It is the battle that forged the partnership, and the subsequent legend, of the German generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Sponsored Links Hindenburg commanded German forces during the August 1914 battle its comprehensive victory - it was perhaps the German Army's greatest success of the war - ultimately brought Hindenburg an appointment as German Army Chief of Staff in 1916. The Russians had lost 125,000 men, ten times the German losses. The Battle of Tannenberg (1914) was the first decisive clash between the Germans and the Russians in the twentieth century. Reproduced below is a summary of the Battle of Tannenberg by Paul von Hindenburg. On the third day (29 August), the I Corp completed the encirclement of the Russian army, after which Samsonov was never heard from again, and his army disintegrated. The German XCII and I Reserve Corps pushed back the Russian right, the I Corps their left, and the XX Corps attacked their centre. Unbelievably, the Russians were using uncoded radio transmissions, and by this point the Germans knew exactly where the Russian troops were. On 24 August the Russian advance was halted at the battle of Orlau-Frankenau by the German XX Corps, which then withdrew to Tannenberg. Samsonov, two Russian armies attacked Germany’s eastern border from Tannenberg, present-day northeastern Poland. The Battle of Tannenberg is famous for being one of the first main events of World War I.
After a series of minor defeats against the Russians, the Germans placed General Paul von Hindenburg in command of the eastern front, with General Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff, and on 22 August, before leaving for the east, Ludendorff put in place a plan to attack the Russian Second Army under General Alexander Samsonov, ignoring for the moment the Russian First Army. The Battle of Tannenberg was a decisive engagement between the Russian Empire and the German Empire in the first days of World War I. The German army captured 92,000 Russian soldiers as war prisoners during the Battle of Tannenberg.
Battle of the First World War a crushing German victory over the Russians invading East Prussia.