Eduard Totleben

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General Eduard Ivanovich Totleben

Count (Franz) Eduard Ivanovich von Totleben (Todleben) ( Russian Эдуард Иванович Тотлебен , scientific transliteration Ėduard Ivanovič Totleben ; * 8 May July / 20 May  1818 greg. In Mitau, today Jelgava , Latvia ; † July 1, 1884 in Bad Soden ) was a German-Baltic general in the Russian army . He was best known for his achievements in the field of fortress construction and pioneering .

Life

origin

According to the well-known Russian Biographical Dictionary by Polowzow, the family comes from a branch of the old Thuringian family Totleben . Adam Heinrich Totleben (1714–1773) from Thuringia settled in Insterburg , East Prussia as a city citizen. His son Theodor Friedrich von Totleben (1749-1804) became a merchant in Sabile , Courland in the west of Latvia and thus the founder of the Baltic branch of the family. The Russian general Gottlob Curt Heinrich Graf von Tottleben (1715–1773) does not belong to the Baltic branch of the family.

Military career

Totleben was trained first at the cadet school in Riga , then from 1832 to 1836 at the engineering school in St. Petersburg . In 1837 he joined the Genie Corps as a sub-lieutenant and fought in the Caucasus from 1847 to 1850. He took part in the sieges of the Chechen fortresses Salti and Tschoch as a staff captain and then worked as a lieutenant colonel at the side of General Karl Andrejewitsch Schilder during the siege of Silistra from 1854 during the Crimean War .

He achieved great fame among the European military after the rapid erection of defensive works on the south side of Sevastopol , which alone made the long defense of the fortress possible. In the early stages of the siege of Sevastopol , the fortifications were little more than hastily erected earth walls, reinforced by wattle, fascines and gabions . Under the direction of the engineer Totleben, ramparts and trenches were built in the winter months of 1854/55 to a more refined level than ever before in the history of siege warfare . The bastions had Totleben by casemates reinforce: several meters below the surface physically protected gun emplacements, covered with thick ship beams and earth, by which withstood the heaviest shelling. Inside the strongest fortified bastions, the Malachow and the Redan, there was a maze of bunkers and other rooms, each with a small chapel and a hospital .

During the winter months the siege had gone through a quiet period, as both the Russian army and the Allied forces focused less on the fighting than on strengthening their fortifications . From the end of February 1855, however, the almost constant bombardment by French cannons began, so that a complex bulwark with a bezel , called a mamelon , had to be built under this bombardment. It should enable a better defense of Fort Malachow. Quarry pits were built in front of the Redan. But at the beginning of June 1855, the French armed forces were able to bring the Mamelon under their control.

On June 20, 1855, Totleben was wounded in the foot and had to stop working. He was then appointed lieutenant general and adjutant general of the Tsar and, in 1860, director of the engineering department in the War Ministry. During this time he campaigned for Dostoyevsky with the Tsar , who had written to him, first to be able to move from his exile from Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan to the European part of Russia and later to come back to St. Petersburg from the provincial town of Tver .

Furthermore, he was adjutant to Grand Duke Nikolaus d. Ä. as inspector general of genius. In 1877 he was first appointed to the theater of war in Bulgaria in September -  Russo-Ottoman War (1877–1878)  - and entrusted with the supervision of the siege work in front of Pleven . After the fall of the city made possible by him, Totleben was raised to the rank of count: he was registered as count on March 3, 1856 in the registers of the Estonian knighthood , on May 3, 1857 in the Courland knighthood , in the same year on December 31 in the Livonian knighthood Knighthood and on March 5, 1858 accepted into the Oeselsche Knighthood . Later he was entrusted with the demolition of the Bulgarian fortresses and in April 1878 with the supreme command in Turkey. In 1879 Totleben became governor general of Odessa and a year later of Vilnius . After a serious illness he died in Bad Soden in 1884. With his son Count Nikolai Georg Eduard von Totleben (1874–1945), landowner and Russian major general, the male line of the Baltic branch of the von Totleben family died out.

Honors

Works

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Orlando Figes, Bernd Rullkötter: Crimean War. The last crusade. Berlin Verlag 2011. S.clxxiv
  2. ^ Dostojewski, Gesammelte Briefe 1833 - 1881, Piper-Verlag, Munich, 1966, Letter # 107 of March 24, 1856
  3. ^ Dostoevsky Letters, Vol. 1, 1832-1859, Ardis, Ann Arbor, 1988, ISBN 0-88233-897-8 , Letter # 157 of October 4, 1859
  4. ↑ Totleben - A Russian island that doesn't exist. Feature. Deutschlandfunk, September 28, 2012, accessed on September 28, 2012 .
personal data
SURNAME Totleben, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Totleben, Eduard Iwanowitsch; Totleben, Franz Eduard Janowitsch von; Todleben, Eduard Franz von; Тотлебен, Эдуард Иванович (Russian); Totleben, Ėduard Ivanovič (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian general
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1818
PLACE OF BIRTH Mitau, today Jelgava
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1884
Place of death Bad Soden am Taunus