Background
Otto von Below was born at Danzig (now Gdansk) on January 18, 1857, the son of a Prussian general from the Mecklenburg branch of the family.
Otto von Below was born at Danzig (now Gdansk) on January 18, 1857, the son of a Prussian general from the Mecklenburg branch of the family.
Below attended the War Academy in 1884-1887 and two years later was promoted captain in the General Staff.
Below became battalion commander in 1897 and eight years later regimental commander in the grade of colonel; in 1909 Major General von Below was given a brigade and three years later as lieutenant general headed the Second Division at Insterburg in East Prussia.
On August 2, 1914 Below was appointed head of the I Reserve Corps, and eighteen days later fronted the Russians at Gumbinnen as the right wing of the Eighth Army. By the end of August, the I Reserve Corps had closed the ring around the Russian Narev Army; from September 5-15, Below helped defeat the Russian Second Army at the Masurian Lakes. For these twin victories that forced the enemy behind the Niemen River, Below was promoted general of infantry. He next defended East Prussia as the Eighth Army was withdrawn to Poland, and on November 7 decimated the enemy at Gôritten. Below then became the youngest officer of his rank to be given command of an army, as he succeeded General Hermann von François as head of the Eighth Army.
In February 1915, Below and General Hermann von Eichhorn's Tenth Army fought the bitter winter battle of the Masurian Lakes, taking 100,000 Russian prisoners at the Augustov forest; Below received the coveted order Pour le mérite for annihilating the Russian Tenth Army. In July Below headed a new Niemen Army and repulsed a Russian assault in eastern Poland; by December he had been returned to the Eighth Army and in July 1916, held back another Russian offensive at Kekkau. His troops by now had taken Courland and Lithuania as far as the southern reaches of the Dvina.
On October 10, 1916, Otto von Below was appointed commander of a new Army Group Below (German Eleventh and Bulgarian First Army) in Macedonia. From November 3 to 27 he defended Monastir, but eventually abandoned it against Ger-man and Bulgarian pleas to hold it; during March 11-26, 1917 Below managed at least to stabilize the front near Monastir and to deny General Maurice Sarrail a decisive victory in Salonika. Above all, Below's holding action allowed the successful completion of the Rumanian campaign of Field Marshal August von Mackensen and General Erich von Falkenhayn by covering the rear of the operation. Below was dispatched to the western front on April 22, 1917 to head the Sixth Army near Arras, but was recalled from this command on September 9, 1917.
Below's services were required on the Italian front. General Erich Ludendorff had entrusted his alpine expert, General Krafft von Dellmensingen , with preparing an assault over the Julian Alps against the Italians and Below was nominally placed in command of a hastily assembled German-Austro- Hungarian Fourteenth Army consisting of twelve assault divisions. On October 24 Below’s forces advanced along the line Tolmino-Flitsch-Karfreit, and three days later burst upon the Italian plain, inflicting almost 600,000 casualties and forcing the enemy behind first the Tagliamento and later the Piave rivers.
In January 1918, the much-traveled Below returned to the western front as head of a new Seventeenth Army in Artois, and he distinguished himself during the Michael offensive on March 21 in extremely heavy fighting around Arras. Unfortunately, the Seventeenth Army on August 8 was severely mauled in fighting around Arras and Albert, and the following month had to fall back upon the old Siegfried line and finally on Cambrai. On October 12 Below was given the First Army on the Aisne and ordered to hold the Hunding sector of the Hindenburg line; on November 8 he was appointed head of Home Defense West at Kassel for a final stand on German soil.
The new republican government appointed Otto von Below head of the XVII Army Corps at Danzig, but in June 1919, Below resigned from the service in opposition to the government's conciliatory policy with regard to the new Polish state. Below spent his last years in retirement working on behalf of various patriotic groups. He died at Besenhausen near Gottingen on March 9, 1944. The Allied demand of February 1920 that Below be turned over and tried on charges of war crimes was never fulfilled.