The Moltkes were the greatest military family in the history of Germany. Olaf Jessen, a specialist in military history at the University of Freiburg, has decided to interest himself in the genealogy of the family's paternal and maternal lines. To this end he has undertaken a number of investigations and produced, on the basis of an overwhelming abundance of source material, the first history of the family as a whole. Let it be said at once: the book is an achievement of a wholly superior order. The delicacy of some of the subjects treated, the boldness of statement, the relative directness of style, the subtle undertones of portions of the arguments—all these are the hallmarks of Jessen's work.

The book itself consists of fifteen chapters, not counting the conclusion, stretching over two centuries of time and dealing with the Moltke family, from when it first issued from Denmark in the late eighteenth century, to the year 2010 when, at 8 o'clock in the evening of January 4, Freya von Moltke, the wife of James, the famous resister to Hitler, passed away, amid great remorse in her native land, in Vermont at the age of ninety-eight. In its entirety the book runs to nearly 500 pages, including some fifty-six illustrations, mostly plates of the members of the family together with one or another of the many prominent personalities with whom they were brought into contact in their long years of service not only to the German but, as Jessen makes clear in his earlier pages, the Danish government as well.

Jessen adds much to the story by going over the causes and results of the wars he covers with great color and flair and much lively atmospheric detail. It is a tragic story of overstrained nerves, of bureaucratic disloyalties, of shortsightedness and secret longings for war on the part of many of the Moltkes and the imposing presence and authority they never failed to exert. His investigations are—all of them—richly informed by his knowledge of the family's history, all interesting and deserving of a detailed critical comment that cannot be given within this space. But there are three of them—one on the rise and thought of Helmut von Moltke in the years before 1870; another on his nephew, widely called Moltke, the Younger, in the years prior to World War I and the immediate months following its outbreak; and a third on the assassinations and executions of Adolph and James von Moltke in the Hitler time—that form the heart of the book's deepest concerns.

At the forefront of Jessen's inquiry stands the figure of Helmut von Moltke, and a fascinating figure it is. Moltke, whose death occurred in 1891, still awaits a modern biographer, but Jessen has made a major contribution to understanding this most striking personality. It is difficult to exaggerate the influence Moltke exerted on German strategy in the three wars of unification. It was he who singlehandedly transformed the General Staff into the most powerful agency in Germany, this as a result of his brilliant campaigns in the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870–71. Jessen is at pains to emphasize the advantage of a number of qualities that suited Moltke well for the role he was destined to play: abundant energy that enabled him to rise from the poverty into which he had, in 1800, been born in Denmark; a long experience in the field of military planning and engineering; a lively interest in railroad construction and the impact it would have on the face of war; an understanding of the importance of the uncertainties that attended every war; and the necessity of preparing for these by conceiving of and dealing with multiplex scenarios of military action.

In January 1871, Jessen notes, Moltke, engaged as he was in his epochal conflict with Bismarck (a conflict that, incidentally, eventually came in intensity to rival the war itself), laid down, “How short or how long this . . . war continues and with whom peace is finally concluded is the business of no one” (p. 201). Here we have the outlines of the theory he was later to propound in his famous “Essay on Strategy” (i.e., that there was no reason that it should be not possible for strategists to pursue their aims wholly independent of politicians). Generations of soldiers trained by Moltke and immersed in that doctrine were to apply it with disastrous results in World War I.

Of these, Moltke's nephew Heinrich, often called the Younger, chief of the General Staff when war burst upon Europe in 1914, was the most conspicuous, but by no means the only, example. Moltke was undoubtedly clever but, as Jessen shows, his was the cleverness of a precocious adolescent. He was very much a product of his age. His imagination was stirred by revolutionary developments in industry and technology and by the European imperialist ventures into the far corners of the earth. He absorbed the most oversimplified concepts of Social Darwinism and pan-Germanism, becoming the spokesman of a strident imperialism that ignited the passions of his countrymen (as much as they were in the populations of every other European power) at the time. Yet he lacked his uncle's flexibility and power of vision. Under his leadership, the German army met, in September 1914, disaster on the Marne River, and he was quickly, though as Jessen elegantly demonstrates, not quietly pushed aside.

Not all the Moltkes were military men of narrow minds, as Jessen makes clear in his account of Helmut James who was, in January 1945, hanged for the role he allegedly played in a conspiracy against Hitler. The circumstances surrounding this execution remain somewhat mysterious. They apparently emanated from the assassination in Madrid on March 21, 1943, of Hans-Adolf von Moltke, a staunch Nazi supporter and Moltke the Elder's younger brother, who had been made ambassador to Spain on Hitler's direct orders. Jessen's account of the murder and subsequent hanging of Helmut James are nothing short of riveting. The Nazis appear to us as men to whom the application of the term “scoundrel” would be an egregious understatement. Envy, suspicion, a very real tendency to sadism, and a truly unlimited and insane jealousy were, in addition to an equally unlimited ambition, their driving qualities. And lacking the restraint imposed by the positive qualities they lacked, they indulged in the negative ones without stint or hesitation. The result was an immeasurable tragedy for all who came under their rule. This has, of course, been said before, but Jessen has done a truly great service in again bringing it all out. His is a classic work that will be read as long as anyone cares about military history or, for that matter, about history at all.