Hindenburg

William J. Astore and Dennis E. Showalter: Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism. Washington: Potomac Books, 2005.

 

Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was a German aristocrat, it is safe to say. And a Prussian among Germans—a nontrivial distinction, among Germans: the immigrant grandmother of an acquaintance of mine, who spoke almost no English, once perceived that she was being described as a German; “Nein! Nein! Ich bin ein Prusse!” she replied, with due emphasis. Hindenburg, her older contemporary shared the sentiment, saying “I have always felt myself an ‘Old Prussian.‘”

Born into the Junker class in East Prussia in 1847, Hindenburg reached maturity in a Prussia that not only had recovered from its mauling by Napoleon in 1806 but had undertaken the unification of the 37 sovereign German states into one powerful nation-state, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm I, Otto von Bismarck, and Helmuth von Moltke. His father was a reserve infantry officer, his mother a Lutheran. Accordingly, “discipline, duty, and obedience to higher authority prevailed in the household, as “even the young Hindenburg’s nurse was known to bark ‘Silence in the ranks!’ to squelch childish complaints.” Already a member of the Prussian Cadet Corps by the age of twelve, he “demonstrated moral uprightness and physical hardiness without showing any particular intellectual qualities.” He rose to the Senior Cadet School in 1863, selected as a page to Queen Elizabeth of Prussia in 1864, and received his first commission in 1865 as a second lieutenant of the Foot Guards, only a year before the Austro-Prussian War. Hindenburg fought bravely at Königgratz in the war’s decisive battle, which left Prussia in the position of fulfilling its ambition to unite the Germanies and to face off against the French, four years later. In the Franco-Prussian War, Hindenburg survived the attack on St. Privat, near Metz, a battle in which his battalion “took heavy casualties.” No chauvinist, he later admired French conduct during the prolonged siege of Paris, also praising the “ruthless postwar suppression of the Paris Commune” after the war was over and the Third Republic had been established. 

After those wars, Bismarck proceeded step-by-step, winning the Kulturkampf of the 1870s against the Roman Catholic Church, which he stripped of it control over education and authority to make ecclesiastical appointments, powers that had compromised his state-building efforts, especially in the Catholic south. He then made an alliance with Austria-Hungary, avoiding any troubles on his southern border, and attempted a rapprochement with the Russian czar, hoping to secure his eastern flank. For his part, by the end of the decade Hindenburg won appointment to the general staff, was promoted to the rank of captain, and married the daughter of a general. His subsequent elevations in rank in the peacetime army came slowly, but they came; he served under Count Alfred Graf von Schlieffen on the imperial general staff in the second half of the 1880s and was granted command of the Ninety-first Infantry Regiment at Oldenburg in 1893, vowing (as an aristocrat might) “to cultivate a sense of chivalry among my officers, and efficiency and firm discipline,” animated by “the love of work and independence side by side with a high ideal of service.” 

Kaiser Wilhelm II acceded to the imperial throne in 1888, causing German foreign policy to enter “a more bellicose phase after the new kaiser dispensed with Bismarck in 1890.” Despite his extraordinary achievements, Bismarck had been too cautious for young Kaiser Willy’s taste. Still, for a time, perhaps somewhat to Hindenburg’s disappointment (war being the condition of rapid promotion in military organizations), peace continued. So did the slow but steady pace of promotions: chief of staff of the Eighth Army Corps in Goblenz, then brigadier general, the major general and commander of the Twenty-eight infantry Division of Karlsruhe in 1900. In 1905, “he reached the pinnacle of his peacetime military career” as lieutenant general and commander of the Fourth Army Corps at Magdeburg, making him “one of only twenty-four corps commanders in Germany.” Seeing no prospects for further promotion, he retired in 1911 at the age of sixty-four.

By then, his political convictions were settled. “The subordination of the individual to the good of the community” was “not only a necessity,” in his eyes, “but a positive blessing,” one that “gripped the mind of the German army, and through it, that of the German nation.” That nation was surrounded by enemies, indeed oppressed by them, as he supposed. The Geist— the spirit, the mind—of that nation would animate its soldiers in the wars of the future, conducted by means of what the author calls “battles of annihilation.” As the historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, enthusiastically, war requires “the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the state.” There was a moral claim accompanying German ambition. A popular slogan at the time was “Germanness will cure the world”—cure it of bourgeois money-grubbing, base individualism, and all the other moral niaiseries of liberal democracy. “Anticipating der frishfröhliche Krieg, a short and joyful war, young patriotic Germans answered the call to arms in 1914 with pride and celerity.”

The authors remark that Hindenburg and his colleagues were also Fachmenschen —literally ‘facts-men’ or specialists. Technically astute, loyal to a fault,” they “confined [themselves] to an operational and Eurocentric perspective that eschewed study and reflection about the wider socioeconomic and political aspects of war.” That is to say that they read Clausewitz, but without understanding, or perhaps without wanting to acknowledge, his core teaching, that war is a continuation of politics, rightly limited by political aims. Thus, “lacking firsthand knowledge of the world outside of Europe, or of the world of business and industry within and without Europe, Hindenburg also had little exposure to military grand strategy,” instead trying to solve “difficult operational problems by fostering tactical excellence and an aggressive spirit”—by treating means as ends. In the First World War, Hindenburg shared the prevailing preference for offensive operations. This worked on the Eastern Front, where he and Ludendorff ran things, while it failed on the Western Front, where the French and their British allies were able to arrest their advance with trench warfare.

Hindenburg had anticipated a short war. Russia struck first, however, invading East Prussia in August 1914, driving the Eighth Army back. When the Army’s commander, Maximilian von Prittwitz recommended retreat into West Prussia, Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff called Hindenburg out of retirement to replace him, adding Erich Ludendorff as Hindenburg’s chief of staff. “Known to be a hothead” who “suffered from nerves when plans went awry,” Ludendorff needed “someone higher ranking…to take command and provide stability and aristocratic presence” to bring out the best in him—that being his “combination of tactical skill, operational insight, and boundless energy.” “In their postwar memoirs, both men celebrated the Hegelian synthesis they had forged during the war,” although as the war went on, Ludendorff became the more dominant partner, quite likely to Germany’s disadvantage. But by the end of August, the two men worked to regroup their forces and counterattack. Meanwhile, the Russians overreached and fell victim to the Eighth Army’s flanking maneuvers at the Battle of Tannenberg—so named by Hindenburg himself, as it was fought in the vicinity of a fifteenth-century Prussian defeat by Polish and Lithuanian forces (not Russians but nonetheless Slavs—close enough for government work). “It is a great joy to me that I was able to wipe out that disgrace,” Hindenburg intoned. “Tannenburg was Hindenburg’s victory,” “a stunning victory” which destroyed the Russian Second Army, induced its commander to commit suicide, and resulted in the capture of 92,000 Russian troops. While this only stiffened Russian determination to fight on, it also buoyed the German Geist and made Hindenburg the nation’s hero.

Germany’s main problem, however, wasn’t its morale but its overall war strategy. In 1905, General Alfred von Schlieffen wrote a plan for a two-front war, calling for a short (six-week) war on France, which would be overwhelmed by superior German forces attacking through Belgium, followed by a war against Russia. Moltke had modified the Schlieffen Plan, reducing the number of troops in the West. When that offensive failed Wilhelm II sacked him and put Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn in his place. By now, Germany faced a war on two fronts and a naval war with Great Britain. No contingency plan had been written; “there was no consensus about what to do next,” and Falkenhayn persisted in prioritizing the Western Front, despite continued German successes against Russia. Even that effort was hampered by the failure of Germany and its ally, Austria-Hungary, to coordinate their forces. The Austro-Hungarians proceeded to lose catastrophically in Galicia, with 250,000 causalities and 100,000 captured. Ludendorff complained that Germany was “shackled to a corpse”; for their part, the Austro-Hungarian High Command chafed under German contempt. Such “recriminations notwithstanding,” Hindenburg and Ludendorff reinforced their ally’s position in Poland, and Hindenburg was named Field Marshal.

They urged Falkenhayn to send them the troops they needed to finish the war in the East. “Much of the strategic plot of 1915 and 1916 on the German side revolved around the debate and infighting between ‘Westerners’ led by Falkenhayn and ‘Easterners’ led by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.” In this struggle, “Falkenhayn prevailed in part because he had the kaiser’s confidence.” Eventually, however, Hindenburg’s ascendency continued. “Whereas the kaiser was flighty, insecure, and vain (Viennese wags wrote that he ‘insisted on being the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at ever funeral’) Hindenburg exuded confidence and spoke with dignified modesty.” Wilhelm II was quietly and gradually cordoned off from military matters by the military officers themselves. “Hindenburg became ‘the savior of the fatherland,’ a man who had selflessly answered his country’s call to duty well after most men his age had retired,” a symbol of “mature masculinity to thousands of German men,” a “loyal husband and loving father,” combined, to German women, a courageous and just leader to the soldiers. “Larger than life, he nevertheless exhibited proper humility and modesty before God,” “character, rather than intellectual brilliance,” being his “core strength.” In a republican regime, he would have been a latter-day George Washington, but Germany was no republic. And it wouldn’t be long before the young, impetuous Ludendorff would come to dominate the older, more cautious Hindenburg, even as Hindenburg had sidelined the young, impetuous kaiser.

“His directness and devotion to duty endeared him to his soldiers and to the German people.” The esteem was mutual, as he told an American interviewer, the former U.S. senator Albert J. Beveridge (famous for his 1900 speech, “The March of the Flag”): “Our knowledge that we are right; the faith of the nation that we shall win [NB: “shall”]; their willingness to die in order to win; the perfect discipline of our troops; their understanding of orders; their greatest intelligence, education and spirit; our organization and resources” guarantee German victory. It is, of course, not inconceivable that Hindenburg talked that way in the hope of persuading Americans not to intervene on the side of France and Great Britain, but there is no reason to doubt that he meant it, or most of it.

In 1916, Falkenhayn doubled down on his bet that the French would fold. His new strategy, the Ermattungsstrategie, aimed at defeating France in a “war of wearing-down.” It didn’t work: Falkenhayn not only failed to coordinate strategy with the Austro-Hungarians, he failed to share it “with his own army commanders.” The result was the Battle of Verdun, where “Germans gave better than they got” but the French held them off. “Like Tannenberg,” the Battle of Verdun “spawned its own sustaining mythology,” as General Philippe Pétain’s resolute insistence, “They shall not pass!” became the watchword of the French for the remainder of the war. Now, Germany’s campaign on the Eastern Front also faltered, as Russia retook Galician and the Bukovina, capturing half a million Austro-Hungarians while doing so. Had Falkenhayn not gone into Verdun but instead had aided the Austro-Hungarian campaign against Italy, Italy might well have been knocked out of the war, Austria-Hungary could have brought his forces out of Italy in time to halt the Russian offensive in Galicia. These “uncoordinated actions wet the stage for Russia’s greatest victory of the war” and for the success of the British offensive at the Somme River.

By September 1916, with war prospects looking increasingly desperate, Ludendorff’s energy had overcome Hindenburg’s moderation, as the younger man demanded equality in command. Recognizing that the war “had become a colossal Materialschlacht, or material struggle, waged by modern industrial juggernauts,” they conceived the “Hindenburg Program,” a “concerted attempt to mobilize fully, if somewhat belatedly, for total war.” Registering the ethos of the German regime, they supposed that “an economy could be commanded like an army.” It can, but with bad consequences. The long-range consequences should have been obvious: deficit spending leading to inflation, commercial sclerosis caused by the removal of voluntary incentives to work. The medium-range consequence affected the course of the war itself; “the sacrifices required and incurred by modern warfare’s destructive industrialism drove Germany, as well as the Entente powers, to inflate strategic goals to justify national sacrifice.” Even as the “war of wearing-out” slowly exhausted all sides, even as military production goals dislocated the elements of the German political economy, leading to food shortages, rulers needed to make ever more “grandiose political and territorial demands, ruling out opportunities for a compromise peace, which Hindenburg and Ludendorff rejected anyway.” Nor did their mass deportation of Belgian workers to Germany, where they were dragooned into working in factories in order to keep German men on the front lines, make the German regime seem an attractive partner in negotiations. Worse, the average German didn’t fare much better than the hapless Belgians, as his rulers “treat[ed] citizens as subjects who had to put up or shut up.” For example, women were told to pitch in to the war effort or “expect to go hungry”; “barking commands to grieving widows was not the way to win hearts and minds.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff assumed that German hearts and minds had already been won (true) and that they would remain won by dint of an unwavering sense of moral duty, however German persons were treated (false).

Anticipating an Anglo-French offensive in 1917, Hindenburg and Ludendorff prudently put their forces in a defensive posture, withdrawing several miles, leaving booby traps in their wake, constructing a battle zone consisting of pillboxes, trenches, barbed wire, and tank traps, then positioning mobile troops behind all these structures, establishing an “elastic system of defense in depth.” Unfortunately for German fortunes, the wisdom of these military measures was not equaled by their political strategy in the east. Ludendorff pushed for the revival of the kingdom of Poland, expecting to constitute a powerful Polish army to invade Russia. Not only did Poles “not relish serving as cannon fodder for German ambitions,” the policy steeled the weakening czarist regime against any compromise peace. Russia soon “collapsed into Bolshevism,” whose leaders promised to sue for peace, and that “contagion…soon spread to the German army in 1918.” 

Things looked no better at sea, where an effective Entente blockade “continued to bite into the German home front.” Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Admiral Henning von Holzendorff successfully urged “unrestricted” submarine warfare against the blockade and against American shipping to the Entente countries. No longer would German sailors board civilian ships to search for contraband; they would simply sink them. Hindenburg and Ludendorff understood that this could goad the Americans into declaring war, but they gambled that the navy could cripple the Entente “before U.S. soldiers reached France in significant numbers,” a decision that “cost Germany the war.” British exposure of the Zimmerman telegram, an appeal to the Mexican government for “alliance and financial support in return for a Mexican offensive to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona,” only further fueled American outrage and hardly persuaded Mexicans. “The Second Reich needed a second Bismarck to emerge, a master diplomat possessing the guile and force of will” to reign in the generals, but it was stuck with Wilhelm II, who averred, “The soldiers and the army, not parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded the German Empire together. I put my trust in the army.” Hindenburg “found himself becoming an erstatz kaiser.” He and Ludendorff put the blame for Germany’s declining prospects not on themselves but on the hapless Chancellor of the Empire, Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg, whom Ludendorff charged with abetting “German Radical Social Democracy,” with its pusillanimous “longing for peace.” They replaced him with a cipher. Wilhelm II had “essentially granted Hindenburg and Ludendorff the power to fire and hire chancellors at will.” The parliamentary parties fell into line and the military commanders stepped up their implausible propaganda, pretending that war casualties were low, and no shortages of food or other consumer goods existed. 

All this notwithstanding, “with Russia’s collapse, prospects for victory brightened,” and on the occasion of a national celebration of his seventieth birthday Hindenburg “issue[d] a ringing manifesto,” telling Germans to give no thought to the aftermath of the war (“this only brings despondency into our ranks and strengthens the hopes of the enemy”) but to “trust that the German oak will be given air and light for its free growth,” and that “God will be with us to the end!” True enough, God being with all sincere Christians—but He is with us when we suffer and die as much as when we live and succeed. In all, for the political landscape of postwar Germany, with a citizenry accustomed to the regime of militarist monarchy, not commercial republicanism, “the barren soil they left behind was far more hospitable to the hardy weeds of fascism than to the fragile flowers of parliamentary democracy.”

At the beginning of 1918, with victory on the Eastern Front secured and the French army weakening, Germany’s prospects on land looked fairly good. If they could secure the Slavic countries, bring them under German hegemony, they might rival or even surpass the United States as a continental power. But unrestricted submarine warfare hadn’t taken out the British navy, enabling Great Britain to continue to reinforce France. With no “grand strategy to win the war,” and no intention to negotiate a settlement, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, especially Ludendorff, determined to launch a mass offensive in the spring, hoping to win the war before the Americans could arrive, that summer. “They were infected by victory disease.” All of this only “confirmed in Western eyes the insatiable appetite of German militarism.” They had reversed the teachings of Bismarck and Clausewitz, prioritizing military over political aims. Whereas tactical and operational war policies “admitted rational solutions by diligent soldier-specialists” such as themselves, strategic and political policy “required collaboration with allies and statesmen, both of whom Hindenburg and Ludendorff held in contempt.”

A major difficulty resulted from their victory in the East. Germany had taken half of Russia’s industrial base and almost 90 percent of its coal mines; the Bolsheviks plotted revenge. The continued threat from Russia, along with the treaty that made Rumania a vassal of Germany and Austro-Hungary, required Germany to maintain three dozen divisions in the regions, with no possibility of shifting them in time for the planned offensive in the West. “In coercing sweeping concessions from Russia and Rumania, Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s reach exceeded their grasp.” They “placed their trust in battle,” hoping for “a larger Tannenberg” to be obtained “through higher levels of frontline effectiveness.” But they simply lacked the means to win on the Western Front, where national armies backed by the resources of their empires opposed them. “This was not Prussia fighting Austria in 1866 or France in 1870.” Once the French and British commanders “accepted the wisdom of a unified Entente command” under General Ferdinand Foch, “total victory by feats of arms was unattainable” for the Germans. A series of “costly offensives” in spring-summer 1918 failed “to shatter the Entente’s will”; the German army was “conquering itself to death.” By now, the Americans had arrived, under the command of General John Pershing. Ludendorff’s lunges at Paris failed, thanks to continued French valor, American reinforcements and, during the final offensive, the Italians. Although the offensives gained substantial territories, they came at the expense of almost a million casualties, with no replacements, anymore.

In addition, Hindenburg resisted the very concept of machine warfare; against the Entente’s 800 tanks the Germans fielded eighteen; they had one-third the number of trucks than the Entente forces. “It is always bad,” Hindenburg intoned, “when an army tries through technical innovation, to find a substitute for the spirit. That is irreplaceable.” The difficulty is that the human spirit is embodied, and the bodies of the German soldiers were being ground up. This fact never quite got through to Hindenburg or Ludendorff, isolated as they kept themselves from the conditions at the front and refusing to believe bad reports. Exhausted German troops faced an Entente counter-offensive along the Marne River, losing another 420,000 in battlefield deaths and 340,000 to injury and capture. That powerful Geist upon which Hindenburg depended evaporated, replaced by German Zerrisenheit, “profound disorientation, dissonance, and despair.” Scapegoats were needed, and they weren’t to include the German High Command, if the commanders could help it. “Far easier to believe a big lie—that radical socialists and war profiteers (especially of Jewish extraction) had betrayed Germany—rather than to accept the disturbing truth that Germany’s betrayers were its most renowned and respect leaders.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff didn’t scruple to encourage this misdirection, preferring to “shift blame from themselves to Germany’s new civilian leaders,” after the surrender and the collapse of the monarchic regime. (He shrewdly “left the armistice negotiations to the new government,” so that “the brush of total defeat…tarred Germany’s nascent parliamentary government instead of the army.”) And while after the war Ludendorff soon discredited himself by allying with Hitler, “Hindenburg’s reputation survived Germany’s collapse largely intact,” “a testament to Hindenburg’s gravitas, as well as the German people’s need for a noble figure who could uphold the nation’s dignity in defeat.” The authors praise Hindenburg for his “invaluable service” in overseeing the demobilization of what remained of the army, “prevent[ing] a military coup.” He also helped to defeat the Communist uprising in Berlin in January 1919, which would have destroyed the Weimar Republic at its outset.

The harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty exacted punishment for the generals’ misjudgment, although most now would say that its punitive terms themselves constituted both an overreach and an underreach, setting up the next world war. Even at the time, General Pershing, “among others, had warned that leaving the German army intact without its experiencing the humiliation of a final defeat would delude Germany into thinking it had been perfidiously sold out rather than physically whipped”; that was the underreaching. Hindenburg himself propagated the stab-in-the-back lie, as it “freed him from blame” for his conduct of the war. The overreaching consisted of the punitive character of the peace, “highlighted and exploited” by the German Right, poorly complemented by the Entente’s complacent failure to enforce those terms. 

The authors remark something now mostly forgotten: that the Weimar Republic was a success, initially. The regime consolidated after fending off the Hitler-Ludendorff ‘Beerhall Putsch’ in 1923, and “by early 1925, political stability and economic prosperity reduced radical parties such as Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) to nuisances,” with the Nazis winning a paltry “less than 3 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1924 and 1928.” In those years, it was rather from Left that the main threat to republicanism came, but in April 1925 Hindenburg’s election to the presidency (having by now dissociated himself from Ludendorff’s Jewish conspiracy claims) stabilized the political atmosphere mostly by simply occupying this largely symbolic office. “Craving stability and national unity, Germans rallied behind Hindenburg as an ersatz kaiser and father to a ‘fatherless generation.'” As president, he toured the country giving speeches in favor of “a policy of strict constitutionalism that did him credit.” He went on to defeat Hitler for the presidency in 1932. But parliamentary dithering and a nearly constant reshuffling of cabinets (twenty in the thirteen years of the regime’s existence), along with hyperinflation, followed by the worldwide financial collapse, ruined the regime and enabled the Nazis to win a plurality of Reichstag seats, voters being more alarmed by the Communists.

Although French commander Ferdinand Foch and Charles de Gaulle (in his first book, La Discorde chez l’ennemi) praised Hindenburg as a patriot, distinguishing him from the younger, more militant Ludendorff, the authors here disagree, characterizing him instead as the embodiment of “militarism gone mad.” A Prussian patriot, yes, but one who refused “to work sincerely for a republican Germany” after the war, allowing himself “to be co-opted by rightist elements and, eventually, by Hitler, through bribes, flattery, and promises of a return to glory for the army.” (For example, Hitler added five thousand acres to Hindenburg’s family estate, after Hindenburg, as president of the Weimar Republic, chose him as chancellor in 1933.) In his partial defense, the authors grant that by the early Thirties Hindenburg was 85 years old, “worn down and fed up.” They guess that he expected his German conservative allies to contain Hitler, still another example of his wishful thinking. At this point, even Ludendorff had more sense, saying of Hindenburg’s handover of the chancellorship to Hitler, “Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”

This and much that preceded it indicates that Hindenburg’s patriotism was not so much in question throughout his life. His judgment was the problem. Politics is a better school of prudence than the military, and Hindenburg was schooled in the army.