Battle of Tannenberg ends

On 31 August 1914 General Paul von Hindenburg reported to Kaiser Wilhelm II that the ring around the main forces of the Russian 2nd Army had closed the previous day. So ended the Battle of Tannenberg, Germany’s greatest victory on the Eastern Front in the first year of the war. The main fighting lasted from 26 to 30 August, but the old British chronology, like some contemporary sources, gives 31 August as the date on which the battle ended. On that day the German 8th Army was finishing rounding up the shattered Russian units, and its command could announce the final result.

The last days of the pocket

The fighting in the south of East Prussia began on 23 August, when the Russian 2nd Army of General Alexander Samsonov, marching from the Kingdom of Poland, clashed with the Germans near Neidenburg (see Battle of Tannenberg begins). On the same day Hindenburg and his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, took over command of the German 8th Army (see Hindenburg takes command of the 8th Army). From 26 August the Germans struck at both wings of the Russian army, and on 29 August their pincers closed in its rear.

Three Russian corps were trapped in the forests and marshes between Hohenstein and Neidenburg. Exhausted, hungry and cut off from communications, the soldiers tried to break through to the south, but ran into German blocking positions and artillery fire. Samsonov, who had lost control of his army, became separated from his staff on the night of 29–30 August and took his own life in the forest. The Germans found his body only later.

On 30 August Russian units outside the pocket made one more attempt at relief. A group under General Sirelius briefly retook Neidenburg, but could not break through to the encircled troops and had to withdraw. Inside the pocket, column after column and regiment after regiment laid down their arms. Individual groups of soldiers hid in the forests for several more days before being taken prisoner.

Hindenburg’s report

In his report of 31 August Hindenburg informed the Kaiser of the destruction of three Russian corps and of tens of thousands of prisoners, whose number was still rising. In his order to the soldiers of the 8th Army, issued after the battle, he already spoke of more than 90,000 prisoners and countless guns and machine guns. According to later studies, about 92,000 Russians were taken prisoner, and the total losses of the Russian 2nd Army reached, by various estimates, 120,000–170,000 men. The Germans lost, depending on the source, from over ten thousand to 30,000 killed and wounded. The captured equipment was later carried off to Germany in dozens of trains.

The Russian flank corps, the I and VI, managed to avoid encirclement, but were badly beaten and withdrew deep into the Kingdom of Poland.

Grunwald and Tannenberg

The fighting took place mainly around Hohenstein, but Hindenburg asked the Kaiser to name the battle after the village of Tannenberg, today Stębark. Both Ludendorff and the staff officer Max Hoffmann later claimed credit for the idea of this name. It was no accident. In German tradition the name Tannenberg was used for the Battle of Grunwald of 1410, in which Polish-Lithuanian forces routed the Teutonic Order. The new victory was presented as revenge for that defeat and as a triumph of the Germans over the Slavs.

For Poles this symbolism had a bitter edge. Only four years earlier, in 1910, the 500th anniversary of Grunwald had been solemnly celebrated, and in Kraków the Grunwald Monument, funded by Ignacy Paderewski, had been unveiled. Poles in fact fought on both sides of the front at Tannenberg: conscripts from the Kingdom of Poland in the Russian army, and inhabitants of Pomerania, Warmia and Masuria in the German army.

The memorial and its end

In the 1920s the Germans erected a huge memorial to the victory near Hohenstein. In 1934 Hindenburg was buried there, and in the following years the Nazis rebuilt the memorial into a mausoleum and a place of national cult. In January 1945, before the arrival of the Red Army, the Germans removed the coffins of Hindenburg and his wife and blew up part of the structure. The ruins were dismantled after the war, and almost nothing of the memorial remains today.

Significance

Tannenberg made Hindenburg and Ludendorff national heroes. The victory opened the way for them to take over the supreme command of the German army in 1916. Immediately after the battle the 8th Army began to regroup against the Russian 1st Army of General Paul von Rennenkampf, which it defeated at the beginning of September in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes. The Russian defeat came at a price for the Germans, however: to save East Prussia, two corps were transferred east from the Western Front, and they were then missing on the Marne.