Chief of Staff, Vol. 1 by Zabecki David;

Author:Zabecki, David; [Zabecki, David T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

After serving as first general staff officer (Ia hereafter) at Germany’s High Command East (Oberost hereafter) since November 1914, Hoffmann became the chief of staff at that headquarters on 30 August 1916. On the same day, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria succeeded Hindenburg as the commander of Oberost, with permanent quarters in and around Brest-Litovsk. Leopold—a brother of the reigning king of Bavaria and a son-in-law of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria—had been a professional soldier for over forty years and previously had commanded both an army and an army group on the eastern front. It would therefore be quite wrong to assume that the elderly prince was merely a figurehead in his new post and that Hoffmann could henceforth do whatever he wished. It is clear, on the other hand, that on some occasions, and particularly during the armistice and peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, the field marshal did indeed give his chief of staff a free hand.4

When Colonel Hoffmann took over as chief of staff, he could count on several seasoned veterans of the previous regime to help him with his new responsibilities. Among these were the deputy chief of staff for logistics (Oberquartiermeister), Maj. Gen. Ernst von Eisenhart-Rothe, and the highly talented senior intelligence officer, Maj. Fritz Gempp (who later created the Abwehr service of the Reichswehr).5 Of the staff officers newly recruited by Hoffmann, three were particularly noteworthy. To fill the Ia slot he himself had just vacated, Hoffmann chose Maj. Viktor Keller, a very capable man who previously had served in a similar capacity at corps and army headquarters on the Russian front.6 After Keller was promoted to a more senior position, Hoffmann recruited Maj. Friedrich Brinckmann to take his place. Brinckmann not only was a seasoned staff officer with extensive experience on the eastern front, but also was quite versatile. Before the war he had served as a military attaché in Belgium and the Netherlands, and in 1918–19 he would once again be used in politically sensitive posts.7 It seems clear that during his posting to Oberost (from November 1916 to June 1918) Brinckmann was Hoffmann’s closest advisor, while Maj. Karl Hofmann, the second general staff officer (Ib), became an equally trusted executor of Hoffmann’s wishes. Admired for his “incredible stamina and zest for work,” Hoffmann had begun his career in the corps of engineers, and was thus particularly suited to deal with the technological aspects of modern war.8 In 1918 General Hoffmann also relied heavily on Maj. Edmund Wachenfeld, who acted as a roving observer of frontline units for his deskbound chief.9

After Gempp was transferred to other duties in November 1916, the senior intelligence post at Oberost was filled in succession by two brothers, Emil and Robert von Winterfeld. The latter, another engineer by background, had joined Oberost as a junior intelligence officer in 1914 and would spend the entire war period and much of the 1920s in that field.10 When he was reassigned to the central office of the secret military intelligence branch (Abteilung IIIb), Capt.

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