Background
Alexander von Linsingen was born in Hildesheim on February 10, 1850.
Alexander von Linsingen was born in Hildesheim on February 10, 1850.
Linsingen joined the Prussian Army in 1868 and rose to Corps Commander (II Corps) in 1909.
Five years later he rose to regimental chief in the grade of colonel, and in 1901 was advanced to major general as head of the Eighty-first Infantry Regiment. Next came command of the Twenty-seventh Division in the grade of lieutenant general, and from 1909 to 1914 General of Infantry von Linsingen was chief of the II Army Corps.
At the outbreak of the war, the Pomeranian II Corps was attached to General Alexander von Kluck's First Army and received its baptism of fire at Mons on August 22/23 against the British Expeditionary Corps. Several days later it again drove the British back at Le Cateau, and on September 5, at the onset of the battle of the Marne, the II Corps was rushed to the Ourcq River to assist the hard-pressed IV Reserve Corps. Colonel Richard Hentsch, however, ordered a German retreat from the Marne on September 9, and Linsingen withdrew behind the Aisne River. On November 8 he was ordered to Flanders as head of an army group between the Fourth and Sixth Army with instructions to take Ypres. Failing to accomplish this, he was transferred to the eastern front late in November 1914, in time to participate in the battles around Lodz.
On January 9, 1915, Linsingen was given command of a composite German-Austro-Hungarian force known as the German South Army in the Carpathians. This unit managed to advance from the mountain passes as far as Stryi on January 22, but snow halted any further actions. The breakthrough of General August von Mackensen's Eleventh Army at Gorlice-Tarnow on May 2, however, heralded a general advance in the east, and Linsingen marched into Galicia as far as the Dnjestr River, and on May 31 took 60,000 prisoners at the battle of Stryi. There the offensive ground to a halt as the Russians reinforced their units around Stryi and Zuravno; Linsingen was rewarded for his efforts in the south with the coveted Pour le mérite.
Mackensen's army had gradually swelled to such proportions that in July 1915, it was divided into two units; Linsingen received command over a new Bug Army. On August 26 he took Brest-Litovsk with this force and drove the Russians back upon Pskov. The next month Linsingen was reinforced with the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army and became head of a new Army Group Linsingen, with orders to stabilize the southern sector of the eastern front. Linsingen's darkest hour came on June 5, 1916, when General Aleksei Brusilov, attempting to relieve the pressure on Verdun, unleashed a massive attack directly against Army Group Linsingen. The Habsburg Fourth Army under Archduke Joseph Ferdinand collapsed totally and its headquarters at Luck were overrun by the Russians. By July Linsingen had managed to regroup his forces behind Luck and to halt the Russian drive near Kovel, but not before over 200,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers had been lost. Brusilov, for his part, absorbed a horren-dous 1 million casualties. Linsingen's sector of the front thereafter remained relatively quiet.
In February/March 1918, after the Bolsheviks had broken off peace talks at Brest-Litovsk, Linsingen led the German drive into the Ukraine and the Crimea, taking Odessa and Poltava. The Bolsheviks then agreed to German terms and Army Group Linsingen was officially disbanded; in April Linsingen was promoted colonel general.
In addition, General Wilhelm Groener had found it impossible to work with Linsingen and had replaced him with General Hermann von Eichhorn; on June 1, 1918, Linsingen was shunted off to become commander in chief in the Mark and governor of Berlin. He retired from the army on November 17, 1918, after his troops had made common cause with the revolution in Berlin. Linsingen died in Hanover on June 5, 1935.