Dates: 1847-1934

A classic 19th-century Prussian officer who embraced 20th-century total war. As a strategist and tactician Hindenburg contributed to the defeat of Russia in the East and confounded the French and British on the Western Front.

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Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) is one of the giant figures of German history. During the First World War he rose to attain the position of supreme warlord and he later undertook long service as President of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. During his lifetime he enjoyed almost mythical status as war hero and father of the nation who was the living embodiment of the German soldierly virtues of discipline, honour and devotion to duty.

However, this seemingly magnificent image belies another version of history in which Hindenburg is portrayed as a brutal yet incompetent militarist who presided over two disastrous periods in his nation’s history; leading Germany to defeat in the First World War and ushering the Nazis into power in 1933.

Hindenburg was born in Posen, Prussia in 1847 into the class of militaristic Prussian aristocrats known as Junkers and became deeply imbued with the values of this class. He joined the army in 1859 and saw service in both the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 and Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-general before retiring after an honorable, if unremarkable, career in 1911.

When war broke out in 1914 Hindenburg was recalled to army service and tasked with halting the mighty Russian invasion of East Prussia. It was during this time that he forged a close relationship with Erich Ludendorff, who was assigned to him as Chief-of-Staff. The erratic tendencies within Ludendorff’s dynamic character were tempered by Hindenburg’s iron will and this balance was to enable them to become a formidable military partnership.

Together they won a string of victories on the Eastern Front in 1914-15, notably at Tannenberg (23-30 August 1914) and Masurian Lakes (9-14 September 1914 and 7-22 February 1915). Hindenburg reaped the credit for this success and in so doing achieved unrivalled fame and popularity in Germany.

When the German Chief-of-Staff, Erich von Falkanhayn, fell from power following the failure of his western strategy in 1916, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the only viable candidates to take over the higher direction of the war. Through a combination of prestige, military efficiency and intrigues against rivals they gradually established themselves over the Kaiser and the German Parliament (the Reichstag) to become supreme warlords of Germany. Under their direction, Germany’s war effort reached a new peak of intensity, which entailed mobilizing all resources and waging war with a new ruthlessness.

In the short term these measures revitalized Germany’s war effort. During 1917 Allied offensives in the west were repulsed by the new and more formidable defensive lines and improved tactics. In the east sustained pressure on Russia contributed to her collapse into revolution. At sea Germany’s policy of unrestricted U-boat warfare had a devastating impact upon Allied maritime supply lines. Yet it was this that was to prove her undoing, for it in its wake it brought the United States into the War, swinging the balance of resources massively away from Germany.

In the face of this Hindenburg and Ludendorff undertook a desperate gamble. Bolstered by troops freed up by Germany’s victory in the east, in the spring of 1918 they planned to launch a massive offensive on the Western Front, Operation MICHAEL, which aimed to defeat the Allies before the Americans arrived in large numbers.

Utilising highly advanced storm troop tactics, the offensive was initially a dazzling success, which shattered the Allied front and restored mobility to the battlefield for the first time since 1914. This success, however, belied the deep-seated weaknesses of the plan. The German Army was too exhausted to sustain the offensive and lacked the mechanical transport to convert tactical success into strategic victory. In fact the offensive signaled the death knell of the German Army, which was now badly short of manpower and committed to defending a perilously vulnerable salient. When the Allies unleashed their counter attack in the summer of 1918, the Germans were pushed back under relentless pressure and forced to sue for peace.

Whilst responsibility for this defeat lay squarely upon his shoulders, Hindenburg skillfully preserved both his reputation and that of the army. Together with Ludendorff he concocted the notorious ‘stab in the back’ myth, which placed the blame for Germany’s defeat on unpatriotic elements within German society rather than the failure of German militarism.

Hindenburg was reluctantly persuaded to emerge from retirement in 1925 to stand for president of the new Republic. His unsuitability for this position was tragically exposed when during the economic crisis of the early 1930s the Nazis emerged as the strongest party in the Reichstag. Despite his antipathy for the Nazis, Hindenburg was eventually persuaded to allow Hitler to become Chancellor, an act that spelt disaster for both Germany and the world.