Death of Colmar von der Goltz

On 19 April 1916 the German field marshal Colmar von der Goltz, commander of the Ottoman Sixth Army, died at his headquarters in Baghdad. He was 72. According to the British official history (Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia) and German biographers, he was killed by typhus, which he had contracted at the front on the Tigris, probably on the way back from Kut. He had been ill for some time. Some German works specify that he died during the night of 18–19 April. Some works speak of typhoid fever, but the German sources clearly refer to typhus (Fleckfieber). The field marshal did not live to see the victory he had been working towards since December: ten days later the besieged British division of General Charles Townshend capitulated.

The British chronology of the war states under this date that Goltz was murdered by an Albanian officer. This version is confirmed neither by the official history nor by the German and Turkish biographies of the field marshal. The official cause of death was typhus, and historians accept it to this day. During the war, however, rumours circulated that the field marshal had been poisoned. According to one version, cited among others by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, this was done by the Young Turks, who disliked his influence. None of these rumours has been confirmed. There is also confusion over the date: the English translation of the memoirs of General Otto Liman von Sanders gives 6 April, which is most likely the same day according to the Julian calendar then used by the Ottoman authorities.

Goltz died when the fate of Kut was already almost sealed. The day before, Ottoman troops had counter-attacked at Beit Aiessa, and food in the town was running out. His authority over Turkish operations, however, was slight, as Moberly notes. The Turks had not agreed to a German chief of staff and had given him a Turkish one, and on the Tigris decisions were in practice taken by Halil Bey (Halil Kut), the uncle of the war minister Enver Pasha. It was he who now took command of the whole Sixth Army. Liman von Sanders later wrote that the success at Kut so swelled Halil’s pride that the Turks stopped listening to German advice. Instead of following up their blow against the British, in the summer they sent XIII Corps to Persia.

Opinions of Goltz are mixed. For decades he had trained Ottoman officers and was widely respected in Turkey, but as governor of occupied Belgium in 1914 he had threatened to punish whole localities for sabotage. His attitude towards the Armenian genocide is also judged in different ways. According to the American historian Isabel Hull, in 1915 he approved the deportations as a military necessity, and in December of that year, by then in Mesopotamia, he threatened to resign unless they were halted. He obtained only a brief halt, and only in Mesopotamia.

The field marshal’s body was first buried in Baghdad. The coffin was later taken to Constantinople and, after funeral ceremonies on 24 June, laid to rest in the park of the German embassy’s summer residence at Tarabya (Therapia) on the Bosporus, next to the ambassador Hans von Wangenheim, who had died in October 1915. On 18 June 1916 a ceremony in honour of Goltz was held in the Reichstag building in Berlin. After delivering the funeral oration there, General Helmuth von Moltke, the former chief of the German General Staff, suffered a stroke and died. According to an often repeated account, a year and a half later, in November 1917, the conqueror of the city, the British general Frederick Stanley Maude, died in the same house in Baghdad.