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Remembered Today:

German general staff question


JasonK

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Hi folks, new member here. I'm looking for direction in a specific field of study and I think the topic fits in this section.

 

What I'm looking for is insight into the decision making and prioritization of the German general staff. How did they come up with plans, eg. Falkenhayn concerning Verdun, and what was important to them?

I'm an operations researcher so this stuff says a lot and is done differently by different organizations. I already know the staff organization, order of battle and "what happened where" stuff... been studying this war for about 30 years. So I'm not looking for yet another book ;-) unless it is filled with primary sources.

 

I'll give you an example from WW2: the Hitler Directives. These are prioritization documents from top down, and what surprised me on initial reading was the very small distribution--hand delivered to 7 or 8 officers. Make sense that you'd want to keep these things secret and therefore control distribution. But imagine a CEO today not wanting to "share the news" and get everyone in the company rowing in the same direction! There are other directions initiatives could be made, of course, such as a general staff concept sent up for approval, or a weird sideways thing like the Norway invasion which came about in an unusual manner. Also, the Second World War German top planners viewed logistics and news about fuel supplies and requirements from the Quartermaster department of low importance. I have the impression those of the First took those topics more seriously. So that's the flavor of things I'm looking for.

Despite googling I've had a difficult time finding anything like this for WW1. Maybe they're not scanned documents yet. Again, I have read enough of the "they went there and did this" kind of thing for the past three decades... those kinds of books will refer to primary sources ("So-and-so said in a February 1918 report to Ludendorff that XYZ resource was not available")--but where is the report?

I found Zabecki's pair of Chief of Staff books to be excellent as an example of the sort of thing I'm hoping to find. The opening section in particular describes how the structure was arrived at and adaptions during wartime, such as the unexpected rise of importance of the map making department. Hopefully someone will know of a similar work in the planning and prioritization direction. Primary sources are also useful, ie. the reports and plans themselves, as I'll be able to pull out what they thought was important from the things they say and don't say. Thanks and if you have questions to help with clarification I'm all ears.

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It sounds like you really need to talk to Jack Sheldon who has spent a lot of time in the different German archives and would have a very strong understanding of your needs.

 

 

Cheers,

Chris

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Well, one of the problems is that most of the Prussian military archives were lost when the building was bombed in 1944/45. However, some directives from higher up survive in high level military archives in Bavaria, Baden and Wurttemberg (these states still had their semi-independent army and thus have their own military archives). Some things have somehow survived, mostly in copied form in the Prussian archives, now kept in Freiburg/Breisgau as well. Note that all of these archives have very few documents scanned and/or available online, so studying the online inventories and going there is necessary if you really want to study this subject.

Anyway, you can also start reading some memoirs of high-level generals (Rupprecht von Bayern, Ludendorff, Falkenhayn, ...), but also the real "Reichsarchiv" series. They often give some insight in how decisions were made.

 

Jan

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Thanks @green_acorn and @AOK4. I'll search for Jack Sheldon in a minute. I appreciate the info about the bombing of the archive building and confirmation that, yes, few documents are scanned.

I have found a couple of archive sites (hathitrust.org has been especially useful for memoirs) as well as some papers (a 1992 US War College paper on understanding the German general staff system by Millotat, Mendelssohn's on The German Military Mind, Wilkinson's The Brain of An Army). These should be a good start.

 

If you have pointers about the Reichsarchiv series, I could use those... googling gave me some info but I didn't see English translations of books on Amazon nor did the link on the Wikipedia page work anymore for a website. I did find an online book, German War Planning 1891-1914 by Zuber, from your guidance, so it has already been useful. Thanks again.

Edited by JasonK
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3 minutes ago, JasonK said:

 googling gave me some info but I didn't see English translations of books on Amazon nor did the link on the Wikipedia page work anymore for a website.

 

If you're really into learning more about the German side, then one can't do that without reading and studying books and documents in German language as most things that are still around haven't been translated.

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1 minute ago, AOK4 said:

 

If you're really into learning more about the German side, then one can't do that without reading and studying books and documents in German language as most things that are still around haven't been translated.

 

True, and I have studied the language for about 4 years, but I'm only conversant at the basics "Safe to eat? Where is bathroom"-level. Maybe time to step up my game.

 

Interesting in contrast how much scholarship there has been on the War In The East in the past three or four decades, but how little remains known to English speakers about the German thinking side of things... especially despite Americans toting off all those Nazi records after the war, and then hurriedly returning them after not doing a good job of looking through them.

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1 hour ago, JasonK said:

 

True, and I have studied the language for about 4 years, but I'm only conversant at the basics "Safe to eat? Where is bathroom"-level. Maybe time to step up my game.

 

Interesting in contrast how much scholarship there has been on the War In The East in the past three or four decades, but how little remains known to English speakers about the German thinking side of things... especially despite Americans toting off all those Nazi records after the war, and then hurriedly returning them after not doing a good job of looking through them.

 

We're lucky to have the Americans, as they made a lot of microfilms of German military archives in the interbellum. These microfilms are nowadays often the only things left of those German (Prussian) military records.

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On 06/07/2020 at 15:19, AOK4 said:

 

We're lucky to have the Americans, as they made a lot of microfilms of German military archives in the interbellum. These microfilms are nowadays often the only things left of those German (Prussian) military records.

I'm very interested to know more about this  - do you know where the US copies are held, and are there online catalogues available? Any guidance you can provide would be much appreciated.

 

Many thanks, John

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6 hours ago, johntaylor said:

I'm very interested to know more about this  - do you know where the US copies are held, and are there online catalogues available? Any guidance you can provide would be much appreciated.

 

Many thanks, John

 

I know that the Americans made microfilms of the German military files of units during the time that they were opposite American units, but I've seen more copied files in the Bundesarchiv/Militärarchiv in Freiburg/Breisgau. I think the American microfilms should be in the American National Archives? Or the Library of Congress?

 

Jan

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The Americans returned copies to the Germans of all the material copied by the two officers in the 1920s.

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13 minutes ago, MartH said:

The Americans returned copies to the Germans of all the material copied by the two officers in the 1920s.

 

Those copies are the ones I mentioned that are in Freiburg/Breisgau.

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Thanks for this, I'm familiar with the material held at Freiburg but wondered if there's any further material held in American archives. As you know the documents captured by the Russians are now available online and I dream of a similar treasure trove somewhere in the USA!

 

All the best, John

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