Helmuth von Moltke

Helmuth von Moltke (born October 26, 1800, Parchim, Mecklenburg [Germany]—died April 24, 1891, Berlin, Germany) was the chief of the Prussian and German General Staff (1858–88) and the architect of the victories over Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1871).

Early career

Moltke’s father, a man of unstable character, belonged to the nobility of Mecklenburg, his mother to an old family of the free city of Lübeck. The Moltkes were impoverished, and young Helmuth, whose health was not too good, had an unhappy start to life. Since his father had emigrated to Holstein (then a Danish possession) in 1805 and had taken Danish nationality, the boy completed his education with the Royal Cadet Corps in Copenhagen and joined a Danish infantry regiment. After a visit to Berlin in 1821, however, he decided to transfer to the Prussian Army, and in 1822 he obtained a commission as a second lieutenant in the Prussian Life Guards, being posted to Frankfurt an der Oder.

In October 1823 Moltke was sent to the General War College for a three-year course, but, since his health was deteriorating, he went in the summer of 1825 to Bad Salzbrunn for convalescence, during which he studied modern languages. On his return to Frankfurt in the summer of 1826 he took up writing, largely to improve his financial position, and published a novel, Die beiden Freunde (1827; new ed. 1957). In May 1828 he was transferred to the General Staff’s Topographical Bureau in Berlin.

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Continuing his literary work, Moltke published his Darstellung der innern Verhältnisse und des gesellschaftlichen Zustandes in Polen (1832; Poland: An Historical Sketch, 1885) and also accepted a publisher’s offer for a translation of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Although he completed most of it, the work was never published.

Moltke was attached to the Prussian General Staff in March 1832 and promoted to the rank of first lieutenant a year later. Toward the end of 1835 he was sent to Turkey to advise Sultan Mahmud II on the modernization of the Turkish Army, and in 1836 he was authorized by Berlin to enter the Turkish service. After some work in Istanbul and travels in the Balkans, he went in 1838 to Armenia, where Turkish forces were preparing an offensive against the Egyptian invaders of Syria. The failure of the offensive, in 1839, was due largely to the Turkish commander’s disregard of Moltke’s advice.

Returning to Germany at the end of 1839, Moltke reentered the Prussian service. He published a selection of his letters from Turkey, Briefe über Zustände und Begebenheiten in der Türkei, in 1841. In April 1842 he married an English girl, Marie Burt (1825–68), stepdaughter of his sister Augusta. An essay on the considerations that should govern the choice of routes for new railways (1843) is more significant of his future than his next book, Der russisch-türkische Feldzug in der europäischen Türkei 1828–1829 (1845; The Russians in Bulgaria and Rumelia, 1854).

Late in 1845 Moltke was appointed personal aide-de-camp to the invalid prince Henry of Prussia (1781–1846), who was living privately in Rome. Though this appointment ended with Prince Henry’s death, it gave Moltke the opportunity to begin work on a splendid topographical map of Rome and its vicinity (published in 1852) and to write his “Wanderungen um Rom” (published in his Wanderbuch, 1879; Notes of Travel, 1880). Moreover, when the warship bringing Prince Henry’s body back to Germany reached Gibraltar, Moltke left it and made his own way home across Spain, recording his impressions in his “Tagebuchblätter aus Spanien” (also published in the Wanderbuch).

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Working again for the Prussian General Staff, Moltke started thinking about the major problems confronting Prussia: the unification of Germany and the security of a country surrounded by potential enemies yet lacking natural frontiers. He was convinced that only the army could provide a satisfactory solution to these problems, and he expressed his delight at the suppression of the revolution of 1848–49 by writing to his brother that the curtain had come down on Prussia’s worst enemy—democracy.

A colonel from 1851, Moltke was in 1855 appointed personal aide-de-camp to Prince Frederick William, the future king of Prussia and German emperor (Frederick III). This post involved more travels: to Scotland and thence to England, to Russia (Briefe aus Russland, 1877; Letters from Russia, 1878), and to France. Even so, apart from the period of his Turkish service and his brief stay in Rome, Moltke’s career up to 1856 had been mostly dull routine or concerned with the affairs of his princely masters rather than the profession of arms. Only in Turkey had he served with troops.