Oskar von Hutier was born in
Erfurt on 27 August 1857, in the Prussian
Province of Saxony. His family had a long tradition of military service; his grandfather served in the French Army and his father, Cölestin von Hutier, rose to the rank of colonel in the Prussian Army. Hutier was commissioned into the German Army in 1874 and attended the
Prussian Military Academy beginning in 1885. There, he gained the attention of the
General Staff, on which he subsequently served. He served as the
Oberquartiermeister in 1911. and had three children. Their son Oskar was seriously wounded at the
Battle of Verdun in 1916.
World War I , with Hutier's
18th Army, in the southern third, having the farthest advances Hutier spent the first year of the First World War as a divisional commander in
France. There, he commanded the
1st Guards Infantry Division in the
Second Army. He commanded the unit during the
First Battle of the Marne, and remained on the Western Front until April 1915, when he was transferred to the Eastern Front. There, on 4 April, he took command of the
XXI Corps of the
Tenth Army. He briefly commanded the
Army Detachment D from 2 January to 22 April in 1917. On 22 April, he was promoted to
General der Infanterie (General of the Infantry) and placed in command of the
Eighth Army. On 3 September 1917, Hutier, commanding the Eighth Army, ended the two-year siege of the Russian city of
Riga. He moved his troops to an unexpected sector in the Russian lines, and using a heavy bombardment prepared by
Georg Bruchmüller and a surprise crossing of the
Dvina River, took the city. The tactics he employed—surprise and encirclement—were essentially standard German Army doctrine; his infantry attacked in company-strength skirmish lines after crossing the River Dvina, much as they would have done in 1914. He followed this success with
Operation Albion, an amphibious assault (the only successful one of the war) that seized Russian-held islands in the
Baltic Sea. Hutier was awarded the
Pour le Mérite by
Kaiser Wilhelm II for seizing Riga. After arriving on the Western Front, Hutier was placed in command of the newly formed
Eighteenth Army. In March 1918, during
Operation Michael at the start of the
German spring offensive, Hutier employed the new
infiltration tactics that had been developed over the preceding three years on the Western Front. He hammered the British
Fifth Army, advancing some 40 miles along the
Somme River toward
Amiens in the span of fifteen days. Hutier's forces captured around 50,000 prisoners; Hutier was awarded the Oak Leaves to accompany his Pour le Mérite for this victory. A contemporary French magazine credited Hutier with creating these infiltration tactics, which relied on small, flexible forces that moved rapidly, calling them "Hutier tactics", though he had had no significant role in developing them. Later in June, Hutier directed an offensive toward
Noyon, which made initial gains but broke down in the face of stiff Allied resistance. For the rest of the war, Hutier's Eighteenth Army fought on the defensive while the Allies launched a
strategic counter-offensive that culminated in Germany's total defeat by November.
Later life Following the
Armistice in November 1918, Hutier marched his Army back to Germany, where he was greeted as a hero. He retired from the army in 1919. Like his overall commander and cousin, Ludendorff, Hutier long maintained that the German Army had not been defeated in the field, but was "
stabbed in the back" by domestic enemies on the home front. Hutier served as president of the
German Officers' League from 1919 to shortly before his death in
Berlin on 5 December 1934, at the age of 77. ==Decorations and awards==