Great General Staff

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The first Great General Staff (1870/71)

The Great General Staff was the general staff in the German Empire that was tasked with planning and conducting wars. In a narrower sense, the Great General Staff was responsible for the continuous investigation and preparation and review of plans for mobilization and military campaigns. The headquarters of this institution has been the General Staff Building in Berlin since it was founded in 1871 . The Great General Staff was created with the Bismarck Empire on January 1, 1871. During the First World War , the seat of the Great General Staff was in the Great Headquarters , which was relocated several times during the course of the war. The institution ended on June 28, 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles , in which the dissolution of the Great General Staff was enforced. Paul von Hindenburg resigned on July 3, 1919, Wilhelm Groener on July 15, 1919.

Creation of the General Staff

However, the history of the development of this General Staff did not originate in Prussia. At the end of the 17th century , the Great Elector organized his general quartermaster staff along the lines of the then highly regarded Swedish army . The task of the staff was to supervise the engineering service of the army, to monitor the marching routes and to select camps and fortified positions. At the same time similar institutions emerged in England under Cromwell , in Austria and other southern German states. The modern Prussian general staff was not the result of the reform phase from 1807 to 1814. In essence, the forerunners of the general staff developed as early as the 18th century, but specifically as early as 1803 by Christian von Massenbach and Levin von Geusau . Under Gerhard von Scharnhorst , the General Staff was then institutionally linked from 1808 as a central body in the newly established War Ministry with the General Staff officers in the newly formed troop brigades. With that it became a kind of nervous system into the troops. The Prussian General Staff did an excellent job in the Wars of Liberation against France and in the Wars of Unification . His military plans were based on military science. The expression general staff is still a popular term in everyday language for thorough planning that leaves nothing to chance. In the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, the then Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke knew how to bring his general staff work to full effect: Three Prussian armies advanced separately into Bohemia and met with the greatest precision on the battlefield to defeat the opposing army.

Creation of the Great General Staff

Last Great General Staff in the Great Headquarters in Wilhelmshöhe Palace in November 1918

Legal basis

The military held a special position in the empire . The empire had legislative competence for the military and the navy. A Reich Ministry of War was not planned. The troops of the individual countries were subordinate to the respective federal princes, who were, however, incorporated into the Prussian army by military conventions. In addition, the kingdoms of Saxony and Württemberg retained certain independence, while the kingdom of Bavaria was nominally independent. There was a Prussian war minister , but he was only responsible for administrative matters of the army. The king was in command of the Prussian army and assigned himself to the General Staff as a commanding aid. The chief of the great general staff had the immediate right . With the outbreak of the First World War, the Great General Staff was reclassified to the General Staff of the Field Army through expansion to include parts of the Bavarian, Saxon and Württemberg General Staff and other specialist services and later renamed the Supreme Army Command (OHL), analogous to Prussia, the command aid of the "Supreme Warlord"; In fact, however, the emperor let the chief of the OHL and his first quartermaster general wrest more and more direct authority from him .

Military mission

The Prussian "General Staff of the Army" carried out military planning in the Reich with assigned General Staff officers from Württemberg and assigned General Staff officers from Saxony and Bavaria in the "Great General Staff". The General Staff was subdivided into the central, the "Great General Staff" in Berlin and the General Staffs of the Corps or General Commands and the General Staff officers of the divisions. The Chief of the General Staff called himself "Chief of the General Staff" and was also the chief of all general staff officers. Even in Prussia , the General Staff had a special, also political significance since Moltke . He was extremely influential because since 1883 he, together with the commanding generals and the commanders-in-chief, Immediatrecht with the Kaiser as “Supreme Warlord” (German Empire) and “Chief of the Army” (Prussia) and thus had the de facto opportunity to bypass the Chancellor's military decisions and to meet the Reichstag. This is considered to be one of the germ cells of the catastrophe of the First World War , since military planning was not necessarily subject to political control (see also: Primacy of politics ). In this way, the Schlieffen Plan was able to develop into the only war plan and almost into a dogma, without any important politicians of the empire being even initiated. The leadership of the Imperial Navy was also not familiar with this army planning. The "Great General Staff" was divided into several departments.

structure

  • The 1st department dealt with Russia
  • The 2nd division was the deployment division
  • The 3rd department dealt with France and England
  • The 4th division with the fortresses of these states
  • The 5th division with Italy and Austria-Hungary
  • The 6th division was the maneuvering division

Chief of the Great General Staff

Supreme Army Command (OHL)

After Falkenhayn's resignation, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were entrusted with command of the army. This new form of leadership was called Supreme Army Command . Hindenburg was in charge of legal matters; in fact, the years 1917 and 1918 can be interpreted as Ludendorff's military dictatorship. The designation OHL was later, historically incorrect, transferred to the army command of Moltke and Falkenhayn. Strictly speaking, the term must not be applied to the staff.

literature