lakeland, three days in marching time, neither would be able to come rapidly to the other’s assistance if it ran into trouble which, unbeknownst either to Rennenkampf or Samsonov, was the way they were heading. (2)
The aviators’ intelligence initially paid off for Prittwitz. When Rennenkampf began offensive operations on August 17, Prittwitz knew that Samsonov was late and thus could momentarily afford to keep most of 8th Army in the north-east. A Russian probe which showed up at the small town of Stallupoenen, ten miles east of Gumbinnen, was quickly checked, but when Prittwitz ordered a counter-attack of General Herrmann von François‘ I Corps on August 20, the Russians had already prepared an entrenched position near Gumbinnen. I Corps was, as was the whole 8th Army, composed of East Prussian men defending their homeland, and their aggressiveness in assaulting a fortified Russian position cost them dearly.
By mid-afternoon, I Corps had come to a halt. Its neighbouring corps, XVII, commanded by the famous Life Guard Hussar, von Mackensen, who was encouraged by early reports of its success, was meanwhile attacking north-eastwards into the Russians’ flank.
It did so without reconnaissance which would have revealed that, on its front as on that of von François, the Russians were entrenched. From their positions they poured a devastating fire into the advancing German infantry who, when also bombarded in error by their own artillery, broke and ran to the rear. By late afternoon the situation on the front of XVII Corps was even worse than that on the front of I Corps and the Battle of Gumbinnen was threatening to turn from a tactical reverse to a strategic catastrophe.
To the right of XVII Corps, I Reserve, under von Bülow, counter-attacked to protect Mackensen’s flank against a Russian advance. At Eight Army headquarters, however, even the news of that success could not stay the onset of panic. There Prittwitz was yielding to the belief that East Prussia must be abandoned and the whole of his army retreat beyond the Vistula. (3)
The big red arrow on the map above shows the intended retirement to the west, beyond the Vistula, that Prittwitz thought unavoidable. The bold blue arrows in squares DE 3-4 symbolize Rennenkampf’s III, IV and XX Corps, moving westward, into the direction of the fortified zone of Königsberg. At its southern flank, First Army is protected by 1st Cavalry Division and in the north by the Guard Cavalry Corps. Squares BCD 1-2 show Second Army, composed of I, XXIII, XV, XIII and VI Corps, plus 15th, 6th and 4th Cavalry Divisions. Samsonov’s II Corps is located in the geographical middle of the Lakeland, square DE 2, in the act of being transferred to Rennenkampf on August 21. It is on the way north-west, to join First Army at Angerburg.
At OHL [Supreme Command] Moltke balked at the very thought of withdrawing 8th Army behind the Vistula. But for the margins of the operational plan being too narrow, Moltke had no troops available for an immediate reinforcement. To make the situation worse, the men of 8th Army had their roots and families in East Prussia; an order to retreat might cause a revolt. Moltke decided that a new broom was needed on the Eastern front. Two brooms, actually.
Moltke decided first that a director of operations of the first quality must be sent instantly to the east to take charge. He chose Ludendorff, who had twice so brilliantly resolved crises in Belgium. He next determined to dispose of Prittwitz altogether, judging his declared intention to retire behind the Vistula, even if subsequently reconsidered, to be evidence of broken will.
In his place he promoted Paul von Beneckendorff and Hindenburg, a retired officer noted for his steadiness of character if not brilliance of mind. As a lieutenant in the 3rd Foot Guards, Hindenburg had been wounded at Königgrätz in 1866 and fought in the Franco-Prussian War. He claimed kinsmen among the Teutonic Knights who had won East Prussia from the heathen in the northern crusades, had served on the Great General Staff and eventually commanded a corps.
He had left the army in 1911, aged sixty-four, but applied for reappointment at the war’s outbreak. When the call from Moltke came, he had been out of service so long that he was obliged to report for duty in the old blue uniform that had preceded the issue of field-grey. He and Ludendorff, unalike as they were, the one a backwoods worthy, the other a bourgeois technocrat, were to unite from the start in what Hindenburg himself called “a happy marriage.” Their qualities, natural authority in Hindenburg, ruthless intellect in Ludendorff, complemented each other’s perfectly and were to make them one of the most effective military partnerships in history. (4)
Hindenburg
Ludendorff
On August 23, Hindenburg and Ludendorff arrived at Rastenburg whither the HQ of 8th Army had been moved, and summoned the staff for a conference the very next day. The discussion began with an analysis of the situation by General Scholtz, commander of XX Corps which was, at the moment, the sole German unit opposing the slowly advancing Samsonov in the south. Strategically, the newcomers in command were much aided by a resolution Prittwitz had enacted just before he was relieved of duty. During his years at the Staff Academy, Prittwitz had participated in the aforementioned war games and hence was familiar with the East Prussian counter-strategy, which called to defeat the Russians “in detail”. Prittwitz had decided that, after the tie at Gumbinnen, as he saw it, Rennenkampf could be counted as checked, and that First Army would typically need a few days to regroup and redeploy. If he acted fast, he might beat Samsonov in the south before Rennenkampf, in the east, resumed the offensive. Ably assisted by his Chief of Staff, Colonel Max Hoffmann, he ordered von François’s I Corps from Königsberg whither it had retired, and von Mackensen’s XVII Corps, at the moment south-west of Gumbinnen, to entrain southward to meet Samsonov.
Rennenkampf
Samsonow
These movements are indicated on the map below by the thin dashed lines and bold red arrows, showing the early stages of the German movements. I Corps retired to Königsberg in order to board the coastal railway line while XVII and I Reserve traversed first westward, then south-west, into the direction of Allenstein. Scholtz’s II Corps was already in the vicinity, around the small towns of Hohenstein and Tannenberg.
Thus, Hindenburg and Ludendorff did not have to design a new plan, whose development might have cost precious time but were able to adopt Prittwitz’s strategy, which they pursued at best speed. To their aid came a few monumental errors in the Russian dispositions, chiefly by Rennenkampf. When First Army’s forward reconnaissance units, after the four days of the Battle of Gumbinnen, reported that the presence of German troops facing them was thinning out, Rennenkampf assumed that 8th Army had retreated to the fortified zone of Königsberg. Such a move might be reasonable, at some level, since it would compel First Army to a lengthy siege, which might give the Germans time enough to send reinforcements from the Western Front. Thus, Rennenkampf stopped the pursuit of I and XVII Corps, consolidated his territorial gains, and initiated preparations for the upcoming siege.
He reported his decision to STAVKA and asked for assistance with the investment of Königsberg, for which his troops, lacking heavy artillery, were ill prepared. But since the delay meant that he was, for the time being, incapable of keeping touch with the rest of the German army, he proposed to Zhilinsky to send Samsonov in the direction of the Vistula, i.e. north-west. Once First Army had reduced Königsberg, the planned envelopment of 8th Army could be reactivated. Army Group Northwest followed Rennenkampf’s suggestion and Samsonov was ordered to proceed in north-western direction, to the Vistula, but away from First Army.
Rennenkampf’s proposition was risky in itself – what if the siege failed? But what transpired in the event was worse. On the morning of August 25, First Army’s radio traffic with STAVKA and Army Group Northwest, which included the siege plan, was intercepted and deciphered by Ludendorff’s radio monitors. Moreover, the messages yielded the priceless information that First Army would halt and thus be unable to support Second Army in case it headed into trouble.
Rennenkampf’s decision to halt allowed Hindenburg and Ludendorff to concentrate against Second Army. They could afford to leave Königsberg essentially unprotected except for its entrenched garrison and a weak screen of 1st Cavalry Division [see map above, the red dots, C 3-4, west of Rennenkampf]. Now the railways came into play. The existence of two lines allowed 8th Army to route parts of XVII and I Reserve Corps southward, via the Insterburg-Allenstein line traversing East Prussia, and to convey I Corps by the coastal railway to Elbing, and then route them via Marienburg and Deutsch-Eylau to Seeben, into a position opposite the left flank of Samsonov’s I Corps which stood between Soldau and Usdau. Ludendorff even ordered the small Vistula garrison from Thorn to meet François’s I Corps near Lautenburg [Map above, square B 1]. By August 26, XVII Corps stood at Bischofstein [Map above, C 3], and I Reserve between Allenstein and Seeburg [Map above, C 2-3], opposing Samsonov’s northernmost unit, VI Corps at Bartelsdorf. The main body of Second Army still stood south of Allenstein [XIII, XV and XXIII Corps, Map above, BC 1-2].
The tactical situation on the map above depicts the advantage the Germans earned by the flexibility of their troop movements, which, in addition, almost completely evaded Russian detection. There were hardly any German troops left in the north-east, vis-a-vis Rennenkampf – except for the very light screen of 1st Cavalry – and the Russian II Corps, now detached to First Army’s southern flank, lingers in a completely uncontested area. Except for her cavalry, First Army remained almost stationary; by August 26 it had moved barely ten miles west – cautiously – through empty land. Second Army was still moving north-west but was spreading all over the Lakeland, from Zielun, 15th Cavalry in the south-west, to Sensburg, 4th Cavalry, in the north-east. This was when Hindenburg …
… was passed the transcript of a complete Russian First Army order for an advance to the siege of Königsberg which revealed that it would halt some distance from the city on 26 August, well short of any position from which it could come to Second Army’s assistance in the battle he planned to unleash.
Furnished with this assurance, he met von François, whose corps was just beginning to arrive at Samsonov’s flank, in confident mood. Distance was working for him, the distance separating Samsonov and Rennenkampf’s armies, and so now too was time, the self-imposed delay in Rennenkampf’s advance which, had it been pressed, would have put the First Army well behind the Lakeland zone in positions from which it could have marched south to Samsonov’s assistance. (5)
Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s plan were successive attacks into Second Army’s right flank, that is, to attack from Allenstein in south-western direction. François’s I Corps was to begin the offensive on August 25.
Hermann von François
Max Hoffmann, Chief of Staff
Then François, whose stubborn aggressiveness could take a wilfully uncooperative form, interrupted the smooth unrolling of a plan that should have brought his I Corps, XVII and XX successively into action against Samsonov’s flanks. Claiming that he was awaiting the arrival of his artillery by train, he was slow off the mark to attack on 25 August, and slow again the next day.
Ludendorff arrived to energize the offensive, with characteristic effect, but François’s hesitation had meanwhile had a desirable if unintended result. Unopposed in force to his front, Samsonov had thrust his centre forward, towards the Vistula against which he hoped to pin the Germans, thus exposing lengthening flanks both to François, now to his south, and to Mackensen and Scholtz, who were marching XVII and XX Corps down from the north. On 27 August François rediscovered his bite, and pushed his men on. Samsonov, disregarding the danger to his rear, pressed on as well. On 28 August his leading troops savaged a miscellaneous collection of German troops they found in their path and broke through almost to open country, with the Vistula beyond.
Ludendorff, seized by a fit of his nerves his stolid appearance belied, ordered François to detach a division to the broken units’ assistance. François, creatively uncooperative on this occasion, did not obey but drove every battalion he had eastward at best speed. With the weight of Samsonov’s army moving westward by different routes, there was little to oppose them. On the morning of 29 August, his leading infantry reached Willenberg, just inside East Prussia from Russian territory, and met German troops coming the other way [see map below]. They belonged to Mackensen’s XVII Corps, veterans of the fighting south of the Masurian Lakes, who had been attacking southward since the previous day. Contact between the claws of the two pincers – the units were the 151st Ermland Infantry of I Corps and the 5th Blucher Hussars of XVII – announced that Samsonov was surrounded. (6)
The map above portrays the situation on August 30. I Corps had begun its move at Seeben and marched east via Niedenburg, to Willenburg. Since Samsonov was marching in the opposite direction, north-west, none of his units encountered I Corps, and Second Army remained oblivious of the Germans’ presence in their rear. After I and XVII Corps had met at Willenburg, Scholtz’s XX Corps closed the trap on the western side. Except for VI Corps which escaped by retiring in south-eastern direction over the Russian border, the whole of Second Army was caught in a huge pocket east of the towns of Hohenstein and Tannenberg.
Situation August 30, 1914
Victoryy aaccounced
The bag amounted to approximately 50,000 Russian casualties and 92,000 prisoners, compared with losses of about 30,000 killed, wounded or missed on the German side. These numbers made the Battle of Tannenberg, as it was named according to Hindenburg’s wishes, a most particular event compared to the battles on the Western front which frequently caused wholesale destruction but so far had rarely yielded significant numbers of prisoners. For the moment, the danger to East Prussia and Silesia was averted, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff hailed as the saviours of the nation.
Russische Gefangene und Beute The Generals of 8th Army
Rennenkampf, however, proved a tougher customer than Samsonov. When the Germans, now reinforced by the arrival of IX and the Guard Reserve Corps from France, attempted to repeat the encircling manoeuvre against First Army, Rennenkampf managed to evade the German pincers adroitly in what was called the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. On 13 September he was safely back in Russian territory, regrouped, and, reinforced by a new Russian army, the Tenth, conducted a counteroffensive which succeeded in re-establishing a Russian line near the Angerapp River, which was held until February 1915.
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] Keegan, John, The First World War, Vintage Books 2000, ISBN 0-375-40052-4361, pp. 140-41, 142-44, 145, 145-46, 148, 148-49
German Military History Research Office Edition 2007
Perhaps the most famous – and most misinterpreted military document in world history – but not, as is often claimed, the blueprint for 1914 – is the so-called “Great Memorandum” (also known as the “Schlieffen Plan”), written by German Field Marshal and Chief of Staff Alfred Graf von Schlieffen – dated 1905, the year of his retirement, but probably completed in 1906. It was simply a memorandum – a military-political statement that repeatedly addressed the issue of (in Schlieffen’s opinion) a much-needed expansion of the German army at a time when much of the budget went to the Navy. It was not a current deployment, let alone a mobilization plan. Link to the PDF – File
Author’s remark: Please keep in mind that this post is about the 1905 original Great Memorandum of Count Schlieffen – NOT about what happened in 1914, as described in the map below.
The “Schlieffen Plan”, like any other document, must be seen in the historical context in which it originated. Two arguments seem to be particularly valid here: (1) The plan arose from a certain tradition – that of the Prussian General Staff to plan and carry out rapid campaigns for limited objectives, which had worked so well in 1866 and 1870/71, and (2) no one had an alternative. Holger Herwig – with whom this author does not necessarily agree on everything – argued in 2003 in the anthology “The Origins of World War I,” Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-81735-8, p. 155:
But Schlieffen’s critics lacked a viable alternative. Their vision (or fear) of a peoples‘ war lasting anywhere between seven and thirty years was unacceptable – to Kaiser, generals, parliament and nation. The Second Reich was not the Third; total mobilization for total war was anathema to one and all. Thus, simply to reject Schlieffen’s blueprint of a short war for limited aims – a strategy deeply rooted in Prussian military annals – was to deny the very viability of what the historian Gerhard Ritter called „Kriegshandwerk“. Put bluntly, to concede that the vaunted Prussian Genera Staff could no longer conduct short wars of annihilation was to admit that war had ceased to be a viable option by the start of the twentieth century. There were few takers in Germany for such a radical notion.
Hence, war it had to be. After having lost the Great War, however, in various post-war works of German officers Hermann von Kuhl, Gerhard Tappen, Wilhelm Groener and Reichsarchiv (Imperial Archives) historians directed by former Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel) Wolfgang Förster, a thesis or narrative was developed that held:
I. That in the years leading to 1905, the former Chief of the German General Staff, Field MarshalAlfred von Schlieffen, had conceived a development and operations plan for a two-front war against France and Russia that all but guaranteed victory, and
II. that it was the failure of 1914 Chief of Staff Generaloberst (Colonel-General) Helmuth von Moltke the Younger to follow and execute the plan properly that led to Germany’s loss of the World War.
The story had to be taken on faith, because the famous plan was not made available – not a snippet of it was published to support the allegations. Yet in principle – so much was known – the plan prescribed an attack on northern France through Belgium and an encirclement and subsequent siege of Paris, which should force a French capitulation – more or less like shown in the West Point Map below:
After most German military archives were destroyed in the subsequent Allied bombings of World War II, the plan was believed lost, that is, until in 1953, German monarchist historian Gerhard Ritter found a copy of Schlieffen’s Memorandum of 1906 (backdated to 1905) at the National Archives in Washington. Indeed, it appeared that the original memorandum had not been stored in the ministry of defence at all but at his home and was found much later in the estate of his daughter. In 1958 he published the paper in English, with a foreword by B.H. Liddell-Hart, under the title “The Schlieffen Plan – Critique of a Myth” at Praeger, New York (the original German version appeared 1956 at R. Oldenbourg, Munich). [No ISBN or Library of Congress Card available] It is available here as a PDF File – please read carefully.
A few hints: The Memorandum describes war solely against France – NOT a two-front war including Russia. The plan employs 94 divisions all in all – a number which never existed (Moltke had to do with 68 divisions in 1914, of which a few had guard duties at the North Sea Coast and around invested cities like Maubeuge and Brussels) – but most crucial are logistic and spatial impossibilities. John Keegan analysed them in “The First World War”, Vintage Books 2000, ISBN 0-375-40052-4361, and I hope I will be forgiven if I quote Keegan’s analysis at length:
The Great Memorandum – Author’s Copy
[Schlieffen’s] midnight pettifoggery had as its object an exact adjustment not of German numbers to those that the French could deploy, but to what the Belgian and French road network could carry. Such calculations were the groundwork of staff-college training: students, transferring from prepared tables the length of a marching column – twenty-nine kilometres for a corps, for example – to a road map, could determine how many troops could be pushed through a given sector at what speed. Since thirty-two kilometres was the limit of a forced march, that would be the advance of a corps on a single road; but the tail of a column twenty-nine kilometres long would remain near or at the marching-off point at the day’s end. If there were twin parallel roads, the tails would advance half the distance, if four three- quarters, and so on. Ideally, the units of a corps would advance not in a column but in line abreast, allowing all of it to arrive at the day’s end thirty-two kilometres further on; in practice, as Schlieffen admitted in one of his amendments, parallel roads were at best to be found one to two kilometres apart.
Day22, all Corps correct and present, all roads jam-packed …
As his great wheeling movement was to sweep forward on a front of three hundred kilometres with about thirty corps, however, each would have only ten kilometres of front on which to make its advance, in which there might be at best seven parallel roads. That was not enough to allow the tails of the columns to catch up with the heads by the day’s end. The drawback was serious in itself; more seriously, it absolutely forbade any attempt to crowd more troops into the radius of the wheeling movement. They would not fit, there simply was not room.
Here we come to the question how the six (non-existing) Ersatz-Corps that the attentive reader will see appearing out of thin air in Map 3 could have made their way to Paris?
Day 31, nine days later, six new, non-existent, reserve corps (i.e. 12 divisions) appear magically in the siege ring around Paris, marked in green …
It is at this point that a careful reader of the Great Memorandum recognises a plan falling apart: Map 3 in no way shows how the new corps are to advance or to invest Paris, the central strong point of the “great fortress” that was Schlieffen’s France. The corps simply appear, with no indication of how they have reached Paris and its outskirts. The “capacity of the railways” is irrelevant; railways, in Schlieffen’s plan, were to carry the attackers no further than the German frontier with Belgium and France. Thereafter, it was the road network that led forward, and the plodding boots of the infantry that would measure out the speed of advance.
Schlieffen himself reckoned that to be only twelve miles [just under twenty kilometres, ¶] a day. In the crisis of August and September 1914, German, French and British units would all exceed that, sometimes day after day – the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment averaged sixteen and a half miles during the great retreat from Mons to the Marne, 24 August – 5 September, and covered twenty-three and twenty-one miles on 27 and 28 August respectively – but Schlieffen’s mean was not far short of the mark. Von Kluck’s army on the outer wing of the great wheel achieved a little over thirteen miles a day between 18 August and 5 September 1914, over a distance of 260 miles.
For the “eight new corps,” needed by Schlieffen as his plan’s clinching device, to arrive at the decisive place of action, they would have actually needed to march not only further and faster, which defied probabilities; but to do so along the same roads as those occupied by the corps already existing, a simple impossibility.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find buried in the text of the Great Memorandum its author’s admission that “we are too weak” to bring the plan to a conclusion and, in a later admission, “on such an extended line we shall still need greater forces than we have so far estimated.” He had run into a logistical impasse. Railways would position the troops for his great wheel; the Belgian and French roads would allow them to reach the outskirts of Paris in the sixth week from mobilisation day; but they would not arrive in the strength necessary to win a decisive battle unless they were accompanied by eight corps – 200,000 men – for which there was no room. His plan for a lightning victory was flawed at its heart. It was pigeonholed for use nonetheless.
In the original 1956 edition of Gerhard Ritter the maps are in the back of the book and of low quality. I have placed them in appropriate parts of the text and added coloured lines for better following the argument.
The problem of the plan, as it lies before us, is its interpretation. After Terence Zuber (former US Army officer and historian in Würzburg) argued from 1999 on in various publications that the plan is just a memorandum, and there was no indication that it ever was the true basis of manoeuvres or even a comprehensible technical discussion – on the contrary – documents were found in the 1990s at the archives of the former GDR on the actual exercises that his successor Moltke held until 1914. Naturally, there was a great outcry of established historians, who believed their livelihoods threatened. See Zuber, Terence, “The Real German War Plan 1904-14,” The History Press 2001, ISBN 978-0-7524-5664-5.
International conferences have swiftly been convened to stop the heresy, but Zuber’s critique, whose cornerstones are perhaps best read in the English Wikipedia article on the plan, makes perfect sense. The problem is that, if it were a real plan, one would have to assume that the German Chief of Staff was devoting himself to planning – until 1905 – for a single-front war against France, which was completely out of the question following the Franco-Russian alliance after the non-prolongation of the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. There would be no single-front war, as Terence Holmes pointed out. Hew Strachan, perhaps the dean of World War I history, tends to accept many of Zuber’s conclusions.
The counter-criticism also argues that the memorandum incorporates the brief military weakening of Russia after the catastrophe of the Russo-Japanese War. This seems, however, rather irrelevant, as in this war, the main losses of Russia related to their fleet, which did not interest the German Navy much – the High Seas Fleet prepared against England. The main problem of the present counter-criticism is that it argues the events of 1914 – not the memorandum of 1905.
In 2007, the German Military History Research Office (MGFA) published “The Schlieffen Plan: Analyses and Documents“, edited by Michael Epkenhans, Hans Ehlert and Gerhard P. Gross. Wiki informs us that … “This volume contains a copy of Schlieffen’s 1905 Memorandum misfiled in the German Military Archives at Friedberg, and German deployment plans from the year 1893/94 to 1914/15, most of which had been lost otherwise. These documents, not yet available in English translation, are said to strongly support the traditional ideas of a “Schlieffen Plan” that Zuber disputed.”
First impression [Update 05.06.2019]: The problem of the book probably lies in the organization of the conference from September 30 to October 1, 2004, that gave rise to ist existence. The reason for convening the conference in the first place had been the fundamental criticism of Terence Zuber – see above. In the implementation of the conference, this was, however, not made the order of the day, but various participants were given the opportunity to present their own theses to the “Schlieffen Plan” – but not, as mentioned above, in response to the memorandum of 1906, but to announce their own, previously unpublished opinions about the developments of the German deployment plans from 1905 to 1914 or about the events of 1914.
There is a need for differentiation: When Zuber called the Schlieffenplan a “myth” after 2000, he did not mean that the plan did not exist – the memorandum lies plainly in our sight – but he pointed to the incongruity of the memorandum (see John Keegan’s analysis of its tactical impracticability and the use of “Ghost Divisions”) with the legend developed after 1918 – that Schlieffen had presented a perfect plan that the younger Moltke did not understand, or “watered down” by changes to the plan.
Hew Strachan
This blog entry does refer to the memorandum of 1905-6, as stated above, not the events of 1914 or the preparations and possible plans under Moltke. However, such was not the topic of the conference. Annika Mombauer develops theses concerning something she calls the “Moltke Plan”, i.e. a possible history of the still unknown actual war plan of 1914. Other contributions deal with the military situations, plans and political realities in Austria-Hungary (Günter Kronenbitter), France (Stefan Schmidt ), Russia (Jan Kusber), Great Britain (Hew Strachan), Belgium (Luc De Vos) and Switzerland (Hans Rudolf Fuhrer and Michael Olsansky). Regardless of the qualities of these contributions, the question of their relevance for the plan at hand arises.
Zuber’s core thesis was, and is, that the “Schlieffen Plan” (in the form of the Great Memorandum of 1905/6) was not an actually feasible plan and that there are no indications that it actually formed the basis for 1914 planning.
There is much work left for subsequent updates, but another striking example of the tactical impracticability of the plan (which John Keegan probably omitted for lack of space) would be the encirclement of Paris, as planned by 1st Army (v. Kluck, and the six non-existent Ersatzkorps). If we imagine a ring encircling Paris in a line Compiègne – Pontoise – Plaisir – Orsay – Évry – Brie-Comte-Robert – see picture below – we are faced with an additional front length of over 400 kilometres (in a two-sided enclosure front as in Alesia) without any flank protection or backing – which would all but invite the Allies to a catastrophic encirclement of the western part.
Siege-ring around Paris …… and possible Allied counter-attack …
The continuation of this article and analysis of a few newly available documents you will find on:
… which gave an introduction to the subject and remains the basis for this extended version. Please make sure you read it first, as an introduction in these matters. The original post solely discussed the Schlieffen Plan of 1905/1906 – now we shall consider the actual developments of August and September 1914 until the Battle of the Marne and the developments arising thereof.
Various newly discovered historical documents regarding 1914 will be translated into the English language and presented here for the first time.
Before discussing the plans of Schlieffen, the “Schlieffen Plan”, and the real German war plan of 1914 in any detail, we must first familiarize ourselves with the geography of the battlefield. A common border between France and Germany exists only in the south, between Switzerland and Luxembourg, along the Vosges Mountains west of Mulhouse and Strasbourg, and the high terrain of the Lorraine between Donon and Thionville, through the upper half of which flows the Moselle River via Metz to the Rhine. These stretches of mountains respectively highlands are in general territory where the lay of the land favours the defender and hence were fortified by both sides. France built four principal modern fortresses in a north-westerly oriented line, from Belfort near the Swiss border, to Epinal, Toul/Nancy and Verdun at the Meuse River, which forms the main defence line in the north-western quadrant of the region.
The principal defences on the German side of this stretch ran along the ridgeline of the Vosges opposite the Upper Rhine and were strengthened by a fortified fallback position at Strasbourg. The highlands stretching out between Donon, Sarrebourg, Morhange and Metz had been fortified only weakly, for it was thought that a flexible defence in this area offered a good chance of mounting a counterattack. Along the Moselle River, from Metz to Thionville (Diedenhofen) near the border to Luxembourg, ran the “Moselstellung”, the ‘Moselle Position’, the main fortified German area, which was considered impenetrable. The good defensive perimeters on either side ensured that once French attacks during the opening Battle of the Frontiers in the first weeks of August had been repulsed, and the Germans blooded their noses in attacking at the Grand Couronne de Nancy, the whole Franco-German border saw little action until late in 1918.
The middle part of the western theatre consisted of the independent Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Ardennes Forest, a high plateau that stretches from northern Luxembourg about thirty miles on each side of the German- Belgian border into the respective countries, almost to Aachen (Aix-La-Chapelle) and Liège (Lüttich). The strategic pièce de résistance on this part of the front is Verdun, for an outflanking of Verdun from the north-west along the Meuse in southeastern direction would outflank the whole French fortress belt.
But it was the northernmost part of the Franco-Belgian-German borderlands that received the most attention of military strategists, for the plains of Flanders and in particular, a path following the northern bank of the Meuse and Sambre Rivers, along Liège and Namur in Belgium to Maubeuge at the Franco-Belgian border, offered a convenient route for an army crossing from northern France into western Germany or vice versa, presenting a good opportunity to outflank the enemy. It could thus not surprise anyone that Belgium fortified the areas of Liège and Namur, and France did the same with Maubeuge. Still, the opportunity provided by the plains loomed large in the minds of continental generals, and, as Gerhard Ritter explains, it was taken more or less for granted that the roads would be used. By whom, remained a topic of discussion.
We know that the idea of forcibly raising the Belgian frontier barriers played a great part at the height of the French struggle for hegemony under Napoleon III. After his fall there could be no thought of a French offensive for many decades. But when French chauvinism flared up again under Boulanger in 1887 and there seemed to be an immediate threat of a Franco-German war, European public opinion was not at all certain that Belgian neutrality would be respected by either belligerent, since both had secured their positions on the Lorraine front by strong fortresses.
In England there were uneasy memories of the obligation assumed in 1839, and renewed in 1870 by treaties with France and the North German Bund, to guarantee Belgian neutrality. British diplomacy at first assured Brussels that the obligation would be honoured; but soon it was advising the Belgians not to count on effective British help, for which there were too few military resources, but to try to defend their border on their own.
At the same time there appeared in the semi-official press some very strange articles, obviously inspired by the Foreign Office, which can only be regarded as “kites” to sound public opinion on the question of neutrality. They discussed whether, in the event of a German march through Belgium into northern France, England could not accept the situation provided Bismarck gave his word not to infringe Belgian sovereignty and only to use a “right of way” through the country. The question was answered in the affirmative.
Other newspapers, too, gave warnings against going beyond paper protests – an indication of how much the Liberal England of that day disliked being drawn into Continental quarrels. Furthermore, it was clearly noticeable that Lord Salisbury regarded France, not Germany, as the country threatening European peace, and that his sympathies were far more on the German side. …
This was the time, in 1887, when the German General Staff, too, was discussing the possibility of the French Army being able to outflank the German position in Lorraine through Belgium. But Count Moltke was not in the least disturbed by this, as one sees from his great strategic plan of 1887:
“On the right, our position could only be outflanked at any distance by a violation of neutral countries, Luxembourg or Belgium. This would result in an entirely changed military situation which we need not discuss here, but which would obviously develop unfavourably for the French. However poorly one may estimate the military resistance of these countries, the invasion would be weakened by the need to keep watch on their troops and hold their populations in check.
The whole operation would come to a standstill on the Rhine, while we ourselves would advance in mass from the south. If, incidentally, anything could spur England into action, it would be the occupation of Belgium by the French Army. For all these reasons, the whole enterprise seems highly unlikely.”
This fitted in with the declaration Bismarck had caused to be published in the semi-official “Post”; the British reflections were not only premature but also groundless. Germany would never open war with the violation of a European treaty. If one supposed that the German General Staff was bound to contemplate a breakthrough via Belgium, it had to be pointed out that this far from exhausted the ingenuity of the German General Staff. It was furthermore an error to suppose that the conduct of German policy was subject to the views of the General Staff. (26)
As long as Bismarck was responsible for Germany’s policies, nobody doubted that he exercised control, not the generals. But after his retirement in 1890, German foreign policy quickly acquired a vacillating quality – the subsequent chancellors Caprivi and Hohenlohe were not only ignorant of foreign relations but made no efforts to improve their expertise. Soon the situation Bismarck had toiled all his life to avoid came to pass – détente between France and Russia. The spectre of a two-front war first raised its head.
Perhaps the most famous – and most misinterpreted military document in world history – but not, as is often claimed, the blueprint for 1914 – is the so-called “Great Memorandum” (also known as the “Schlieffen Plan”), written by German Field Marshal and Chief of Staff Alfred Graf von Schlieffen – dated 1905, the year of his retirement, but probably completed in 1906. It was simply a memorandum – a military-political statement that repeatedly addressed the issue of (in Schlieffen’s opinion) a much-needed expansion of the German army at a time when much of the budget went to the Navy. It was not a current deployment, let alone a mobilization plan. Link to the PDF – File
In 1914, the axis of the German attack is clearly EAST of Paris, not WEST of it …
The “Schlieffen Plan”, like any other document, must be seen in the historical context in which it originated. Two arguments seem to be particularly valid here: (1) The plan arose from a certain tradition – that of the Prussian General Staff to plan and carry out rapid campaigns for limited objectives, which had worked so well in 1866 and 1870/71, and (2) no one had an alternative. Holger Herwig – with whom this author does not necessarily agree on everything – argued in 2003 in the anthology “The Origins of World War I,” Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-81735-8, p. 155:
But Schlieffen’s critics lacked a viable alternative. Their vision (or fear) of a ‘peoples war’ lasting anywhere between seven and thirty years was unacceptable – to Kaiser, generals, parliament and nation. The Second Reich was not the Third; total mobilization for total war was anathema to one and all. Thus, simply to reject Schlieffen’s blueprint of a short war for limited aims – a strategy deeply rooted in Prussian military annals – was to deny the very viability of what the historian Gerhard Ritter called „Kriegshandwerk“. Put bluntly, to concede that the vaunted Prussian General Staff could no longer conduct short wars of annihilation was to admit that war had ceased to be a viable option by the start of the twentieth century. There were few takers in Germany for such a radical notion.
Hence, war it had to be. After having lost the Great War, however, in various post-war works of German officers Hermann von Kuhl, Gerhard Tappen, Wilhelm Groener and Reichsarchiv (Imperial Archives) historians directed by former Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant-Colonel) Wolfgang Förster, a thesis or narrative was developed that held:
I. That in the years leading to 1905, the former Chief of the German General Staff, Field MarshalAlfred von Schlieffen, had conceived a development and operations plan for a two-front war against France and Russia that all but guaranteed victory, and
II. that it was the failure of 1914 Chief of Staff Generaloberst (Colonel-General) Helmuth von Moltke the Younger to follow and execute the plan properly that led to Germany’s loss of the World War.
The story had to be taken on faith, because the famous plan was not made available – not a snippet of it was published to support the allegations. Yet in principle – so much was known – the plan prescribed an attack on northern France through Belgium and an encirclement and the subsequent siege of Paris, which should force a French capitulation – more or less like shown in the West Point Map below:
After most German military archives were destroyed in the subsequent Allied bombings of World War II, the plan was believed lost, that is, until in 1953, German monarchist historian Gerhard Ritter found a copy of Schlieffen’s Memorandum of 1906 (backdated to 1905) at the National Archives in Washington. Indeed, it appeared that the original memorandum had not been stored in the ministry of defence at all but at his home and was found much later in the estate of his daughter. In 1958, he published the paper in English, with a foreword by B.H. Liddell-Hart, under the title “The Schlieffen Plan – Critique of a Myth” at Praeger, New York (the original German version appeared 1956 at R. Oldenbourg, Munich). [No ISBN Number or Library of Congress Card available] It is available here as a PDF File – please read carefully.
A few hints: The Memorandum describes war solely against France – not a two-front war including Russia. The plan employs 94 divisions plus 12 non-existing “Ersatz”-Divisions all in all – a number which never existed (Moltke had to do with 68 divisions in 1914, of which a few had detached duties at the North Sea Coast and around invested cities like Maubeuge and Brussels) – but most crucial are logistic and spatial impossibilities. John Keegan analysed them in “The First World War”, Vintage Books 2000, ISBN 0-375-40052-4361, and the author hopes to be forgiven for quoting Keegan’s analysis at length:
The Great Memorandum – Author’s Copy
[Schlieffen’s] midnight pettifoggery had as its object an exact adjustment not of German numbers to those that the French could deploy, but to what the Belgian and French road network could carry. Such calculations were the groundwork of staff-college training: students, transferring from prepared tables the length of a marching column – twenty-nine kilometres for a corps, for example – to a road map, could determine how many troops could be pushed through a given sector at what speed. Since thirty-two kilometres was the limit of a forced march, that would be the advance of a corps on a single road; but the tail of a column twenty-nine kilometres long would remain near or at the marching-off point at the day’s end. If there were twin parallel roads, the tails would advance half the distance, if four three- quarters, and so on. Ideally, the units of a corps would advance not in a column but in line abreast, allowing all of it to arrive at the day’s end thirty-two kilometres further on; in practice, as Schlieffen admitted in one of his amendments, parallel roads were at best to be found one to two kilometres apart.
As his great wheeling movement was to sweep forward on a front of three hundred kilometres with about thirty corps, however, each would have only ten kilometres of front on which to make its advance, in which there might be at best seven parallel roads. That was not enough to allow the tails of the columns to catch up with the heads by the day’s end. The drawback was serious in itself; more seriously, it absolutely forbade any attempt to crowd more troops into the radius of the wheeling movement. They would not fit, there simply was not room.
Here we come to the question of how the six (non-existing) Ersatz-Corps that the attentive reader will see appearing out of thin air in Map 3 could have made their way to Paris?
It is at this point that a careful reader of the Great Memorandum recognizes a plan falling apart: Map 3 in no way shows how the new corps are to advance or to invest Paris, the central strong point of the “great fortress” that was Schlieffen’s France. The corps simply appear, with no indication of how they have reached Paris and its outskirts. The “capacity of the railways” is irrelevant; railways, in Schlieffen’s plan, were to carry the attackers no further than the German frontier with Belgium and France. Thereafter it was the road network that led forward, and the plodding boots of the infantry that would measure out the speed of advance.
Schlieffen himself reckoned that to be only twelve miles [just under twenty kilometres, ¶] a day. In the crisis of August and September 1914, German, French and British units would all exceed that, sometimes day after day – the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment averaged sixteen and a half miles during the great retreat from Mons to the Marne, 24 August – 5 September, and covered twenty-three and twenty-one miles on 27 and 28 August respectively – but Schlieffen’s mean was not far short of the mark. Von Kluck’s army on the outer wing of the great wheel achieved a little over thirteen miles a day between 18 August and 5 September 1914, over a distance of 260 miles.
For the “eight new corps,” needed by Schlieffen as his plan’s clinching device, to arrive at the decisive place of action, they would have actually needed to march not only further and faster, which defied probabilities, but to do so along the same roads as those occupied by the corps already existing, a simple impossibility.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find buried in the text of the Great Memorandum its author’s admission that “we are too weak” to bring the plan to a conclusion and, in a later admission, “on such an extended line we shall still need greater forces than we have so far estimated.” He had run into a logistical impasse. Railways would position the troops for his great wheel; the Belgian and French roads would allow them to reach the outskirts of Paris in the sixth week from mobilisation day; but they would not arrive in the strength necessary to win a decisive battle unless they were accompanied by eight corps – 200,000 men – for which there was no room. His plan for a lightning victory was flawed at its heart. It was pigeonholed for use nonetheless.
In the original 1956 edition of Gerhard Ritter, the maps are in the back of the book and of low quality. The present author has placed them in appropriate parts of the text and added coloured lines for better following the argument.
The problem of the plan, as it lies before us, is its interpretation. After Terence Zuber (former US Army officer and historian in Würzburg) argued from 1999 on in various publications that the plan is just a memorandum, and there was no indication that it ever was the true basis of manoeuvres or even a comprehensible technical discussion – on the contrary – documents were found in the 1990s at the archives of the former GDR on the actual exercises that his successor Moltke held until 1914. Naturally, there was a great outcry of established historians, who believed their livelihoods threatened. See Zuber, Terence, “The Real German War Plan 1904-14,” The History Press 2001, ISBN 978-0-7524-5664-5.
International conferences have swiftly been convened to stop the heresy, but Zuber’s critique, whose cornerstones are perhaps best read in the English Wikipedia article on the plan, makes perfect sense. The problem is that, if it were a real plan, one would have to assume that the German Chief of Staff was devoting himself to planning – until 1905 – for a single-front war against France, which was completely out of the question following the Franco-Russian alliance after the non-prolongation of the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. There would be no single-front war, as Terence Holmes pointed out.
The counter-criticism also argues that the memorandum incorporates the brief military weakening of Russia after the catastrophe of the Russo-Japanese War. This seems, however, rather irrelevant, as in this war, the main losses of Russia related to their fleet, which did not interest the German Navy much – the High Seas Fleet prepared against England. The main problem of the present counter-criticism is that it argues the events of 1914 – not the memorandum of 1905.
In 2007, the German Military History Research Office (MGFA) published “The Schlieffen Plan: Analyses and Documents“, edited by Michael Epkenhans, Hans Ehlert and Gerhard P. Gross. Wiki informs us that “This volume contains a copy of Schlieffen’s 1905 Memorandum misfiled in the German Military Archives at Friedberg, and German deployment plans from the year 1893/94 to 1914/15, most of which had been lost otherwise. These documents, not yet available in English translation, are said to strongly support the traditional ideas of a “Schlieffen Plan” that Zuber disputed.”
First impression [Update 05.06.2019]: The problem of the book probably lies in the organization of the conference from September 30 to October 1, 2004, that gave rise to ist existence. The reason for convening the conference in the first place had been the fundamental criticism of Terence Zuber – see above. In the implementation of the conference, this was, however, not made the order of the day, but various participants were given the opportunity to present their own theses to the “Schlieffen Plan” – but not, as mentioned above, in response to the memorandum of 1906, but to announce their own, previously unpublished opinions about the developments of the German deployment plans from 1905 to 1914 or about the events of 1914.
There is a need for differentiation: When Zuber called the Schlieffenplan a “myth” after 2000, he did not mean that the plan did not exist – the memorandum lies plainly in our sight – but he pointed to the incongruity of the memorandum (see John Keegan’s analysis of its tactical impracticability and the use of “Ghost Divisions”) with the legend developed after 1918 – that Schlieffen had presented a perfect plan that the younger Moltke did not understand, or “watered down” by changes to the plan.
Hew Strachan
This blog entry originally only referred to the memorandum of 1905-6, not the events of 1914 or the preparations and possible plans under Moltke. However, such was not the topic of the conference. Annika Mombauer develops theses concerning the “Moltke Plan”, i.e. her own possible history of the actual war plan of 1914,. Other contributions deal with the military situations, plans and political realities in Austria-Hungary (Günter Kronenbitter), France (Stefan Schmidt ), Russia (Jan Kusber), Great Britain (Hew Strachan), Belgium (Luc De Vos) and Switzerland (Hans Rudolf Fuhrer and Michael Olsansky). Regardless of the qualities of these contributions, the question of their relevance for the plan at hand arises.
Zuber’s core thesis was, and is, that the “Schlieffen Plan” (in the form of the Great Memorandum of 1905/6) was not an actually feasible plan and that there are no indications that it actually formed the basis for 1914 planning.
There is much work left for subsequent updates, but another striking example of the tactical impracticability of the plan was the encirclement of Paris, as planned by 1st Army (v. Kluck, and the six – or eight – non-existent Ersatzkorps). If we imagine a ring encircling Paris in a line Compiègne – Pontoise – Plaisir – Orsay – Évry – Brie-Comte-Robert – see picture below – we are faced with an additional front length of over 400 kilometres (in a two-sided enclosure front as in Alesia) without any protection of the flanks – which would all but invite the Allies to a counterattack and a subsequent catastrophic encirclement of the western part of 1st Army.
Siege ring around Paris …Allied counter-attack …
What then, was Moltke’s real plan in August 1914?
These tactical and strategic impossibilities of the 1905/1906 Plan by Schlieffen were clear to his successor, the Younger Moltke. With only 38 corps (23 active, 11 reserve, 4 cavalry) available against the French, British and Belgian armies in the Western Theatre (4 corps and 1 cavalry division remained in East Prussia and 2 divisions guarding the coast), any attempt to follow Schlieffen’s Plan was simply suicidal. Schlieffen had used 94 divisions (= 47 corps) plus 6 non-existing “Ersatz”-Corps against France alone in his plan and had still called for further expansion of the army.
The idea of the double encirclement including the gigantic siege of Paris, as envisioned by Schlieffen, remained a pipe dream, as John Keegan’s operational analysis, concerning the relative strength of the armies and the strictures of geography prove. What did Moltke have in mind then? His full plan has never been published, but some of the underlying documents have seen the light of day since the German Reunification of 1990, which made available some documents from Eastern German sources long believed to be lost. Let us first have a look at the deployment plan for 1914, the underlying assumptions and Moltke’s initial orders.
Original German deployment plan and general intentions in the Mobilization Calendar 1914/15 [Excerpts, to be continued … To be translated into the English language for the first time, coming in the spring of 2020]
Mobilization Calendar 1914/15.
General information about the deployment and the political situation.
1. Germany’s war preparations are directed primarily against France. Russia is likely to join France in war against Germany; hostilities from the English side are to be expected.
With respect to the French popular mood, a German war with Russia or England alone is not to be expected. Should Russia or England declare war alone, then German diplomacy must force France to a final decision. About Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Denmark etc. cf. I. Section 13.
In the event of a war against Russia, agreements exist with the Austro-Hungarian general staff to launch a general offensive into Russia. Italy is expected to join Germany in a war against France. The Italian General Staff has committed to the deployment of 2 {?} cavalry divisions in the first days of mobilization and to send, subsequently, an army of 3 army corps by rail via Austria to southern Germany. In further activities, the intervention of the main Italian forces on the French Alpine border is to be expected. Agreements have also been made with other states, of which the chief of the Army General Staff, Q.Q. I, and the boss of the 2nd {…} have knowledge.
Germany can only mobilize its entire army; partial mobilizations are barred due to the intermeshing of the preparatory work of all Army Corps.
At mobilization, the German army deploys:
a) the complete Field Army, consisting of 26 army corps, 13 reserve corps, 1 reserve division (3rd Reserve Division), 11 cavalry divisions (Guard 1 – 9, Bavarian), 1st Landwehr Corps and 24 1/2 mixed Landwehr brigades,
b) the fort crews and occupation troops. The merger of the “reserve formations for possible mobile use“ to a full Replacement Army (G. IV. VIII. X. XIX. Bavarian Replacement Divisions, 55 mixed Replacement Brigades XIV) is in preparation; see. Clause 3.
In addition, the Landsturm is mobilized. The border and coastal protection clauses come into force throughout the German Reich.
3. Only a single deployment plan is prepared, in which the main German forces deploy at the western border against France. A relocation of the army part deploying southwest of Metz may become necessary under certain circumstances. In the case of the early appearance of superior French forces in the Lorraine, it should be considered whether to relocate 6th Army in the line St. Av.-Saaralben-Pfalzburg.
The 8th Army (4 Corps, 1 Reserve Division, 1 KD Landwehr Corps, 3 mixed Landwehr brigades) remains in the East. The 8th Army either marches immediately against Russia or remains under the scheduled implementation of the mobilization as well as border and coastal protection in the eastern corps districts until provisions can be made about their further use.
If Russia remains neutral, the 8th Army may become used against France. Its removal is prepared. Following the end of mobilization, IX. AK with the 2 Landwehr commands 1 IX (33. 34. 37. 38. mixed Landwehr-Brigades) will be established as northern deployment. If there is no threat to the German coast, the IX. AK. and possibly the northern brigade as well may be ordered to another theater of war.
The replacement army can be used as a whole or divided onto the western, eastern and northern theaters of the war. …
… 13. In a general meeting of the chiefs of the Army General Staff with the Reich Chancellor, the Federal Foreign Office, K.M., military cabinet and chief of the Admiral staffs the likely opponents and the allies’ and neutral powers stance in the event of war are to be ascertained; if possible to determine whether the transfer of French forces from African ports on the Mediterranean coast to France is to be expected.
Oral agreements must be procured with the Chancellor and the Federal Foreign Office that the following demands were made immediately after the mobilization was pronounced:
a) to Belgium:
The Belgian government has until the 2nd day of Mobilization, 6 p.m., to decide whether Belgium wants to be Germany’s friend or foe or whether Belgium – as a neutral state – will allow the passage of German troops, immediately open the fortresses L. [Liège?], Huy and Namur to the German army, surrender the railway lines {…} and renounce the mobilization of the Belgian army. If Belgium joins the German side, it must support the march-through of the German army by all available means, safeguard Namur against a possible coup of the French army and prevent English landings. Any postponement of the Belgian government’s reply must not be allowed;
b) to Holland:
English landings must be prevented, the German army may limit Dutch neutrality {?}. (About the crossing of the Dutch section around Maastricht see paragraph 71 d). If 2nd Army cancels the planned coup on L., we must immediately negotiate with Holland to receive permission of an unhindered march through this corner.
c) to Luxembourg:
The march-through must be permitted, the railways must be protected and their use be provided.
d) to Denmark:
English landings must be prevented.
10th Mobilization day and the following:
A decision must be made regarding the use of the Italian army. There are several possibilities:
Their approach immediately following the 6th and 7th Army
Action against the blocking forts line between Epinal and Belfort
The left flank of the Italian Army in their actions against the Vosges into France will be covered to the lateral forces of the German Army [i.e. 7th Army, remark by author] on the Upper Rhine.
The German deployment against France is based on the following intent:
1. The main forces of the German army are to pass through Belgium and Luxembourg and proceed to France. Their advance is – if the present information about the French deployment turns out correct – planned around the pivot point Diedenhofen-Metz. Relevant for the progress of the turning movement is the right wing of the army. The movements of the inner armies will be adapted, so that the cohesion of the whole Army and the connection to Diedenhofen-Metz may not be lost.
2. The protection of the left flank of the main forces of the army – besides the Diedenhofen and Metz fortresses – must be guarded by the troops deployed south-east of Metz.
3. For the rapid advance of 1st and 2nd Army, the roads through Liège must be open. In the case that Belgium allows the German army to march through, the Commanding General X. A.K. shall occupy Liège with readily movable troops. – If Belgium opposes, the following cases are considered for the removal of Liège:
a: A quick strike with troops ready to march ahead and transported ahead under commanding General X. A.K.
b: an attack with strong forces under the command of the 2nd Army
c: an attack establishing a siege. All roads south of the Dutch border are at the disposal of 2nd Army for the operation against Liège … As soon as Liège is taken, the 2nd Army must clear the march roads intended for the 1st Army…. If 2nd Army does not succeed in opening the avenues blocked by Liège up to the 12th day of mobilization, it will initiate a siege of the fortress by reserve and siege formations and march around the south of Liège. In this case, the advance of the 1st Army should –
but only on express command of the Supreme Army Command – proceed through Dutch territory.
4. The beginning of the general advance of the main German forces will be ordered as soon as 1st and 2nd armies are ready in the Liège pocket. The Cavalry Commander 2 – including the assigned infantry battalions – is then placed immediately below the Supreme Army Command and will receive the command to proceed north of and past Namur against the Antwerp-Brussels-Charleroi line: to determine the position of the remainders of the Belgian army, guard against a possible landing of English troops and assert an eventual presence of French forces in northern Belgium. He will also receive the order to investigate north of Namur into the area west of the Meuse, the Namur-Givet route, and determine the position of the left French army wing. The cavalry commander will be instructed to provide the high command of the 2nd and 1st Army with messages; his reports to the Supreme Army Command are to be passed on immediately.
“The Schlieffen Plan: Analyses and Documents“, pp. 478 – 484
Just in, fresh from the press: The maps of the German “Aufmarsch West” (Deployment Plans West) 1899-1914. Commentary following soon!
1899 – 1900: Note 12 Italian Divisions (marked red …)Changes 1906/07 – The Transition of Command from Schlieffen to Moltke
In the meantime up to 1914, the only notable changes concern the Upper Rhine, by and by the Italian troops disappear and are replaced by 7th Army, split between the Vogesen heights …
1907/081908/09 – 7th Army appears for the first time (green arrow) …1909/10 West I1909/10 West II1910/111911/12
1913-14: More or less, the actual deployment in August 1914 …
Quotations:
(26) Ritter, Gerhard, The Schlieffen Plan – Critique of a Myth, Oswalt Wolff Publishers, London 1958, pp. 79 – 81
Ethnically, Europe was a complicated affair. Ethnicity had not been a primary political criterion in the Middle Ages within the original feudal system – especially in Central Europe – as the heterogeneity of not only the Holy Roman Empire but also of Italian city-states and Turkish suzerainty over the fragmented Balkan lands anteceded the rise of nationalism.
Not only Germans realized after 1848 and 1871 that the political status quo had not truly changed. The princes remained in control of Europe, the bourgeoisie concentrated on economic progress and the developing socialist movement sought consolidation. The Congress of Berlin 1878 had attempted to set the remaining issues of European disharmony.
Anton von Werner, Congress of Berlin (1881): Final meeting at the Reich Chancellery on 13 July 1878, Bismarck between Gyula Andrássy and Pyotr Shuvalov, on the left Alajos Károlyi, Alexander Gorchakov (seated) and Benjamin Disraeli
Nationalism had originally been a leftist cause – against the princes – but it was skilfully turned against the burghers and the evolving working class and most effectively reinforced by a strange new ideological concoction – anti-Semitism.
While xenophobia remains one of the apparently ineradicable hobbies of man, and persecution of Jews has happened in history alongside the persecution of every other minority one can imagine, anti-Semitism as a concept is of quite a recent origin. The word itself seems to have appeared here and there since the 1860s, notably in an essay Richard Wagner published anonymously 1850 (“Das Judenthum in der Musik” – Jewishness in Music), but only found general attention after 1879, when the German agitator Wilhelm Marr published a treaty named “Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet (The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective)” [German text] – the same year in which he also founded the “Antisemiten-Liga” (League of Antisemites).
Sarajevo, June 28, 1914 – Moments before the Assassination
Anti-Semitism found a number of prominent proselytes – Emperor Wilhelm II, the influential political author Heinrich Claß and various men of the cloth, but was by far not confined to Germany. France struggled fifteen years under the Dreyfus-Affair and in Imperial Russia pogroms on Jews belonged to the favourite entertainment of the masses.
Whole books have been written on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, an asinine fabrication cobbled together and first published in Russia in 1903 – a ludicrous conspiracy theory on Jewish world domination – however, the quackbook was taken as holy writ by such usual suspects as Wilhelm II or Henry Ford, who had 500.000 copies printed and distributed.
Nationalism and anti-Semitism were the two major fulcrums of aristocratic domination of political Europe in the second half of the 19th Century until the rise of the socialist movement created an even more suitable bogeyman. Hence, the burghers need not only to fear economic ruin by Jewish shylocks and rapine by illoyal border-dwellers – indeed their physical existence was now jeopardized by the threat of revolution by the masses of unwashed labourers who failed to properly profess their gratitude for the starvation wages they were receiving.
Early Placard
First Congress of the Socialist International
Marx and Engels
Early Offices in Paris (x)
It is thoroughly understandable that so much existential peril left the burghers of the continent in a grave and present fear – which might best be mitigated by expanding self-defence. What were the numbers on which the glorious undertaking of arming the nation might be based on?
Panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar by William Lionel Wyllie – The fixed idea of British Naval Tradition
The following statistics, which give us an idea of Germany’s industrial and political developments versus her competitors, are provided by Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Vintage Books 1989, ISBN 0-679-72019-7 , pp. 200 ff.):
It is immediately visible that France is the odd man out in regards to her population growth; while the United States increased its population between 1890 and 1913 by 56.5%, Russia by 48.6%, Germany by almost 36% and Great Britain by a somewhat more modest 23%, the French population remained almost constant, growing only 3.5% in these twenty-three years. Another indicator for economic and industrial development is the percentage of urban versus rural population:
Great Britain, whose
industrialization had started some fifty years earlier than that of any other
country, not surprisingly leads the world, although percentagewise, her urban
population grew only by 15.7% between 1890 and 1914, while Germany’s grew by
85.8% and that of the United States by 59.8% France looks better here, with 26.5%
growth, while Japan more than doubles its urban population. Italy, Austria and
Russia are in between as far as percentage change goes, but their low absolute
shares of around or under 10% depict them as underindustrialized as of yet.
The following view centres on the sine-qua-non of early industrial development, the production of steel:
These numbers depict the state of the respective country’s industrialization most consequentially, for without steel neither consumer goods nor arms could be built. Taking France’s small population growth into consideration, her increase of steel production between 1900 and 1913 is, percentagewise, an impressive 307%, although her total production of 4.6 million tons in 1913 is dwarfed by the USA’s 31.8 and Germany’s 17.6 million tons. Trendwise, both Great Britain and France lag behind them in industrial expansion, while Russian steel production is beginning to take off. It approximately doubles between 1890 and 1900, and again between 1900 and 1913, although, in absolute numbers, the 1913 output of 4.8 million tons was still meagre if compared to the country’s size. We now take a look at the total energy consumption:
If one were to combine the data above, and add a few other parameters, the result would describe the changes in relative industrial strength of the Great Powers:
This picture depicts the relative change in the potentials of the powers, which must be taken in their economic, as related to size and population, and geostrategic contexts, that is, related to their location. Italy and Japan remain struggling to catch up, while Russia is handicapped by her lack of infrastructure and Austria-Hungary by internal tension. If one compares the change of percentage over time, the USA expanded its capacity by 635%, Germany by 501%, and France by 228%, while Great Britain’s industrial power only grew 173%, an indication that her imperial splendour was beginning to fade even before 1914. We now shall compare the absolute market shares, which, over time, indicate relative ascent or decline:
This table strikingly reveals the weakening of Western Europe, Great Britain and France, compared to the United States, across the Atlantic Ocean, and Germany, in the middle of the continent. England’s portion in 1913 is only 59% of her share in 1880, that is, a decrease of 41%. France fares a bit better but still loses 27% of her world market percentage of 1880, while the USA increase their ratio by 117, 6% and Germany by 74.1%. The quota of Russia, Austria and Italy remain largely unaltered. If a European war was in the cards, Germany’s continental enemies would be best advised to rush it before they fell further back. Speaking of war, we now shall turn our attention to the military:
Berlin – Unter den Linden 1914Contemporary Comparison of Army Strength at the Outbreak of WW I
Even a cursory review of the table above sends the bells ringing for the burial of a few cherished prejudices. Not only is the German army, the presumptive menace of the continent, much smaller than Russia’s, which one might take for granted given the latter’s vastness, it is smaller than France’s, too. In the case of Austria-Hungary, her men, who are dispersed to cover a hostile border of some 1500 miles length, number only 100,000 more than Italy’s, who, after her entry in the war in 1915, had to defend or attack on a border of far less than a hundred miles; in essence the sites of a few Alpine passes. If we take the hostile coalitions of 1914, the Entente has 2,794 million men under arms, more than twice the number of the Central Powers’ 1,335 million men. All these numbers and many more will, of course, be discussed at length in “The Little Drummer Boy”, in the section on the Great War, from Chapter XIII on.
A comparison of the great powers’ total military personnel in 1914 vis-a-vis 1890 shows us that, in less than a quarter century, the number of servicemen increased from 2,9 million to almost 5 million, by more than two thirds. How does this compare to the much-made-of naval races of these years?
The High Seas Fleet at Kiel Harbour
It would seem almost beyond belief, but the naval tonnage of the great powers more than quintupled from 1,533,000 tons in 1880 to 8,153,000 tons in 1914 – growing by 532%. Fish must have begun to feel claustrophobic. As the figures for Japan and the USA make clear, the naval race was not limited to the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea; the latter found it necessary to almost triple the size of her navy in the fourteen years between 1900 and 1914 from 333,000 tons to 985,000; that is, afterthe Spanish-American War and the annexations of the Philippine, Cuban and Hawaiian islands, not before it.
As it would be expected, the different geostrategic locations of the powers decided which service was to become the primary beneficiary of the increasing budgets: the naval power Great Britain had little use for much infantry; her temporary apex in 1900, with 624,000 men under arms, was a result of the ongoing Boer War, not of a sustained increase in army spending. Her senior service, the Royal Navy, primary power instrument and conditio-sine-qua-non of her imperial grandeur, launched into a protracted building spree against the German and American navies (1812 was by no means forgotten) that resulted in a quadrupling of her size between 1880 and 1914.
There is a rule of thumb in history which holds that the more arms are being stacked upon each other the greater the probability that they will go off one day. It is true that this rule did not pan out during the Cold War, to our all survival, but this was more the result of the impracticability of nuclear warfare than of a sudden increase in human wisdom. In the early twentieth century, however, the focus of our inquiry, every new battleship launched and each new army corps established precariously challenged the balance of power – and one day, on August 1, 1914, the rule of thumb became grim reality.
When we are talking modern warfare, one of the words we invariably encounter is that of a “Division“. But what exactly is a “Division”? Let’s have a look at this concept in World War I:
NB: This post refers to “Division” as the word is used in land warfare. It may have very different meanings in other contexts. See Wiki:
“While the focus of this article is on army divisions, in naval usage division has a completely different meaning, referring to either an administrative/functional sub-unit of a department (e.g., fire control division of the weapons department) aboard naval and coast guard ships, shore commands, and in naval aviation units (including navy, marine corps, and coast guard aviation), to a sub-unit of several ships within a flotilla or squadron, or to two or three sections of aircraft operating under a designated division leader. Also, some languages, like Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Polish, use a similar word divizion/dywizjon for a battalion-size artillery or cavalry unit.“
Infantry 1914
The partitioning of armies into ‘divisions’ came into practice in the two French Coalition Wars (France against counter-revolutionary Austria, Russia and Prussia) in the 1790s and the subsequent Napoleonic era, in which armies had to be split up to defend against or attack more than one enemy at a given time or to fulfil tactical assignments, such as outflanking or enveloping manoeuvres.
The definition of a ‘division’ is that it is the smallest sub-unit of an army that can fulfil independent assignments, i.e., the smallest unit that has everything to fight its own small war. Thus said, it follows that a division must have more than soldiers, guns and ammunition: it must have a staff, engineers, signal troops, supply troops, a medical corps, a hospital, kitchen, laundry, map bureau and so forth.
Some units displayed somewhat strange customs: the Prussian Guard Corps was deployed according to size:
Recruits 1909 – the numbers are body height above one metre …
Until 1915, various specialist departments in the German Army – telephone departments, flak trains, pioneer battalions, mine-throwing companies, medical companies, field hospitals, car columns, horse hospitals, hunters, foot artillery and train etc. – were not commanded by the division, but subordinated to the superordinate army corps as corps troops. However, this proved impractical in wartime and was changed. During the war, at least in the war of positions on the Western Front, it quickly became clear that cavalry was basically superfluous there – existing units were scaled down or relocated to the eastern front, where their traditional function of reconnaissance could still be used. Due to the august command of his Majesty Wilhelm II, senseless cavalry attacks were practised in peacetimes up to the Imperial Manoeuvres of 1913 – in practice – from 1914 on, however – they became suicide by machine gun.
Manoeuvre 1913 – Suicide 1914
In the First World War, a fully equipped German infantry division would contain the following troops:
4 Infantry Regiments of 3,000 men each; each Regiment composed of 3 Battalions of 1,000 men; each Battalion composed of 4 Companies of 250 men; altogether 12,000 infantrymen;
1 Artillery Regiment consisting of 12 Field Batteries of 6 135 mm guns each and 2 Heavy Batteries of 4 155 mm guns (some divisions had an additional Heavy Howitzer Battalion with 16 150 mm howitzers);
2 Brigades of Cavalry, 680 sabres each, sometimes supported by 2 Field Gun Batteries of their own and a 6 Machine-Gun Company;
1 Squadron of reconnaissance aircraft, 6 machines, pilots, mechanics;
1 Special Artillery Brigade for the discretionary use of the division commander, (54 light 77 mm guns and 18 135 mm guns);
1 Special Machine Gun Company with 6 guns, and
1 Special Artillery Battalion with 18 105 mm howitzers.
Divisional troops, staff and support:
1 Battalion Combat Engineers (Sappers, in German called ‘Pioniere’ (Pioneers);
1 Signal and Communications Detachment with 2 Companies;
1 Quartermaster Train with 2 Companies;
1 Administrative Company;
2 Kitchen Companies (Butchers, Bakers, Cooks);
1 Mail Platoon and Field Post Office;
1 Medical Corps, consisting of 2 Hospital Companies and 4 Transport and Supplies Companies;
1 Veterinary Company;
1 Divisional Staff Company with 4 Detachments: Commanding Officer, Operations Officer (Ia), Supply Officer (Ib) and Intelligence Officer (lc);
1 Map Room;
1 Music Corps, and
1 Company Field Police (MP).
A complete infantry division employed therefore approximately 20,000 men, 7,000 horses and a train of 1,200 supply wagons. Yet a division that had all these troops present and correct would have to be called lucky indeed – for after the first battle most divisions had to do with half of these numbers – or less. In practice – after the huge losses of the first weeks – general staffs often commissioned whole corps to take over the independent tactical roles that divisions had been assigned to before the melee had begun.
In terms of vertical composition, two divisions formed a corps, and two corps an army. In practice, as the war dragged on and many units had to make do with smaller numbers, corps tended to get larger, sometimes as big as four divisions. Attrition had halved divisions strengths. When whole divisions were not available or had to be broken up, infantry brigades were used, half of a division – two infantry regiments plus whatever artillery was available.
Every country deviated from the scheme in characteristic ways. French divisions were equipped with a brigade of pre-established reserves, and while their field artillery, the 75 mm gun, was excellent and outperformed the German 77 mm model, they were usually weaker in the larger artillery calibres. British divisions were of somewhat larger size and compensated for an initial dearth of machine-guns with excellent marksmanship. Russian divisions – at least in the early campaigns – were huge, on account of their having not only three but four infantry regiments per division, i.e. sixteen battalions as opposed to twelve. American divisions were truly monstrous, roughly twice as big as German divisions.”
“Every night and every morn, Some to misery are born, Every morn and every night, Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.
William Blake “Auguries of Innocence”, L. 119
Then as now, the town of München is the capital of Bavaria, one of the oldest German self-governing states – first a duchy, then a kingdom. As European states go, she is of fair to middling size, about 27,000 square miles or 70,000 square kilometres big, slightly smaller than modern Austria or South Carolina but larger than Belgium,Switzerland or West Virginia, and forms the southeastern part of modern Germany. She shares borders with the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland, and reaches, in the north-west, close to Frankfurt in Hesse. In the south, she harbours a part of the great central European mountain range, the Bavarian Alps, with the Zugspitze peak, at 9270 ft. or 2960 metres her highest elevation (Germany’s too), where, as the saying goes, only eagles dare to fly. . . .
The 19th Century bestowed on the somewhat sleepy town a protracted period of modernization, a side effect of the industrialisation that much accelerated from the 1830s on. The land changed within two generations from its former almost exclusively rural character into a modern industrial state. The first German railway line had been opened between the Bavarian towns of Nuremberg and Fürth in 1835, and only half a century later, in Baden and Württemberg, slightly to the west, Nikolaus Otto,Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz worked on building horseless carriages. The company founded by the latter two, Daimler-Benz, is still one of the finest names in automobile manufacture; Bavaria, of course, is home to the fast cars of BMW and Audi.
Munich around the turn of the century … sheep grazing at the Theresienwiese, place of the annual Oktoberfest …
Cultural cross-fertilization and a strong artistic inheritance from the Italian Renaissance gave München an almost Italian charm: compared to Prussia, Bavaria was almost an anarchy (the royal family was proof enough, as we will see), but a lovely one and people from near and far came to settle there. The Bavarians still pursue an almost southern tradition of easiness of living, a very un-Prussian flair of dolce far niente. The country prides herself, reminiscent of her tradition, as the purveyor of Libertas Bavariae, Bavarian Liberty; and the land honoured her commitment when, although staunchly Catholic, she provided refuge to over ten thousand French Huguenot, i.e. Calvinist, families, who fled France and the wrath of Catharina de Medici in the seventeenth century after the Edict of Nantes – guaranteeing freedom of worship – had been revoked. The industrious newcomers were an important gain for Bavaria in general and München in particular; a number of streets named after prominent Huguenot families remind of the benefits they brought to town.
In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, the early reign of Ludwig I, the town began to lose her provincial character; before he had met and fallen for Lola Montez, the King had sponsored a public building program in neoclassical style – the results can still be seen on the boulevards of Ludwig Street and Maximilian Street. The genius of architects Leo von Klenze and Friedrich von Gärtner remains visible in the great number of their designs adorning the town which we all rebuilt according to the original plans after the bombing damage of the Second World War.
With Bavarian charm and a much more gregarious social climate than stiff-necked Prussia, provincial Berlin or mercantile Hamburg, München became a centre of international art and culture by the end of the nineteenth century, second only to Paris; leaving Vienna’s imperial fatigue and London’s faux Westminster grandeur easily behind. . . .
Second only to Paris, München, then harbouring about 600,000 inhabitants, attracted artists from all countries and walks of life, and became, in particular, a vortex for the avant-garde. As far as painting goes, the year 1909 alone had witnessed the establishment of four new artist groups, one of which called itself simply the ‘New Artists Association‘ and included Alexej von Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky. In the Café Stephanie at Amalienstraße, one could meet, at any time of day or night, radical intellectuals like Kurt Eisner, Erich Mühsam or Ernst Toller, all of whom rose to prominence after the war. While these artists and philosophers were far too progressive for Hitler’s bourgeois taste, they brought to München artistic flair and fervour unsurpassed until, twenty fateful years later, Berlin entered into the Roaring Twenties. But in 1910 Berlin was a cultural graveyard. Ian Kershaw [Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London, 1998), ISBN 0-393-32035-9]observed:
Schwabing, the pulsating centre of Munich’s artistic and Bohemian life, drew artists, painters, and writers from all over Germany and from other parts of Europe as well. They turned Schwabing cafés, pubs and cabarets into experimental hothouses of “the modern”. “In no city in Germany did old and new clash so forcefully as in Munich,” commented Lovis Corinth, one celebrated artist who experienced the atmosphere there at the turn of the century.
Lovis Corinth – The Three Graces
The
theme of decline and renewal, the casting off of the sterile, decaying
order, contempt for bourgeois convention, for the old, the stale, the
traditional, the search for new expression and aesthetic values, the
evocation of feeling over reason, the glorification of youth and
exuberance, linked many of the disparate strands of Munich’s modernist
cultural scene.
Schwabing Carnival 1900
The Stefan George circle; the scourge of bourgeois morality, playwright and cabaret balladeer Frank Wedekind; the great lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke; and the Mann brothers – Thomas, famous since the publication in 1901 of his epic novel of bourgeois decline, Buddenbrooks, and whose vignette of homosexual tension, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) had been published the year that Hitler arrived, and his elder, more politically radical brother Heinrich – were but some among the galaxy of literary luminaries in pre-war Munich.
In painting, too, the challenge of “the modern” characterized the era. Around the very time that Hitler was in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc,Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele Muenter, and August Macke were leading lights in the group Der Blaue Reiter, revolutionizing artistic composition in brilliant and exciting new forms of expressionist painting. The visual arts would never be the same.
Here revolutionaries of any ilk and calibre peddled their doctrines and, at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, moved to München in 1826 from Landshut (whither it had been moved from Ingolstadt where it had been founded in 1472), a complete spectrum of political designs was brought to the attention of students and burghers alike. The main campus happened to be in Schwabing as well, providing the students – always on the prowl for new and exotic sensations – with a stage for every imaginable and some unlikely forms of artistic impression. The light-hearted spirit in which even the most outrageous or ridiculous doctrines of art or politics found an attentive audience became the modern articulation of Libertas Bavariae. In the juxtaposition of William Blake‘s verse, Schwabing was clearly born to sweet delight, and unconventional souls from all over the globe flocked to München.
One such unconventional soul was Herr Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, who was hearing law and politics at the university, where he had inscribed himself as Herr Meyer. Herr Meyer was domiciled in Schleißheimerstraße 106, only a few blocks west of the campus and was better known in his native Russia under the alias ‘Lenin’.
Another unconventional soul, Adolf Hitler, soon frequented the same cafés, pubs and beer gardens in Schwabing, reading newspapers while slowly sipping on a cup of coffee, or peddling his paintings in art shops or simply on the street. Opposite the main University building, a hundred yards past the Siegestor, a quarter-mile of the Leopoldstraße serves as the artists’ outdoor gallery, and until this day the resident painters sell their works there. Adolf was, as we will find out, a bit of a revolutionary himself, but the year 1913 saw him half-frightened and half-intoxicated by the sheer rush of the artistic scene. . . .
Munich Central Railway Station before the war …
Adolf Hitler and his friend Rudolf Häusler arrived from Vienna on Sunday, May 25, 1913, and immediately set out to find accommodation. They walked down Schleissheimer Straße, north-west of the railway station, and, in the window of a small tailor shop at # 34, noticed a small sign advertising a room to let. They went in, and quickly closed a deal with the tailor’s wife, Frau Anna Popp, to rent a tiny mansard on the third floor. On May 26 respectively 29, they registered with the Munich police, with Hitler estimating the duration of their visit at two years. In Vienna, Hitler had alerted the police to his leaving, as he was required to do, but had left no forwarding address; the police file dryly states “destination unknown”, indicating that Hitler was not keen on his whereabouts becoming known. This would concur with the fact that his earlier ‘disappearance’ in the autumn of 1909 magically coincides with the exact period in which he was obliged to report to the Austrian army. He left Vienna, Sechshauserstrasse 56, c/o Frau Antonie Oberlechner, on September 16, 1909, without providing a forwarding address, and did not re-register with the Vienna police until February 8, 1910, the day he resurfaced and moved into the men’s hostel at Meldemannstrasse. . . .
Schleissheimer Straße 34 during the Nazi Era, with a memento (Hitler’s room window marked)
Adolf Hitler had now arrived in the town that would become his principal residence for the next twenty years; the town he was to christen later the ‘Hauptstadt der Bewegung’, the Capital of the [Nazi] Movement.” For a while, the Popps’ became his family; Robert Payne gives us a mise en scène of life at Schleißheimerstraße 34:
Many years later, when the National Socialists were in power, Frau Popp was asked what she remembered about her lodger. Naturally, she remembered many things to his advantage: he was kind to the children, Peppi and Liesel, and was modest, well-mannered, and self-effacing. He spent the day painting and drawing, and he studied every evening and every night. …
She was one of these inquisitive landladies who examine the possessions of their tenants, and she remembered that his books were “all political stuff and how to get on in Parliament.” She also remembered something that others had observed: his solitude.
He seemed to have no friends, lived completely alone [as mentioned above, for reasons unknown, nobody mentioned Rudolf Häusler before Thomas Orr investigated the neighbourhood in 1952, ¶], refused the Popps’ invitations to share their supper, rejecting all their overtures, and spent whole days in his room without stirring outside. He lived on bread and sausages and sometimes knocked politely on their kitchen door to ask for some hot water for his tea.
“He camped in his room like a hermit with his nose stuck in these thick heavy books,” she said. It puzzled her that he should be both a painter and a voracious reader, and one day she asked him what all this reading had to do with his painting. He smiled, took her by the arm, and said: “Dear Frau Popp, does anybody know what is and what isn’t likely to be of use to him in life?” (4)
The Little drummer boy, p.279-80
The Popps liked him. He knew how to behave, which impressed them, for it seemed to imply that, in reality, beyond the mask they were sure he was wearing, he was someone different, someone better than who he professed to be. He lived on his own planet, not necessarily in the known universe, and had no contacts we know about except that a former resident of the men’s hostel claimed to have met him once in München, in a chance encounter at the railway station. [FN 1] He did paint, though, and he did sell his works; we have a good handful of reports by his customers. The physician Dr Hans Schirmer remembered:
[FN 1]: The name of the man was Josef Greiner, who seems to have been a welsher and a blackmailer. In 1939 and 1947, he published books describing his supposed friendship with Hitler in München and Vienna. Both books were banned, 1939 by the Nazis themselves and the 1947 opus by the occupation authority. Cf. Joachimsthaler (8)
… I was sitting one summer evening in the garden of the Hofbräuhaus, nursing my beer. Around 8 p.m. I noticed a very modest and somewhat coarsely clad young man, who looked to me like a poor student. The young man went from table to table, offering a small oil painting for sale.
Time lapsed, and it was around perhaps 10 p.m. when I saw him again and realized that he still had not sold the picture. When he came near me, I asked him whether I could but it, since his fate troubled me somewhat. He answered: “Yes, please,” and when I asked for the price, he put it at five Marks.
My fortunes at that time … were not great, and since I had in my pockets only the little cash one needed to buy the beer, I gave the young man three Marks and my address, on a prescription form, and asked him to come back, with the painting, to my practice the next day, where I would give him the rest.
He handed me the painting right away and told me he would see me tomorrow immediately after the transaction was finished, he went to the buffet and bought two Frankfurters and a roll, but no beer.” (5)
Munich tramway scene, by Adolf Hitler
A merchant in hats, Josef Würbser, was visited in his store.
“It was in April 1914. I was manning the cashier post, in the hat shop Zehme at Marienplatz and Dienerstraße, when a young man came in and asked me whether I would be interested in buying two of his paintings. He needed to sell them in order to buy books for his studies.
Since I dabbled in painting a bit myself, my interest was immediately aroused, and I studied the two paintings, one of which showed the “Old Mayor’s Office” and the other “The Old Courtyard”. I liked the pictures, which showed the beautiful motives in the brightest of colours and bought both of them. I cannot recall the price exactly, but it must have been between fifteen and twenty-five marks.” (6)
The jeweller Otto Paul Kerber recalled:
“A young man came into my store one day in 1912 [it must have been 1913 or early 1914, ¶] and offered me a watercolour of the Munich Residence. I liked the painting and bought this and subsequently a few more paintings of the young man, who came by regularly. As far as I remember, I paid, depending on size and quality, between 15 and 20 Marks per picture.” (7)
The “Siegestor”, Victory Arch, Munich, by Hitler
Little did they know it then, but most of his customers made the deal of their life, for, in the Third Reich, the paintings sold for up to 5,000 Mark. It remained clear, however, that the attraction was the artist, not the work. Joachim Fest remarks about Hitler’s artistic fancies and idols:
His standards had remained unchanged since his days in Vienna when he paid no heed to the artistic and intellectual upheavals of the period. Cool classicist splendour on the one hand and pompous decadence on the other – Anselm von Feuerbach, for example, and Hans Makart – were his touchstones. With the resentments of the failed candidate for the academy, he raised his own taste into an absolute.
He also admired the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque art; the majority of the pictures in the Berghof belonged to this period. His favourites were a half-length nude by Bordone, the pupil of Titian, and a large coloured sketch by Tiepolo. On the other hand, he rejected the painters of the German renaissance because of their austerity.
Paris Bordone, Venus and Amor – one of Hitler’s favourites
As the pedantic faithfulness of his own watercolours might suggest, he always favoured craftsmanlike precision. He liked the early Lovis Corinth but regarded Corinth’s brilliant later work, created in a kind of ecstasy of old age, with pronounced irritation and banned him from the museums. Significantly, he also loved sentimental genre paintings, like the winebibing monks and fat tavern keepers of Eduard Grützner. In his youth, he told his entourage, it had been his dream someday to be successful enough to be able to afford a genuine Grützner. Later, many works by this painter hung in his Munich apartment on Prinzregentenstraße.
Alongside them, he put gentle, folksy idylls by Spitzweg, a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach, a park scene by Anselm von Feuerbach, and one of the many variations of Sin by Franz von Stuck. In the “Plan for a German National Gallery,” which he had sketched on the first page of his 1925 sketchbook, these same painters appear, together with names like Overbeck, Moritz von Schwind, Hans von Martes, Defregger, Boecklin, Piloty, Leibl, and, finally, Adolph von Menzel, to whom he assigned no fewer than five rooms in the gallery. (9)
His business increased slowly, he obtained steady customers, and some actually ordered in advance. The chemist Dr Schnell, who had a shop at Sendlinger Straße 42 near the city centre and a chemical factory in the northern district of Milbertshofen, (10) remembered that one day a poor young painter came in…
… who apparently had been told by somebody that I had previously helped poor artists. He asked for a bit of support. “I am an architectural painter,” the young man said and offered to paint a small picture for me. On inquiry, he stated his name as Hitler, he was Austrian and in town to become a painter.
“Well then, please paint me the Asam Church next door,” Dr Schnell said. “After eight or ten days, Hitler brought a small painting of the Asam Church, which was surprisingly well done. I paid him the agreed-on Twenty Marks and bought a few more of his paintings, which he always delivered on time. I was also able to pass on further orders, which I received from my acquaintances that saw the picture of the Asam Church. … Then the First World War intervened, and Hitler and the paintings were forgotten. …
When Hitler entered the political scene after the Great War, I wanted to find out whether the politician Adolf Hitler was indeed identical with the pre-war painting student. So once I briefly went to the Hofbräuhaus, where Hitler was addressing a rally and established that he was indeed the same man whose paintings I had bought. …
Much later, after the Nazis came to power, I was once invited by Hitler to the Four Seasons Hotel. He asked how I was doing and how the paintings were, and whether he could do me a favour. One time, between 1934 and 1936, a man from the staff of the “Führer’s Deputy” Hess visited me in the office by the shop, in which Hitler’s town paintings hung, and inquired whether Hess, who was interested in the paintings, could come and see them. Hess then did show up, with two or three other gentlemen, and viewed the pictures. … Later some party office asked for my permission to make photocopies of the paintings, for the party archive, which I granted.” (11)
Maximilianstraße around 1900
Based on the testimonies of Hitler’s customers and Frau Popp, who said that he produced a painting every two or three days, Anton Joachimsthaler computed that if he sold, say, ten paintings a month, he could live rather well. In his municipal sales licence, which he needed to peddle his paintings legally and which doubled as a tax form, he entered sales of approximately one hundred Mark per month, which probably was the lowest number he could get away with. Even if he initially earned less than the fifteen or twenty marks that seem to have become the norm after a few months, he must have earned between 150 and 200 Marks per month soon. This was rather decent, compared to the wages of a normal worker, who at this time in München earned between 96 and 116 Marks but had to provide for his family, too. (12)
As in Vienna, it seems that Hitler had more money than he let on, and his professions of poverty in “Mein Kampf” ought to be taken with a large spoonful of salt. Even if it is true that he, as he later claimed, often had only one Mark for his lunch or dinner, this amount must be set in relation to the prices of the time, which were very low. A litre of beer, approximately two pints, was 30 Pfennige (pennies), one egg 7 Pfennige, a pound loaf of bread 16 Pfennige and a litre of milk 22 Pfennige. One Mark went a long way.
As far as we know, his way of life did not deviate much from that of Vienna, which may teach us caution about the tales Hitler later spun of his studies of politics, philosophy and history in pre-war München. In one of the table monologues during the Second World War, he professed art, not politics, as his reason to go to München.
“[I wanted to continue] … to keep working as an autodidact and to add on a period of practical work once I was in the Reich. I went to Munich happily: I had set my goal to learn for three more years and then, at 28 years of age, to apply as a designer at Heilmann & Littmann [a Munich construction firm, ¶].
I would have entered their first competition, and, I believed, they would realize my talent and acknowledge my faculties. I had contributed, privately, to all the current architectural competitions, and when the designs for the new Opera House in Berlin were publicized, my heart started beating, and I told myself, that they were much worse than what I had delivered. I had specialized in stage design.” (13)
None of the orderly archives of these competitions preserved any of the entries Hitler had – privately – contributed, so that, alas, we are precluded from a proper judgement of their artistic value.
His repose in München provided him with a less conspicuous benefit: that he, as he believed, has escaped being drafted into the Austrian army. It was the standard in Austria as in all other European countries, that the young men of a certain age, twenty, in Austria, were called up for the military which kept them, after two or three years of active service, at the beck and call of the reserve units for the next twenty years or so. Hitler had been required to register in the autumn of 1909, exactly when he disappeared. Even if he had had a valid excuse, say, illness, he was required to re-register in 1910 or 1911. Given Hitler’s unfavourable opinion of the Habsburg state, it cannot surprise us that he felt no urge to serve it.
On August 11, 1913, the Linz police issued a warrant for Hitler, alleging draft-evasion. From Hitler’s remaining relatives, perhaps the Schmidts, they found out that he lived in the men’s hostel in Vienna. On inquiry, Vienna reported back to Linz that Hitler had flown out, leaving no forwarding address, but that a few occupants of the hostel remembered that Hitler had spoken of going to München.
Linz thus inquired at München, and on January 8, 1914, was notified that Hitler was indeed registered in München, c/o Popp, Tailor, Schleißheimerstraße 34/111. In the afternoon of January 18, 1914, a troop of the Munich police was sent there to serve Hitler with an Austrian summons for military inspection.
“Herr Adolf Hitler, born 1889, domiciled Linz an der Donau, presently staying in Munich, care of Popp, Schleißheimerstraße 34/111, is hereby summoned to present himself for military registration in Linz, at 30 Kaiserin Elisabeth Quay on January 20th, 1914, and in the event of his failure to comply with this summons, he will be liable to prosecution under Paragraphs 64 and 66 of the Law regarding Military Service of the Year 1912.” (14)
the little drummer boy, p. 282
This was no joke. According to the Austro-Bavarian Extradition Treaty of 1831, he could be arrested and delivered to the authorities in Linz in iron fetters if he did not heed the call. Hitler talked to the officer in charge of the delegation, Constable Herle, who demanded a signature for the receipt of the summons. For the benefit of the constable and his crew, Hitler composed an impromptu apology:
“I missed to register myself in the autumn of 1909 but corrected this oversight in February 1910. At this time I reported to the Conscription Office IB in the Mayor’s Mansion, and from there was directed to my home precinct, the XXth. I asked to report right there in Vienna [instead of Linz], signed some protocol or affidavit, paid one Krone and never heard again of the affair. It never entered my mind, however, to evade registration, neither is this the reason for my residing in Munich. I was always registered with the police in Vienna, [FN 2] as I am here in Munich.” (15)
[FN 2] This was an outright lie; we know he was not registered from September 16, 1909, to February 8, 1910. He repeated the lie in the letter to the Austrian authorities (see below), but, luckily, nobody checked the false claim.
The Austrians must have forgotten him, he said, for he was clearly no deserter. We do not know what Herle thought of the story, but in all probability, it was not the first time in his career that he encountered a suspect blaming an error on the authorities. The story Hitler concocted was fishy in itself, and maybe he counted upon the Bavarian officer’s ignorance of Austrian military laws and procedure; the European nations of this age very carefully kept track of their prospective recruits and did not simply “forget” them; the requirement of registering every change of address had been, in fact, created exactly for this military purpose.
Herle arrested Hitler and took him to the police headquarters. On the next morning, the prisoner was presented to the Austrian Consulate General. It appears that he was assisted there by a consular officer or perhaps a paralegal, for he was allowed to present his case in a written statement. This was not quite the normal procedure; perhaps Hitler’s sangfroid began to work.
By then he had fleshed out his tale. First, he claimed, untruthfully, that he had received the summons too late; then he contended that the problem was the fault of the Austrians, who had mistakenly looked from him in Linz when he was actually in Vienna or vice versa. Eloquent in excuse, and strangely lachrymose in tone, his statement reminds the reader of the wheedling style of his father’s letter to the bishop of Linz in the marriage affair, when it describes his toilsome life in München. Fortuna has conserved the document, which allows us a look into the young man’s vexations:
… In the summons, I am described as an artist. I bear this title by right, but it is only relatively accurate. I earn my living independently as a painter, being totally deprived of an income (my father was a civil servant), and I work only in order to further my education. Only a small portion of my time can be spent in earning a living, for I am still educating myself to become an architectural painter.
My income is therefore very modest, just enough to cover my expenses. As testimony, I refer you to my income tax statement, which is enclosed, and I would be grateful if it could be returned to me. It will be seen that my income is estimated at 1200 Marks, which is rather more than I really earn, and does not mean that I actually make 100 Marks a month. Oh no. …
With regard to my failure to report for military service in the autumn of 1909, I must say that this was for me an endlessly bitter time. I was then a young man without experience, receiving no financial assistance from anyone, and too proud to accept financial assistance from others, let alone beg for it. Without support, compelled to depend on my own efforts, I earned only a few Kronen and often only a few farthings from my labours, and this was often insufficient to pay for a night’s lodging. For two long years, I had no other mistress than sorrow and need, no other companion than eternally unsatisfied hunger. I never knew the beautiful word youth.
Even today, five years later, I am constantly reminded of these experiences, and the remainders take the form of frost blisters on my fingers, hands and feet. And, yet I cannot remember those days without a certain pleasure, now that these vexations have been surmounted. In spite of great want, amid often dubious surroundings, I nevertheless kept my name clean, had a blameless record with the law, and possessed a clear conscience – except for that one constantly remembered fact that I failed to register for military service. This is the one thing I feel responsible for. It would seem that a moderate fine would be an ample penance, and of course, I will pay the fine willingly.
I am sending this letter independently of the testimony, which I have signed today at the Consulate. I request that any further orders should be transmitted to me through the Consulate and beg you to believe that I shall fulfil them promptly.
All the declarations made by me concerning my case have been verified by the Consular authorities. They have been exceedingly generous and have given me hope that I may be able to fulfil my military duties at Salzburg. Although I cannot dare to hope for such a thing, I request that this affair may not be made unduly difficult for me.
I request that you take the present letter under consideration, and I sign myself, Very respectfully,
ADOLF HITLER
Artist Munich Schleißheimerstraße 34/111 (16)
This letter is an early and excellent insight into the mind of a person who would go on to become a professional deceiver. It is not only the sheer bending of the facts that surprises, but it is also the style of the missive; it reveals that Hitler knew exactly what to write and how.
The letter reeks of the specific style of the age, of the servile lachrymosity employed when one has a problem with the authorities. The submissive, sometimes brown-nosed and sometimes cajoling tone is, by today’s standards, an all too obvious attempt to induce sympathy for one’s pleadings in the face of a stern bureaucrat, who has the power to take drastic measures. It may well be true that bureaucrats, in general, expect Byzantine flattery, and antecedent obedience from the public they serve (and which pays their salaries), but Hitler’s letter almost sounds as if he were trying to poke fun at the addressees. The style is hither awkward and yonder familiar, eerily intimate at times, as if to beg money from a rarely-seen uncle.
Strikingly effective, however, is his argumentation: even before the judgement is cast, he appeals to a higher court, beyond the transient character of Austrian military justice. His crime is not desertion, he claims, his bane was poverty. He will be using a very similar tactic of confessing to a non-existent charge eleven years later when facing trial for the Beer Hall Putsch. As he will then, he now proclaims his guiltlessness; in the words of Robert Payne, “the higher court will pronounce him innocent, for his only crime is poverty; his name is clean, his record blameless, his conscience clear. He claims that his sole ambition in life is to serve the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and as we read the letter we know that he despises this monarchy and all its works, and has not the least intention of abiding by its orders.” (17)
In the event, his attempts to enlist the sympathies of the consular staff were successful: the consul himself agreed to forward Hitler’s letter to Linz, along with one of his own, in which he states that he personally as well as the Munich police believe that Hitler was honest and missed the registration by mistake, not criminal intention. Furthermore, the Herr Consul recommended that Hitler should be allowed to face the military examination board in the border town of Salzburg rather than to have to travel all the way to Linz. Showing rare generosity, the consulate even paid for Hitler’s train fare.
The military command in Linz agreed, and on February 5, 1914, Hitler took a train to Salzburg. In a brief examination, the doctors found Hitler unfit for combat or auxiliary duty and dismissed him without further obligations. That was exactly what Hitler had hoped for, and he went back to Schwabing and his books and paintings with a lighter heart. In “Mein Kampf”, he later claimed that the lively political discussions in the cafes and beer gardens trained his intellect and improved his adeptness of argument. Of paramount importance, he wrote, was his repeated study of Marxism.
“I again immersed myself in the theoretical literature of this new world, attempting to achieve clarity concerning its possible effects, and then compared it with the actual phenomena and events it brings about in political, cultural and economic life. Now for the first time, I turned my attention to master this world-plague.” (18)
Three considerations may cause us to doubt the veracity of the statement. Since Hitler had never been “employed” in the sense that a factory worker is employed, one may doubt how much he truly understood of the realities of collective bargaining, of accident insurance, workman’s compensation, health care or pension plans, the bread-and-butter tasks of labour unions. Second, at the time he supposedly “immersed” himself in the study of Marxism, the Russian October Revolution or any other communist revolution was still years in the future, and no country in the world had a socialist government yet. Thus, one may wonder how exactly Hitler formed his opinion of the “world-plague” and where the “actual phenomena and events” occurred which he said he observed. It appears much more likely that these parts of “Mein Kampf” – written not before 1924 – represent hindsight, and that he afforded himself prescient clairvoyance of the evils of Marxism as early proof of his political genius. Thirdly, it is questionable how much free time painting and selling the pictures left him.
But he came to like Munich as much as he of late despised Vienna. The townspeople had an easy way of living, Hitler liked the Bavarian dialect, which he had picked up as a child in Passau, and the racial and lingual hodgepodge of Vienna that he had learned to detest was completely absent. Even in the very cold winter of 1913/14, when fewer customers than usual could be found on the snow-covered streets and empty beer gardens, he was still high in spirits; Munich continued to shine. [FN 3] Yet it is clear that he did not partake in the social or political life of the town; not a single document, no newspaper clip mentions his name. With the exception of Rudolf Häusler, we know of no other acquaintances. In the last sixty years, all likely archives have been searched: we have, for example, even a letter of a friend, Fritz Seidl, who knew Hitler during the one year at the boarding-house of Frau Sekira in Linz, when they were in first grade at the Unterrealschule; but nothing from Munich – but not a single photograph. (19) In a well-known paragraph of “Mein Kampf”, Hitler praised the town:
[FN 3] “Munich Shines!” was the title of a popular cabaret program.
“If today I am more attached to this city than to any other spot on earth in this world, it is partly due to the fact that it is and remains inseparably bound up with the development of my life; if even then I achieved the happiness of a truly inward contentment, it can be attached only to the magic which this miraculous residence of the Wittelsbachs exerts on every man who is blessed, not only with a calculating mind but with a feeling soul.” (20)
Oktoberfest 1910
But when he sat in the cafés and read the newspapers, he could not fail to become informed of the latest international tensions. The Balkans occupied the headlines again, as they had when wars had erupted there in 1912 and 1913. In one of the literary more recommendable passages of Mein Kampf, Hitler describes the peculiar atmosphere of early 1914:
“As early as my Vienna period, the Balkans were immersed in that livid sultriness which customarily announces the hurricane, and from time to time a beam of brighter light flared up, only to vanish again in the spectral darkness.But then came the Balkan War and with it, the first gust of wind swept across a Europe grown nervous. The time which now followed lay on the chests of men like a heavy nightmare, sultry as feverish tropic heat, so that due to constant anxiety the sense of the approaching catastrophe turned at last to longing: let Heaven, at last, give free rein to the fate which could no longer be thwarted. And then the first mighty lightning flash struck the earth; the storm was unleashed and with the thunder of Heaven there mingled the roar of the World War batteries.” (21)
The steady worsening of Europe’s international relations since about 1906 will properly be the subject of the following chapters. But in a strange way, all the accounts we have of June and July 1914 agree on its perfect weather, which contrasted so starkly with what was to follow. On these long summer nights, Hitler was still selling the fruits of his brush and pencil in the beer gardens unless he was busy painting the glow of the sunsets. But he was in his mansard, alone, immersed in a book, on the afternoon of June 28, 1914, when his landlady stormed up the stairs and entered his room without knocking on the door.
In tears, Frau Popp informed her lodger that earlier in the day the heir apparent to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg and his wife Sophie had been assassinated in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, by a young man called Gavrilo Princip, an anarchist with presumed connections to Serbia.
The archduke, a nephew of Emperor Francis Joseph, had arrived in Bosnia three days earlier to inspect the annual military manoeuvres. After the conclusion of the exercise, the prince insisted on paying a visit to the Bosnian capital, although the local administration had received warnings of a plot. Half a dozen conspirators, dispersed over the town’s main thoroughfares, had been waiting for the royal couple, but it was only dumb luck that Princip met the open royal carriage backing out slowly from the wrong end of a one-way street, unguarded. He fired a pistol twice and killed both the archduke and his wife.
Hitler ran down the staircase and joined the crowds that assembled on the streets. In Vienna, a mob already beleaguered the Serbian Embassy. The news from Sarajevo was the sensation of the year.
