The Krügers therefore blended myth and acoustics. Eight large towers, placed in a circle large enough to contain 100,000 people, were linked by heavy walls. Each tower had a specific function. One was a youth hostel, one housed battle flags, a third was a chapel, and so on. Together they defined what George L. Mosse calls a “sacred space,” with the participants at the center of the festival rather than looking upward and forward at a ritual performer.2 This significant departure in German national monuments would be replicated time and again during the Third Reich.
There were simpler, homelier memorials as well. Stones and plaques marked individual sites of the battle. Nor were the graves of the fallen collected, as in the west, into huge plots suggesting anonymous mass sacrifice. The region was dotted with little military cemeteries, fenced in birch and carefully tended. Even after the memorial’s erection these remained places of pilgrimage. School children from all over the Reich came by train on reduced fare excursions, back-packing from Allenstein or Neidenburg to the villages mentioned in their guidebooks, placing flowers on the graves, completing the trip by standing open-mouthed within the memorial to East Prussia’s German identity.3
Among Tannenberg’s principal figures, Ludendorff’s postwar career is only slightly less familiar than Hindenburg’s. An open foe of the Weimar Republic, he became a corresponding focal point of nationalist and Right-radical elements. His involvement in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 was followed by his selection in 1924 as head of the Nazi delegation in the Reichstag. For a time Hitler even considered himself the “drummer” of Ludendorff or someone like him. But the strain of years of war service combined with the influence of his second wife to lead Ludendorff down the path of crackpot religious and political activity. As Hitler moved closer to power, Ludendorff withdrew even further into a shadow world. Alienated from Hindenburg, and from most of his wartime comrades, he emerged in 1934 to warn his old commander that in appointing Hitler chancellor he had delivered Germany to “one of the greatest demagogues of all time.”4
As Ludendorff and Hindenburg became involved with national issues, Max Hoffmann took over more and more of the operational and strategic planning for the eastern front. When his superiors left for Berlin in 1916, Hoffmann remained in Russia—partly because he had made himself indispensable there, partly because his confidence in his own abilities made him an increasingly uncomfortable subordinate. By denying Hoffman a wider field for the exercise of his talents, Hindenburg and Ludendorff may well have compounded their own problems later in the war.
Hoffmann for his part emerged as the gray eminence of the east, recognized by superiors and subordinates as the brains of the theater. He was largely responsible for the plans that halted the 1916 Brusilov offensive, and for orchestrating the German breakthrough at Riga the next year. He was a key figure in negotiating the armistice at Brest-Litovsk. While as anti-Bolshevik as the rest of the officer corps, Hoffmann favored policies of limited territorial annexation—an attitude earning Ludendorff’s wrath. After the collapse, he performed a last service, coordinating the withdrawal of German troops from Russia. The postwar publication of his diaries and memoirs kept him before the public as a controversial figure until his death in 1927.
Of the corps commanders, Mackensen’s career continued to flourish after Gorlice-Tarnow. With Seeckt at his elbow, he commanded the army group that overran Serbia in 1915. The next year he spearheaded the conquest of Rumania. By this time age had finally caught up with Mackensen; he spent the rest of the war commanding the occupation forces in Rumania. While evacuating his troops after the armistice, Mackensen was arrested by the Hungarians and turned over to the French.5 Interned for a year, he returned home a hero symbolizing Germany’s victimization. Scholtz rose unobtrusively and competently to army command by 1918. But the real success story among 8th Army’s corps commanders was Otto von Below. In November, 1914, he was promoted to army command—one of the most rapid advances in the history of the Second Reich. In Russia and the Balkans he continued to demonstrate the same energy and tactical skill that characterized him at Tannenberg, with fewer of the questionable command decisions. Sent to Italy in 1917, he led an improvised German-Austrian army to the victory of Caporetto. The next year he commanded a field army in Ludendorff’s March offensive. But perhaps the greatest tribute to Below’s abilities came at the war’s very end, when on November 8 he was assigned to command the expected last stand on Germany’s soil.
Hermann von François was less fortunate. As 8th Army’s senior corps commander he took over when Hindenburg and Ludendorff were promoted to command of the eastern front. He remained a difficult subordinate. Relieved in November, 1914, for what amounted to persistent refusal to follow orders, François accepted demotion to a corps command on the western front and retired from that post in 1918. Ludendorff’s critics later suggested he wished to be rid of a man who knew too much about the shaky foundations of his reputation. But François’s personal papers for the war years are replete with complaints of his antagonistic behavior to colleagues and subordinates alike. “You still refuse to fit in,” wrote the director of the military cabinet in 1916. It was at once a description and an epitaph.6
François was born too late, or too early. He could have commanded a corps under Napoleon, or a division of Stonewall Jackson’s foot cavalry. He was the type of man who might have reached distinction in 1940 or 1941 at the head of a panzer group. But a loose cannon like François was an unacceptably high risk in the days before the internal-combustion engine once more made possible the conduct of war from forward command posts.
Conta ended the war as commanding general of the Carpathian Corps, and Heineccius of VII Corps in France. Staabs finished his career as commander of XXIX Reserve Corps, one of the formations raised in 1915. Emil Hell rose to become chief of staff of Army Group Kiev. Schmidt von Schmidtseck survived his ups and downs with François to command the 11th Infantry Division with distinction. Even the panic-stricken major of the 4th Grenadiers learned enough from his experiences to be trusted with an infantry regiment, albeit a wartime reserve formation.
In the course of the war, Tannenberg’s rank and file were scattered across the battle fronts of Europe even more thoroughly than their commanders. Easier to trace are the formations. Six active and three reserve divisions bore the brunt of the Tannenberg campaign. They remained on the Eastern Front through 1915, the core of Hindenburg’s and Ludendorff’s hopes for decisive victory. As the fighting in Russia died down, their destiny lay in the west. First to go were the 35th and 36th Divisions, transferred in September, 1915, in response to the Allies’ fall offensive. The 1st Division fought at Verdun in 1916. Most of the others changed fronts in the first months of 1917, with the 41st briefly detoured into Rumania. The cavalry, the Landwehr, and the other garrison troops by and large remained in the east, their roles changing from combat to garrison and occupation duties as the war wound down. The strangest odyssey of any of 8th Army’s old formations was that of the 146th Infantry. War’s end found the regiment, originally part of the 37th Division, in Palestine, part of the forces sent by OHL to stiffen the Turkish defense. The Masurians were a long way from their peacetime garrison of Allenstein when they faced the British, Indian, and Anzac troops of Sir Edmund Allenby. But the regiment fought as well in Asia Minor as it had in East Prussia, sustaining the reputation of German arms in an unlikely setting and earning the ungrudging admiration of its enemies.