Alexander von Linsingen

Alexander von Linsingen was one of the oldest and longest-serving German army commanders of the First World War. When war broke out he was 64 and commanded a corps. After the campaign in France and Flanders he was sent to the Eastern Front, where he spent more than three years. In 1915 he led the South Army through the Carpathians and to the Stryi, then the new Army of the Bug towards Brest-Litovsk and Pinsk, and from the autumn of that year he headed an army group in Volhynia and Polesia in which Austro-Hungarian troops also fought under German command. In the summer of 1916 his troops stopped the Brusilov offensive before Kovel, and in 1918 they advanced into Ukraine and entered Kiev. He ended the war as commander of the troops in Berlin, in the days of the November Revolution.

Before the war

He was born on 10 February 1850 in Hildesheim, into an old noble family of the Kingdom of Hanover that had given the army officers for generations. His grandfather was a Hanoverian general of cavalry. He was brought up in the cadet corps and in April 1868, after Prussia had already annexed Hanover, he joined the Prussian army. As a young infantry officer he fought in the Franco-Prussian War and received the Iron Cross.

His career was unusual for a general who was to rise to command an army group. Linsingen never served on the Great General Staff. All his life he was a line officer and an adjutant: he commanded a company, a battalion in Lübeck, a grenadier regiment in East Prussia, a brigade and a division in Ulm. In 1909 he took over II Corps in Stettin, made up of Pomeranian regiments, and went to war with it.

1914: France and Flanders

In August 1914 II Corps became part of General Alexander von Kluck’s First Army, which marched through Belgium on Paris on the right wing of the German army. At the beginning of September Linsingen’s corps crossed the Marne, but when the French Sixth Army struck from the west, Kluck turned it back north. It was one of the first corps Kluck moved to the Ourcq, and it fought there until the retreat to the Aisne.

In the autumn Linsingen was sent to Flanders. In November, in the final phase of the First Battle of Ypres, he commanded an army group formed from XV Corps and General Karl von Plettenberg’s Guard Corps, which attacked on both sides of the Menin road. On 11 November its troops, among them the Prussian Guard, attacked at Nonne Bosschen. They broke into the British line but were stopped and thrown back. It was the last great German attack at Ypres in 1914.

1915: the Carpathians and the Stryi

At the turn of 1914 and 1915 Austria-Hungary found itself in a difficult position. The Russians were besieging Przemyśl and stood on the Carpathian passes. The chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, prepared a winter offensive, and the Germans, though sceptical of his plan, sent help. In January 1915 the South Army, the first joint army of the two states, was formed from German and Austro-Hungarian divisions, and Linsingen became its commander. The headquarters of II Corps was converted into the army staff.

On 23 January the offensive began. The South Army attacked in the Eastern Beskids towards Stryi, but in deep snow and frost, without roads, it advanced very slowly. Despite weeks of fighting it failed to break through to the foothills, and the Winter Battle in the Carpathians did not save Przemyśl, which capitulated in March. Only in April, after long fighting, did Linsingen’s troops take the Zwinin ridge, a key Russian position above the road to Stryi.

Real success came after the breakthrough at Gorlice by August von Mackensen’s army. The Russians had to abandon the Carpathians, and the South Army came down to the foothills. For this, in mid-May Linsingen received the Pour le Mérite. At the end of May, having concentrated its forces for a single blow, his army attacked the Russian positions before Stryi and took the town on 31 May. When it tried to force the Dniester, however, the Russians replied with a counter-attack that pushed its units back across the river and for a few days threatened Stryi itself. In mid-June the army moved again, towards Żydaczów and the Gniła Lipa, in parallel with Mackensen’s march on Lviv. At the beginning of July Linsingen received the oak leaves to the Pour le Mérite.

The Army of the Bug: Brest and Pinsk

On 8 July 1915 General Felix von Bothmer took over the South Army, and Linsingen assumed command of the new Army of the Bug, formed from the right wing of Mackensen’s Eleventh Army. In July his troops attacked on the eastern wing of Mackensen’s army group, between the Wieprz and the Bug, towards Hrubieszów and Chełm, while the main forces broke through the front at Krasnystaw. The offensive in the Lublin region, together with the advance from the Narew, forced the Russians to abandon the Kingdom of Poland.

In August the Army of the Bug crossed the river near Włodawa and outflanked from the east the fortress of Brest-Litovsk, which fell on 25 August. Then Linsingen’s troops entered the Polesian marshes and in mid-September occupied Pinsk. At the same time, further south in Volhynia, the Austro-Hungarian autumn offensive collapsed, and the Russians recaptured Lutsk. The chief of the German general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, agreed to send German divisions to help, but on condition that the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army came under the orders of a German general. Thus Linsingen’s army group was created, in which the Austro-Hungarian troops in Volhynia joined the Army of the Bug. The threat of a German blow from the north persuaded the Russians to give up Lutsk after only a few days. The front came to rest on the line of the Styr and the Polesian marshes. The Polish Legions also fought here as part of the army group.

1916: Brusilov and the defence of Kovel

On 4 June 1916 the armies of General Aleksei Brusilov broke through the Austro-Hungarian front. The heaviest blow fell on the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, which belonged to Linsingen’s group. Its front at Lutsk fell apart within a few days, and the Russians took tens of thousands of prisoners and occupied the town. The archduke soon lost his post. According to some authors Linsingen, who made no secret of his low opinion of Austro-Hungarian commanders, had a hand in this.

The Germans brought reinforcements to Volhynia, some of them from France, and on 16 June Linsingen’s troops counter-attacked the salient at Lutsk. They did not retake the town, but they stopped the Russian march on Kovel, the most important railway junction in that part of the front. At the beginning of July the Russians attacked again on the Styr. At Kostiuchnówka the Legion brigades held up the attack for several days, but the front still had to fall back behind the Stokhid. From the end of July until the autumn the Russians, including the elite Guard regiments, attacked again and again across the marshes of the Stokhid, suffering enormous losses. They did not take Kovel. The defence of this sector was Linsingen’s greatest achievement. From the summer of 1916 his army group was subordinate to the eastern command of Paul von Hindenburg, and then to his successor, Prince Leopold of Bavaria. In January 1917 the Kaiser awarded Linsingen the Order of the Black Eagle.

1917–1918: Ukraine and Berlin

The year 1917 passed quietly on his sector. After the revolutions in Russia the Russian army was disintegrating, and in December an armistice was concluded. When in February 1918 the talks at Brest stalled and the Germans signed a separate peace with Ukraine, Operation Faustschlag began. The troops of Linsingen’s army group advanced east from Volhynia, almost unopposed, and on 2 March, just behind units of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, entered Kiev. Under their protection the Central Rada returned to the city. On 31 March the army group was dissolved, and the occupation of Ukraine was directed by Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn. Sources differ on the date of his promotion to colonel-general: according to some it was February 1916, according to others 7 April 1918, the fiftieth anniversary of his entry into the army.

In the summer of 1918 Linsingen became commander-in-chief in the Mark of Brandenburg and governor of Berlin, responsible for order in the capital. When at the beginning of November the sailors’ mutiny was spreading from Kiel, on 7 November he banned the formation of workers’ and soldiers’ councils “on the Russian model”. He brought into Berlin units considered loyal to the Kaiser. The ban achieved nothing. On 9 November the revolution reached Berlin, soldiers went over to the demonstrators, and Linsingen forbade the troops to shoot, including in defence of the Reichstag building. That day he tendered his resignation, and on 17 November he retired.

After the war

After the war Linsingen lived in Hanover and played no political role. He remained a respected figure among veterans and in his home region. Streets and barracks in Hameln were named after him. He died on 5 June 1935 in Hanover, aged 85. Three days later he was buried with state honours in the New St Nicholas Cemetery.

Assessment

Linsingen was neither a theorist nor a great strategist. He was a line commander of the old school, tough, demanding and regarded as a difficult man. His career shows that in the German army, dominated by general staff officers, a commander without such training could also rise to the highest posts if he had good chiefs of staff beside him. Historians of the Eastern Front point out that his victories of 1915, on the Stryi, at Brest and Pinsk, came only after the breakthrough at Gorlice, when the Russians had to retreat anyway. The winter offensive in the Carpathians, which he conducted together with the Austrians, ended with heavy losses and small gains.

His command in 1916 is rated most highly. In Volhynia he had to rescue the front of an ally that had fallen apart, and with limited reinforcements he built a defence on which the Russian attacks on Kovel broke. His relations with the Austrians, however, were strained. He was regarded as a general who took no account of his ally’s sensitivities and made no secret of his sense of superiority, which for many Austro-Hungarian officers symbolised their army’s growing dependence on the Germans. His last task, defending the monarchy in Berlin in November 1918, ended in failure, though his decision not to fire on the crowd probably spared the city bloodshed.