A Critical Mass of Confusion - Searching For Alexander Samsonov's Final Moment (Part Two)

Willenberg is now Wielbark, Ostpreussen is now Poland, and Alexander Samsonov’s suicide during the Battle of Tannenberg is now history. My goal is to find and visit the location where Samsonov spent his final moment. Locating the exact spot means looking for clues in books and digital sources. Whatever results my searches may yield will hopefully allow me to pinpoint the location of the place where a shot rang out in the darkness sometime after midnight on August 30, 1914, amid the thick forests of present day north-central Poland.

Seeking out a suicide spot is diabolical detective work, something that only makes sense as part of criminal investigation, friends or family trying to find closure or in the service of history. The result of this search will be to find and explore one of the darker recesses of the First World War. This is a potential trip down a path pockmarked with the residue of death and despair. One that leads to an obscure spot on a forgotten front. A place to contemplate the moment where fate dealt a decisive blow to the Russian Army, General Samsonov’s life, and set Russia on a wayward course that continues right down to the present day. The case could be made that Russia’s recent unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is along that same trajectory. Tannenberg is not as distant as one might imagine.

Switching Sides – A Geopolitical Puzzle

At first, I was not optimistic that the location where General Samsonov took his life could be located. There were complicating factors that would make the search more difficult. While the battle only occurred a little over a century ago, the area in which it took place suffered massive geopolitical upheavals, Tannenberg was the first of these. There was much worse to come. These upheavals led to the collapse of empires and the rise of nations in their place. This made the geography of Tannenberg difficult to mentally navigate. For instance, the land on which the battle took place did not belong to a nation-state in 1914. Instead, it was in the German Empire. During the interwar period, the sprawling battlefield would become part of two nations, Poland and Weimar Germany. During World War II, the area was occupied by the Germans. After the war ended, it became part of Poland.

The battle then existed in a sort of strange historical netherworld. As part of Poland, the battlefield was severed from the two main combatants, the Germans and Russians who spilt so much blood fighting the battle. The area’s German population had been expelled. Monuments to the battle which commemorated it were destroyed. The most prominent of these, the massive Tannenberg Memorial was where the body of Paul von Hindenburg, the German commander glorified for his role in the battle was reburied. Hitler ordered the monument destroyed during the German retreat in 1945. Hindenburg’s body was removed and reburied once again, this time in western Germany. The Soviet Red Army was majority Russian and as such wanted no reminders of any German victory even if it did render a blow to the Tsarist Army.?

Survival Instinct – Inheritors of the Earth

Even when monuments to the Battle of Tannenberg were not targeted they could still be caught in the crossfire of the many conflicts that consumed the area. Towns in the region were heavily damaged during the final campaign of World War II. This was the end of a thirty-one-year process that had proved apocalyptic. Tannenberg was the starting gun for decades of destruction, reconstruction and still more destruction over land contested by Germans, Russians, and Poles. The latter ended up being the lone survivors in the area. Ironically, Poles played hardly any role in the 1914 battle. Poland ended up being the inheritor of the territory on which the battle was fought. They were already living in the area, but their role was as detached observers watching everyone else commit suicide. That included Alexander Samsonov.

Poland offers a complicating factor for anyone trying to orient themselves on the battlefield because the names of nearby places to where Samsonov’s suicide might have occurred were changed from German to Polish ones. Fortunately, finding the Polish place names and matching them with German ones would not prove as difficult as I first imagined. Another complicating factor concerns Samsonov’s role as part of an invading army that lost the battle. Though his suicide spot is worth marking for historical interest, that would have taken place under either the Germans or Poles. Commemorating where an enemy general shot himself was probably not high on the priority list for the German regime which occupied the area after the battle. On the other hand, the battle was a great achievement for the Germans both during and after the war. Plenty of commemoration would later take place. For instance, the Germans constructed the Tannenberg Memorial and moved the body of Paul von Hindenburg, one of the commanding generals at Tannenberg there. Of course, Germans extolling the glories of a fellow German made sense. I assumed that marking the spot of Samsonov’s suicide did not fall high on their postwar priority list.

Uncharted Territory – Off The Map

My first clue in locating the suicide spot was found online with a short description stating, “in the woods south of Willenberg.” This was nowhere near exact enough, but it did give me a good starting point, I then found another source that mentioned the location as between (Nidizica) and Willenberg (Wielbark). This information was more promising as it gave me an area to focus on. A train line ran between the two locations, which might also mean a road could be running between the two towns. A road was vital because the best-case scenario would be for the location to be near one. I did not relish the thought of walking far off the road and deep into the woods scouring for a marker amid leafy foliage and thick ground cover.?

It is easy to get lost in these woods. That is one of the things that happened to the Russians during the battle. This created a critical mass of confusion which the Germans exploited. The area is known for its lakes, forests, and sandy soil, each of which presents problems for anyone searching for a specific place in the area. Getting lost is nothing new. Samsonov and the staff officers who were with him on the last night of his life were also lost. They tried to reconnect with what was left of the 2nd Army. Realizing that they had little chance of this they stumbled along in the darkness. Then Samsonov separated himself from the rest of the group. At that moment he knew exactly where he was headed. To a place could not be found on any map.?