Thus far, the Bundeswehr's General Staff system has been presented descriptively and within functional categories. At the center of this exposition was the illustration of the peculiarities of the German General Staff officer as the commander's adviser. This chapter is intended to illustrate the way the Bundeswehr General Staff officers see themselves and their working methods through the discussion of historical milestones.
The term General Staff has gone through various changes of meaning. In the 16th century, it described a group of top-ranking generals. King Frederick the Great was his own Chief of Staff because officers functioning as advisers did not exist in his Army. He formed a corps of orderlies who reconnoitered the terrain and conveyed his personal orders to subordinate commanders. This corps was called the Quartermaster General Staff (General-quartiermeisterstab). In Frederick's major formations, brigadier majors served as staff officers. They wrote reports and gathered information for the battle. Napoleon's General Staff can be described as a military office directed by the Chief of the General Staff. Napoleon did not tolerate officers who interfered with matters of command and control. Marshal Berthier, his Chief of the General Staff for many years, was only tasked to pass on his orders. Thus, he did not participate in command and control activities. Therefore, the historic roots of the Prussian-German General Staff system do not go back to Frederick the Great or Napoleon, as has often been falsely assumed.
The man who created the Prussian-German General Staff was David Gerhard von Scharnhorst from Hannover. The son of a former noncommissioned officer of Schaumburg-Lippe and tenant farmer, he was born in 1755 in Bordenau near Hannover at the lake Steinhuder Meer. He received his military education and training in the school of the Count von Schaumburg-Lippe, located in Castle Wilhelmstein at the Steinhuder Meer. In 1801 he applied to the King of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm III, for employment in the Prussian service. He received the rank of lieutenant colonel and was raised to nobility.
Scharnhorst and a group of young Prussian officers had recognized early the sweeping changes in military affairs that had taken place in the course of the French Revolution and refined by Napoleon. They wanted to use them to good advantage for the renewal of Prussia as a military power. This was deemed necessary because the mass armies of the wars of the French Revolution and the demands for general conscription terminated the era of cabinet wars of King Frederick the Great's time. Initially soldiers driven by patriotic enthusiasm fought in the French revolutionary armies, thus differing greatly from the armies of mercenaries of the era of Frederick the Great. Consequently, the Prussian commanders around 1800 were no match for Napoleon's military genius. The new era called for scientifically trained officers, who were supposed to support the commanders as advisers. In Prussia, however, there were not very many of them.
The General Staff dating back to the times of the Prussian King, Frederick the Great, was reorganized in 1803. General von Geusau established three brigades, each commanded by a lieutenant colonel. These lieutenant colonels were called quartermaster lieutenants (Quartiermeisterleutnants) and were supported by 18 officers holding major's or captain's rank. The new Quartermaster Staff did not have an effect on the Battle of Jena and Auerstaedt in 1806. By then, the staff's powers and methods of working had not been developed sufficiently. We can say, however, that the roots of today's General Staff officer go back to the Prussian Quartermaster General Staff of 1803.
In the fighting following the Battle of Jena and Auerstaedt, the relationship between the commander and the scientifically trained General Staff officer typically found in later German armies came into being. When General von Bluecher withdrew from the pursuing French over the Harz mountain range, Scharnhorst assisted him as an adviser. Bluecher had a very high opinion of his educated adviser and accepted his advice regarding operations and command and control. It is justified to consider this as the birth of the "commander's adviser" (Fuehrergehilfe) of the Prussian-German General Staff System.
In 1808 the Prussian War Ministry was newly created. It was headed by Scharnhorst, who was at the same time the Chief of the General Staff. French protests forced Scharnhorst to give up his position as a War Minister. However, he remained the Quartermaster General, which was the Prussian title of the Chief of the General Staff. In 1807 King Frederick Wilhelm III appointed him to head the Military Reorganization Commission to reestablish Prussia's Army and to clear it of the officers who had failed in the 1806 campaign. He was assisted by 2 or 3 Quartermasters of major general or colonel rank, 3 to 5 Quartermaster lieutenants holding major rank and 12 adjutants of captain rank. On the whole the Quartermaster General Staff consisted of 21 officers. The staff was assigned to prepare the Prussian Army for wartime operations, as well as train the Prussian King's operations staff for wartime and support him in his capacity as the Commander in Chief.
In 1804 Scharnhorst founded an academy for young officers who had emerged from a voluntary association of young, studious officers that had surrounded him. Among them was Carl von Clausewitz, a lieutenant at that time. After the lost Battle of Jena and Auerstaedt, the Academy was dissolved. In 1810 Scharnhorst laid the foundation for the General War School (Allgemeine Kriegsschule), which was supposed to be the counterpart of Humboldt University that opened the same year. First, this school was intended to prepare two classes of officer candidates for their officer's examination and to offer young officers an opportunity to receive higher, scientific training. Later King Frederick Wilhelm III founded three war schools for officer candidates and the General War School was reserved for senior officers. From this time onwards, the school was to be an "educational establishment for all branches and was to replace those institutions that concentrate on the training of an officer for just one field of knowledge." The training objective of the General War School was stated in old fashioned language:
Although the training is tailored to teach the student the special knowledge and skills corresponding to his future assignments, great store is set by combining the studies with extended use of thinking in order to make the training of the mind the main subject of training."
Training at the General War School lasted 3 years. The school's capacity permitted the training of 50 officers who first had to pass an entrance examination. From 1819 the Inspector General for Military Training and Education was placed in charge of the General War School. Henceforth, it was reserved for those officers who, after having acquired profound knowledge, wanted "to prepare themselves for higher and extraordinary tasks in the service," i.e., mainly for future General Staff officers. The number of officers registered for training every year was reduced to 40, and the subjects were taught in the form of lectures as in a university. For 3 years, the lectures were held from October 15 to July 15 of the respective year of training. In the interim, the students served in other branches of service
On October 1, 1859, the General War School was renamed the War Academy (Kriegsakademie). The War Academy was supervised by the Chief of the General Staff. The management of the Academy was split into a military directorate responsible for disciplinary affairs, and a studies directorate responsible for the scientific portion of the curriculum. General von Clausewitz, who was one of its military directors for many years, wrote his monumental work On War (Vom Kriege) during this assignment. Being the military director, he did not exert any influence on the curriculum of the Academy. The War Academy was the precursor to the Bundeswehr's Command and General Staff Academy.
The far-reaching congruence of objectives of the Humboldt University and the training at the General War School shows that Scharnhorst and his fellow reformers wanted much more than military reforms. Their activities must always be considered within the framework of the overall Prussian reforms. Scharnhorst, who had advanced due to his brilliant abilities, wanted to open up all positions within the renewed Prussian Army for scientifically trained officers, without regard to their social background. The group of noble leaders who dominated the Prussian Army overwhelmingly disapproved of the necessity of scientific education for the officer. Scharnhorst wanted to force them to compete for their qualifications with a new academic elite. However, he was realistic enough to realize that it was not possible in Prussia to do away with a system that continued to select military leaders according to class and birth.
He was right in his assessment. In the Prussian Army, and the federal contingents attached to the Imperial Army (Reichsheer) after 1870, soldiers of the higher nobility commanded armies up to the end of World War I without being properly trained for this task. There were, however, some notable exceptions such as the Bavarian Crown Prince during World War I. Scharnhorst wanted to diminish the weakness of this system by providing these army commanders with General Staff officers as their advisers. This, then, served as the decisive root to support the need for a "commander's first adviser," a concept whose effects are felt to this day. The need for a trained body of General Staff officers was the result of the increase in the size of the 19th century armies and their organization into separate divisions and corps. For both logistical and strategic reasons these formations usually marched separately and united only to do battle. The complex management of these forces required professionally trained General Staff officers. The founders of the Prussian-German General Staff pursued aims that went beyond military professional matters. The reformers' political and educational objective was to create a constitutional monarchy in which the best should have access to all functions and positions in the army. These new, basically middle-class qualification features were to be effective in the Prussian-German General Staff from that day on. During the 19th century, conservative Prussian officers fought against the goal of the reformers that officer candidates should be high school or even college graduates and pass an officers' examination before graduation. They believed that by these requests, officer candidates from noble families would not be competitive with better academically trained candidates, from educated commoners' families, and that the nobility would lose influence in the officers' corps. This dispute never affected the General Staff officers and their recruitment and selection by means of examinations. Thus, qualification requirements based on merit alone were accepted in the General Staff earlier than in other social strata. This phenomenon must certainly be considered a further important historic milestone for the Bundeswehr's General Staff officer.