Background
Mackensen was born in Haus Leipnitz, near the village of Dahlenberg (today part of Trossin) in the Prussian Province of Saxony, on December 6, 1849. His father, an administrator of agricultural enterprises.
Mackensen was born in Haus Leipnitz, near the village of Dahlenberg (today part of Trossin) in the Prussian Province of Saxony, on December 6, 1849. His father, an administrator of agricultural enterprises.
His father sent Mackensen to a Realgymnasium in Halle in 1865, seemingly in the hope that his eldest son would follow him in his profession. After the Franco-Prussian War he left the service and studied at Halle University, but returned to the army in 1873.
Mackensen began his military service in 1869 as a volunteer with the Prussian 2nd Life Hussars Regiment. In 1904 he commanded the hussar regiment of the Prussian Guard, and in 1908 he became the commanding general of the Seventeenth Army Corps. At the outbreak of World War I, Mackensen was on the eastern front and took part in the Battle of Tannenberg. Commanding at first the Ninth Army, he broke through the Russian front at Lodz, Poland, in November 1914. In the early part of 1915 he commanded the Eleventh Army in Western Galicia, Poland, being made field marshal in June of that year. He later took Brest-Litovsk and Pinsk. In the fall of 1916 he overran Serbia and was commander-in-chief of "Army Group M, " the combined troops of the Central Powers which crushed Romania and forced its surrender in January 1918. Mackensen was made military governor of Romania. Taken prisoner by the Allies, he was held at Salonika till November 1919 and retired from active service in 1920. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 Mackensen accepted the post of state counselor and was paraded in demonstrations in his hussar uniform to increase the prestige of the Nazi regime.
Mackensen married Doris von Horn, the sister of a slain comrade, in 1879. Her father Karl von Horn was the influential Oberpräsident of East Prussia. They had two daughters and three sons.