Johannes Friedrich Leopold von Zeckert was born in Schleswig on April 22, 1866. The son of a Prussian general, he joined the Royal Alexander Guards Grenadier Regiment in 1885 as an officer candidate. In 1893 he married Dorothy Fabian, who had no children after the marriage, but the couple had a good relationship.

He showed his talent for staff work at an early age, entering the Military Academy in Berlin in 1897 and then alternated between front-line and staff units. In 1899 he was transferred to the General Staff as an assistant, at this time only a lieutenant in the 6th Army. In 1913 he was appointed lieutenant colonel chief of staff of the Third Army in Berlin, a position he held until the outbreak of World War I. The Third Army, which was subordinate to the First Army of Alexander von Crook, served as the most important right-wing offensive in the famous "Schlieffen Plan" of the German army. After the Battle of the Marne, the First Army was forced to retreat. But von Zeckert showed his individual talent and leadership in this fight.

On 27 January 1915, Zechter was promoted to colonel and transferred to chief of staff of the 11th Army of Auguste von Mackensen, newly formed in Eastern Galicia. In the breakthrough of the Battle of Gorlitse-Tarnov, which began on May 2, 1915, the 11th Army advanced a total of 3oo kilometers, completely uprooting the Polish salient by the end of September, completely removing the Russian threat to Galicia. Mackensen's command was important in this victory, but Zechter's masterful planning was even more indispensable. He was promoted to Major General and was awarded the Order of the Blue Max. From January to November 1915, he planned the completion of the occupation of Serbia. This feat allowed von Zeckert to add oak leaves to his Blue Max Medal.

Austria-Hungary was dealt a heavy blow as a result of the massive offensive carried out by the Russian cavalry General Brusinov in June 1916. Zeckert was thus appointed chief of staff of the Austro-Hungarian army, whose task was to recuperate the army and improve its combat effectiveness. This task was not easy to accomplish because of the growing hostility between Germany and Austria-Hungary. Zeckert soon realized that it was difficult to get along with his Austro-Hungarian colleagues. Nevertheless, Zechter succeeded in the task. Burdened with the expectation of another miracle, he was sent to Turkey in January 1917 as Chief of the General Staff of the 6th Army. But this task was not up to even von Zeckert. On the battlefield of Palestine, Allenby launched an offensive on September 19, 1918, and routed Sanders' Turkish-German forces. On January 3o, Turkey signed an armistice, allowing all Germans to leave Turkey within 3o days.

Zeckert returned to Germany on November 13, and Paul von Hindenburg put him in charge of organizing the evacuation of German troops from Ukraine and the entire eastern front, and he did so well under very difficult conditions that he was able to join the German delegation to the Paris Peace Conference as a military representative. Zecht was then promoted to lieutenant general, and indirectly Tihindenburg served as the last chief of the General Staff before the dissolution of the German General Staff from 7 to 15 July 1919. On 11 November, he became chief of the General Staff of the 6th Army, which had real power, and began to build an elite force of 100,000 men – the largest under the Treaty of Versailles. In March 192o, he became Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht. At this time, he was about to start the biggest business of his life.

Zecht's personality is "cold", "irritable", "cold", his nickname is "Sphinx", in short, he has a strong personality. Manstein described Zechter as "everybody had felt his inner passion and the iron will that made him the leader of the army." "He's not a theorist, he's more about the operational dimension. He expresses his hostility towards theorists in this way: "There are three things that the human brain struggles with in vain: stupidity, bureaucracy, and slogans."

Zecht sees people as central to the reconstruction of his military. He entrusted almost all the responsibilities to competent staff officers, who personally supervised the training. He resurrected the former General Staff with the titular "Peacetime Army Organizing Committee" and spared no effort in the training of the officer corps. Finally, the German General Staff provided a small but highly enterprising cadre team to guide the rest of the core staff and combat teams. His value was demonstrated in 1933-194o, a period in which the German army increased 5o times, but at the same time the doctrine of mobile warfare was constantly refined. In World War II, most of the graduates of the General Staff, as well as the staff officers and commanders of the troops, performed very well at the operational level.

Zekett doubted that the traditional type of large army could conduct mobile warfare based on a strategy of pursuing a quick and decisive victory, and believed in a small, long-serving, professional, and athletic army. In 1921, he began a formal study of the lessons of the war, which resulted in Army Doctrine No. 487, in which Zecht himself wrote "Leading and Fighting with Synthetic Weapons." This book became the basis for the training of the German army until the 3o years, and from the 3o years they were revised into the famous 3oo army regulations, which were used until 1945.

The doctrine of the new German army was based on the above lessons. The most striking part of the new doctrine is about the integration of armored warfare with air power. In order to train in tank and aircraft tactics, which were prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, he offered training assistance to the Red Army in exchange for the establishment of a secret training center in the Soviet Union. The training center includes three illegal training programs: armor, aircraft, and chemical warfare.

Armored warfare was a response to the recognized technological failures of the First World War. Zecht prefers a strategy of war of annihilation to a strategy of war of attrition. He emphasized movement, and his training orders began with a slogan - "Combat is movement". Despite Zecht's forward-thinking views in many areas, until his death, he had a strange affection for cavalry, which is still criticized for narrow-mindedness. Moreover, he never fully endorsed the powerful capabilities of large-scale armored forces operating in coordination with other weapons and air power. Although Zekt never fully understood the power of mechanized warfare, he was not sure how to conduct tank warfare accurately, and placed more emphasis on motorized logistics support for cavalry divisions. But Zechter did not take concrete action against the changes pushed by Guderian and others. On the other hand, the results of the experiments of Guderian and others formed a synthesis between the two that advocated a large 6th Army and Zecht's "devaluing a large army", in which they built an army - a small army of well-equipped armored units. The Germans further developed the Storm Force tactics of World War I (i.e., the Huttier tactics) into a mechanized all-arms doctrine.

Zeckert had a broader and deeper understanding of the revolutionary nature of air force operations. He drew 18o officers from the newly created German army and advocated the creation of an independent air force. Since the Treaty of Versailles prohibited this, he formed the Shadow Air Force. All exercises require the participation of the Air Force and are subject to extensive arbitration. His doctrine of the Air Force centered on support for ground forces, with the acquisition of air superiority as the supreme principle. Unlike the United States and Britain, Germany used bombers to achieve what is now known as battlefield air interdiction. For this purpose, the Germans concentrated on the construction of fighters, then attack aircraft on the ground, and finally bombers.

All in all, the most outstanding feature of Zecht's army lies in the close integrity of its political leadership and policy, the priority of the soldiers, the proper staff system, and the correct doctrine. The German army of this period was small but almost impeccable, and was one of the most outstanding military machines in history.

Summing up, the later German army had a distinctly Zeckert personal style. Looking at the history of World War II, it is not difficult to see that the brilliant achievements of the German army, especially the initial results, are closely related to Zeckert's efforts. However, Zecht's plan also had a number of shortcomings. This led to some criticism that these shortcomings were partly responsible for the final defeat of the German army in World War II.

Michael-Giller was a harsh critic of the independence of the German army from political reality. He argues that this led to a convergence of ideologies and techno-supremacism, which propelled Germany into World War II and its devastation. Zeckert, he argued, had focused the Germans on the art of warfare, with their eyes set on a quick victory in the war. As a result of the distinction between the practitioners and strategists of the war, many of Germany's operational successes in World War II did not have lasting strategic implications. Guiye successfully describes the dangers of an army that tries to stand on its own apart from the political structure and is too much interested in operational victory, and he clearly shows that technological excellence is itself an empty shell.

The strongest criticism of Zekter's army was that the military vision of the General Staff was too narrow. So much so that by 1934, the Chief of the General Staff further reduced the focus of training in sand table exercises, from the strategic operational level to the tactical (division and corps) level, which led to the neglect of logistics and intelligence subjects. As Albert Seaton writes, "The operations of the Army Staff are seldom too tactical, and many of its members are content to fight as if in a vacuum, considering a 2oo-mile radius as a matter of strategy." ”

The most persuasive criticism was pointed out by a German scholar: "Germany's superiority in will and leadership is inescapable of its ability to arbitrarily and short-sightedly assess potential adversaries." ”

Some of the other accusations include: the rearmament effort was economically fragile and largely ignored the weaknesses of the German economy; The Luftwaffe was successful in tactics, but not fully competent for all levels of strategic operations, etc.

In general, of course, this army created by Zekt worked very well. The seven-week assault in 194o destroyed the French army; The German army then became more obsessed with tactical and operational victories in North Africa, the Balkans, and especially in Russia. Towards the end of World War II, the leadership and doctrine of the German army succeeded in delaying the destruction of Hitler's state, despite the overwhelming material superiority of the Allies. It should be said that Zechter completed the greatest career of his life brilliantly and entered the halls of history as the "father of the German army in World War II".

In the early autumn of 1926, his enthusiasm for the monarchy cut him off. He allowed a member of the royal family of Hohenzollern to wear a military uniform to attend an annual military exercise, which was specifically forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles, and also collided with the rising republican sentiments in Germany at the time. Zekt was forced to resign on January 8.

In 193o, he ran for parliament. During his tenure in the National Assembly of the Weimar Republic, von Zeckert had close contacts with Hitler's Nazi Party.

He was sent to China in 1934 to help build a modern Chinese army as head of Chiang Kai-shek's German military advisory group. His suggestion was valuable for the Kuomintang's fifth encirclement and suppression of the Red Army in Kiangsi, which led to the epic Red Army's Long March. He served as the chairman of the National People's Congress and handled military and political affairs on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek himself. In addition, several German-style equipped divisions he trained and established for the Kuomintang also played an important role in the early stage of the Anti-Japanese War, and were the core force of the early anti-Japanese resistance.

In March 1935, he returned to Germany. He died of a heart attack in Berlin on December 29, 1936.