Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Biography

Helmuth von Moltke was born in 1800 in Parchim, Mecklenburg, to a family that soon settled in Danish Holstein. He trained at the military academy in Copenhagen and began his career in the Danish army, but in 1822 transferred to the Prussian service and completed the course at the general war school in Berlin in 1826. Posted to the general staff in the early 1830s, he also wrote fiction, history and travel accounts and translated part of Gibbon.

From 1835 he spent four years in the Ottoman Empire advising Sultan Mahmud II's army, surveying the Straits and Anatolia, and was present at the Ottoman defeat at Nezib in 1839. Back in Prussia he became an early advocate of the military use of railways, served as a corps chief of staff, and in 1855 became aide to Prince Frederick William.

Appointed chief of the Prussian General Staff in 1857, Moltke turned it into a modern planning body built on railway mobilisation, staff training and broad directives that left subordinates room to act. He directed the later stages of the war against Denmark in 1864 and planned the decisive campaigns against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870-71, victories that made possible the unification of Germany.

Made a count in 1870 and a field marshal in 1871, he led the Great General Staff of the new German Empire until he retired in 1888, and sat in the Reichstag from 1871 until his death. In 1889 he recorded his voice on an Edison phonograph, the earliest-born person whose voice survives. He died in Berlin in 1891.