Background
Liman von Sanders was born in Stolp (now Słupsk) in the Pomerania province of the Kingdom of Prussia.
Liman von Sanders was born in Stolp (now Słupsk) in the Pomerania province of the Kingdom of Prussia.
He joined the military in 1874 and rose to the rank of General of Cavalry.
Otto Liman entered the army in 1874 and five years later was attached to the cavalry; in 1887 he entered the General Staff. He was appointed brigade commander as major general in 1906, and five years later was in Kassel as lieutenant general and commander of the Twenty - second Division. Ennobled in July 1913, Liman added his wife's Scottish name to his own. In December 1913, he was dispatched to Turkey as chief of a German military mission, and in January 1914, was promoted Turkish field marshal, inspector general of all Ottoman forces as well as Prussian general of cavalry.
In August 1914, Liman worked diligently to bring about Turkey's entry into the war and he grew bitter and cantankerous as the Turks agonized over their position - to the point where Liman considered challenging both the Turkish war minister and navy minister to a duel, and asked Wilhelm II (q.v.) to recall the mission. Instead, he was appointed commander of the Turkish First Army at the Bosphorus in August 1914, all the while quarrelling over jurisdiction with Ambassador Hans von Wangenheim.
Liman gained world recognition after March 1915 when General Enver Pasha (q.v.) appointed him head of the new Turkish Fifth Army entrusted with defense of Gallipoli against expected Allied assaults. Especially in May and June Liman capably handled the defenses against overwhelming enemy naval and material superiority; only the successful Allied evacuations of 500,000 troops in December 1915 tarnished Liman's image both at Constantinople and at Berlin. It was over the general's bitter objections that Germany and Turkey in October 1917 concluded a new ten-year military convention, to take effect after the war, which gave the Turks ultimate command over all German officers attached to their forces.
On February 27, 1918, Liman was given the thankless and impossible task of shoring up the Turkish front in Palestine as commander of Army Group F in Syria. Twice he repelled British attacks in Jordan but, denied supplies and reinforcements by Enver and General Hans von Seeckt (q.v.), the new chief of staff at Ottoman headquarters, the front soon collapsed. On September 20 General Sir Edmund Allenby's (q.v.) troops captured Nazareth, barely failing to seize the German commander.
Liman fell back upon Damascus in October 1918, but the armistice of Mudros precluded further disasters for the Turkish forces. Liman returned to Constantinople until January 1919 in order to oversee the repatriation of German troops in Asia Minor. On his way home in February, the British held "Pasha Liman" at Malta for six months as a suspected war criminal; finally released in August, he was permitted to return home. Field Marshal Liman von Sanders retired from the army in October 1919 to write his memoirs, and he died in Munich on August 22, 1929.
(Memoirs)