A lot of photos of Tannenberg monument. September 27, 1933. In the interwar period a monument was erected at Hohenstein then in German East Prussia (now Olsztynek in the Polish voivodship of Warmia and Mazury) to the celebrate the late August 1914 WWI battle in which the German Army surrounded and annihilated the Russian Second Army commanded by General Samsonov. In part the battle took place in the vicinity of the village of Tannenberg, the location where some 500 years earlier the combined Polish-Lithuanian forces had dealt a crushing defeat to the Teutonic Knights, a German Military Order. The 1914 victory became known in Germany as the Second Battle of Tannenberg. On this latter occasion the German victory had been total: of the 150,000 strong Russian Second Army 92,000 had been taken prisoner and another 30,000 were killed or wounded. Only around 10,000 of Samsonov's men had escaped. In the face of the defeat, Samsonov walked off into the woods and committed suicide. The concept of erecting a monument to celebrate the 1914 victory was first advanced in 1919 by the Association of the Veterans of East Prussia. Subsequently, a contest was staged for a design of the monument. It resulted in the submission of over 400 projects and was won by the brothers Walter and Johann Kruger, architects from Berlin. In 1924, on the 10th anniversary of the battle, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had commanded the German troops in the battle, took part in the laying of the monument's foundation stone, a ceremony attended by some 60 thousand people, primarily veterans of WWI. The monument was built in the period 1925-27. Hindenburg, who in 1916 became Chief of Staff of the German Army. He became President of Germany after the war and as such he appointed Adolf Hitler to be its Chancellor in 1933.