Hans von Seeckt

German military leader

• Born: April 22, 1866
• Birthplace: Schleswig, Prussia
• Died: December 27, 1936
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Seeckt reshaped Germany’s small post-World War I Reichswehr, or national defense, on modern lines, emphasizing the principles of mobility and combined attack later employed in the Blitzkrieg victories of 1940.

Early Life

Hans von Seeckt (zaykt) was the second surviving child and only surviving son of Captain (later General) Richard von Seeckt, and Auguste von Seeckt aus Greifswald. Gymnasium-educated and more intellectual than athletic, Hans joined the select Alexander Guards Regiment of the Prussian army as an ensign in 1885 and made second lieutenant in 1887. Hard work and intelligence earned for him a year at the War Academy in 1893, promotion to first lieutenant in 1894, General Staff assignments in 1897, and appointment to the German General Staff, with subsequent promotion to captain in 1899. Seeckt worked on the mobilization of the 1900 China Expedition and was promoted to major in 1906.

In 1893, Seeckt married Dorothea Jacobson Fabian, of German-Jewish middle-class background, in a happy though childless union. Seeckt’s foreign observer assignments plus holidays provided the couple with travel experience in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and India. Their Berlin home became a center for a varied society with broad cultural interests. By 1914, the slim, monocled, somewhat elegant major already had much the appearance of his later years.

In the War of 1914, Lieutenant Colonel von Seeckt planned the attack at Soisson well enough to be promoted to colonel and was sent to the eastern front as chief of staff for the Eleventh Army and Mackensen’s Army Group. Seeckt’s spectacular success in the Gorlice-Tarnow breakthrough of May, 1915, earned for him a promotion to major general but also the lasting jealousy of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. In 1916 and 1917, as chief of staff for Archduke Karl of Austria and later Archduke Joseph, he coordinated Austro-German operations in southeastern Europe. In 1918, Seeckt served as a lieutenant general in, and chief of staff for, the Turkish army under Enver Paşa.

Life’s Work

Late in 1918, Seeckt returned to a Germany shaken by the November collapse of the Kaiserreich. He strongly urged the view that the new Reichswehr was the legitimate heir to the old army rather than simply a creation of President Friedrich Ebert’s hastily contrived Weimar Republic. As organizer of northeastern defenses, Seeckt successfully pushed the recapture of Riga to show that Germany still counted in Eastern Europe. As an adviser, however, on the 1919 Treaty of Versailles settlement, he found the Allies adamant on German disarmament, which included abolishing the General Staff and reducing the army to four thousand officers plus ninety-six thousand men, all on long-term enlistments.

Seeckt preserved a de facto General Staff through the Truppenamt (troops bureau), which he headed after the retirement of Hindenburg and General Wilhelm Gröner in 1919. General Walther Reinhardt became army commander, and with him, and under Defense Minister Gustav Noske, Seeckt shared the tumultuous domestic and Freikorps conflicts of 1919 and 1920.

Such a conflict brought Seeckt to national prominence in March of 1920, when the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin threatened to overthrow the republic. Seeckt consistently opposed this attempt, in which General Ludendorff was a chief figure, but he refused to sanction divisive bloodshed. His persistent “Reichswehr do not shoot Reichswehr” line of argument preserved army unity, and, after civil officials and labor unions thwarted the putsch, the government promoted Seeckt to army commander in place of Reinhardt. Seeckt’s subsequent leniency toward some former putschists has been criticized.

Shaping Germany’s 100,000-man army into a credible military force was now the great task confronting Seeckt. The insignificance in numbers was compounded by Treaty of Versailles prohibitions on military aircraft, tracked vehicles, heavy guns, and trained reserves. What officer of ability and ambition would join an army incapable of beating any country worth calling an enemy? The situation required imaginative alternatives, political as well as military. Seeckt turned to Russia in 1921 to establish in that diplomatically isolated country some jointly owned factories for tank and airplane design. These covert projects were small, but their experimental planes and tanks loomed large in Seeckt’s military thinking. Also, this not totally secret prelude to the Rapallo Pact (1922) gave the German generals a sense of direction. Any Russo-German cooperation endangered Poland, and thereby weakened the French alliance structure in Eastern Europe.

In the Silesian border plebiscite of March, 1921, Seeckt sanctioned unofficial Freikorps activities, and these increased in scope during the 1923 French occupation of the Ruhr and the Rhineland Republic attempt. With the skyrocketing inflation of 1923, the economic and political weakness of the Weimar Republic invited a renewal of the “putsch politics” to which the Freikorps leaders gravitated. Seeckt adroitly squelched the Küstrin-Spandau Officers’ Putsch of September 30 and forcibly suppressed the Leipzig “Red Militia” in October. In the November, 1923, Munich Putsch, Seeckt strung out negotiations until, with emergency powers and Hindenburg’s support, he persuaded the Bavarian separatist leaders and the Reichswehr commanders to acknowledge and uphold the authority of the republic. This did not prevent Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler from leading a November 9, 1923, “March,” but its suppression by the local authorities seemed at the time a vindication of Seeckt’s methods.

There was in early 1924 some press speculation that Seeckt might use his emergency powers to make a putsch of his own, but Seeckt’s special powers had been conditioned on clear and public promises to support the republic. Seeckt may have intended to position himself for a presidential try in 1926, but on Ebert’s unexpected death in 1925, the patriotic candidate elected to be Reich president was Field Marshal Hindenburg. Seeckt was now no longer “the coming man” in politics, or at the top of army authority, but was henceforth an unnecessary and even inconvenient figure in both fields.

In February of 1926, Seeckt gave an incautious casual agreement to Crown Princess Cecilie’s request that her eldest son, Prince Wilhelm, be allowed to take part in some Reichswehr exercises. Seeckt’s staff failed to keep this participation (September 13-21) as discreetly obscure as he had ordered, and German news stories inspired foreign fears of a Hohenzollern restoration. Worse, when War Minister Otto Gessler asked for an explanation, Seeckt penned such an unsatisfactory reply that Gessler asked for his resignation. Seeckt appealed to the president, but Hindenburg accepted Seeckt’s resignation on October 8.

The last decade of Seeckt’s life was active but less influential. After travel vacations with his wife, Seeckt wrote several books and articles and was from 1930 to 1932 a People’s Party member of the Reichstag. The 1932 reelection of Hindenburg and the 1933 accession to power of the Nazis ended his political activities. Still nominally an “adviser” to the Reichswehr, from 1933 to 1935 he established the German military mission to the Chinese Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1935, Seeckt returned to Germany in ill health, and the final year of his life was one of ceremonies and tributes, in great part from the Nazi leaders who now controlled the Reich. Seeckt died in Berlin on December 27, 1936.

Significance

The narrative of Seeckt’s political fortunes accounts for much of his career, but the task of rebuilding the army was the work for which he was, and remains, celebrated. Briefly, Seeckt rejected the World War I overemphasis on mass armies and entrenched defensive firepower and proposed a mobile offensive with new technology to win by disorganizing the enemy’s power to resist. Effective general staff control of war policy was a key to success, and the preserving, organizing, and directing of this staff was an immediate priority for Seeckt. The mobile offensive involved a coordinated firepower concentration with a capacity to advance in the course of battle. The airplanes, tanks, gun carriers, and even cavalry of the attack must be accompanied or closely followed by men, ammunition, and fuel. The mechanization, motorization, and radio command of the next war would impose a speed of action controllable only by a staff of highly trained professionals. Seeckt evidently had no exact blueprint for the practical details and technical problems involved, to the frustration of many of his staff, who had to prepare “maneuvers” with conspicuously imaginary weapons. Seeckt’s general concept of the next war was not unique among contemporary military theorists, but his fellow visionaries in France and Great Britain were not in command, and their supreme commanders did not share the vision, with results made manifest in 1940.

In restoring the morale of a defeated army, Seeckt succeeded beyond all expectations, as the dispirited though dogged style of 1919 steadily improved into the energetic and purposeful confidence of 1926. This was a morale that refused to accept the defeat of 1918 as final and that defied the 1919 treaties. These sentiments were felt, or at least understood, by most Germans. The burdens of Versailles, weakness of the League of Nations, and Allied hypocrisy on “disarmament” seemed to justify Seeckt in making Germany’s small army at least one that was ready to fight. The later political developments of the 1930’s were not then anticipated.

Politics, indeed, were not Seeckt’s métier. His ability at logical deduction from fixed principles, perhaps useful in his idea of an army-state, was ill-suited to Germany’s experiment in democracy. As a monarchist and authoritarian, Seeckt could not love the republic, although he served it better than some of his critics have admitted. Like many others, Seeckt in 1932 believed that Hitler might be the leader Germany needed and learned better only when it was too late.

Seeckt was not by training or nature an innovator, and his turn of thought was contemplative rather than original or creative, a fact that limited his capacity for inventing new mobile offensive tactics for practical operations. He saw with logical clarity that the accepted objectives and principles of warfare were lost sight of in World War I’s “strategy of attrition,” which opposed modern technology with great human numbers until the side with more lives to spend became the winner. For soldiers to exploit the technology of war rather than to be exploited by it was the useful premise of Seeckt’s thinking.

Bibliography

Carsten, Francis L. The Reichswehr and Politics, 1918-1933. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1966. The best account of German army politics in the Seeckt era. This is not a biography or a sympathetic look at Seeckt’s politics but a detailed and scholarly work drawn from extensive research in the papers of many army leaders.

Corum, James S. The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Describes how Seeckt devised a new military doctrine and developed the means for launching an offensive mobile war.

Craig, Gordon A. The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640-1945. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1955. A moderately critical history by an American scholar; provides a useful introduction and background.

Dupuy, T. N. A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. This general work includes a good two-page biography of Seeckt plus a readable account of Seeckt’s political career, with a practical sense of the normal military role.

Goerlitz, Walter. History of the German General Staff, 1657-1945. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953. Standard general history by a respected German scholar; gives a good introduction and background.

Gordon, Harold J. The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919-1926. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Best defense of Seeckt’s politics by an American scholar. Well documented. Critical of the republic’s antimilitary bias. Overlooks some points covered by Francis Carsten and is too credulous of police reports but gives more inside information than most authors attempt.

Salomon, Ernst von. The Outlaws. Translated by Ian F. D. Morrow. London: Jonathan Cape, 1931. A Freikorps member’s memoir. Distasteful, but generally authentic, and an essential supplement to academic studies of Freikorps politics.

Seeckt, Hans von. Thoughts of a Soldier. Translated by Gilbert Waterhouse. London: E. Benn, 1930. This is the most useful of several short works published in English. Seeckt’s style does not translate easily.

Strohn, Matthias. “Hans von Seeckt and His Vision of a Modern Army.” War in History 12, no. 3 (July, 2005): 318. Discusses Seeckt’s role in developing the Reichswehr during the Weimar Republic.

Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John Wheeler. The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918-1945. London: Macmillan, 1953. The most widely read and broadly informative version of the thesis that the German generals undermined the republic and sold out to Hitler. The chapter on Seeckt presents more interpretation than research.