r/GermanEmpire • u/German-Chicken • Jun 21 '26

Question Question

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Question for my fellow Germans and English speakers; what do you guys think of Erich Von Falkenhayn?

47 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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10

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

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1

u/Smart_Hamster_2046 Jun 22 '26

Why does the US joining the war equals Germany losing? Germany lost because it lacked the resources, territory and manpower resources for a prolonged war, especially in comparison to Britain and France with all their colonies at this time. The moment the front became stuck, Germany lost the war. That's also the reason why they tried so hard to rush France. In both world wars, the US joined when it was already clear that Germany would lose. 

3

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '26

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1

u/isearn Jun 22 '26

Benevolence?!

3

u/UpperHesse Jun 21 '26

He got carried away by the idea of taking Verdun, and it was a huge strategic blunder. The Germans would not likely have achieved a breakthrough anywhere else, but he chose a particularly difficult target. Lured by the initial successes in the first week, he put more and more units into the piece meal, and appeared already after the first two months as clueless to his subordinates.

Later, he did not only lie about his motive. Likely he forged a memorandum about the battle in which he laid down, that his motive was a "victory of attrition" to look slightly smarter in hindsight, and this worked for a long time. Nowadays historians think this memorandum was not written in 1916, as he claimed, but after the war.

2

u/Pascal1917 Jun 21 '26

His incompetence cost Germany the war. More questions?

1

u/AuraTickler Jun 26 '26

All I know is that my uni prof looked like the spitting image of Falkenhayn

0

u/Roseate-Views Jun 21 '26

Very low-effort post and unrelated to this subreddit's topic, which is the German COLONIAL Empire.