Erich Ludendorff
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (sometimes given incorrectly as Erich Friedrich Wilhelm von Ludendorff) (April 9, 1865 – December 20, 1937, Tutzing, Bavaria, Germany) was a German Army officer, noted as a general during World War I. After the war, he supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party for a time. He was acquitted of criminal charges for his role in the Nazis' unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch. He became disillusioned with politics and retired from public life in 1928.
Early years
Ludendorff was born in Kruszewnia near Posen, Prussia (now Poznań, Poland), son of August Wilhelm Ludendorff. Though, strictly speaking, not a Junker himself, Ludendorff was loosely connected to the privileged class through his mother, Klara Jeanette Henriette von Tempelhoff, daughter of Friedrich August Napoleon von Tempelhoff and his wife Jeannette Wilhelmine von Dziembowska, herself from a germanized Polish Noble Family. He grew up on a small family farm and received his early schooling from his maternal aunt. His acceptance into cadet school at Plön was largely due to his excellence in mathematics and extraordinary work ethic that he would carry with him throughout his life. Ludendorff and Heinz Guderian attended the same cadet school, which produced many well trained German officers.
Rise in the military
Commissioned as an officer at 18, he began what appeared to be a promising military career. He was appointed to the German General Staff in 1894 and served as Chief of the Mobilization Section from 1904-13. Ludendorff was involved in testing the minute details regarding the Schlieffen Plan, assessing the fortifications around the Belgian fortress city of Liege. Most importantly, he attempted to prepare the German army for the war he saw coming. The Social Democrats, who by the 1913 elections had become the largest party in the Reichstag seldom gave priority to army expenditures, building up its reserves, or funding advanced weaponry such as Krupp's siege cannons. Funding provided the military went to the Kaiserliche Marine. Due to his adamancy, Ludendorff was dismissed from the General Staff and demoted to head a Fusiliers division as the army succumbed to outside pressures. Ludendorff was convinced that his prospects in the military were nil but took up his mildly important position.
Barbara Tuchman describes Ludendorff in The Guns of August as Schlieffen’s devoted disciple who was a glutton for work and a man of granite character. He was deliberately friendless and forbidding, and remained little known or liked. Lacking a trail of reminiscences or anecdotes as he grew in eminence, Ludendorff was a man without a shadow.
World War I
In World War I, Ludendorff was first appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to Germany's Second Army under Karl von Bülow. His assignment was largely due to his knowledge and previous work investigating the dozen forts surrounding Liege, Belgium. The German assault in early August 1914, according to the Schlieffen Plan for invading France, gained him national recognition.
The Germans experienced their first major setback at Liege. Belgian artillery and machine guns killed thousands of German troops attempting frontal assaults. On 5 August, Ludendorff took command of the 14th Brigade whose general had been killed. He cut off Liege and called for siege guns. By 16 August, all forts around Liege had fallen, allowing the German First Army to advance. As hero of Liege, Ludendorff was awarded Germany's highest military medal, the Pour le Mérite.
Russia had prepared for and was waging war more effectively than the Schlieffen Plan anticipated. German forces were collapsing as the Russians advanced towards Koenigsberg in East Prussia. Only a week after Liege's fall, Ludendorff, then storming Belgium's second great fortress at Namur, was urgently requested by the Kaiser to serve as Chief of Staff of the Eighth Army on the Eastern Front.
Ludendorff went quickly with Paul von Hindenburg, who was recalled from retirement, to replace Commander Maximilian von Prittwitz, who had proposed abandoning East Prussia altogether. Hindenburg relied heavily upon Ludendorff and Max Hoffmann in crafting victory in the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.
In August 1916, Erich von Falkenhayn resigned as Chief of the General Staff. The Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL or "Supreme Army Command") Paul von Hindenburg took his place, with Ludendorff as his First Generalquartiermeister or Deputy Chief of Staff. Ludendorff was the chief manager of the German war effort throughout this time, with Hindenburg his pliant front man. Ludendorff, in a huge strategic blunder, advocated unrestricted submarine warfare to break the British blockade, which became an important factor in bringing the United States into the war in April 1917.
The so-called Third Supreme Command of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, or "Third OHL", was effectively a military-industrial dictatorship, which largely relegated Kaiser Wilhelm II to the periphery. They meddled with domestic politics and forced government ministers to resign, including three Chancellors. Afterward, they held an effective veto over appointments in the state hierarchy.
Russia withdrew from the war in 1917 and Ludendorff participated in the meetings held between German and the new Bolshevik leadership. After much deliberation, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918. That same year, as commander-in-chief on the Western Front, Ludendorff planned and organized Germany's final offensive, known as Operation Michael. This final push to win the war fell short and as the German war effort collapsed, Ludendorff's tenure of war-time leadership ended. On September 29, the Kingdom of Prussia assumed its pre-war authority, which lasted until Kaiser Wilhelm II's abdication. Ludendorff fled Germany for Sweden.
Reflections on the war, a look to the future
In exile, he wrote numerous books and articles about the German military's conduct of the war while forming the foundation for the Dolchstoßlegende, which he was also largely responsible for. Ludendorff was convinced that Germany had fought a defensive war and in his opinion, Kaiser Wilhelm II had failed to organize a proper counter-propaganda campaign or provide efficient leadership.
Ludendorff was also extremely suspicous of the Social Democrats and leftists, who he blamed for the humiliation of Germany through the Versailles Treaty. Ludendorff also claimed that he paid close attention to the business element (especially the Jews), and saw them turn their backs on the war effort by letting profit dictate production and financing rather than patriotism. Again focusing on the left, Ludendorff was appalled by the strikes that took place towards the end of the war and saw the homefront collapse before the front, with the former poisoning the morale of soldiers on temporary leave. Most importantly, Ludendorff felt that the German people as a whole had underestimated what was at stake in the war: he was convinced the Entente had started the war and was determined to dismantle Germany completely. In what has proven to be somewhat prophetic, Ludendorff wrote:
By the Revolution the Germans have made themselves pariahs among the nations, incapable of winning allies, helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital, and deprived of all self-respect. In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution.
- My War Memories, 1914-1918
Political career
Ludendorff eventually returned to Germany in 1920. The Weimar Republic planned to send him and several other noted German generals (von Mackensen, et al) to reform the National Revolutionary Army of China, but this was cancelled due to the limitations of the Treaty of Versailles and the image problems with selling such a noted general out as a mercenary. Throughout his life, Ludendorff maintained a strong distaste for politicians and found most of them to be lacking an energetic national spirit. However, Ludendorff's political philosophy and outlook on the war brought him into right-wing politics as a German nationalist and won his support that helped to pioneer the Nazi party. Early on, Ludendorff also held Adolf Hitler in the highest regard. In Fritz Thyssen's 1941 book, I Paid Hitler, Thyssen recalled a conversation he had with Ludendorff in 1923:
"There is but one hope", Ludendorff said to me, "and this hope is embodied in the national groups which desire our recovery." He recommended to me in particular the Overland League and, above all, the National Socialist party of Adolf Hitler. Ludendorff greatly admired Hitler. "He is the only man", he said, "who has any political sense. Go and listen to him one day."
At Hitler's urging, Ludendorff took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The plot failed but Ludendorff was acquitted in the trial that followed. In 1924, he was elected to the Reichstag as a representative of the NSFB (coalicion dvfp-Nazi party), serving until 1928. He ran in the 1925 presidential election against former commander Paul von Hindenburg and received just 285,793 votes. Ludendorff's reputation may have been damaged by the Putsch, but he conducted very little campaigning of his own and remained aloof, relying almost entirely on his lasting image as a war hero, an attribute which Hindenburg also possessed.
His last years
After 1928, Ludendorff went into retirement, having fallen out with the Nazi party. He no longer approved of Hitler and began to regard him as just another manipulative politician, and perhaps worse. After learning that Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany, an aging Ludendorff reportedly sent a telegram to President von Hindenburg:
"By appointing Hitler Chancellor of the Reich, you have handed over our sacred German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I prophesy to you this evil man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and will inflict immeasurable woe on our nation. Future generations will curse you in your grave for this action."
Although the original copy of the telegram has yet to be found, one of the first sources to mention the memo was Hans Frank, who served as Reichsminister and Generalgoverner of Poland during the Nazi Era. He wrote about the note in his memoirs, appearing shortly before his execution as a war criminal. Perhaps a more reliable account was that of Captain Wilhelm Breuker, a close associate of Ludendorff's. When Breuker wrote his memoirs in 1953, he also attested to the existence of the telegram.
Nevertheless, in his later years, Ludendorff went into a relative seclusion with his second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz (1874 - 1966), authoring several books. He concluded that the world's problems were the result of Christians, Jews, and Freemasons; together with Mathilde, he founded the "Bund für Gotteserkenntnis" (Society for the Knowledge of God), a small and rather obscure esoterical society that survives to this day.
In an attempt to regain Ludendorff's favor, Hitler paid Ludendorff an unannounced visit in 1935 and offered to make him a field marshal. Infuriated, Ludendorff thundered back: "a field marshal is born, not made." When Ludendorff died in 1937, he was given a state funeral attended by Hitler, who declined to speak.
External links
- Erich Ludendorff Firstworldwar.com Who's Who
- Ludendorff by H. L. Mencken published in the June 1917 edition of the Atlantic Monthly
- Biography of Erich Ludendorff From Spartacus Educational
References
- Ludendorff, Erich (1971) [1920]. Ludendorff's Own Story: August 1914-November 1918; the Great War from the siege of Liège to the signing of the armistice as viewed from the grand headquarters of the German Army (in English and translated from German). Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press. ISBN 0-8369-5956-6.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link) - Ludendorff, Erich: The coming war. Faber and Faber, 1931 (= "Weltkrieg droht auf deutschem Boden")
- Ludendorff, Erich: The nation at war. Hutchinson, London 1936 (= "Der totale Krieg").
- Goodspeed, Donald J. Ludendorff: Genius of World War I. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|origdate=ignored (|orig-date=suggested) (help) - Lee, John (2005-03). The Warlords: Hindenburg and Ludendorff. London: Orion Books. ISBN 0-297-84675-2.
{{cite book}}:|format=requires|url=(help); Check date values in:|date=(help) - Asprey, Robert B (1991). The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the First World War. New York: W. Morrow. ISBN 0-688-08226-2.
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