Erich Ludendorff

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Erich Ludendorff (sometimes given incorrectly as Erich von Ludendorff) (April 9, 1865 – December 20, 1937, Tutzing, Bavaria, Germany) was a German Army officer, noted as a general during World War I.

Ludendorff was born in Kruszewnia near Posen, Prussia (now Poznań, Poland). Though, strictly speaking, not a Junker himself, Ludendorff was loosely connected to the privileged class through his mother, Klara von Tempelhoff. 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.

Commissioned as an officer at 18, he made a splendid military career, appointed to the German General Staff in 1894, serving as head of the deployment section in 1908 assisting with the fine-tuning of the invasion strategy for France, the Schlieffen Plan.

In World War I Ludendorff was first appointed Deputy chief of staff to Germany's Second Army, under Karl von Bülow, responsible for capturing the forts of Liège, without which the Schlieffen Plan could not succeed. This task successfully accomplished, Ludendorff was sent to East Prussia where he worked with Paul von Hindenburg as his Chief of Staff. Hindenburg relied heavily upon Ludendorff and Hoffmann in crafting his victories in the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.

In August of 1916, when Falkenhayn resigned as Chief of the General Staff — the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL or "Supreme Army Command"), Hindenburg took his place with Ludendorff as his First Generalquartiermeister — his Deputy Chief of Staff. Ludendorff was the chief manager of the German war effort throughout this time, with Hindenburg his pliant front man. Ludendorff advocated unrestricted submarine warfare, which was ultimately responsible for bringing the USA into the war.

Their so-called Third Supreme Command or "Third OHL", was effectively a military-industrial dictatorship, which largely relegated Kaiser Wilhelm II to the periphery. They meddled with domestic politics to the point of forcing the resignation of government ministers, including the Chancellor himself three times in a row; they then held an effective veto over appointments in the state hierarchy.

With Russia's withdrawal from the war in 1917, Ludendorff played a key role in the advantageous Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Effective commander-in-chief on the Western Front in 1918, Ludendorff planned and executed a series of German offensives which came close but failed to collapse the Entente (see Operation Michael). The massive American military buildup made Germany's position untenable, causing Ludendorff to lose his nerve and transfer power back to the Reichstag on September 29. He demanded an immediate peace, whereafter he left Germany for Sweden.

In exile, he wrote numerous books and articles mythologizing the German military's conduct of the war, practically founding the Dolchstoßlegende, claiming that the army had been "stabbed in the back" by left-wing politicians. Ludendorff eventually returned to Germany in 1920, where as a right-wing politician he took part in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923). In 1924 he was elected to the Reichstag as a representative of the Nazi party, serving until 1928. He lost the 1925 presidential election against his former commander, Paul von Hindenburg.

Before the Nazi rise to power, 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.

After 1928, Ludendorff went into retirement, having fallen out with the Nazi party. He concluded that the world's problems were the result of Christians, Jews and Freemasons; together with his second wife Mathilda, he founded the "Bund für Gotteserkenntnis" (Society for the Knowledge of God), a small and rather obscure esoterical society that has survived until today. In his later years, many believed Ludendorff to be little more than an eccentric. He rejected Hitler's offer to make him a field marshal in 1935. At his death in 1937, he was given a state funeral attended by Hitler.

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

Bibliography

• General Erich Ludendorff, My War Memoirs, 1914-1918. 2v. ("Meine Kriegserinnerungen 1914-1918", written in Sweden, 1919).
• Donald James Goodspeed, Ludendorff: Genius Of World War I, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
• John Lee, The Warlords: Hindenburg And Ludendorff (Great Commanders S.)
• Robert B Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff and the First World War, Time Warner, 1994.