Origin Paul Georg Edler von Rennenkampff was born on 29 April 1854 in the manor of
Konofer (now Konuvere,
Märjamaa parish, Estonia) in the then
Governorate of Estonia, one of eight children of
Captain Karl Gustav Edler von Rennenkampff and Anna Gabriele Ingeborg Freiin von Stackelberg, he came from the Konofer–Tuttomäggi–Sastama branch of the
Baltic German Rennenkampff family and was of
Lutheran faith. His paternal ancestors were of
Westphalian origin, originating in
Osnabrück. On his mother's side was the Stackelberg family, whose common ancestor was
Carl Adam von Stackelberg, a
Swedish cavalry officer and participant in
The Great Northern War.
Early career As a youth, Rennenkampf was educated in the
Tallinn Knight and Cathedral School (; ), a
German-speaking school established especially for local
Baltic German aristocrats. Upon graduation, he joined the military as a non-commissioned officer in the 89th Infantry Regiment. He graduated the in
Helsinki and began his military career with the Lithuanian 5th Lancers Regiment. He graduated at the top of his class from the
Nicholas General Staff Academy in
St. Petersburg (or at the first category) in 1881. From late August to late November 1884, he was an over-officer of the
14th Army Corps, specialising in instruction. In late September 1886, he was the chief of staff of the
Warsaw Military District, serving under General and later Field Marshal
Count Gurko. In early 1888, he was appointed to the Kazan Military District. Rennenkampf subsequently became the senior adjutant to the headquarters of the
Don Cossacks. In late October 1889, he was appointed headquarters officer for special assignment at the
2nd Army Corps headquarters. In late March 1890, he was appointed the chief of staff of the
Osowiec Fortress in
Russian Poland. The same year he was promoted to
colonel, after which he served in several different regiments until late November 1899, when he was appointed chief of staff of the Transbaikal region, and was promoted to
major general.
Boxer Rebellion From 1900 to 1901, Rennenkampf participated in the suppression of the
Boxer Rebellion in
China. He distinguished himself with extreme success during the campaign, receiving both the 4th and 3rd classes of the
Order of St. George for military distinction. in 1901 In mid-September, Rennenkampf left for Dagushan, leaving hundreds of troops to protect the mint and arsenal. After several days of resetting, he attacked and occupied
Tieling and
Mukden with his detachment attacked, maintaining control until October. Within this time, the general survived numerous assassination attempts; during one encounter, when he and his troops entered a manor, three Chinese men with spears charged toward the general, with a Cossack, Fyodor Antipyev, saving the general and being stabbed himself. For military distinction, he was awarded the Order of St. George of the 3rd degree. The raid of the cavalry detachment of Rennenkampf was one of the most successful and decisive military operations in the Boxer Rebellion. In just three months of actions, Russian troops had taken over 2,500m2 of land, the best trained Chinese troops stationed at
Heilongjiang were defeated and pushed out of Manchuria, and rebel detachments were dispersed, leading to the cessation of the Chinese resistance movement against their Russian occupiers.
Russo-Japanese War In February 1904, after the outbreak of the
Russo-Japanese War, Rennenkampf was appointed commander of the Trans-Baikal Cossack Division. In June, he was promoted to
lieutenant-general in recognition of his military distinction. In late June 1904, while scouting the
Japanese positions at
Liaoyang, he was shot in the leg, shattering the
shin. After less than two months he returned to active service, without fully recovering from his wounds. In the
Battle of Mukden, Rennenkampf again distinguished himself commanding the Tsinghechensky detachment, which was stationed at the left flank of the
1st Manchurian Army led by General
Nikolai Linevich. During the battle, he showed great persistence, which, combined with other reinforcements, was able to repulse
Field Marshal Kawamura's offensive. According to some historians and writers, after the Battle of Mukden, a personal conflict occurred between Rennenkampf and General
Samsonov and it came to an exchange of blows, which made the two of them lifelong foes; some other historians argue that there could be no clashes between the generals. The main source of this rumor is the memoirs of the German general
Max Hoffmann, who was an observer with the Imperial Japanese Army during the war; capable of personally observing relations among Russian generals, he would subsequently become one of Rennenkampf's enemies in the
First World War. In his memoirs, which refer again to rumors, Hoffmann mentioned that both generals quarrelled in Liaoyang after the battle; however, this claimed argument remains physically impossible, as Rennenkampf was seriously injured at this time. After the war, Rennenkampf commanded numerous army corps, including the 7th Siberian Army Corps, the
3rd Siberian Army Corps and the
3rd Army Corps.
1905 Russian Revolution After the war, Rennenkampf commanded an infantry battalion with several machine guns which followed a train in
Harbin, restoring communications between the Manchurian Army and Western Siberia. Within this time, the
Revolution broke out; this task remained interrupted via a revolutionary movement in Eastern Siberia, the
Chita Republic. Rennenkampf and his forces were sent to suppress the movement, successfully restoring order in
Chita. After this campaign, he remained a target for assassination by numerous rebel groups and several plots to assassinate him were planned. In late October 1906, he faced an assassination attempt while walking along the street with two of his adjutants; a member of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party, who was sitting on a bench, threw a bomb onto the general's feet. However, rather than destroying Rennenkampf and his adjutants, the explosion merely stunned them. The attempted assassin was later arrested and tried. , c. 1914 The decisive actions of Rennenkampf in the course of a war and in the suppression of rebellion led to further advancements in his career. In late December 1910, he was promoted to
General of the Cavalry, then promoted to
General-Adjutant in 1912. A further promotion to commander-in-chief of all troops within the
Vilna Military District followed in mid-January 1913.
World War I in Russian-occupied
East Prussia, August 1914 In the beginning of the
First World War, Rennenkampf was appointed commander of the
1st Army of the
Northwestern Front, under commander-in-chief General
Yakov Zhilinsky; his rival Samsonov was the commander of the
2nd Army invading
East Prussia from the south. On 7 August 1914, Rennenkampf and his troops entered East Prussia from the east. While retreating upon orders from the defending
8th Army commander, General
Maximilian von Prittwitz, a gap formed between the Russian armies; exploiting this, the Imperial German
1st Division, commanded by General
Hermann von François, counterattacked at the
Battle of Stallupönen, initiating the Eastern Front of the war. Although it was a victory for the Germans, Russian artillery bombardment halted the German offensive, causing François to withdraw to the town of
Gumbinnen. Rennenkampf continued his advance, defeating the 8th Army under the Prittwitz's command at the
Battle of Gumbinnen. But due to a later incorrect assessment made by Zhilinsky, the victory at Gumbinnen did not develop. After the battle, Rennenkampf was ordered by Zhilinsky to launch an offensive against the heart of East Prussia,
Königsberg, but his army did not link up with Samsonov's
2nd Army due to a mistake made by Zhilinsky. As a result, the German 8th Army under the new commander, General (later field marshal)
Paul von Hindenburg, charged through the gap, then encircled and nearly wiped out the 2nd Army near
Allenstein (the Battle of Tannenberg). When the desperate Samsonov sent his appeals for help, instead of immediately replying and heading south to aid Samsonov, Rennenkampf almost completely ignored the appeal. When he finally began to head south, he and his men started too late and proceeded more slowly than they should have, contributing to the defeat of the 2nd Army. After the battle, Samsonov, fearing being held responsible for the defeat, committed suicide. After the 2nd Army's annihilation at the Battle of Tannenberg, Rennenkampf's army took over all the defenses along the
Deyma,
Lava and the
Masurian Lakeland. On 7 September, the
First Battle of the Masurian Lakes began, as the Germans attacked the left flank of the 1st Army with a powerful detachment. Zhilinsky broke his promise to provide Rennenkampf with reinforcements from other formations; as a result, the 1st Army had to retreat hurriedly. The
2nd Army Corps, led by General Vladimir Slyusarenko, resisted desperately, as did Rennenkampf himself, who transferred all the cavalrymen, reserves, and troops from the right to left flank of the
20th Army Corps in order to avoid encirclement by Hindenburg. By 15 September, he skillfully withdrew his men from encirclement and withdrew behind the
Neman, saving all the remaining troops he had. After this failure, despite his best efforts to blame Rennenkampf for the defeat, Zhilinsky was dismissed and was replaced by the General
Nikolai Ruzsky. In mid-November at
Łódź, due to the indecisiveness and mistakes made by Ruzsky, the 1st Army was unable to prevent the
XXV Reserve Corps of General
Reinhard von Scheffer-Boyadel from escaping out of the encircling movement, causing the front to retreat. A sharp conflict then broke out between the two men. After the incident, Rennenkampf was relieved from his position. His acts during the battle became the subject of a special commission under General
Peter von Baranoff; he was even considered being tried for treason, due to his ethnic background. He was then dismissed in early October 1915 "for domestic reasons with a uniform and pension". After that, he stayed in
Petrograd, living in retirement with his wife Vera until the
Bolshevik coup. However, his retirement was extremely unsettling, as he was falsely accused of being a traitor, and all across Russia, on streets and in public places, people insulted him for his actions. Even Baltic Germans accused him, as Vera recalled, as being a "terrible Russophile". All these events plunged Rennenkampf into deep moral suffering. Army chief of staff General
Nikolai Yanushkevich wrote the following about the issue of
German Generals in the Russian Army to the Minister of War, General
Sukhomlinov: In a further investigation, it was revealed that it was Ruzsky's strategic mistakes that had let Scheffer-Boyadel and his troops escape from the encirclement. This, however, did not bring Rennenkampf back to service.
February Revolution Rennenkampf was arrested shortly after the
February Revolution, as many of the revolutionaries remembered his role in the suppression of the Chita Republic back in 1905. He was then questioned by the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the
Russian Republic, although he was not charged with any crimes.
October Revolution and death Rennenkampf was arrested again after the
October Revolution and, like many other tsarist officials, was imprisoned in the
Peter and Paul Fortress. He was released shortly afterwards due to deteriorating health. After that, he, along with several other tsarist generals, went south to
Taganrog, his wife's birthplace, and lived under the protection of a merchant named Smokovnikov. After the
Red Army took over the city, Rennenkampf disappeared, disguised as a Greek subject named Mandusakis, but was tracked down by the Red Army and identified, after which he was brought to the headquarters of the Bolsheviks under the order of
Red Army commander-in-chief
Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko. After arriving, the former general was offered a command in the Red Army, with refusal implying death. Rennenkampf refused to defect to the Bolsheviks, saying: At the time, the Germans were
advancing toward Taganrog; the
Czechs and
Anton Denikin's
White Army were as well. As a result, Rennenkampf was taken hostage by the Bolsheviks and brought near the railway tracks running from the Martsevo station to the Baltic. Upon arrival, Rennenkampf was forced to dig his own grave, then stabbed before being executed with a bullet to the temple.
Aftermath According to Rennenkampf's wife Vera's memoirs, after his death, the
Whites were told that Rennenkampf was on the way to
Moscow. In May 1918, after the Whites had taken over Taganrog, a stick was found stuck in the ground near the railway tracks running from the Martsevo station to the Baltic Plant. After they dug up the grave, they found several bodies, including one nearly naked with a bullet wound to the head. When they took the corpses to a local cemetery (now the
Taganrog Old Cemetery) in the city, Rennenkampf's wife Vera arrived at the cemetery and identified the nearly naked corpse as her husband Paul. The White troops and Rennenkampf's wife held a funeral that fulfilled Rennenkampf's wish of being buried in an
unmarked mass grave with other victims of the
Red Terror. But other than her memoirs, there is no evidence of Rennenkampf's burial in the
Old Cemetery in Taganrog. In recent years, researchers at the
Hoover Institution archives of the
Stanford University found several photos taken during the civil war. In the photos, a marked grave was clearly seen on the left with "
P. K. Rennenkampf" written on it. This allowed historians and researchers to determine and establish the final resting place of Rennenkampf at the burial ground in the
Old Cemetery in Taganrog.
Family Born into a large and wealthy family, Rennenkampf had five brothers and two sisters. His brothers included Woldemar Konstantin von Rennenkampff (1852–1912), a cavalryman and the director of the Russian gun industry, and Georg Olaf von Rennenkampff (1859–1915), a chief of powder manufacturing in
Zawiercie. Rennenkampf married four times. In 1882, he married Adelaide Franziska Thalberg, with whom he had three children: Adelaide Ingeborg (1883–1896), Woldemar Konstantin (1884) and Iraida Hermaine (1885–1950). Thalberg died in 1888 after only six years of marriage. In 1890, in
Vilno, Rennenkampff married Lydia Kopylova, with whom he had one more child, Lydia (1891–1937). He then married Evgenia Dmitryevna Grechova, with whom he had no children. Finally, in 1907 in
Irkutsk he married Vera Nikolayevna Krassan (Leonutova), with whom he had a daughter, Tatyana (1907–1994), and adopted Vera's daughter Olga (1901–1918) from her first marriage. Unlike his other marriages, Rennenkampf's marriage with Vera was long and happy. Vera, as the wife of the commander of the Vilna Military District, was a trustee and member of a branch of the
International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. When the war broke out, she participated in organizations that cared for the wounded. In Vera's memoirs, she wrote of her founding of the Committee for Assistance to the families of reserve lower ranks, tailoring workshops for the front, and her participation in the formation of the flying car detachment of the
Evangelical Red Cross that took the wounded from the battlefield. After the war and Rennenkampf's death, the fate of his family was unknown, but Vera and Tatyana escaped to
Paris,
France. Olga was murdered on her doorstep the same month as her stepfather's murder. The rest of the family either fled to Estonia or back to
Germany during the civil war. ==Legacy==