Transcription
He was, without question, one of the most effective leaders of the First World War on either side. We’ve seen him and his death’s head hat again and again in our regular episodes, but he was also quite controversial in his personal beliefs. So today, ladies and gentlemen, here’s August von Mackensen. I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War bio special about August von Mackensen.
Well, it didn’t originally have the “von.” He was born Anton Ludwig Friedrich August Mackensen on December 6, 1849, in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father administered a large estate but was not the owner. The family was not part of the aristocratic Junker class and was, in fact, a lineage of agriculturalists, not warriors. August grew up with the sons of peasants and hirelings. Still, his education was very much filled with the Prussian ideals of being hardworking, conscientious, and subservient to the state and the monarchy. After that, with the glories of the Prussian victory in the 1866 war in mind, August joined the Prussian cavalry in 1869 and served in the Leibhusarenregiment, a hussar regiment traditionally open to non-aristocratic men. They had been founded by Frederick the Great in 1741 and were known as the Black Hussars or the Death’s Head Hussars. The Attila, their uniform, was pitch black with the exception of the white cords. The death’s head—Totenkopf in German—on the hat meant “no mercy.”
Mackensen was 20 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and he hoped to bring glory and honor to his name from the war, knowing that without ancestry or social standing, he had to do so to be recognized. After dangerous reconnaissance missions and fearless cavalry charges, he returned home as a Leutnant, awarded the Iron Cross. He then left the army and began studying agriculture, but he was still a highly esteemed officer of the reserves of the new German Empire, where an Iron Cross was worth more than most diplomas. He returned to active service in 1873 and began climbing the army ladder. Over the next 15 years, the ambitious and dedicated officer rose to major; the same promotion took the aristocratic Paul von Hindenburg 19 years. Without ever entering the War Academy, he was called into the Prussian General Staff in Berlin, reporting directly to the Kaiser. His department made plans dealing with Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans. He was promoted to Generalleutnant in 1903 and was based in Danzig until 1914 when the war began.
The Russian advance into East Prussia brought with it a wave of panic. Fleeing Prussian refugees met the advancing German army, and on August 18th, at the Battle of Gumbinnen, Mackensen, commanding the XVII Corps of the 8th Army, ordered a frontal assault that failed spectacularly. In two hours, he lost 9,000 men; the defeat would haunt him for years to come. He redeemed himself, though, during Hindenburg’s counteroffensive and played a major part in encircling the Russian forces. A few months later, he preserved the German 9th Army from destruction at Lodz with a well-timed retreat, and after Germany emerged from Lodz victorious, on his 65th birthday, he was awarded the Pour le Mérite—Germany’s highest military honor—for his actions there. It was then that he began to be a figure in the public imagination. Postcards and photographs of Mackensen became popular as the “Victor of Lodz” was celebrated.
The thing is, he never really enjoyed the celebrity or being hailed as some sort of heroic legend, though he hated it when Hindenburg and Ludendorff were given credit for his victories. Mackensen was anti-Semitic, thinking Jews embodied anti-German traits, and anti-Catholic. Serving in Poland, he had plenty of time to reflect on Germany’s war aims. He favored an annexation of the Baltic States but not Polish territory—because of all the Polish Catholics—which he did not believe would be beneficial to the German state. He thought Germany should concentrate on its future security because a bad peace would only bring about another war. So he never stopped believing in German victory, though he did, in fact, long for peace, seeing the terrible death and pain of the war firsthand. One of his letters to his wife read: “Everyone expects a great deciding success from me, but great successes during war are usually only achieved through great casualties. How many death sentences contain my order to attack? It is this thought that bears down on me before every battle.” He believed that Entente politicians were at fault for the war, and thus, any peace should be a German peace, worthy of the sacrifice of his men.
In April 1915, Mackensen was given command of the 11th Army, and his new Chief of Staff was Hans von Seeckt. Together, they planned an offensive to begin near Gorlice-Tarnow against the advancing Russian army. They then achieved something remarkable: a total breakthrough of the Russian lines. Using massive amounts of artillery, which the Russians could not counter, they pushed them back 500 km over the summer and recaptured Lemberg. Such a tremendous victory made Mackensen a true national hero, and he was promoted to Field Marshal. In September, he met Chief of Staff Falkenhayn and the Kaiser and was given both his Field Marshal’s baton and his next assignment—the conquest of Serbia. After a huge German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian invasion, Belgrade fell, and Mackensen was ennobled. In fact, August von Mackensen was even considered as supreme commander of the eastern forces. He had the support of Falkenhayn and the Kaiser, but they misjudged the situation in the east—not just the hugely successful Russian Brusilov Offensive in the summer of 1916, but also Romania’s entry into the war. Mackensen did not believe they would join, and when they did, Falkenhayn was out as Chief of Staff, and Hindenburg was in.
Sobered by another nation joining the Entente, Mackensen put together a rather odd assortment of German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman troops to attack Romania. On his 67th birthday, his forces entered Bucharest, and over the coming months, he would kind of be the ruler of four-fifths of Romania and was even called the Kingmaker. Now, he expected neither Serbia nor Romania to exist after the war. He respected the Serbs, whom he considered the best soldiers in the Balkans, but oddly enough, he did not have such respect for his allies, the Bulgarians, whom he considered unreliable. He thought the German alliance with Bulgaria was just on paper and would not last. One thing he did support was unrestricted submarine warfare since his troops had already been fired on by American ammunition, and he felt they were already sort of at war. He had nothing but scorn for the Reichstag in Berlin, since they were mostly Social Democrats and Catholics, and he was a staunch monarchist. In fact, he hated Parliamentarianism in general and longed for a man like former Chancellor Bismarck, the sort of man he thought was direly needed now.
On his 68th birthday, in 1917, the guns on the Eastern Front went quiet. While High Command prepared for a 1918 offensive in the west, Mackensen helped negotiate the Peace of Bucharest; he had big plans for Romania. Other big plans afoot included the possibility of an alliance between Soviet Russia and Germany, and Mackensen was considered to lead a combined force from the two to defeat British forces sent in to fight the Bolsheviks, but the world war ended, and so did those plans. But Mackensen, with his undiminished belief in German victory, was himself planning a counteroffensive in Macedonia even as German High Command gave up the war as lost at the end of September 1918. The armistice found him still in Romania. The Allies demanded the retreat of all Central Powers troops from foreign territory, so the harsh winter of 1918-1919 found Mackensen’s men leaving Romania much like Napoleon left Russia over 100 years earlier, pursued by the French army, leaving the wounded and the sick on the way, and selling their equipment to make it home. He himself was imprisoned in Hungary and then transferred to Salonika. It was not until December 1919 that August von Mackensen was released to Germany. He arrived by train, and a huge crowd of old soldiers, including Falkenhayn and von Seeckt, were there to meet him. He resigned from the army in January 1920, unwilling to serve a democratic state, which was against everything he stood for.
There was a lot of life left for Mackensen; his biography is basically half-finished after World War I. You can look it up yourself, for that’s beyond the scope of this channel, but August von Mackensen died on November 8th, 1945, after the Second World War was over, at the age of 95. By that time, Germany’s most successful field leader during the First World War had lived a life that spanned Prussia, the North German Confederation, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Allied Occupation. It was certainly a life less ordinary.
If you want to learn more about another famous German general who was on a lot of postcards between 1914 and 1918, you can click right here for our episode about Paul von Hindenburg. Like us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, and don’t forget to subscribe. See you next time.