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Lieutenant General Erich von Falkenhayn

Historical picture document from Illustrirte Zeitung from 1916 (no reprint - no copy)

Image format (without border) 6 x 8 cm - printed on the back.

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Documentation:
Erich Georg Sebastian Anton von Falkenhayn (* 11. September 1861 in Belchau Castle; † 8th. April 1922 in Lindstedt Palace near Potsdam) was a Prussian general of the infantry, Ottoman marshal and in the First World War Prussian Minister of War and Chief of the General Staff. He came from the noble family Falkenhayn and was the son of Fedor Tassilo von Falkenhayn (* 6. February 1814 in Nakel; † 20 January 1896 in Tarnowitz) and his wife Franziska, née Freiin von Rosenberg (* 26. June 1826 in Kloetzen; † 14 August 1888 in Graudenz). His father was a squire on Belchau and Schwirsen. In 1872, at the age of eleven, Falkenhayn entered the Culm cadet establishment, after which he moved to the Prussian main cadet establishment in Lichterfelde for three years. On the 17th On April 18, 1880, at the age of 18, he joined the Oldenburg Infantry Regiment No. 91 of the Prussian Army. From 1. In October 1887 he completed the war academy in Berlin for three years and was promoted to first lieutenant in the meantime. on the 22nd On March 1, 1891, Falkenhayn joined the General Staff in Berlin. First he worked in the topographical section, then in the railway department. In March 1893 he was promoted to captain. On 2. January 1894 followed his use in the General Staff of the IX. Army Corps in Altona. On the 9th December 1895 he became company commander in the infantry regiment "von Borcke" (4. Pomeranian) No. 21 in Thorn. After nine months of service, Falkenhayn left on 25. June 1896 on leave of absence for "financial and career reasons" and went to China as a military adviser. As a military instructor, he set up a military school in Wu Chang based on the Prussian model, but without finding the support of the Chinese military authorities. In 1898 he moved to the German leased area of Kiautschou and was awarded the title of major with a patent dated 25. March 1899 re-employed à la suite as military attaché in the Prussian army. After his return to Germany he was employed from 24. February 1900 for a short time again used in the General Staff in Berlin and changed on 29. March to Karlsruhe to hold the position of Chief of Staff of the XIV. Army Corps to take over. on the 7th On September 19, 1900, he was assigned to the General Staff of the East Asian Expeditionary Force Command, which was involved in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. After a long stay in Manchuria and Korea, Falkenhayn returned home back. On the 18th October 1903 he was appointed battalion commander of the Braunschweig Infantry Regiment No. 92 appointed in Braunschweig, on 15. In September 1905 he became a lieutenant colonel. on the 10th April 1906 he was again used in the General Staff. A year later, on 22 March 1907 he became Chief of the General Staff of the XVI. Army Corps in Metz, on 18. In May 1908 he was promoted to colonel. On the 27th. January 1911 to the commander of the 4. Appointed to the Foot Guard Regiment in Berlin, he was already appointed on 20 April February 1912 due to unforeseen personnel bottlenecks Chief of the General Staff at the IV. Army Corps in Magdeburg. In this position he reached on 22. April 1912 the rank of Major General. Falkenhayn was also instrumental in organizing the Kaiser's maneuvers. On the 8th In July 1913, Falkenhayn was surprisingly appointed Prussian Minister of War. In this position, he was responsible for implementing the 1913 Army Bill that was approved in the spring, which envisaged a significant rearmament of Germany. He first gained public awareness through his appearances before the Reichstag in connection with the Zabern affair around the turn of the year 1913/14, in which he unreservedly defended the questionable behavior of the military authorities in Alsace-Lorraine and defended the army against criticism from civil society in took protection. In the July crisis of 1914, Falkenhayn was one of the key figures around the outbreak of the First World War. Like most military men, he did not expect a European war at the time and probably did not initially consider the Sarajevo assassination to be a good time. Nevertheless, he soon belonged to those who supported Kaiser Wilhelm II. pushed for a declaration of war. In the first year of the war, after the First Battle of the Marne, Falkenhayn September 1914 Helmuth Johannes Ludwig von Moltke as Chief of the General Staff. After the failure of the Schlieffen plan, he first tried to outmaneuver France and England by running the race to the sea (via northern France and Belgium to the North Sea). However, the project did not succeed and ended after the Battle of Ypres in complete trench warfare on the western front. Falkenhayn recognized early on that total military victory was no longer achievable after the Battle of the Marne. He urged in a dated 18 The memorandum submitted by the political leadership on November 19, 1914 to end the war through negotiations was not heard. Already on the 20th On January 1, 1915, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn succeeded Falkenhayn as Minister of War. On the day of his relief he was promoted to general of infantry, on 16. In February 1915 he was awarded the Order Pour le Mérite for his achievements to date. As Chief of the Army Command, Falkenhayn now devoted himself entirely to the military organization of warfare. What is striking about Falkenhayn's position as Minister and Chief of Staff is that his power base lay less in the General Staff itself (Falkenhayn had spent years abroad, beyond the staff's social contacts and networks) than in his relationship with the Kaiser himself, who to a certain extent supported him appreciated, but above all within the possible alternative to him, the general duo Erich Ludendorff/Paul von Hindenburg, detested the strategist Ludendorff out of personal antipathy and at the same time feared Hindenburg's popularity in the public. Despite success at the Battle of Tannenberg, Falkenhayn felt it was impossible to completely defeat Russia and at the same time be strong enough in the west to maintain a successful defense there against the ever-strengthening Entente. This brought him into conflict with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who wanted to surround and encircle the large but poorly managed Russian army from the north and south. Many high-ranking officers from the area around Ober Ost, such as Ludendorff's right-hand man Max Hoffmann, simply called Falkenhayn "the criminal" from the time he rejected the strategy of encircling the East. Falkenhayn's refusal resulted on the one hand from the fact that he feared that if such an approach were successful, his competitor would replace him as Chief of General Staff, but on the other hand he did not consider the Russians to have been defeated, nor did he want to be drawn further into the depths of Russian space or narrowing the empire's diplomatic leeway towards Russia through conquests. Falkenhayn's attitude towards his ally Conrad von Hötzendorf, the head of the Austro-Hungarian army, was also negative. In March 1915 Conrad had plans to attack in the west, but the situation in Galicia was unstable after the Battle of the Carpathians. He therefore asked for German help in order to be able to launch an attack near Gorlice. Falkenhayn found this plan promising, gave up his own plans and released eight divisions for the eastern front. Although the At the beginning of May 1915, when Italy threatened to enter the war, Falkenhayn took an energetic part in the breakthrough battle in Galicia, but after major successes did not want to see the advance continue. He also snubbed allied Austria when he demanded that Trentino be ceded to Italy in order to prevent the formation of a new front. In October 1915 Falkenhayn released funds to crush Austria's opponent Serbia. These operations were also only partially successful after the German forces of the Central Powers had to stop their advance on the Greek border on Falkenhayn's orders. Falkenhayn feared that forces in the periphery would be tied up, which would then no longer have been deployable for other purposes on the western front. In May 1916 he then completely refused Conrad's request for German troop assistance for the Austrian offensive in South Tyrol, partly because Italy was not officially at war with Germany and he had no interest in changing anything (among other things because of goods imports from the still neutral USA). Falkenhayn developed a "fatigue strategy" for 1915, which envisaged limited offensives in the east and a defensive in the west. At the beginning of 1916 he wanted to occupy the ridges in the west near Verdun in a surprising advance and bombard the fortress with massive artillery. The French would have had to either give up Verdun, the strongest of their strongholds on the German border - which, in his opinion, they would never do - or they would have "bled to death" in Verdun. Even contemporaries spoke of the "blood pump" or "bone mill" of Verdun. Falkenhayn did not expect to be able to bring about a victory against the Entente in this way. Rather, he considered that the losses on the French side were heavier than on the German side. This strategy failed, among other things, because the French replaced their troops more quickly in accordance with Pétain's Noria principle, while the deployment phases of the German units were longer - which had a demoralizing effect. The defensive victory of the French in front of Verdun cost them enormously high losses, but the losses of the German army were almost as high and thus ultimately pointless - quite contrary to what Falkenhayn had expected, who had extrapolated previous French loss ratios on the western front and were therefore ultimately pointless, since they balance of power did not change. Given the material and Given the Allied superiority in personnel, which became increasingly apparent as the war progressed, Falkenhayn's strategy of exhaustion in Verdun was never realistic. After the strong Allied attacks on the Somme, further attacks at Verdun were no longer justifiable and the failure on the western front was obvious. Domestically, too, the battle was a single "disaster", since it also killed Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, who was officially in Verdun the 5th Army. Army led, in public with the almost unbearable losses in connection. The heavy losses in the Battle of the Somme in the west, the collapse of the Austrian front during the simultaneous Brusilov offensive in the east and Romania's declaration of war, which was not expected at this time, especially by Falkenhayn, forced the German army command to act. Eventually, Moriz von Lyncker persuaded the enraged Kaiser to ask Hindenburg to give an immediate lecture. Only the commander-in-chief of the army had immediate rights. Falkenhayn understood the intrigue correctly and asked for the resignation as Chief of the General Staff, which the Kaiser accepted on 29 April 1941. August 1916, despite his reluctance towards the general duo Hindenburg/Ludendorff, who succeeded Falkenhayn. As compensation, Falkenhayn received September 1916 the supreme command of the 9. army against Romania. He forced the invasion of Transylvania, defeated two Romanian armies near Sibiu and Kronstadt and fought his way out of the mountains into Wallachia in the Battle of Argesch. The capture of Bucharest on April 6. December 1916 he succeeded in cooperation with the Danube army under August von Mackensen. In mid-July 1917, at the request of the Ottoman army command under Enver Pasha, Falkenhayn took over the leadership of Army Group F, whose forces in Iraq and near Aleppo were newly formed. After long arguments with the Turkish leadership, he was arrested on April 7. Finally, on September 9, 1917, as an Ottoman field marshal, he was appointed commander-in-chief of two Turkish field armies in Palestine. Although he was not able to prevent the conquest of Palestine by the British under General Edmund Allenby in December 1917, he was able to prevent the forced resettlement of Jews from Palestine planned by the Turkish government under governor Cemal Pasha, which was to be modeled on the Armenian genocide . Jerusalem, which he for symbolic reasons at all wanted to keep cases fell on April 9. December 1917. The front against the superior British had previously slipped. From 4. On March 1, 1918, Falkenhayn became commander-in-chief of the 10. Army in western Russia, the function in which he also saw the end of the war.
Source: Wikipedia

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