Background
Marwitz was born in Stolp (Słupsk) in the Province of Pomerania and entered the Prussian Army in 1875.
Marwitz was born in Stolp (Słupsk) in the Province of Pomerania and entered the Prussian Army in 1875.
From 1883 to 1886 he attended the Prussian Military Academy. Until 1900 he commanded a cavalry regiment, at which point he became chief of staff of XVIII Corps. Before the outbreak of the First World War he was the Inspector-General of Cavalry.
From 1900 until 1905 he commanded the prestigious Third Guards Cavalry Regiment; next he was appointed staff chief of the XVIII Army Corps, after which he returned to the guards cavalry, this time commanding the First Brigade. Marwitz was promoted major general in 1908 and lieutenant general three years later as chief of the Third Division. One year before the war he became inspector general of all cavalry.
On August 4, 1914, Marwitz commanded the German cavalry west of Aachen and led it into Belgium as far as Lille and Senlis in order to decoy the advance of the First and Second Armies. He was promoted general of cavalry on August 19, and fought with General Alexander von Kluck's First Army against the British at Le Cateau. Marwitz was rushed to the Ourcq River on September 5-9 and ordered to cover the exposed left wing of the First Army during the battle of the Marne; thereafter as part of the German retreat ordered by Colonel Richard Hentsch, Marwitz withdrew behind the Aisne. By the end of September his cavalry stood at the Somme as part of Crown Prince Rupprecht's Sixth Army and fought at the battle of Arras the following month. Sent to Flanders and Artois in December, Marwitz, who was commanding eight cavalry divisions, took part in the race to the Channel and fought bloody engagements at Lille and Ypres. The advent of the machine gun, barbed wire, and poisonous gas greatly inhibited a force that still relied mainly on saber and lance.
On December 24, 1914, Marwitz was appointed head of the XXXVIII Reserve Corps, but soon was transferred to the eastern front where, in mid-February 1915, he took part in the winter battle of the Masurian Lakes as the right wing of General Hermann von Eichhorn's Tenth Army, which routed its Russian numerical counterpart. Marwitz next trapped the Russian XXII Army Corps at the Augustov forest and received the order Pour le mérite for this daring feat of midwinter cavalry action.
In March 1915, Marwitz was dispatched to Hungary to assume comand of the Beskiden Corps in an attempt to shore up the weak southern front. In April he repulsed the Russians in the Laborcza Valley in the Carpathians, and when General August von Mackensen broke the enemy's lines at Gorlice- Tarnôw on May 2, Marwitz was able to join the broad advance and drive the Russians beyond Lemberg. Illness in July, however, forced him to rest.
By November 1915, Marwitz had sufficiently recuperated to assume command of the VI Army Corps at Péronne, where he engaged the British in trench warfare until June 1916. General Aleksei Brusilov's massive thrust against the Austro- Hungarians that same month brought Marwitz's VI Army Corps to the Carpathians in yet another attempt to hold the mountain passes and to prevent the enemy from deploying on the Hungarian plain. At Kovel, having received command of an army group, Marwitz managed not only to blunt Brusilov's attack, but also to regroup the beaten Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand.
Marwitz returned to the western front on December 17, 1916, as head of the Second Army near St. Quentin, where he conducted trench warfare until March 1917. That month his troops were successfully withdrawn behind the Siegfried line in a defensive posture, but on November 20, 1917, Marwitz had the dubious honor of first experiencing mechanized warfare during the tank battle at Cambrai. By November 30 he had managed to counterattack and to force the enemy behind Cambrai.
On March 21, 1918, the Second Army advanced against Péronne as part of the overall Michael offensive. Marwitz next struck out for Amiens, the vital rail link where the British and French armies were joined, but he was forced to halt along the line Albert-Villers-Bretonneux. In April the Second Army engaged in bloody combat at the Somme as well as at the Ancre and Avre rivers. On August 8, in what General Erich Ludendorff termed the "black day of the German Army," Marwitz's units were mauled by enemy tank and infantry advancing under the cover of fog along the broad line Albert-Villers-Bretonneux; several divisions were totally destroyed nearly 30,000 men were lost that day in what became the worst German defeat in the Great War. Thereafter Marwitz was dispatched to Verdun to assume command of the Fifth Army in the Champagne, where he faced mainly American units. He retired from the army in December 1918. After the war, Marwitz became active in various officer clubs; he died of a heart attack in Wundichow on October 27, 1929.
In 1881 he married Helene von Kameke, daughter of Prussian War Minister Georg von Kameke, with whom he had five children.