The Tragic Pursuit of Total Victory: Germany’s Unrelenting Offensive That Lost WWI

Indeed, Hindenburg owed his position to the fact that ordinary Germans had inextricably linked his name with victory. His meteoric rise to the top of Germany’s military hierarchy in 1916 was as unexpected as it was unprecedented. He was recalled from retirement and obscurity in 1914, at the age of sixty-six, and given command of the Eighth Army on the Eastern Front. Together with Ludendorff, his chief of staff, Hindenburg destroyed the Russian Second Army at the Battle of Tannenberg, then turned and sent the Russian First Army reeling eastward at the Masurian Lakes. Hailed as the savior of Prussia, he quickly became compared to the heroic Siegfried on coins commemorating those battles.

By October 1914, Hindenburg was the most celebrated man in Germany, eclipsing Kaiser Wilhelm II in the eyes of a German public thirsting for victories after setbacks in the West. By November, he was a field marshal. Towns adopted his name, ships were named after him, and shops stocked Hindenburg cigars, soaps, and other ephemera in his honor. The myth of Hindenburg even stretched across the Atlantic to American shores, where he was mischaracterized as the “German Cincinnatus.” There was nothing of the citizen-soldier about Hindenburg or Ludendorff: Both were Prussian warriors, through and through.

In retrospect, it was none too surprising that Germany’s two warlords sought military solutions to what were in fact broader geo-strategic problems. Then-Captain Charles de Gaulle, who was held from 1916 to 1918 as a POW in Germany, astutely noted Hindenburg’s broad popular appeal and Ludendorff’s “warrior puritanism,” with its call for greater and greater sacrifice in the cause of ultimate victory. Under their leadership, Germany became a machine for waging war and little else—a reductive approach that could be justified only by total victory in the West: a result revealingly known as a “Hindenburg peace.”

To win, Hindenburg and Ludendorff knew they had to prevail despite the stagnated conditions and enormous wastage of trench warfare. Their winning recipe was based on the German army’s self-perceived military advantage: its warrior ferocity and improvisatory skills as demonstrated specifically in well-planned and vigorous attacks. The coming offensive was to be a total warfare of the mind in which skill, spirit, and especially will would ultimately end a “forever war” of materiel in Germany’s favor, or so Hindenburg and Ludendorff hoped. Nevertheless, it remained to be seen whether these ingredients would provide a recipe for victory.

In seeking total victory, Hindenburg and Ludendorff oversaw the gradual erosion of civilian authority. Politicians who raised objections, such as Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (who resigned in July 1917), were outmaneuvered. Although nominally in charge, Kaiser Wilhelm dared not challenge the “silent dictatorship” being forged by his warlords.

Without any significant civilian check to their authority, Hindenburg and Ludendorff proceeded to invert Clausewitz’s famous dictum that warfare must serve politics. For the duumvirate, politics—indeed all elements of the fatherland—had to serve war.

Before they could launch a decisive offensive on the Western Front, however, Hindenburg and Ludendorff recognized that the German army had to regain its vitality. In late 1916, they reversed Falkenhayn’s injunction to hold everything and counterattack always. Instead, the Western Front in 1917 became a theater to be endured and even reduced as Germany sought victory elsewhere, whether by defeating the Russian army or by knocking Britain from the war through unrestricted submarine warfare.

That spring, Germany’s warlords approved a “scorched earth” withdrawal to the Siegfried Line (known among the Entente powers as the Hindenburg Line). Code-named Operation Alberich after the malicious dwarf of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, it was an operational masterstroke, but it was also a contingent one. Hindenburg and Ludendorff approved it, but reluctantly. By nature, both men were risk takers who believed in the ability of tough-minded men to seize the moment and inspire others to victory, as they themselves had done at Königgrätz in 1866 and Liège in 1914. For them, Alberich was an expedient spoiling action while Germany focused on the ultimately unsuccessful U-boat campaign against Britain and the successful elimination of Russia in 1917.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to