When I was working on my book Holding Out, and before that the PhD on which it’s based, I developed a number of research tools to support what I was doing. I think some of these at least would be useful to others researching the German army in the First World War, so I’ll publish them here.
Biographies of officers. These were originally in an appendix in my PhD which I cut from Holding Out; I’ve subsequently updated it to include later research, and I’m still adding to it – so you can expect to find new entries appearing from time to time. The latest entries (January 2025) are Richard Hentsch and Leopold von Rauch of OHL’s Intelligence Department (on which see below).
German Army Command and Control in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. I wrote this research paper in 2010 and it’s been available for a while on my academia.edu site.
German doctrinal manuals in the series ‘Regulations for Trench Warfare for All Arms’ [Vorschriften für den Stellungskrieg für alle Waffen].
German handwriting of the early twentieth century is a well-known stumbling block.
OHL’s Intelligence Department. I wrote about this in Chapter 5 of Holding Out, and I’ve now uploaded a list of all the officers I’ve identified, plus some prosopographical research.
Coming soon: the Gempp report on German military intelligence in the First World War.