13Cf. Heinz Burger, Bei Tannenberg zwei Schlachten. Ritter und Feldherren aufWacht im Osten (Stuttgart, 1935); Rudolf van Wehrt, Tannenberg (Berlin, 1934); Rolf Bathe, Tannenberg. Der Einsatz des letzten Mannes (Berlin, 1935).
14Andreas Hillgruber, Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944145 als Problem der deutschen Nationalgeschichte und der Europäischen Geschichte (Wiesbaden, 1985), 13; Michael Salewski, “Der Erste Weltkrieg-ein deutsches Trauma,” Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire LXII (1985), 184.
15Cf. inter alia Stefan Kuczynski, Wielka wojna z Zakonem Krzyzackim w latach 1409–1411 (Warsaw, 1955; rev. ed. 1960); and Spor o Grunwald rozpiawy polemiczne (Warsaw, 1972).
Bibliographical Essay
The nature of the chapter references in this volume make a full bibliography redundant. My principal archival sources were the holdings of the German foreign office in Bonn and the Bundesarvhiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg. From Bonn, the Deutschland, Russland, and Krieg 1914 files were particularly valuable. The BA-MA collection of private papers includes the Nachlässe of Max Hoffmann, Hermann von François, and Otto von Below. The latter is also a rich source of information on the prewar army. The Nachlässe of Wilhelm Gröner and Adolf Tappen helped reconstruct prewar planning for the defense of East Prussia, while the Nachlass of F. W. Foerster contains correspondence clarifying—or attempting to clarify—several controversial points of the campaign. The records of the Admiralstab der Marine in the German Navy Archive include a good deal of significant correspondence with the general staff, as well as the navy’s own analyses of German strategic and geographical positions.
The exhaustive and exhausting literature on specific aspects of the contributions of Russo-German hostility to the outbreak of World War I is best traced through the footnotes. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987), incorporates the most recent, and by far the most familiar, statement of Russia’s relative weakness. James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (New York, 1984), emphasizes Europe’s structural weaknesses; Volker Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (New York, 1973), differs from its companion volumes in the St. Martin series, The Making of the 20th Century, (Zara Steiner on Britain, D. C. B. Lieven on Russia, and John Keiger on France) in stressing the aggressive intentions of his subject. Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston, Toronto, 1965), deserves renewed attention, particularly in a current context stressing the possibilities of long-term German-Soviet rapprochement. The new translation of Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914 (Leamington Spa, 1987), establishes for an English-speaking audience the fence-moving nature of Russian expansionism prior to World War I, and how it differed essentially from imperialism’s more familiar forms, colonialism and economic penetration.
On the opposing armies, Bernd Schulte, Die deutsche Armee 1900–1914. Zwischen Beharren und Verändern (Düsseldorf, 1977); and Manfred Messerschmidt, “Preussens Militär in seinem gesellschaftlichen Umfeld,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 6, Preussen im Rückblick, ed. H-J Pühle, H-U Wehler (Göttingen, 1980), pp. 43–88; are the best examples of a currently dominant school of thought sharply critical of the German army’s social role and fighting power. David R. Jones, “Imperial Russia’s Forces at War,” in Military Effectiveness, Vol. I, The First World War, ed. A. R. Millett, W. Murray (Boston, 1988), 249–328, is the best readily-available survey of a subject treated at greater length in “Russia’s Armed Forces at War: 1914–1918: An Analysis of Military Effectiveness” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Dalhousie University, 1986). Bruce Menning’s forthcoming Bayonets Before Bullets is a definitive analyses of doctrine, training, and tactics in the Russian army of 1914. Allan Wildman’s two volumes on The End of the Russian Imperial Army (Princeton, 1979) stresses the impact of war on the army’s structure.
Operationally Tannenberg is most familiar to English-language readers from its Russian perspective. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, especially its revised and enlarged edition (New York, 1989), incorporates an historical dimension that makes its case more by weight than by scholarship. W. Bruce Lincoln, Passage through Armageddon (New York, 1986), and Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–17 (New York, 1975), include up-to-date summary accounts of Tannenberg. Lincoln focusses on the command aspects of Russia’s disaster; Stone emphasizes the army’s structural weaknesses. Of the older secondary accounts, N. N. Golovine, The Russian Campaign of 1914, tr. A. G. S. Muntz (Ft. Leavenworth, Kans., 1933) remains valuable for its copious excerpts from unpublished or obscure Russian accounts. British general Sir Edmund Ironside’s Tannenberg: The First Thirty Days in East Prussia (Edinburgh, 1933), is a professional soldier’s account containing translations of many of the Russian orders whose original texts are in Sbornik dokumentov mirovay voyni na russkom fronte. Manevrenni period 1914 goda: Vostochno-Prusskaya operasiya, ed. Generalny Shtab RKKA (Moscow, 1939), Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917, Vol. I (London, 1921), incorporates the most familiar description of the 2nd Army’s situation. Jean Savant, Épopée Russe (Paris, 1945), is an emigré apologia for Rennenkampf, nevertheless helpful in explaining the 1st Army commander’s behavior during the Tannenberg campaign.
Material from the German side of the battle line is at least as ample, though less accessible. Hindenburg and Ludendorff both left memoirs, published in English as Out of My Life (London, 1933) and Ludendorff’s Own Story (New York, 1929). Max Hoffmann’s War Diaries and Other Papers (London, 1929); and Hermann von François’s Marneschlacht und Tannenberg (Berlin, 1920), give their respective authors the best of every situation, but are useful retrospectives. Walther von Stephani, Mit Hindenburg bei Tannenberg (Berlin, 1919) offers a junior staff officer’s perspective.
Of the secondary accounts, the German official history, Die Befreiung Ostpreussens, Volume II of Der Weltkrieg (Berlin, 1925), is detailed and reliable on everything that can be verified, but glosses over the problems of command that played such a major role in the campaign. Walter Elze, Das Deutsche Heer von 1914 (Breslau, 1928), despite its title, is a sound analysis of Tannenberg by one of interwar Germany’s finest civilian military historians. The volume is particularly valuable because it reprints many orders whose originals were lost during World War II. Elze’s distaste for what he considers Ludendorff’s unjustified postwar pretensions are as clear as his admiration for Hindenburg.