General Erich Georg Anton von Falkenhayn was the Chief of the German General Staff during the First World War from September 1914 until 29 August 1916. He was removed in the late summer of 1916 after the failure at the battle of Verdun, the opening of the Allied offensive on the Somme, the Brusilov Offensive and the entry of Romania into the war. He was later given important field commands in Romania and Syria.
Background
Falkenhayn was born in Burg Belchau near Graudenz, West Prussia (now Białochowo, Poland) to Fedor von Falkenhayn (1814–1896) and Franziska von Falkenhayn, née von Rosenberg (1826–1888). His brother Arthur (1857–1929) became tutor of Crown Prince Wilhelm while Eugen (1853–1934) became a Prussian General of Cavalry. His only sister Olga von Falkenhayn was the mother of Fieldmarshall Fedor von Bock.
Education
Becoming a cadet at the age of 11, he joined the Army in 1880. He served as an infantry and staff officer and became a career soldier. Falkenhayn was raised in the Cadet School and in 1890 graduated from the War Academy third in his class.
Career
In 1896 he toured China as a captain in the General Staff and three years later as major and instructor at the Chinese Military School at Nankow, he was ordered to serve as second staff officer in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. His reports from China found favor with Wilhelm II and Falkenhayn's career was assured: in 1905 he was promoted lieutenant colonel, three years later colonel, and after staff work with the XVI and IV Army Corps, commander of the Fourth Foot Guards m 1911. The next year came promotion to major general and, in July 1913, to lieutenant general as Prussian war minister at the young age of fifty-one. During the Zabern (Saverne) Affair he staunchly defended army officers against Reichstag critics for their harsh treatment of civilians in the Reichslander Alsace-Lorraine. In the officer corps Falkenhayn had earned the reputation of being a pusher, a careerist, yet he unflinchingly continued to defend matters such as the duel, officer honor, and the institution of the military cabinet against parliamentary critics.
On September 3, 1914, Falkenhayn urged the chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, to take the Channel ports and to halt the German advance at the Marne, but his advice was rejected. Two days later the hasty retreat from the Marne began and Falkenhayn caustically noted: "Our General Staff has completely lost its head. Schlieffen's notes do not help any further, and so Moltke's wits come to an end." On September 14 Falkenhayn replaced the broken Moltke as head of the General Staff an appointment not made public until November 3 in order to spare Moltke humiliation; Falkenhayn concurrently served as Prussian war minister until February 1915, one month after his promotion to general of infantry.
Tall, slender, aloof, Falkenhayn seemed the epitome of a Prussian staff officer. His closely cropped hair and his "clever but sarcastic eyes" conjured up visions of precision, sharpness, and action. Unfortunately, his military strategy was precisely the opposite: security dominated all his thoughts and deeds.
Falkenhayn's tenure as staff chief began on an unfortunate note. The costly drive to the sea in September and October was followed in October and November by massive assaults against Ypres with raw recruits at a time when battle-tested veterans lay idle between the Aisne and the Vosges. Worse, Falkenhayn rejected out of hand General Wilhelm Groener's proposal to shuttle six army corps to Ypres in order to turn the tide against the Allies. Nor did Falkenhayn have a successful hand in the east. After the twin victories of Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff at Tannenberg and at the Masurian Lakes, the staff chief could not bring himself to release sufficient units from France for a planned breakthrough at Lodz.
Indeed, Falkenhayn was hardly in an enviable position. He had at all times to balance men and supplies among three major fronts, and to steer a clear course between Reichstag and kaiser. In the west, Falkenhayn early in 1915 accepted the stalemate and prepared for a long entrenchment by expanding military railways and increasing munitions supplies.
In the south, his hopes that the entry of Turkey into the war on the side of the Central Powers would help turn the tide proved illusory. And in the east, there rapidly developed a vicious power struggle between Falkenhayn and Ludendorff. While the former sought to dole out sufficient troops to the eastern command to keep the Austro-Hungarian ally in control of the Carpathians, the latter demanded a grand sweep through Poland and a knock-out blow against the Russian armies near Vilna.
In the end, Falkenhayn compromised: the German breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow on May 2, 1915, by General August von Mackensen netted 400,000 Russian soldiers as well as Lemberg and Przemysl, but there were insufficient reserves to exploit the breach in the enemy lines. By September the eastern front had again been stabilized from Riga to Czernowitz. Next, the Austrian commander, Field Marshal Baron Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf insisted on a major operation against Italy; Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia countered with demands that Russia be accorded primary emphasis. Falkenhayn temporarily escaped a basic decision because of Bulgaria's entry into the war in the fall of 1915: after Serbia was overrun by Austro-German-Bulgarian forces, the Allies fell back upon Salonika with 500,000 men. But again relations with the ally at Vienna soured as Conrad demanded the elimination of the Salonika pocket, while Falkenhayn successfully countered with shifting the fulcrum of the war back to France. A fervent adherent of the strategy of attrition (Ermattung), Falkenhayn, in December 1915, persuaded the kaiser to adopt the limited objective of bleeding the French white near the historic fortress of Verdun.
On February 21, 1916, the monstrous German action at Verdun unfolded as a series of limited advances designed to draw the French into German artillery fire. Falkenhayn had correctly assessed the French temperament as Paris committed division after division to hold the stone forts at any cost. Unfortunately, as the German armies hurled themselves against French units at Verdun, General Aleksei Brusilov unleashed a broad assault against the entire Austro-Hungarian front in the east. The initial attack between June 5 and 8 quickly turned into a rout as over 200,000 troops were taken by Brusilov. At the same time, the British opened a major effort at the Somme, and when Rumania in August declared for the Entente, Falkenhayn's position became untenable. Too many powerful agencies joined forces to oust him. The Prussian war minister, General Wild von Hohenborn, regarded the staff chief as a "weakling." Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg feared Falkenhayn's rumored political ambitions, while Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow was solidly in Ludendorff's camp. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria went so far as to state that Falkenhayn's continued stay at the General Staff meant certain defeat for Germany. Above all, Falkenhayn was viciously denounced by Ludendorff and Hindenburg, and he yielded to this duumvirate on August 29,1916.
Falkenhayn declined the offer of an ambassadorship to the Porte, and instead, on September 16, took command of the Ninth Army against Rumania. He was completely successful in the field. The enemy was dislodged from Hermannstadt and Transylvania, and on November 11 Falkenhayn's forces captured the mountain passes leading into Wallachia hours before the major snows arrived; in conjunction with Mackensen, Falkenhayn, in December 1916, victoriously entered Bucharest.
Early in 1917 Falkenhayn arrived in Turkey at the head of the so-called Asiatic Corps in order to regain Mesopotamia, but the scheme had to be abandoned. In July he was sent to Palestine as chief of Army Group F to shore up the Ottoman front; but the German arrived in Jerusalem the day after Field Marshal Edmund Allenby's drive on Beersheba. A series of counterattacks failed to halt the British advance and, in February 1918, General Liman von Sanders replaced Falkenhayn as commander in Palestine. Promoted a Turkish marshal, Falkenhayn returned to Germany in March to assume command of the Tenth Army in Lithuania. He brought this unit home in February 1919, retired in June of that year, and died at Castle Lindstedt near Potsdam on April 8, 1922.
Politics
Falkenhayn was certainly not one of the great military captains. Two verdicts, one of his day, and the other more recent, must suffice. Colonel Max Bauer noted that Falkenhayn possessed nearly every gift of nature "except the intuition of a commander. His decisions were half measures and he wavered even over these." Sir Basil Liddell Hart con¬curred, castigating Falkenhayn's strategy as "history's latest example of the folly of half measures."
Connections
In 1886 Falkenhayn married Ida Selkmann, with whom he had two children: a son Fritz Georg Adalbert von Falkenhayn, born in 1890, and a daughter Erika Karola Olga von Falkenhayn, born in 1904 and married to Henning von Tresckow (1901–1944).