The German Eleventh Army in the First World War

The German Eleventh Army was an army of Imperial Germany, formed in the spring of 1915 as a reserve of the Supreme Army Command. Under August von Mackensen, with Hans von Seeckt as chief of staff, it broke the Russian front at Gorlice on 2 May 1915 and led the pursuit that drove the Russians out of Galicia. In the autumn of 1915, under Max von Gallwitz, it took part in the conquest of Serbia, and then until the end of the war it held the Macedonian front, made up more and more of Bulgarians.

A reserve from the west (1915)

The army grew out of the idea that every division of the Western Front should give up one of its four regiments. By the end of March 1915 fourteen new divisions had been formed in this way, with soldiers who already knew war. On 3 March the order was issued to form the Eleventh Army headquarters. On 9 March General Max von Fabeck was appointed commander and Colonel Seeckt chief of staff. The staff gathered on 11 March in Kassel and moved to Maubeuge, where it studied the ground for an offensive north of Arras. As early as 28 March Fabeck left for the First Army, and for several weeks Seeckt ran the staff alone.

The Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, decided, however, that the new forces would go east. Austria-Hungary had bled itself white in the Carpathians over the winter and had to be helped. On 16 April Mackensen, who had earlier commanded the Ninth Army at Łódź, took command of the Eleventh Army, and from 21 April trains carrying eight German divisions arrived in western Galicia. At the end of April the army comprised the Guard Corps, the X Corps and the XLI Reserve Corps, together with the Austro-Hungarian VI Corps and a combined corps, eight German divisions and two Austro-Hungarian in all.

Gorlice and the pursuit (May–September 1915)

On 2 May, after several hours of fire from more than a thousand guns and mortars, the Eleventh Army, supported by the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, attacked the Russian Third Army between Ciężkowice and Gorlice. The first line fell the same day, and on the evening of 5 May the commander of the Third Army ordered a retreat. Ludendorff later wrote that Seeckt, thanks to his keen intellect, became one of the most prominent figures of the war.

The army pressed on eastwards. In mid-May it took the bridgehead at Jarosław and crossed the San, and at the end of May it went round Przemyśl from the north; the fortress returned to Austro-Hungarian hands on 3 June. Mackensen now commanded a whole army group, and his Eleventh Army broke through the Russian positions at Magierów, which on 22 June opened the way to Lviv for the allies. By the end of June the army had taken more than 250,000 prisoners.

At the end of June the Eleventh Army turned north, towards Lublin and Chełm, and on 16 July, with the Prussian Guard in the lead, it attacked at Krasnystaw. The attack on the Kingdom of Poland from the south was part of the great offensive of the Central Powers, which forced the Russians to abandon Warsaw. On 25 August the troops of Mackensen’s army group took Brest-Litovsk. In September the Eleventh Army headquarters was dissolved, and its staff became the staff of Mackensen’s army group, intended for use against Serbia.

Serbia (1915)

The name passed to General Gallwitz’s Twelfth Army headquarters, which at the end of September was moved to the Banat and renamed the Eleventh Army. Gallwitz had seven divisions in three corps, deployed on the Danube opposite Smederevo and Ram. On 6 October the Eleventh Army and the Austro-Hungarian Third Army set off under Mackensen’s command on the conquest of Serbia, and a week later Bulgaria struck from the east. The Germans crossed the Danube on 7 October at Ram and on 8 October at Kostolac.

After the fall of Belgrade the Eleventh Army advanced up the Morava valley. On 1 November it entered Kragujevac, where the Serbs had earlier blown up the country’s only arsenal, and in the second half of November its units reached Pristina. The Serbian army, however, avoided encirclement and withdrew across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania.

The Macedonian front (1916–1918)

From February and March 1916 the Eleventh Army guarded the Greek border, facing the Entente troops who had landed at Salonika. Its headquarters was first at Veles, and from 5 October 1916 at Prilep. There were fewer and fewer Germans on this front: according to Ludendorff, in August 1916 there was about one German division here. The Eleventh Army therefore consisted mostly of Bulgarian divisions with an admixture of German regiments, and in September 1918, at the time of the Vardar offensive, it was made up almost entirely of Bulgarians under German officers.

In the autumn of 1916 the army of General Arnold von Winckler took over the sector at Bitola, but on 19 November the allies took the town. At that time it came under the army group of General Otto von Below. In 1917 it held on at Bitola during the French March offensive, and the allies’ May attacks west of the Vardar ended without gains.

On 15 September 1918 the Serbs and the French attacked at Dobro Pole the Bulgarian divisions of the Eleventh Army, then commanded by General Kuno von Steuben. By then it was a German army only in name and staff. A Serbian wedge split it from the Bulgarian First Army, and on 29 September French cavalry took Skopje and cut off General Fleck’s German corps. Under the Armistice of Salonica the soldiers of the Eleventh Army west of the Skopje meridian were to lay down their arms. When Fleck’s units also surrendered, the number of prisoners taken by the allies rose to about 77,000.

The German units of the Eleventh Army fell back through Serbia. In October the Serbs retook Niš, and the army withdrew through Jagodina to Szolnok in Hungary. On 7 December 1918 its headquarters was moved to Allenstein in East Prussia, and at the beginning of 1919 it was dissolved.