Canadian Military History

Volume 19 Issue 2 Article 8

2010

Germany’s Western Front Translations from the German Official History of the Great War

Mark Osborne Humphries

John Maker

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Recommended Citation Mark Osborne Humphries and John Maker "Germany’s Western Front Translations from the German Official History of the Great War." Canadian Military History 19, 2 (2010)

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Editor’s Note: Germany’s Western Front, edited by Mark Osborne Humphries and John Maker, is a multi-volume English-language translation of Der Weltkrieg, the German official history of the First World War. Originally produced between 1925 and 1944 using classified archival records that were destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War,Der Weltkrieg is the untold story of German experience on the Western Front. What follows in the foreword, written by Hew Strachen, to the 1915 volume of the series.

Foreword in the technologies they employed, then the pace of its authors was produced a conflict that was not as quickening: the events of 1914 had static as the immobility of the trenches taken six volumes, those of 1915 by Hew Strachan which dominated the character of the three (and these are the basis for fighting suggested. It has now become this translation), and of 1916 two. axiomatic that “modern war” was Two more volumes appeared to take ar is a reactive business, a conceived and developed through the the story to November 1918. Being Wcompetition whose outcome experience of this titanic fight, and completed during the Second World is dependent not on some sort of the lessons which it bequeathed. But War, volumes 13 and 14 never gained absolute standard of excellence the military history on which such a wide circulation. Five hundred on the part of one side, but on the arguments rest continue to be lop- copies of each were reprinted in 1956, relative superiority of one side over sided. English-language historians, but they did not sell out until 1975. another. It is this relationship, the not just Britons but also Americans, Such disappointing sales were dynamic between two opponents as Australians, Canadians and New themselves indications of two each struggles to impose its will on Zealanders, have done more than phenomena. First, the Second World the other, that should be at the heart those writing in French and German War had made the study of the First of operational military history. But to deepen our understanding of the World War deeply unfashionable it rarely is. Military history, for all conduct of operations on the western throughout Europe, a trend that its massive progress in the last two front. However, their research is too only changed in Britain in 1964, or three decades, particularly in the often written from the perspective after the fiftieth anniversary of the English speaking world, remains far of one side only. It pays little or no war’s outbreak, and in Germany too national – and even nationalistic attention to the sources available not until the ninetieth anniversary – in its approach. If the serious for the Germans, for what they in 2004 – if then. Second, German study of military history as a self- tell us about German intentions, military history after 1945, in so far contained subject has a significant German reactions, or even German as it survived at all, stepped away agenda for the future, it is this – to perspectives on British or French from the operational focus embraced be comparative. efforts. by the general staff historians of For no war and no front is this T h e gap is all the more the Wilhelmine period and of injunction more important or more extraordinary as the German official which Der Weltkrieg was the final pressing than it is for the First World history of the war on land, Der manifestation. This condition still War and its western front. The cycle Weltkrieg, is not a rare set of volumes, pertains: operational military history of reaction and reaction between at least for the war up to the spring does not have the respectability in two coalitions, remarkably similar of 1917, a point it had reached with German academic circles which it has in their military organisations and volume 12, published in 1939. By now acquired in the English-speaking

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world. The British official history has historians of the Reichsarchiv, the was subordinated to the Wehrmacht. been reprinted, the German has not organisation set up in 1919 to produce It is has therefore been easy to been, despite the scarcity of volumes the German official history, were as condemn the later volumes of Der 13 and 14. thorough in their construction of the Weltkrieg as ideologically tainted. These two arguments may be operational story. The first head of But this is both to exaggerate the sufficient explanations for the neglect Reichsarchiv’s section for the collection effect of the Nazis on the writing of of the Der Weltkrieg in Germany, of documents, Theodor Jochim, the history and at the same time to but they do not apply to English- distinguished its work from that of underplay a pre-existing issue whose speaking historians. Their reasons for academic historians, contending that, roots date back not to Weimar but to not consulting it more frequently are, “The events of the war, strategy and Wilhelmine Germany. presumably, linguistic. For monoglot tactics can only be considered from a After 1933, Jochim’s goal scholars, this translation will be a neutral, purely objective perspective remained the guiding principle boon beyond measure. It has for the historians of the been fashionable to rubbish the Wehrmacht as it had been for work of the official historians those of the Reichsarchiv. Their of the First World War of all careers were formed under languages. Sir James Edmonds, the Hohenzollerns, and their whose labours on behalf of function within the army, as it Britain were not completed had been for the historians of until 1948, and who has been the Prussian general staff, was criticised by David French, Tim not only to record but also to Travers and Denis Winter, to teach. Military history enabled cite three historians with very officers of the future to learn different perspectives, presided from the examples of the past; over an enterprise which they would not do so if mistakes may not conform to current committed by their predecessors expectations of historians, but were glossed over. Der Weltkrieg which strove hard for objectivity. did not set out specifically to As Andrew Green has shown glorify the German soldier. His in Writing the Great War: Sir heroism in front-line combat James Edmonds and the Official was the subject of a separate, Histories 1915-1948 (2003), more popular series edited by this was team writing avant Georg Soldan. Schlachten des la lettre. Draft narratives were Weltkrieges covered individual compiled from the documents battles in a run of 36 much and were then circulated to the slimmer volumes, the last of surviving participants for their them published in 1930, three comments in the search for years before Hitler came to balance. Edmonds’s creation could which weighs things dispassionately power. What did affect the writing of lay much greater claim to unbiased and is independent of any ideology.” Der Weltkrieg was the course of Nazi authority than could – say – Basil The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 foreign policy. The Reichsarchiv had Liddell Hart’s The Real War, probably would test this resolve. Volume 9, established working relationships the most widely read one-volume parts of which are included in the with the official historians of other account of the war in the English present translation, was published powers, especially Britain. But language between 1930 and 1964. in 1933, and so was the last to appear contacts with the Soviet Union, Markus Pöhlmann has produced a under the old regime. The president which had provided training areas study comparable to Green’s on the of the Reichsarchiv in that year, Hans for the Reichswehr in the late 1920s, writing of Der Weltkrieg, to which von Haeften, resisted flying the were broken after 1933, and the this foreword is heavily indebted. swastika flag over the office building. comparative input available for the Kriegsgeschichte und Geschichtspolitik: In 1934 the Reichsarchiv, which even earlier volumes began to wither. der Erste Weltkrieg. Die amtliche though staffed by former army During the Second World War itself, deutsche Militärgeschichtsschreibung officers had thus far remained an volume 14 – dealing with the events 1914-1956 (2002) shows that the independent body at least in name, of 1918 – was censored for fear of

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upsetting Romania (Germany’s ally treaty of 1919. This suited the general quantitative inferiority in the First in the Second World War, if not in staff historians, who by 1923 had World War, and its “humiliation” at the First) and Bulgaria (an ally in established virtual control of the the peace of Versailles in 1919. The both wars). These political pressures entire project, convinced that they presumption in the didactic purpose therefore drove the German official could produce an adequate history of of Der Weltkrieg was that there was a historians even more to a purely the war that was almost exclusively perfect solution to the conundrums military narrative of events. military in its focus. of operations, that strategy and This focus on military history Their hopes rested on an illusion: even policy could be subordinated narrowly defined was a product Der Weltkrieg could not in fact be to the operational level of war, and not of Nazi rule but of a much apolitical. German officers – like those that a war conducted as the military older tradition in German military of many other armies – were wont to experts thought it should be waged thought, to be found in the quarter protest their political neutrality, Hans would produce the right outcome for century before the outbreak of von Seeckt, the head of the surrogate Germany. the First World War in the Erich von Falkenhayn, the famous dispute between Hans chief of the general staff between Delbrück, professor of history September 1914 and August in Berlin, and the military 1916, and therefore the central historians of the general staff. character in this book, became a Delbrück argued that Frederick prime target for the historians of the Great in the Seven Years the Reichsarchiv. Having served War (1756-1763) had adopted in China before the First World a strategy of attrition, designed War, his career had not been to wear out the coalition of shaped by Alfred von Schlieffen, France, Austria and Russia the chief of the general staff by manoeuvre, whereas the between 1891 and 1905, and the staff historians said Frederick’s principal architect of the army’s strategy was one of annihilation, approach to the operational using manoeuvre to seek battle. level of war before 1914. Both were right, because for Falkenhayn’s overseas service each the focus of attention was a had convinced him that Britain’s different level of war. Delbrück maritime and imperial strength was concerned to put war in made it the centre of gravity its political context; the staff of the enemy coalition, and historians were considering that therefore it should be the the operational aspects, the focus of Germany’s war effort. relationship between strategy In the bitter debates between and tactics. So determined were “easterners” and “westerners” they that the conduct of war could be general staff between 1919 and 1926, (to borrow the vocabulary of the separated from its political objectives providing a case in point. But both British memoirs of the wars and that they could not even see the point the German army and its chief of apply it to a more apposite context), of Delbrück’s argument. Aspects of the general staff had too great a Falkenhayn focused on the west the dispute with Delbrück lingered professional role in shaping German because he realised that ultimately on after the war, until his death policy for that to be a deliverable French and Russian capacity to carry in 1929. Delbrück was one of ten aspiration. Germany had been united on fighting rested on British economic academics appointed to the historical by war and its subsequent history strength. The trouble was that there commission to oversee the work of until 1945 was shaped by it. The was no operational solution to this the Reichsarchiv, the bulk of them focus on operations carried its own strategic conundrum, as Britain’s in favour of putting the war in its implications for the formulation of forte was naval and Germany’s political context. They were not German strategy between 1870 and military. Joint planning was in helped when the foreign ministry 1945: operational excellence came any case a casualty of institutional refused to cooperate as it wanted to be seen as the tool which could division, since Falkenhayn as a to produce its own story, the better cut through Germany’s problems, soldier had no leverage over the to rebut the terms of the Versailles its encircled position in Europe, its navy. The best he could hope for

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was to bring the war to a satisfactory of the eastern front even while the weight applied to Russia in 1915 conclusion before Britain deployed events described in this volume were should be directly military, not its “New Armies” to France. Unlike unfolding. Shuttling back and forth diplomatic. Hindenburg’s iconic role Schlieffen’s, his solutions were not to the east, visiting the headquarters as a national hero created a political primarily operational, but political. of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, leverage which ultimately neither the He wanted a separate peace with he became such a fierce critic of chancellor, Theodor von Bethmann Russia to free up the German army Falkenhayn that he was nearly court- Hollweg, nor the Kaiser could resist. to concentrate in the west. This is martialled. It has been argued that Der the underlying thread of volumes 7, The operational perspective Weltkrieg was written to glorify 8, 9 of Der Weltkrieg, whose sections of the official historians therefore Hindenburg and (especially) relevant to the western front are here provided the ammunition with Ludendorff, just as it has been said published in English for the first time. which Der Weltkrieg attacked (wrongly, as Andrew Green shows) Falkenhayn’s grasp of the Falkenhayn. Holger Afflerbach’s that Edmonds used the British official wider strategy imposed on history to defend Douglas Germany was not compatible Haig. In 1917-18, Haeften had with his own staff’s focus on worked on propaganda in the the operational level. Even German supreme command, his friends, such as Wild von Oberste Heeresleitung III. But Hohenborn, who succeeded after the war Hindenburg him as Prussian minister of war, and Ludendorff kept their were not persuaded. Like the distance from the work of the victors of Tannenberg in 1914, Reichsarchiv, and Der Weltkrieg Paul von Hindenburg and Erich barely mentioned Hindenburg Ludendorff, they could see the in its account of the events of opportunity for operational 1918. Wolfgang Foerster, who success in the east. Envelopment succeeded Haeften in 1934 as battles of the sort so strongly the director of what was now advocated before the war by called the Forschungsanstalt für Schlieffen (who was now dead) Kriegs- und Heeresgeschichte, could be carried through against was better disposed towards Russia. Hans von Haeften, who Ludendorff. He treated the had enjoyed a key role in the victory at Tannenberg, whose work of the Reichsarchiv since site was both a focus for the its inception, was appointed its commemoration of the First president in 1931, and oversaw World War and a memorial to the production of volumes 7, 8, Hindenburg after his death, as General Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief and 9 of Der Weltkrieg. He was a “model battle,” on a par with of the General Staff of the Field Army not as unbiased in his views and head of the OHL. the great German victories of as the standards demanded by Leipzig in 1813 and Sedan in Jochim suggested he should be. 1870. But the lesson from all three Heart problems had meant that he political biography, Falkenhayn. cases was that the use of envelopment had had to forego active operational Politisches Denken und Handeln im as an operational method had led appointments on the general staff Kaiserreich (1994), provides important to a decisive victory. So the real in November 1914. Instead he had correctives. Falkenhayn’s operational influence on Foerster was not so become adjutant to Helmuth von efforts need to be set in their political much Ludendorff as Schlieffen. In Moltke the younger, Schlieffen’s context. They were accompanied 1921, he had published Graf Schlieffen successor and the chief of the general by a sustained attempt to prise the und der Weltkrieg, a book designed staff at the outbreak of war. Moltke Entente apart, but his efforts to to show how Schlieffen’s legacy became the scapegoat for the defeat persuade Russia to negotiate were had shaped Germany’s conduct on the Marne in September 1914, and incompatible with the predilections of the war. The combination of thereafter stirred the opposition to of either Germany’s principal ally, Ludendorff’s right-wing radicalism Falkenhayn, who had replaced him. Austria-Hungary, or of Hindenburg and mental instability increasingly Haeften began work on a history and Ludendorff. For them, the alienated him from his former

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colleagues on the general staff in military archives in Freiburg. From individual studies. Ludwig Boell’s general and from the Reichsarchiv in these it is clear that many facets of monumental history of the East particular. The authors employed Germany’s war effort other than African campaign, completed in on Der Weltkrieg never subjected the operational level of its conduct 1944, was effectively recreated by Hindenburg and Ludendorff to the interested the Reichsarchiv and its its author after the war, and then sort of psychological profiling that successors. Although the volumes of privately published. Most weighty they accorded to their predecessors, Der Weltkrieg are Eurocentric, theatres were the projected volumes of the Moltke and Falkenhayn, but in 1952 outside Europe were covered briefly economic history of the war, of which Foerster published an independent and were due to be the subject of only the first, pre-war volumes, ever study of Ludendorff’s appeared. “psychological state in the Mark Humphries, John final stages of the First World Maker and their team of War,” Der Feldherr Ludendorff im translators, Wilhlem J. Unglück, in 1952. Kiesselbach, Peter Meinlschmidt Most of the papers which and Ralph Whitehead, are to went into the writing of Der be congratulated on a major Weltkrieg were destroyed when achievement. The year 1915 the Royal Air Force bombed marked the moment when the the depository in which the fighting on the western front Prussian military archives adapted to trench warfare, were stored in 1945. This is and when the armies of all the single most compelling sides began what recent reason for according the utmost British military historians have seriousness to this book. Unlike described as a “learning curve.” the official histories of the other This process was of course not major belligerents of the First a uniquely British phenomenon, World War, that of Germany but one in which Germans can never be written again, or and French also shared, and to at least not from a comparable whose development the battles primary source base. However, at Soissons and Neuve Chapelle, the military papers of the other the gas attack at Ypres, and states of imperial Germany the offensives in Champagne have survived, and so too have and Artois all contributed. collections of private papers This volume will transform belonging to those involved English-speaking historians’ in the writing of Der Weltkrieg. understandings of a crucial Most importantly the papers stage in the First World War. It which were still the subject might even make Germans take of active investigation by the their own operational military official historians were kept history seriously. elsewhere and so not destroyed German soldiers with a rudimentary gas in 1945. Having been stored in mask, circa 1915. Hew Strachan is the Chichele Professor of the History of War, Potsdam in the Cold War, they University of Oxford. have now been united with the

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