Background
Hermann von Eichhorn was born in Breslau on February 13, 1848, grandson of a Prussian minister of culture and of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling; his father was ennobled in 1856.
Hermann von Eichhorn was born in Breslau on February 13, 1848, grandson of a Prussian minister of culture and of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling; his father was ennobled in 1856.
Eichhorn participated in the wars of 1866 and 1870/1871, attended the War Academy, and in 1883 entered the General Staff.
He was promoted major general in 1897 and lieutenant general four years later as divisional commander; in 1904 he was appointed head of the XVIII Army Corps at Frankfurt and the following year promoted general of infantry. Eichhorn became inspector general of the VII Army Inspectorate at Saarbrücken in 1912, and the next year was promoted colonel general. In case of mobilization, Eichhorn had been designated commander of the Fifth Army at Metz, but a serious equestrian injury in 1914 precluded his deployment in this capacity.
On January 26, 1915, Eichhorn was declared fit for duty and took part in the battle of Soissons; thereafter he assumed command of a new Tenth Army in East Prussia. He led this force against the Russian Tenth Army on February 8 during the winter battle of the Masurian Lakes, which ended fourteen days later with a severe rout of the Russians in the Augustov forest. In August 1915, Eichhorn stormed the fortress Kovno, for which he received the order Pour le mérite, and in September captured Vilna, which his Tenth Army held in bitter fighting in March and April 1916.
On July 30, 1916, the new Army Group Eichhorn was formed, consisting of the German Eighth and Tenth Armies in Courland and Lithuania. By October its commander had seized Riga and, in conjunction with the navy, had occupied the Baltic Sea islands of Osel, Moon, and Dagö, and in December 1917 was promoted field marshal.
The year 1918 began with the occupation of Latvia and Estonia, but on March 4 Eichhorn was relieved of command of the Tenth Army as the Bolsheviks accepted German terms at Brest-Litovsk. Instead, on March 31 the field marshal was appointed head of a new army group bearing his name for the occupation of the Ukraine and the Crimea, with headquarters at Kiev. Eichhorn hoped to exploit the grain riches of the region and generally sought to circumvent the Foreign Office in this matter. "There is only one good side to the situation in the Ukraine: a firm hand by the military works wonders; there is only one diplomatic method that works: the use of money. Thus by a combination of force and bribery, the commander in time dissolved the local Rada ("council"), persuaded landowners to sow their crops, and appointed General Pavlo Skoropadsky hetman, or ruler of the Ukraine. Eichhorn was partly successful in his endeavors owing to the brilliant use of field railways made by General Wilhelm Groener, his chief of staff, but in the end his harsh measures only served to drive the Ukrainians back into the arms of Russia. On July 30, 1918, the "uncrowned king of the Ukraine" was murdered by a left-wing social revolutionary in a hazy attempt to force the Bolsheviks to abandon their tenuous cooperation with the Germans.
The field marshal's remains were interned next to those of Count Alfred von Schlieffen in Berlin. Among his staff officers, Eichhorn had enjoyed the reputation of being a highly educated and cultured gentleman as well as a dashing military figure.
