General Staff Course Sedan

The General Staff courses Sedan ( Sedan courses for short ) were a provisional facility of the German Army during the First World War . They were used for the short-term training of General Staff officers , which had previously been hired when the war broke out in 1914.

Before the outbreak of war, it was customary for officers who had qualified for general staff service through a voluntary examination to be trained for three years at the Prussian War Academy . They then served on a trial basis in the Great General Staff before they were finally appointed General Staff officers. This thorough but rather protracted training was discontinued when the mobilization took place in August 1914, as only a short war was expected. But this dragged on and through losses on the one hand, but also due to numerous new troop formations, the need for executives in the General Staffs grew. First you more intent on officers who may indeed been at the Military Academy, but this did not stop because of the war, in the General Staff to take over.

When the demand could still not be met in this way, a provisional general staff training was set up in 1917 in the form of the “General Staff Courses Sedan” . Sufficiently qualified young officers could be accepted into these on the basis of a recommendation by their superiors. They then served in various general staffs and practically got to know the tasks of the first , second or third general staff officer . If the candidate proved himself, after about a year he was assigned to an intensive course of four weeks in the city of Sedan . The 20 participants in a course were divided into two “lecture halls” , each under the direction of an older staff officer . The focus was on an intensive theoretical training. Every week demands and loads were increased, so that only about 75% of the participants in a course passed the same.

After successfully completing the course, the graduates were immediately transferred to the General Staff Service and assigned to a staff. They differed neither in their uniform nor in their position from their fully trained comrades. After the war they were still “retrained” within the Reichswehr in some cases, but how equally they were treated in the end is shown by the fact that one of the “War General Staff Officers ”, Rudolf Schmidt , ultimately entrusted the training of a new generation of General Staff officers himself has been.

Other well-known graduates of the Sedan courses were the later Colonel General Heinz Guderian , Nikolaus von Falkenhorst , Gotthard Heinrici and Georg-Hans Reinhardt as well as the General Field Marshals Walter Model and Friedrich Paulus .

literature

• Hansgeorg Model: The German General Staff Officer - His selection and training in the Reichswehr, Wehrmacht and Bundeswehr , Bernard & Graefe Verlag für Wehrwesen, Frankfurt / Main 1968, p. 19f