Success Quote by Paul von Hindenburg

A tank, in Hindenburg's telling, isn’t just a machine; it’s a psychological weapon that rewrites the rules of courage. The line is engineered to sound like sober military bookkeeping - “technical perfection,” “undamaged trenches,” “obstacles” - but the real payload lands at the end: it “did not fail to have a marked effect.” That stiff understatement is doing heavy lifting. He admits fear without naming it, preserving the officer’s pose of control while conceding that morale can be punctured by engineering.

The intent is partly defensive. Hindenburg frames the shock not as German tactical incompetence or wavering discipline, but as the arrival of a new kind of inevitability: technology so advanced it renders the traditional geometry of war obsolete. Trenches and wire were supposed to be certainty made physical. By emphasizing “undamaged” defenses, he underlines that the problem wasn’t weakness in preparation; it was the enemy’s ability to ignore the very premise of static warfare.

The subtext also reveals a pre-World War II anxiety: industrial modernity dissolving old hierarchies. A “perfected” tank humiliates the romantic image of the infantryman enduring the elements and the shellfire. It crosses, literally and symbolically, what was meant to separate safety from exposure. Coming from a head of state and emblem of the old Prussian order, the phrasing reads like reluctant witness testimony: the battlefield has shifted from valor to systems, and the troops can feel the ground truth of that shift before the leadership fully admits it.