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Ludendorff participated in an unsuccessful Nazi coup in Munich in 1923, and in 1925 ran for president against Hindenburg, now a bitter enemy. From 1924 to 1928 he was a Nazi member of the...
- Overview
- Early life
- Military career during World War I
- Postwar political activities
Erich Ludendorff (born April 9, 1865, Kruszewnia, near Poznań, Prussian Poland—died Dec. 20, 1937, Munich, Ger.) Prussian general who was mainly responsible for Germany’s military policy and strategy in the latter years of World War I. After the war he became a leader of reactionary political movements, for a while joining the Nazi Party and subseq...
Ludendorff was the son of an impoverished landowner and cavalry captain. His mother was a member of an aristocratic military family. Ludendorff was educated in the cadet corps, became an infantry officer, and, because of his outstanding military qualities, was soon promoted to the general staff.
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In 1908 he was put in charge of the 2nd (German) department in the army general staff, the institution generally known as the “great general staff,” which was responsible for preparing contingency deployment and mobilization plans. Under the chief of the general staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, Ludendorff played a significant part in the revision of the Schlieffen Plan. This plan envisaged a gigantic outflanking movement involving the infringement of Belgian neutrality with the aim of crushing France with one blow. Moltke and Ludendorff decided to secure more firmly the extended southern flank between Switzerland and Lorraine. They also discarded the idea of forcing a way through southern Holland and instead made preparations for the surprise capture of Liège, the most important fortress in eastern Belgium, often characterized as “impregnable.”
In Germany, supreme political and military power was traditionally wielded by the commander in chief and the emperor, and general staff officers were not expected to engage in politics. Ludendorff, however, violated this tradition by campaigning for a strengthening of the army, both in personnel and equipment, which the general staff considered essential in view of the general armaments race in Europe. His contact with extreme nationalist political circles favouring increased armament convinced him that, if policy was influenced by “strong men,” a vigorous conduct of war was assured.
The excessively active departmental chief irritated the military authorities, and in 1913 Ludendorff was transferred to the infantry as regimental commander. When war broke out in 1914, he was appointed quartermaster in chief (supply and administration) of the 2nd Army in the west.
It was not until two Russian armies threatened to overrun the German 8th Army in East Prussia that Ludendorff was appointed chief of staff of the 8th Army. Ludendorff, dynamic but occasionally harsh and in times of crisis often nervous, was assigned to the elderly General Paul von Hindenburg, who was renowned for his iron nerves. Ludendorff regarded the problems with which he and his commander in chief were faced as difficult but never insoluble.
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The spectacular victory of Hindenburg and Ludendorff over the Russians in August 1914 at Tannenberg, in East Prussia, a battle that brought Hindenburg worldwide renown, was followed by the German defeat on the Marne in the west that signaled the failure of Ludendorff’s revised Schlieffen Plan. For two years Hindenburg and Ludendorff fought the Russians in the east. Ludendorff’s plan of a general offensive against Russia by means of a temporary reduction of the German forces in the west did not receive approval by the supreme army command in the summer of 1915.
Only in August 1916, after the failure of the German offensive at Verdun and in view of the Allied onslaught on both the eastern and western fronts, did the emperor finally appoint the two generals to assume supreme military control. They attempted to conduct a sort of total war by mobilizing the entire forces of the home front, which was already suffering from the effects of the British blockade. Ludendorff staked everything on a single card, the stubborn pursuit of a “victorious peace” that was to secure German territorial gains in east and west. In 1917 he approved the unrestricted submarine warfare against the British that led to the entry of the United States into the war against Germany but not to England’s collapse. After the tsar had been deposed in March 1917, Ludendorff gave his blessing to the return of the Russian Bolshevik emigrants (including the as yet unknown V.I. Lenin), in the hope of persuading the Russians to conclude peace. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who now exercised a sort of military semidictatorship, also brought about the dismissal of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in the delusory hope that “a strong man” could be found to assume the leadership of the Reich.
On March 21, 1918, Ludendorff opened a general offensive on the Western Front with the object of smashing the Anglo-French armies and forcing a decision in Europe before the Americans arrived in force. But he had overestimated the strength of the German armies; the offensive failed, and when, in the autumn of 1918, the collapse of the German allies—Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey—was imminent, Ludendorff demanded immediate negotiations for an armistice. For a while, the nerves of the hopelessly overworked general gave way, and a psychiatrist had to be summoned to supreme headquarters. When Ludendorff realized the severity of the armistice conditions, he insisted that the war be carried on. When he saw that the political leaders were not prepared to do this, he offered his resignation, which William II accepted on Oct. 26, 1918. At the same time, the emperor, much to Ludendorff’s distaste, ordered Hindenburg to remain at his post. A titan of willpower and energy who had attempted the impossible was suddenly torn away from his sphere of activity; the shock was immense. Ludendorff met the revolution that broke out in November 1918 with complete resignation and went into exile in Sweden for several months.
During the next 20 years Ludendorff led a bizarre life. Adopting the role of the betrayed and misunderstood commander, he took part in the unsuccessful coups d’état of Wolfgang Kapp in 1920 and of Adolf Hitler in 1923, and in 1925 he ran for president against his former commander in chief, Hindenburg, whom he now bitterly hated. From 1924 to 1928 he was a National Socialist member of Parliament.
Consistently pursuing a purely military line of thought, Ludendorff developed, after the war, the theory of “total war,” which he published as Der Totale Krieg (The Nation at War) in 1935. In the first half of the 19th century, the great military theorist of the Prussian general staff, Carl von Clausewitz, had advanced the doctrine of war as an extension of politics by different means. Ludendorff advocated the diametrically opposite view that politics should serve the conduct of war, for which the entire physical and moral forces of the nation should be mobilized, because, according to him, peace was merely an interval between wars.
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (German pronunciation: [ˈeːʁɪç ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈluːdn̩dɔʁf] ⓘ; 9 April 1865 – 20 December 1937) was a German military officer and politician who contributed significantly to the Nazis' rise to power.
Oct 29, 2009 · After Germany’s World War I defeat, Ludendorff, angered by the armistice, helped create the “stab-in-the-back” theory that blamed Jews, communists, liberals and democrats for Germany’s WWI ...
Mar 31, 2015 · Erich Ludendorff was of Germany’s senior army commanders in World War One. Ludendorff found fame after German victories at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lak
In the face of these facts, most biographers and historians of Ludendorff have relied on the alleged mental collapse in 1918, brought on by the strain of managing Germany’s war effort from his perch on the Army Supreme Command (OHL), to explain Ludendorff’s subsequent behavior.
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