In that the 146th was an exception. None of the Tannenberg divisions rose much above mediocrity in the war’s later years, being used primarily as sector-holding formations. For this the army’s personnel policies was largely responsible. Even before the war Germany’s eastern regiments needed recruits and reservists from outside their assigned recruiting districts. The unheard-of casualties of World War I rendered these formations even more dependent on outside sources of replacements. The war ministry and OHL initially provided them by transferring large numbers of men from Alsace-Lorraine, presumed to be less reliable in the west, to the eastern theater. The effect on morale and combat efficiency was obvious, with the Reichsländer too often nursing the grievances of second-class citizens and the old hands distrustful or contemptuous of their new comrades in arms. As 8th Army’s divisions were transferred westward, the Alsatians were often replaced by Poles whose dependability against the Russian army was challenged, and who responded much like the Alsatians. The effect of these transfers was to leave too many formations with little more than their numbers and their traditions. Of the Tannenberg divisions, only the 37th was rated by allied intelligence as a first-class division in 1918. Its price for the designation was a casualty list so high that by the armistice its regiments counted little more than 300 riflemen apiece. They had marched to war with a strength of over 3,000.7
Long after its veterans had retired, Tannenberg continued to influence German military thinking. For the Imperial army’s successors, the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht, Tannenberg was a sign of hope—a sign that professionalism and its accompanying virtues of flexibility, mobility, and will power could bring victory without a wearing down an enemy’s resources. Despite its limitations it was the only nonattritional victory achieved in a major theater by any of the major combatants in World War I. The French and British could point to their triumphs in open warfare, but these had come only at the end of hard pounding that had exhausted the winners almost as much as the losers.
Tannenberg became a benchmark of professionalism—proof of what a well-prepared peacetime army with a minimum amount of grit in its machinery might achieve. It was by no means a direct inspiration for the blitzkrieg. One Wehrmacht general, commenting on what he regarded as a casual attitude to orders during the 1938 occupation of Czechoslovakia, even asserted that “unconditional obedience” at Tannenberg had brought about one of Germany’s greatest victories!8 Nevertheless, if in the interwar years the Seeckts, the Guderians, and the Ludwig Becks focussed on tactical maneuver and operational art to a greater extent than elswhere in Europe, their energies were to a significant degree inspired by memories of August, 1914, in East Prussia.9 And in the later years of World War II on the eastern front, the daring ripostes that kept the Russians at bay for so long similarly owed much to the legacy of an earlier war.
Tannenberg epitomized a basic change in the German army’s attitude towards Russia. The caution with which generals and general staff alike viewed the eastern colossus before 1914 had long before 1941 been replaced by what amounted to open contempt. This owed something to the Reichswehr’s self-definition as Bolshevik Russia’s military mentor in the Rapallo years of the 1920s. At a time when the rest of the world was turning to France for inspiration, it was satisfying to have at least one power paying attention to German concepts and doctrines.10 But it owed even more to the mythology developed on the eastern front during World War I: a mythology stressing the Russian soldier as uniformed protoplasm, unable to respond to the demands of modern war, dangerous only in mass, and even then readily susceptible to defeat at the hands of an enemy that kept his head and used his skills.
This myth focussed on Tannenberg rather than such later victories as Gorlice-Tarnow. Its limited correspondence to the facts tended to go unchallenged because of the relatively small number of German troops involved, and their relative lack of influence in the Reichswehr. The western front was the most common body of German military experience, the place where careers and reputations were made. Anyone presenting the French or British in terms too distant from reality faced prompt challenges from colleagues with different memories. The Russian front had been remote. Units fortunate enough to be transferred there regarded it as a rest cure. Their first encounters with the Russian army usually dispelled that illusion. But it was too comforting for their comrades in the west to abandon. Somewhere there had to be an easy enemy.11
Recent West German research has established the relationship between Hitler’s and the Wehrmacht’s approaches to planning conflict with Russia as much closer than the generals wished to accept when they wrote their postwar memoirs. The Wehrmacht high command’s involvement in the atrocities accompanying Operation Barbarossa also has been demonstrated beyond question.12 To some extent this reflected the permeation of the military at all levels with Nazi racial and ideological ideals. But it was also, in its way, a consequence of the Tannenberg mythos—a mythos establishing the Russians as objects of suppression, so easily defeated that there was neither glory nor honor to be won in the process. The mythologizing of what had actually happened in East Prussia in 1914 thus facilitated both the careless planning and the moral indifference with which the Wehrmacht embarked on Operation Barbarossa. Within six months reality would exact the first installments of a bitter revenge.
The Tannenberg myth also proved significantly useful to Adolf Hitler. Despite his bitter contempt for the old Prussian aristocracy, after becoming chancellor the Nazi leader missed no opportunity to link himself with Hindenburg and to appeal to those elements, particularly in the army, which looked to the aging Reichspräsident as a symbol of stability and honor in rapidly changing times. On March 21, 1933, the private first class took the hand of the field-marshal at a formal ceremony in the garrison church at Potsdam. On August 1, 1934, Hindenburg died at his country estate. The next day Hitler accepted a personal oath of allegiance from the armed forces. And on August 7, the Führer presided over Hindenburg’s burial, in the place of honor beneath the Tannenberg monument.
Tannenberg played a wider role as well in National Socialist propaganda. Before 1933, rearmament and revision of the Versailles Treaty were for most Germans abstract concepts—worth another round of drinks as long as someone else paid the bill. Germans were by and large no more willing than the English to die for Danzig. Since World War I had left Germany essentially unscathed, the Nazis found it correspondingly difficult to conjure up emotionally effective threats. Tannenberg became the major exception. Between 1934 and 1939 the German book market was flooded with popular histories of a barbaric horde turned away in confusion by an outraged Volk. Unlike equivalent works set on the western front, the material built around Tannenberg was able to stress the defensive nature of German behavior in 1914. Here was no room for doubt about who was on whose territory. From general to private the victors were a band of brothers, and all the brothers were valiant in the defense of their violated Fatherland.13