![]() ![]() Now, no noise can disturb the peace of the dead anymore. In the direction of the World War’s battlefield the forest is laid bare and against its backdrop one can find its mountainous area, for whichy such fierce battles were fought. At the foot of the hill lies a lake surrounded by meadows and woodlands typical of East-Prussia. The landscape was significantly opened up and the memorial itself elevated. ![]() In the new Germany, the grand Totenburg Tannenberg received great prestige. It used to be inevitable that the noise of daily life and the irreligious warts of tourist traffic could be heard even below the walls and towers of the Tannenberg memorial. But it also proves that the national socialist philosophy was the first to create the conditions for such a significant monumental construction of these types of memorials. The Tannenberg memorial, designated an Imperial monument by the Führer, proves how such a communal remembrance can be realized in a special local landscape such as East-Prussia. These memorials expressed the reverence of the whole community for those who died during the war. During the years following the war, the ‘Volksbond voor de verzorging van Duitsche oorlogsgraven uit den wereldoorlog’ (People's Union for the care of German wargraves’) erected memorials for the front line soldiers in expansion of its tasks of looking after the soldiers’ graves from the war. A united nation honors the memory of those who died for the community. It is a perfect expression of the zeitgeist. Troost and published by Uitgeverij Westland in 1943, we can learn the following about the Tannenberg memorial. In "Het bouwen in het Derde Rijk" ("Engineering in the Third Reich") written by G. ![]() The Tannenberg memorial is such a monument. It is not surprising therefore that many memorials were erected to honor victorious battles, military leaders, and fallen soldiers. To die for the country was tragic yet honorable. Six decades before that, however, people thought very differently regarding this subject. This is not incomprehensible given the horrific events of the Second World War. People are rather pacifistic and tend to commemorate victims of the persecution and other acts of violence. These types of hero worship do not longer suit the 21st century. In today’s Germany, people in general do not commemorate military acts of heroism, heroic personages or memorials. Source: Maurice Laarman Collection Hero worship To find out more about the magazine and how to subscribe, click here.The Tannenberg memorial. This is an article from the October 2014 issue of Military History Matters. But it was not decisive in any wider sense: Rennenkampf’s First Army fell back in good order after the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, while Germany’s Austro-Hungarian allies crashed to disastrous defeat in Galicia. Tannenberg was a decisive defensive battle in that it saved East Prussia from invasion. Both sides were aware that much en clair messaging was relatively safe. ![]() In any case, the air was alive with radio communications, and it required large numbers of trained enemy operators, fully equipped for interception work, to take full advantage. The Russian problem was lack of codebooks and trained personnel. The Germans also sent many uncoded messages during the campaign. The use of uncoded radio signals was not due to incompetence. In this respect, it represented a mix of 18th- and 20th-century technology. Beyond railhead, it moved at the speed of marching men and horse-drawn transport. The German Army, though more advanced than the Russian, was itself a hybrid. The technical arms were especially good: the Russian artillery was numerous and well-served, and there were no less than 244 military aircraft available at the outbreak of war. Part of the way through its modernisation programme, the Russian Army was a mix of tradition and modernity. The Russian ‘steamroller’ was not a uniformly primitive military machine. In consequence, the decisive battle of the war of movement in East Prussia was fought two weeks before that in the West (the Battle of the Marne). In fact, the Russians mobilised rapidly and launched an immediate offensive to relieve the pressure on their French allies in the West. German plans assumed slow Russian mobilisation. Russian prisoners being held at Tilsit station in August 1914. ![]()
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