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BiographyOn October 2nd, 1847 Paul von Hindenburg was born in Posen (now Poznan, Poland). He was educated at the cadet school in Berlin and joined the Prussian army in 1866. During the next five years took part in the Seven Weeks' War and the Franco-Prussian War. He served for 40 years in the army of the newly proclaimed (1871) German Empire, being promoted to General in 1905. In 1911 he retired from active duty. |
At the beginning of World War I, in August 1914, he accepted the command of the German Eighth Army at the Russian border. Together with General Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff, he achieved an overwhelming Germany victory over numerically superior Russian troops at Tannenberg. He was then promoted to field marshal, and in 1916 he succeeded General Erich von Falkenhayn as chief of the German general staff. With Ludendorff at his side he became responsible for the direction of all German forces. In March 1917 he established the German armies in Western Europe in a system of trenches across northern France known as the "Hindenburg Line," which the Allied armies could not break through until October 1918. After the end of the First World War Hindenburg retired from the army for a second time and published his memoirs entitled "Out of My Life". In this book he claimed the defeat of the German army in First World War had been caused by the domestic revolution that had overthrown the German Empire, and established a republic in 1919. |
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