German Eastern Front chief of staff who placed his soldier's boot on the Brest-Litovsk negotiating table
"The General on several occasions put his soldier's boot on the table around which the discussion was taking place": Trotsky, who wrote that 'Hoffmann's boot was the only reality to take seriously'
An outstanding strategic staff officer who, as Chief of Operations of the German Eighth Army, devised the plans that destroyed the Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. As Chief of Staff of the Eastern Front from late 1917, he was the driving force behind the German position at the Brest-Litovsk peace talks: on 18 January 1918 he spread a map before the Soviet delegation and demanded the severance of Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine from Russia. After Trotsky's 'neither war nor peace' declaration, Hoffmann commanded Operation Faustschlag, an unopposed advance that compelled the Bolsheviks to accept far harsher final terms. He embodied the asymmetry between revolutionary diplomacy and imperial military force, most memorably by placing his soldier's boot on the negotiating table.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1899–1914Served in Russian Section of German General Staff; observer with Japanese army, Russo-Japanese War
- 1914–1916Operations officer, 8th Army, 9th Army & Ober Ost; architect of Tannenberg & Masurian Lakes
- 1916–1918Chief of Staff, Eastern Front (Major General); led German side at Brest-Litovsk negotiations
- 1918.2–3Commanded Operation Faustschlag; imposed final treaty terms on Soviet Russia
- 1919–1920Brigade commander on Polish border; retired March 1920
- 1920–1927Campaigned for anti-Soviet coalition intervention (Hoffmann Plan); wrote memoirs
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarGerman Eastern Front staff chiefOn the First World War's Eastern Front, he planned battles as chief of staff of the German Eighth Army.
- 1917.12–1918.11Brest-Litovsk and Germany’s eastern occupationGerman military negotiatorChief of staff of the German eastern army, he tabled the real annexationist terms on 27 December 1917, showed the demanded frontier on a map on 18 January 1918 and called Faustschlag 'the most comical war'.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionChief German negotiator at Brest-LitovskHe presented the territorial demands map to the Soviet delegation on 18 January 1918 and pushed for harsher terms after Operation Faustschlag, confronting Trotsky.
Postwar anti-Soviet activity and the 'Hoffmann Plan' (1919-1927)
After the war Hoffmann remained a committed anti-Soviet activist even after leaving the army under the republic. In 1919 he was given command of a brigade along the Polish border, but he was retired in March 1920 from the small new army led by Hans von Seeckt, who had quarrelled with him during the war; he then settled in Berlin with his wife, the painter Corinna-Irena Hoffmann. He was the intellectual author of the so-called 'Hoffmann Plan', first formulated in 1922. Together with the industrialist Arnold Rechberg he pushed a scheme under which Germany, jointly with Britain and France, would intervene militarily in Soviet Russia, overthrow the Soviet government in favour of a 'constitutional Russian government', and restore Russia economically. In 1926 and 1927 discussions were held in London under the auspices of the Dutch industrialist Henri Deterding, where the plan and its implementation were debated intensely, and Deterding backed a possible execution with money for Hoffmann. The Reichswehr leadership, however, took no interest: it was then relying on military cooperation with the Soviet Union instead. In the 1920s Hoffmann and Rechberg were also caught up in an affair involving forgeries of Russian chervonets notes intended to undermine Soviet currency; Rechberg was acquitted in 1930. He was prolific as an author as well. In 'Der Krieg der versaeumten Gelegenheiten' (The War of Missed Opportunities, 1923) he settled scores with Falkenhayn and Ludendorff and portrayed Hindenburg as incompetent, while 'An allen Enden Moskau' (1925) addressed the problem of Bolshevism and 'Tannenberg wie es wirklich war' (1926) stressed his own share in the battle. Writing in Berlin from 1919 to 1927, his notes from this period appeared in 1929 as the posthumous papers edited by Karl Friedrich Nowak, which also disclosed in softened form some of his critical remarks on Hindenburg. Hoffmann died unexpectedly of a stroke on 8 July 1927 while taking a cure at Bad Reichenhall, and was buried in the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin. When that cemetery was more than 90 percent destroyed after the Wall was built in 1961, his gravestone was among the few moved and preserved, and in 2002 it was re-erected over the surviving tomb at its historic site after a survey commissioned by a friends' association and the Berlin monuments authority. The rear of the stone, renewed in 2002, commemorates Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes and the winter battle of Lyck and Augustow, while the side records his honorary citizenship of his native Homberg and his wife's portrait of him in the town hall.