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The German General Staff, originally the Prussian General Staff and officially the Great General Staff (German: Großer Generalstab), was a full-time body at the head of the Prussian Army and later, the German Army, responsible for the continuous study of all aspects of war, and for
The chief of staff of the Prussian Army for thirty years, he is regarded as the creator of a new, more modern method of directing armies in the field and one of the finest military minds of his generation. He commanded troops in Europe and the Middle East, in the Second Schleswig War, Austro-Prussian War, and Franco-Prussian War.
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Helmuth von Moltke (born October 26, 1800, Parchim, Mecklenburg [Germany]—died April 24, 1891, Berlin, Germany) chief of the Prussian and German General Staff (1858–88) and the architect of the victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1871).
Moltke’s father, a man of unstable character, belonged to the nobility of Mecklenburg, his mother to an old family of the free city of Lübeck. The Moltkes were impoverished, and young Helmuth, whose health was not too good, had an unhappy start to life. Since his father had emigrated to Holstein (then a Danish possession) in 1805 and had taken Danish nationality, the boy completed his education with the Royal Cadet Corps in Copenhagen and joined a Danish infantry regiment. After a visit to Berlin in 1821, however, he decided to transfer to the Prussian Army, and in 1822 he obtained a commission as a second lieutenant in the Prussian Life Guards, being posted to Frankfurt an der Oder.
In October 1823 Moltke was sent to the General War College for a three-year course, but, since his health was deteriorating, he went in the summer of 1825 to Bad Salzbrunn for convalescence, during which he studied modern languages. On his return to Frankfurt in the summer of 1826 he took up writing, largely to improve his financial position, and published a novel, Die beiden Freunde (1827; new ed. 1957). In May 1828 he was transferred to the General Staff’s Topographical Bureau in Berlin.
Continuing his literary work, Moltke published his Darstellung der innern Verhältnisse und des gesellschaftlichen Zustandes in Polen (1832; Poland: An Historical Sketch, 1885) and also accepted a publisher’s offer for a translation of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Although he completed most of it, the work was never published.
Moltke was attached to the Prussian General Staff in March 1832 and promoted to the rank of first lieutenant a year later. Toward the end of 1835 he was sent to Turkey to advise Sultan Mahmud II on the modernization of the Turkish Army, and in 1836 he was authorized by Berlin to enter the Turkish service. After some work in Istanbul and travels in the Balkans, he went in 1838 to Armenia, where Turkish forces were preparing an offensive against the Egyptian invaders of Syria. The failure of the offensive, in 1839, was due largely to the Turkish commander’s disregard of Moltke’s advice.
Returning to Germany at the end of 1839, Moltke reentered the Prussian service. He published a selection of his letters from Turkey, Briefe über Zustände und Begebenheiten in der Türkei, in 1841. In April 1842 he married an English girl, Marie Burt (1825–68), stepdaughter of his sister Augusta. An essay on the considerations that should govern the choice of routes for new railways (1843) is more significant of his future than his next book, Der russisch-türkische Feldzug in der europäischen Türkei 1828–1829 (1845; The Russians in Bulgaria and Rumelia, 1854).
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Oct 22, 2024 · Moltke was chief of the General Staff for 17 more years from 1871. For part of this time he was occupied with planning for the eventuality of Germany’s having to fight a war on two fronts—against Russia in the east as well as against France again in the west.
After the formation of the German Empire in 1871, the Prussian Army, Royal Saxon Army, Army of Württemberg and the Bavarian Army were autonomous in peacetime, each kingdom maintaining a separate war ministry and general staff to administer their forces.
Helmuth von Moltke (born May 25, 1848, Gersdorff, Mecklenburg [Germany]—died June 18, 1916, Berlin) was the chief of the German General Staff at the outbreak of World War I.
THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF Throughout the period 1864 to 1945, the German General Staff proved to be tactically and operationally the most effec-tive staff system in the world. Yet during this same period, the German system was, through direct or indirect means, to perpetu-ate some of the greatest strategic disasters that any nation has ever ...
