Background
Arthur Albert Baron Arz was born in Hermannstadt, Transylvania, on June 11, 1857, to a Protestant pastor's family.
Arthur Albert Baron Arz was born in Hermannstadt, Transylvania, on June 11, 1857, to a Protestant pastor's family.
Arz early belonged to the so-called Young Saxon party in Transylvania, which declared itself willing, unlike the "Old Saxon" faction, to work with the Magyars. A brief career in law was abandoned in June 1878 when Arz entered the army; he attended the War Academy from 1885 to 1887 and the following year was attached to the General Staff. By the turn of the century he had risen to the grade of colonel and commanded infantry at Kaschau. From 1903 to 1908 Arz served as chief of personnel in the General Staff, and in November 1908, was promoted major general and given command of the Sixty-first Infantry Brigade in Budapest; thereafter came assignment to the Thirty-first Infantry Division.
In August 1914, Arz was given command of the Fifteenth Infantry Division; as subsequent head of the VI Army Corps he fought at Limanowa-Lapanow in 1914, and the following year saw action, in conjunction with Field Marshal August von Mackensen's German Ninth Army, during the breakthrough near Gorlice-Tarnow and the resulting capture of Brest-Litovsk. Arz distinguished himself in 1916 in his native Transylvania as head of a new First Army, fighting a model delaying action against the invading Rumanians while a mixed German-Austro-Hungarian army was being assembled by General Erich von Falkenhayn.
On March 1, 1917, Colonel General Arz von Straussenburg relinquished command of the First Army and succeeded General Conrad von Hotzendorf as chief of the General Staff of the army. Arz lacked political ambition, possessed unbounded good temper, and devoted his talents to serving his imperial supreme commander, thereby reverting to the control structure prevailing in the period 1850 to 1859 under Francis Joseph I. In fact, Arz has been accused of being more an adjutant general than a chief of staff. He quickly abandoned the special standing of the chief of the General Staff and reverted to the traditional role of professional military adviser to the emperor. Headquarters were removed from Teschen to Baden, near Vienna, and operational planning was left to the deptuy chief of the General Staff, General Alfred von Waldstatten. For the remainder of the war, Arz supervised the Austro- Hungarian defenses in the East during General Aleksei Brusilov's offensive, and under his nominal command German-Austro-Hungarian forces broke the Italian front near Caporetto in October 1917 and occupied Venetia as far as the Piave River. Arz desired above all to preserve inviolate the Dual Monarchy and he resisted all attempts by the Hungarians to divide the army into an Austrian and a Hungarian part. Charles I raised Arz into the baronage in February 1918.
Unfortunately, Arz von Straussenburg was not a strong military leader. In June 1918, he was unable to mediate a dispute between Generals Conrad von Hotzendorf and Svetozar Boroevic concerning the nature of a planned assault against the Italians in Venetia. Arz's decision to allocate equal forces to each commander and to permit each to conduct independent operations violated a cardinal tenet of military leadership, namely, concentration, and proved a disaster; by June 20, the Austro-Hungarian offensive had been blunted, the army's cohesion seriously impaired, and the morale of the fighting units destroyed. Late in October 1918, Arz offered the Italians an armistice, but they accepted it only thirty-six hours after Austro-Hungarian demobilization had begun, with the resulting "perfidious" Italian capture of hundreds of thousands of inactive veterans (Rudolf Kiszling). The armistice was finally concluded on November 3; Arz's troops, especially on the southern front, had simply melted away.
An unpolitical general, Arz von Straussenburg faithfully served his supreme commander and remained loyal to the German ally throughout the war.