Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

That will be in episode number 71, Germany Part 1, The Crown from the Gutter.

Part two is where we meet the mastermind of our series, the Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck, a brilliant, eccentric, ruthless politician, along with the other Prussian warlords who helped to forge Germany, King Wilhelm I, the War Minister Albrecht von Ruhn, and my favorite, the greatest general of the modern era, Helmut von Moltke.

Part two also covers the first of our three wars, the Second Schleswig War of 1864, where Austria and Prussia teamed up to fight Denmark.

The Schleswig War of 1864 is almost a footnote in European history, but for Denmark, it's a national tragedy, a national trauma that is almost unregarded by the rest of Europe.

I have four planned out.

First, the 48ers, the German immigrants who fled to America after the revolutions of 1848 and ended up fighting in the American Civil War.

Second, the Prussian army and the genius of Helmut von Moltke to do a deep dive on Prussian doctrine and Prussian military revolution to explain why the Prussians not only won these three wars, but built the theory behind modern warfare.

Third, the birth of Battlefield Medicine and the Red Cross.

It always will be the policy of Germany to avoid a war with Russia, unless supported by England and France.

The great military organization which Bismarck and Moltke affected, the immense standing army which Germany groans under, arises not from anticipated dangers on the part of France so much as from the fear of Russia, although it is not the policy of German statesmen to confess it openly.

If France should unite with Russia in a relentless war, Germany would probably be crushed, unless England came to the rescue.

Germany, placed between two powerful military monarchies, is obliged to keep up its immense standing army against its will as a dire necessity.

Leopold was sufficiently magnanimous to withdraw his claims, and here France's interference should have ended.

But France demanded guarantees that no future candidate should be proposed without her consent.

Of course the Prussian king, seeing with the keen eyes of Bismarck, and armed to the teeth under the supervision of Moltke, the greatest general of the age, who could direct, with the precision of a steam engine on a track, the movements of the Prussian army, itself a mechanism, treated with disdain this imperious demand from a power which he knew to be inferior to his own.

Count Bismarck craftily lured on his prey, who was already goaded forward by his home war party, with the empress at their head.

With implicit faith in the historians of his house, he had already come under the spell of dreams that took their rise in a remote past.

Although heir to a modern empire, entirely different from the Germanic Empire of Otto and Barbarossa, he had sedulously set himself to link up the creation of Bismarck and Moltke with that of the Middle Ages, to reforge the chain of historic tradition, to proclaim himself the heir of the old elected Caesars.

It is obviously with this intention that the Siegesallee was laid out through the Thiergarten in Berlin with its double row of marble statues, symmetrical and funereal, more suited to a royal family vault than to a public park.

There, almost shoulder to shoulder, stand emperors of Germany, ancient and modern, electors of Brandenburg and kings of Prussia, a significant pantheon.

At the same time he declared that he felt certain of victory.

The Belgian monarch, who was better informed as to the real inclinations of the French government and people, tried in vain to enlighten him and to dispel from his mind the false picture that he drew from the language of a handful of fanatical patriots, the picture of a France thirsting for war.

On the 6th of November General von Moltke, chief of the general staff, after a dinner to which the Emperor, in honor of his guest, had invited the leading officials present in Berlin, had a conversation with King Albert.

He expressed himself in the same terms as his sovereign on the subject of war with France, asserted that it was bound to come soon, and insisted still more emphatically on the certain prospect of success in view of the enthusiasm with which the whole German nation would gird up its loins to beat back the traditional foe.

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The Western Boundary and Other Essays by Helmut von Moltke Translated by Charles Flint McClumpher Preface to The Western Boundary The following essay, published in the second number of the Deutsche Filderjahrschrift, 1841, theoretically discusses a question to which the author was called upon to help work out a practical answer, thirty years later, in so glorious a manner.

Footnote.

The review Deutsche Füllte Jahrschrift was published from 1841 till 1870 by J. G. Cotter in Stuttgart, and was one of the first German reviews, as long as it continued to exist.

Among its contributors were the most famous scientists and prominent military leaders like Moltke and Punitz.

End of footnote.

This circumstance alone makes the essay valuable to the reader of today, but still more so the fact that much of the argument may be applied, in a really surprising manner, to the present itself as well as to the year 1840.

Once again, however, it came only to manifest how the French nation, which had rejoiced at the claims of Thiers, had allowed itself to be deceived in its desire for the German frontier.

Frederick earned a reputation as one of the greatest military commanders of the age, while his disciplined and well-drilled army was regarded as the best in Europe.

During the second half of the 18th century, Frederick and his successors joined Russia and Austria in the partitioning of Poland, which eliminated the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the map of Europe.

As a result of the partitions, the Kingdom of Prussia acquired the Greater Poland Region, renamed West Prussia, with Posen as its capital.

In the early 1800s, Emperor Napoleon's desire to expand French influence in Germany faced opposition from the leading Germanic powers, Austria in the south and Prussia in the north.