ABSTRACT
Between 23 and 31 August 1914, the four corps of the German 8th Army under the command of Paul von Hindenburg, with Erich Ludendorff as chief of staff, halted the Russian invasion of Germany and all but annihilated the Russian 2nd Army near the East Prussian village of Tannenberg. By the battle's end, three Russian army corps lay shattered, nearly 200,000 Russians lay dead (including the 2nd Army's commander), wounded or had been taken prisoner, and Germany had itself a new hero – Hindenburg.1 Indeed, as the Hindenburg legend grew in early 1915, rumours and exaggerations inevitably began to spread about the taciturn new field marshal. One such rumour was that Hindenburg had spent the years between his retirement in 1911 and his recall in 1914 wandering the countryside in East Prussia preparing a trap for the invading Russians and that he merely had to dust off his plans when he took over command of the 8th Army in August 1914.2 Members of his staff, however, were not content to allow the field marshal to take all the credit for planning the battle; both his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, and his first General Staff officer, Max Hoffmann, and even the commanding general of the I Corps, Hermann von François, claimed the honour, and each pressed his case after the war's end.3 Despite all that has been written, we will probably never know from whose head the idea for the encirclement at Tannenberg sprang, precisely because almost any General Staff officer in the German army could have, and would have, done almost the same thing faced with such a situation.
