Background
Richard Hentsch was born in Köln on December 18, 1869, the son of an army sergeant.
Richard Hentsch was born in Köln on December 18, 1869, the son of an army sergeant.
Hentsch entered the Saxon army in 1888, attended the Prussian War Academy, and was attached to the Prussian General Staff where he was promoted captain in 1901.
Thereafter, Hentsch served on the Saxon army's General Staff and was given several infantry commands; in 1906, however, he returned to the Prussian General Staff where he was promoted major three years later. In 1912 Hentsch served as staff officer with the XII Army Corps and, in April 1914, received his third appointment to the Prussian General Staff in the grade of lieutenant colonel.
In August 1914, Hentsch was head of the Foreign Armies (Intelligence) Department of the General Staff. Helmuth von Moltke had great confidence in Hentsch and often used him to relay messages to front commanders as was to be the case in September 1914 at the River Marne. In the general advance on Paris, General Alexander von Kluck's First Army had precipitously turned southwest near Amiens-Peronne, and in the process a wide gap developed between the inner wings of this force and General Karl von Bulow's Second Army. The French and British threatened to exploit it. Moltke, at German headquarters in Luxembourg, dispatched Hentsch on a 400-mile tour of the front with sweeping powers to make adjustments to the deployment of armies as he saw fit. At Montmort on September 8, Hentsch found a deeply pessimistic Billow, convinced that he was on the brink of annihilation unless ordered to retreat at once. When Kluck could not assure Hentsch that he would be able to support Biilow with all available forces immediately upon the heels of a French thrust into the gap, Hentsch felt no choice but to order on September 9 a general retreat from the Marne behind the Aisne along the line Soissons-Fere-en-Tardenois. The battle of the Marne had thus been won by the Entente.
In May 1915, Hentsch was attached to an Austro-Hungarian Army Corps and during the summer of that year planned the invasion of Serbia. On September 12, 1915, Hentsch became deputy chief of staff of the Eleventh Army, part of Army Group Mackensen, and received credit for the successful crossing of the Danube and Save rivers. Promoted colonel in January 1916, Hentsch served under Mackensen during the ensuing Rumanian campaign in the fall and winter of 1916 and, on March 1, 1917, was appointed staff chief of the military occupation of Rumania at Bucharest. He died there on February 13, 1918. Hentsch maintained to the end that his decision at the Marne had been the proper one.
Indeed, Hentsch's action of September 8/9, 1914, is probably the most debated single event of the Great War. General Oskar von Hutier spoke for many when he accused the staff officer of having "cheated the troops of victory" on that day. There is near consensus in the memoir literature of German generals that Hentsch s actions deprived an apparently victorious army of the fruits of their labors and thereby frustrated the Schlieffen plan. The charge does not sit well. It is perhaps symptomatic of the state of the German military in 1914 that a staff colonel should be accorded the blame that properly rests with a kaiser who could not fulfill his chosen role, with a General Staff chief who doubted the master plan and who lacked resolute will as well as steel nerves, and an army commander (Biilow) who was overly pessimistic at the approach of shadows, the alleged movement of British marines and Russian armies in Flanders.