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Tannenberg, Battle of

The Battle of Tannenberg (26-30 August 1914), in which General Aleksandr Samsonov’s 2nd Russian (Narevskaia) Army was surrounded and completely annihilated, was one of the largest battles on the Eastern Front in World War I. The battle acquired a significance that was not so much strategic as symbolic, and became an integral part of both Russia’s and Germany’s commemorative and political culture of the interwar period.

Advance of Russian Forces in East Prussia

In the first months of the war, the German army’s tactical operations proceeded according to the Schlieffen Plan, with the main strike being directed first against France. The Russian Empire’s geographical expanse meant a lengthy period of mobilization, which, in the German General Staff’s opinion, would enable them to hold eastern Germany with only one army until a victorious conclusion of the war in the West had been achieved. Contrary to pre-war predictions, two Russian armies, under pressure from their Western allies, had already advanced into East Prussia in the middle of July, and on 19 July General Paul von Rennenkampf (1854-1918) 1st Russian (Nemanskaia) Army had inflicted defeat upon the enemy at the Battle of Gumbinnen. The victory was not strategically important, and the Russian occupation of East Prussia produced a massive flow of refugees and popularization of the concept of the “Eastern March” suffering the “atrocities of the Russian Cossacks.”1

The threat of losing its Prussian stronghold forced the German Staff to adjust their original plans and redeploy two divisions on the Eastern Front. The retired general Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934), the embodiment of the Prussian military tradition, was named as the new commander of the 8th German Army. General Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) was appointed Chief of Staff.

The Defeat of General Samsonov’s Army

The new German plan of operations proposed swift actions against General Aleksandr Samsonov’s (1859-1914) 2nd Russian (Narevskaia) Army, which was cut off from Rennenkampf’s units by the Masurian lakes. The events that played out 26-30 August 1914 around Allenstein were a complex mixture of luck and accident, the uncoordinated actions of the Russian front and military commands, and the military endurance and heroism of individual units. As a result the German 8th army managed to surround Samsonov’s divisions, who outnumbered them, and the general himself, realising the hopelessness of his position, ended his life by committing suicide. In the end, the Russian side lost around 120,000 men, of whom 95,000 were taken prisoner, as well as the entire army’s equipment.

The Mythologising of the Battle of Allenstein

From a strategic point of view, the battle, which was to become known as the Battle of Tannenberg, was not a key event on the Eastern Front during WWI, neither leading to the final defeat of the Russian Empire, nor even to an end to the Russian occupation of East Prussia. Rennenkampf’s forces were only expelled from the province in the autumn of 1914, and in the winter of 1914/15 a second brief incursion ensued. Nevertheless, it is difficult to overestimate the symbolic and political significance of this battle. The very name “Battle of Tannenberg” indicated the German interpretation of it as revenge for the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the hands of the united Slavic and Lithuanian forces in 1410 (known to the Russians as The Battle of Grunwald). The very idea of the “Second Cannes” of the Eastern Front was the origin of one of the more significant German national myths of the WWI period, the Weimar Republic and the early Third Reich.

For the Russians, the defeat of the Narevskaia Army was a heavy blow to morale.2 The “infection of the Russian colossus by the Tannenberg bacillus”3 led to the Russians’ loss of faith in their own power and the likelihood of eventual victory. Representatives of the military elite, thanks to the work of a specialist investigative committee, assessed the reasons for defeat very realistically. Nonetheless, even before the 1917 Revolution, society began to form its own impressions, foremost among these being the perception that it was Russia’s sacrifice to save Paris, and the story of Rennenkampf’s “treachery”, which fitted in neatly with the idea of a German conspiracy. After the Revolution, the reinterpretation of this negative military experience was mainly undertaken by different social and professional groups of the Soviet and Emigrant military elites.

Oksana Segeevna Nagornaja, South Urals Institute of Management and Economics

Section Editor: Yulia Khmelevskaya
  1. Jahn, Peter: “Zarendreck, Barbarendreck”. Die russische Besetzung Ostpreußens 1914 in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit, in: Eimermacher K. a.a. (ed.): Verführungen der Gewalt. Russen und Deutsche im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg, Munich 2005, pp. 223-242.
  2. For detail on the reworking of the Russian experience on the Eastern Front during the war in Soviet Russia and the emigration see: Nagornaja, Oxana: “Syndrom Tannenbergu”. Rosyjska instrumentalizacja wschodniopruskiego doświadczenia, tlum. Iwona A. Ndiaye i Ewa Romanowska [“The Tannenberg Syndrome”. The Russian Instrumentalization of the Eastern Prussian experience. Translated by Ndiaye i Ewa Romanowska], in: Borussia. Kultura -Historia – Literatura, 41 (2007), pp. 202-216.
  3. Noskoff, A.: Mit der russischen Dampfwalze, Berlin 1939, p. 91.
Oxana Sergeevna Nagornaja: Tannenberg, Battle of, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2017-12-21. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10310/1.1
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Map1

Images5

Hindenburg and Ludendorff
Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg wearing his “Pour le Mérite” and the First Quartermaster General of the Supreme Command, Erich Ludendorff (right), autumn 1916.
Unknown photographer: Hindenburg and Ludendorff, black-and-white photograph, n.p., 1916; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1970-073-47, via Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1970-073-47,_Paul_v._Hindenburg,_Erich_Ludendorff.jpg.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en.

German infantry on the march, 1914
The German infantry passes an East Prussian town after the Battle of Tannenberg, September 1914.
Unknown photographer: German infantry on the march, black-and-white photograph, n.p. [East Prussia], September 1914; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R36715, via Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-R36715,_Ostpreu%C3%9Fen,_deutsche_Infanterie_auf_dem_Marsch.jpg.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en.

Paul von Hindenburg’s funeral
The funeral service of Paul von Hindenburg took place on 7 August 1934 in the central yard of the Tannenberg Memorial, which had been constructed between 1924 and 1927 near Hohenstein in East Prussia (now Olsztynek, Poland).
Unknown photographer: Tannenberg-Denkmal, Beisetzung Hindenburg, black-and-white photograph, Germany, 7 August 1934; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2006-0429-502, via Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2006-0429-502,_Tannenberg-Denkmal,_Beisetzung_Hindenburg.jpg.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en.

Sieges-Sonne im Osten, Hindenburg, postcard
After his victory over the Russian troops in East Prussia in 1914, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was venerated as the “hero of Tannenberg“. German propaganda elevated him to a symbol of a trustworthy and victorious military leader. His victory in the 1925 presidential elections showed that his image had survived the military collapse – for which he was partly responsible – largely intact. The title of this postcard reads: “Victory sun in the East.”
Unknown artist: Sieges-Sonne im Osten, postcard, 1914; source: Lebendiges Museum Online, Deutsches Historisches Museum, PK 2004/640, http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/20051448/index.html.
© DHM (PK 2004/640), Berlin.

Northeastern Europe 1914, Campaign in Southwest Poland
This map shows operations on the Eastern Front between September and November 1914.
Unknown author: Northeastern Europe 1914, Campaign in Southwest Poland, map, U.S.A., n.d.; source: U.S. Military Academy West Point, map 29,
https://www.usma.edu/sites/default/files/inline-images/academics/academic_departments/history/WWI/WWOne29.jpg.
Maps courtesy of the United States Military Academy, Department of History.