In the middle of the plaza was located the tomb of 20 unknown German soldier who had died during the 1914 battle. The overall appearance of the monument was strongly suggestive of a Teutonic castle, an indication that the Germans viewed the 1914 victory as in some way a reprisal for the defeat suffered 500 years earlier in an encounter with Slav armies. Linking the individuals towers were 20 foot-high walls, solid on the outside but on the inside forming an arcade facing the monument's central plaza. In the middle of each of the eight sides rose a 75 foot-high tower 30 by 30 feet at its base. Standing on a man-made rise in the ground, the monument, a structure of imposing proportions took the shape of a regular octagon 325 feet across. He became President of Germany after the war and as such he appointed Adolf Hitler to be its Chancellor in 1933. Hindenburg, who in 1916 became Chief of Staff of the German Army. The monument was built in the period 1925-27. In 1924, on the 10th anniversary of the battle, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had commanded the German troops in the battle, took part in the laying of the monument's foundation stone, a ceremony attended by some 60 thousand people, primarily veterans of WWI. It resulted in the submission of over 400 projects and was won by the brothers Walter and Johann Kruger, architects from Berlin. Subsequently, a contest was staged for a design of the monument. The concept of erecting a monument to celebrate the 1914 victory was first advanced in 1919 by the Association of the Veterans of East Prussia. In the face of the defeat, Samsonov walked off into the woods and committed suicide. Only around 10,000 of Samsonov's men had escaped. On this latter occasion the German victory had been total: of the 150,000 strong Russian Second Army 92,000 had been taken prisoner and another 30,000 were killed or wounded. The 1914 victory became known in Germany as the Second Battle of Tannenberg. In part the battle took place in the vicinity of the village of Tannenberg, the location where some 500 years earlier the combined Polish-Lithuanian forces had dealt a crushing defeat to the Teutonic Knights, a German Military Order. In the interwar period a monument was erected at Hohenstein then in German East Prussia (now Olsztynek in the Polish voivodship of Warmia and Mazury) to the celebrate the late August 1914 WWI battle in which the German Army surrounded and annihilated the Russian Second Army commanded by General Samsonov.
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