Hindenburg becomes Chief of the General Staff

On 29 August 1916 at Pless in Upper Silesia, where the German headquarters was then located, Kaiser Wilhelm II removed General Erich von Falkenhayn from the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army. His successor was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, until then commander-in-chief of the German forces in the East. His long-standing chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, received the post of First Quartermaster General (Erster Generalquartiermeister) and joint responsibility for all decisions. So began the Third OHL, the third leadership of the Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) in this war, after Moltke and Falkenhayn. Under Hindenburg and Ludendorff Germany fought on until the autumn of 1918.

Falkenhayn’s fall

Falkenhayn had directed the German army since September 1914, when he replaced Helmuth von Moltke after the defeat on the Marne. He believed that Germany could not crush all its enemies at once, and waged a war of attrition in which the West was to be decisive. In February 1916 he began the offensive at Verdun, which was meant to bleed the French army white. In the summer his plan collapsed. After half a year of fighting Verdun was still in French hands, and according to later estimates German losses were not much smaller than French ones. On 1 July the British and French attacked on the Somme, and in the East the Brusilov offensive shattered the Austro-Hungarian front. Falkenhayn had to send division after division to the East, including some from Verdun. On 9 August the Italians took Gorizia.

He had also long had powerful opponents. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had been at odds with him since the winter of 1914–15. They demanded that large forces be transferred to the East to decide the war with Russia, which Falkenhayn refused out of regard for the Western Front. On their side stood the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, with whom Falkenhayn was in open conflict. According to English-language accounts, in the summer of 1916 the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, also favoured handing the command to Hindenburg, hoping that the popularity of “the victor of Tannenberg” would help the government, as did some industrialists and politicians. The Bavarian Crown Prince, Rupprecht, wrote to the Kaiser’s Military Cabinet that Falkenhayn had lost the confidence of the army. At the end of July Wilhelm II extended Hindenburg’s command in the East as far as the area of Brody, bringing Austro-Hungarian troops under it as well.

News from Romania

Falkenhayn knew that Romania was leaning towards the Entente, but did not expect it to act soon. After the war he wrote that Romania’s entry into the war had not been expected before the harvest was in, and even then only if Austria-Hungary’s position deteriorated further. According to the Austrian official history, as late as 17 August he believed that the Romanians would not strike until October. Yet on the evening of 27 August Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary, and its troops entered Transylvania.

According to accounts from the Kaiser’s entourage, Wilhelm II received the news as a catastrophe and said that the war was lost. The chief of the Kaiser’s Military Cabinet, General Moriz von Lyncker, persuaded him to summon Hindenburg for consultation. Summoning a front commander to a conference on the conduct of the war over the head of the chief of staff was an open expression of distrust. Falkenhayn took it as such and asked to be relieved. The Kaiser, who valued Falkenhayn and looked unfavourably on the influence of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, accepted. In some accounts the decision to remove Falkenhayn is dated 28 August, and Hindenburg’s appointment 29 August.

The conference at Pless

On 28 August Lyncker telephoned Hindenburg’s headquarters at Brest-Litovsk and passed on that the Kaiser was summoning the field marshal and Ludendorff to Pless. Hindenburg recalled that the only explanation he heard was the words: “The situation is serious!” He expected a short conference, so he took only the barest necessities. In the afternoon the two generals left Brest-Litovsk. Ludendorff wrote later that they never returned to the Eastern Front.

They arrived at Pless on 29 August at about ten in the morning. Lyncker was waiting for them at the station, and it was from him that they learnt of their new posts. In front of the castle the Kaiser greeted Hindenburg as Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army, and Ludendorff as First Quartermaster General. Ludendorff had first been offered the title of “Second Chief of the General Staff”, but he rejected it, because he believed there could be only one chief of staff. He demanded instead joint responsibility for all decisions, and received that assurance. Hindenburg recalled that when handing over his duties Falkenhayn gave him his hand with the words: “God help you and our Fatherland.”

The new leaders

Hindenburg was 68. Since the victory at Tannenberg in August 1914 he had been the most popular man in Germany, and from the autumn of 1914 he had commanded the German forces in the East. Ludendorff, seventeen years younger, had from the start been regarded as the operational brain of the pair. In the new arrangement Hindenburg represented the army before the Kaiser and the public, while Ludendorff ran the staff and in practice conducted the war. The command in the East passed from Hindenburg to Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria.

The two took command in the most difficult situation Germany had yet faced. Ludendorff wrote that the army, which had so far waged a defensive war by offensive means, had been driven into pure defence. Intensified Allied attacks were expected on the Somme, in Italy, in Macedonia and south of the Pripyat, and at the same time an attack by the Romanians and Russians on the exposed right flank of the Central Powers in Transylvania and the Dobruja. The day before, Germany had declared war on Romania.

What came next

The new leadership quickly changed course. As early as 31 August Hindenburg and Ludendorff put forward demands for a drastic increase in the production of arms and ammunition, known as the Hindenburg Programme. At the beginning of September they halted the German offensive at Verdun, and the Central Powers agreed to a joint supreme command under Wilhelm II, exercised in practice by the German OHL. In September Falkenhayn took command of the Ninth Army, which was to strike the Romanians in Transylvania.

The change at Pless had consequences reaching far beyond military affairs. The influence of the Third OHL on the policy of the Reich grew month by month, and the Kaiser and the Chancellor were increasingly pushed into the background. Contemporaries already, and later many historians, spoke of the rule of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1917–1918 as a military dictatorship.