Battle of Tannenberg (1914)

In the last days of August 1914, in the opening month of the First World War, the German Eighth Army surrounded and largely destroyed the Russian Second Army in the south of East Prussia. The fighting, from 26 to 30 August, took place around Allenstein, today Olsztyn in Poland. The Russian commander, Alexander Samsonov, took his own life, and the victory made national heroes of the German commanders Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff.

Germany's war plan sent the great bulk of its army west against France, leaving the Eighth Army, barely a tenth of the whole, to hold East Prussia until reinforcements could come. Russia had promised France to invade East Prussia quickly, and it sent two armies under the Northwestern Front of General Yakov Zhilinsky: the First Army under Paul von Rennenkampf from the east, and the Second Army under Samsonov from the south, from the direction of Warsaw. Together they were meant to catch the Germans in a pincer.

The Russians suffered from poor supply lines, a different railway gauge that stopped their trains at the border, and weak communications. Short of codebooks, Samsonov's army sent many radio messages uncoded, and the Germans read them.

Rennenkampf crossed the frontier on 17 August. On 20 August the German commander, Maximilian von Prittwitz, attacked him at Gumbinnen and was driven back, and that evening his headquarters reported that the army would withdraw to West Prussia. The supreme command under Helmuth von Moltke the Younger replaced him with Hindenburg, with Ludendorff as chief of staff; they were told of their new posts on 22 August. The Eighth Army, whose staff included Max Hoffmann, left a thin screen of cavalry and garrison troops facing Rennenkampf, who paused after his success, and moved most of its forces by rail and on foot against Samsonov. One corps travelled more than 150 kilometres by train.

Samsonov pushed north-west with his centre while his wings grew dangerously exposed. On 27 August General Hermann von François's corps smashed the Russian left near Usdau, and on the other flank German corps drove back the Russian right. On 28 August, worried by reports that Rennenkampf was approaching from behind, Ludendorff wanted to break off, but Hindenburg insisted on continuing. By 29 August the two German wings had met near Willenberg, and the Russian centre was trapped. Russian soldiers trying to break out across open fields were mown down, the pocket was pounded by artillery, and long columns of prisoners filled the roads. On the night of 30 August Samsonov went into the woods and took his own life rather than report the disaster to the tsar.

Figures differ widely. Hindenburg claimed 92,000 prisoners, and a German official estimate put Russian killed and wounded at 50,000, while the historian Alexei Oleynikov argues that Russian losses cannot have exceeded about 80,000. An analysis of Russian unit reports gives up to about 120,000 killed, wounded and captured. German losses were around 12,000 by one count, or about 30,000 by others.

The battle was named, at Hindenburg's request, after the village of Tannenberg, about 30 kilometres away, as a symbolic answer to the defeat of the Teutonic Knights 500 years earlier at the Battle of Grunwald. Within a week the reinforced Eighth Army turned on Rennenkampf at the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes and drove him out of East Prussia.

The victory was a tactical masterpiece but not decisive, as Germany still had to fight mainly in the west. Hindenburg became a national hero, while Ludendorff, who is usually given most credit for directing the battle, was also praised. A great memorial completed near the site in 1927 was blown up by retreating German troops in January 1945, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn set his 1971 novel August 1914 around the battle.

Our 1914 map shows East Prussia as part of the German Empire, facing the Russian Empire to the east and south. The battlefield now lies in Poland.