"1914: German numbers" Topic

Hi all,

I mistakenly began a post of the same name on the batrp page, so am re-posting here. Apologies…

I am thoroughly confused – can anyone please enlighten me? I am watching a documentary ('Great War in Numbers') that says the Germans mobilised 4.5m men at the start of the war. Wow!

The documentary then seems to indicate that only around 1 million Germans participated in the Schlieffen Plan, although I'm not clear whether that includes all the armies in the west (inc. those defending Alsace-Lorraine), or just those involved in Moltke's giant cartwheel.

I know some troops were deployed to slow down the Russians, but certainly not vast numbers. Hindenburg seems only to have had about 150,000 at Tannenberg.

So where was the balance of the 4.5m Germans supposedly mobilised in 1914?

Posters on the batrep page have suggested that it wouldn't be unusual for a small proportion of mobilised troops to be with front line armies, but this seems strange. I'd have expected the German Army to have been teeth-heavy and tail-light, relatively speaking.

Any help would be greatly appreciated – thanks in advance!

A lot of that number is troops being called up to fill out reserve formations. They weren't ready for the front lines for a while. Also, even back then there were an incredible number of rear-echelon troops. I was just reading a book on the Russian Army in WWI and even in the last days before everything fell apart in 1917, the Russian army had about 5 million men under arms, but could only muster about a million and half on the front lines.