Background

Erich Ludendorff was born on April 9, 1865, in Kruszewnia in the chiefly Polish-populated Prussian province of Posen. He was the son of August Wilhelm Ludendorff, an impoverished former cavalry officer, and his wife, Klara Jeanette Henriette von Tempelhoff. His younger brother Hans became a distinguished astronomer.

Education

The young Ludendorff entered a cadet academy at the age of twelve. In the course of his education he found himself an outsider, a commoner amid the sons of the aristocracy. In compensation he developed the intellectual energy, fierce determination, and ambition for which he subsequently became renowned. He was a good student but had few friends.

Career

After earning a commission at the age of seventeen, Ludendorff entered a series of regimental and staff postings that led in 1908 to his appointment as a lieutenant colonel in the mobilization and deployment section of the General Staff, that is, in the section responsible for the ultimate material preparations for the Schlieffen plan in case of war. Ludendorff drafted the Army Bill of 1913 that called for upgrading the heavy artillery, enhancing production of munitions, and expanding the peacetime army by three army corps (300,000 men). The Prussian War Ministry was unwilling to adopt such a bold design and instead transferred Colonel Ludendorff, in January 1913, to the relative obscurity of the Thirty-ninth Fusiliers Regiment at Düsseldorf; the following year he was promoted major general as chief of the Eighty-fifth Infantry Regiment at Strassburg.

Erich Ludendorff was appointed deputy chief of staff to General Karl von Bülow's Second Army on August 2, 1914. Six days later he won fame, and the order Pour le mérite, for his daring seizure of the Belgian fortress Liège with only a brigade at his disposal; by August 21 Ludendorff had crossed the Sambre River. Events in the east were then to shape his future. The Russian First Army under General P. K. Rennenkampf fronted the German Eighth Army of General Max von Prittwitz und Gaffron at Gumbinnen, while the Second Army under General A. V. Samsonov threatened Prittwitz from the south; as a result, Prittwitz panicked and ordered a withdrawal behind the Vistula River, thereby possibly abandoning all of East Prussia to the enemy. General Helmuth von Moltke at Koblenz instead summarily dismissed Prittwitz and on August 22 appointed Ludendorff chief of staff of the Eighth Army; almost as an afterthought, General Paul von Hindenburg was brought out of retirement and ordered to board Ludendorff's train at Hanover.

At headquarters in Marienburg, the new duumvirate adopted plans already prepared by Prittwitz's first staff officer, Colonel Max Hoffmann, to score the desired Cannae. Six divisions were deployed against Samsonov's left wing and most of the troops fronting Rennenkampf were secretly withdrawn and hurled against Samsonov's left wing, with the result that the entire Army of the Narev caved in with the loss of nearly 150,000 men at Tannenberg (where in 1410 the Teutonic knights had suffered a historic defeat). Again relying upon intercepted unciphered Russian wireless messages and reinforced by two fresh army corps, the Eighth Army turned against Rennenkampf in mid-September and at the battle of the Masurian Lakes drove the Army of the Niemen out of East Prussia with the loss of over 100,000 men.

Ludendorff next proposed to break out of the Cracow area and to advance against Warsaw, but in November 1914 the legendary Russian "steamroller" finally got under way as seven separate armies drove from southern Poland to the Silesian border. In what Liddell Hart termed "perhaps the finest example of his art as well as one of the classic masterpieces of all military history," Ludendorff used his lateral railways to fall back of Cracow, all the while systematically destroying communications, until his new Ninth Army was ready to move up the Vistula against the joint of the two armies guarding the Russian flank. Thus Ludendorff's wedge, driven into the Russians at Lodz against overwhelming numerical odds, nearly annihilated one army and drove the other back to Warsaw. It was the classic example of concentration and mobility designed to paralyze a much larger force. In fact, General Erich von Falkenhayn had denied Ludendorff sufficient troops for a decisive victory; German reserves either rested idly in Lorraine or were being bled senselessly at Ypres.

In November 1914, Ludendorff was promoted lieutenant-general and appointed staff chief of a new supreme command in the east under Hindenburg. In February 1915, the German Eighth and Ninth Armies routed the Russian Tenth Army of Baron Sievers at the winter battle of the Masurian Lakes, taking 92,000 prisoners in the Augustov forest. But once again, Ludendorff and Falkenhayn fell out over strategy. While the chief of the General Staff desired a frontal attack against the Russians near Gorlice, Ludendorff had developed a plan for a huge sweep from East Prussia into Poland through Kovno and Vilna; these movements were designed to envelop the enemy's northern flank near Minsk and thereby to knock Russia completely out of the war. Of course, Falkenhayn won the day and as a result General August von Mackensen's victory at Gorlice-Tarnow on May 2, though great, was indecisive. Relations between Ludendorff and Falkenhayn degenerated into a state of cold war and both sides tried to rally press, industry, and politicians to their banners. On September 9 Ludendorff was finally allowed to commence his drive on Vilna four months too late and although the armies of Generals Otto von Below and Hermann von Eichhorn drove on Dvinsk and Vilna while the cavalry scouted as far as the Minsk railyards, the front was too extended, and winter forced the Germans to withdraw to more secure positions. The moment for a knockout blow in the east had passed.

Falkenhayn's position had rapidly deteriorated in the meantime. Rumania joined the war against Germany, Verdun refused to fall, and the British and Russians counterattacked at the Somme and in Galicia in order to relieve the pressure on the French along the Meuse. On August 29, 1916, Falkenhayn yielded as chief of the General Staff to Hindenburg; Ludendorff was promoted general of infantry and appointed first quartermaster general of the armies, or deputy staff chief. With Hindenburg little more than a figurehead and Wilhelm II unable to perform his vast constitutional powers, Ludendorff virtually ruled as "silent dictator" for the remainder of the war.

The energetic Colonel Max Bauer helped to enact a program of industrial expansion and enhanced munitions output under the venerable field marshal's name; an Auxiliary Service Law was promulgated, Belgian forced labor was transported to Germany, and skilled workers were assigned to special military priorities. Hoffmann was instructed to stabilize the eastern front in the wake of General Aleksei Brusilov's June offensive, and Generals Falkenhayn and Mackensen by December had defeated Rumania and occupied Bucharest. In the west, where Ludendorff expected a massive British assault along the Somme in the spring of 1917, great artificial defenses were constructed along the arc Lens-Noyon-Reims; step-by-step the Germans withdrew behind this "Siegfried line" (the Allies dubbed it the "Hindenburg line"), thereby dislocating the enemy's plans for the following spring.

Unfortunately, these constructive measures were vitiated on January 9, 1917, when Ludendorff endorsed the navy's blueprint for victory in six months over Britain through unrestricted submarine warfare. The latter failed to achieve its desired result, and on April 6 the United States entered the war against Germany. Ludendorff had fully counted on this turn of events, arguing that he could win the war before the United States could deploy its troops in France.

On the domestic scene, Ludendorff, in July 1917, was primarily responsible for forcing the dismissal of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. The general regarded the chancellor as a "defeatist" on the issue of the U-boat war and spied his chance to move against Bethmann after the Reichstag had drafted a peace resolution calling for an end to the war without annexations or indemnities and after the chancellor had promised suffrage reform for Prussia. This overt political act, culminating in Bethmann's removal from office on July 13, above all others firmly propelled Ludendorff onto the center stage of domestic politics. The appointment of the colorless bureaucrat, Georg Michaelis, as chancellor temporarily allowed Ludendorff to turn his energies once again to the military situation.

In October 1917, the first quartermaster general dispatched six divisions under General von Below to the Julian Alps where, together with nine Austrian divisions, the new Fourteenth Army on October 24 routed the Italians near Tolmino-Flitsch at the battle of Caporetto. The enemy suffered almost 600,000 casualties, prisoners, and deserters and had to fall behind first the Tagliamento and ultimately the Piave rivers before Anglo-French reinforcements could stem the German-Austro-Hungarian advance. Ludendorff had not envisaged such a colossal collapse of the Italian front, and was, therefore, unable after Caporetto to switch his troops to his right wing and thereby to envelop the fleeing Italians totally. For the first time, Ludendorff's strategic concept was drawn in the wake of a tactical plan, rather than vice versa.

The war’s outcome signified a psychological catastrophe for Ludendorff. Temperamentally unable to admit his own failure, he set out on a quest to understand the causes of the German defeat. This effort occupied him for the rest of his life. Even before the end of the war, his attentions had turned toward civilians on the home front, whom he accused of subverting support for the army in the field. Along with Hindenburg, he then became the leading proponent of the "stab-in-the-back" legend. He directed his energies into a series of conspiracies to overthrow the new republican government, which he regarded as the creature of the same "November criminals" who had betrayed the army. His allies now included former officers and a number of civilian groups on the "völkisch" right, including the NSDAP. In November 1923 Ludendorff joined Adolf Hitler in the "Beer Hall Putsch." He soon fell out with Hitler and nearly all of his other allies, few of whom were willing to accept his claims to power in a successor government. He found refuge in a small group of unconditional admirers, as he drifted into increasingly murky fantasies about the "supernational powers," the Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons, who had joined forces to keep Germany weak. Two years before his death in 1937, he published a treatise on Total War, in which he attributed the German defeat in the First World War to the country’s failure to entrust its fate to an omnipotent military leader.

Achievements

• Erich Ludendorff was a German general who gained renown during the First World War, primarily for his efforts on the eastern front. He and future German President Paul von Hindenburg built a military empire in the east that lasted until Germany’s defeat in 1918. He embodied the strengths and weaknesses of the imperial German army in the twentieth century. He is frequently described as representing everything negative in the rising generation of officers: bourgeois by birth, specialist by training, and philistine by instinct. Appointed head of the Mobilization and Deployment Section of the General Staff in 1908, he was a leading advocate of expanding the army. Ludendorff did succeed in getting army estimates increased in the face of a Reichstag whose parties, from Right to Left, above all disliked voting for taxes.
  
  Ludendorff was also responsible for developing and enacting the Hindenburg Program, designed to put what remained of Germany’s human and material resources entirely at the service of the war effort. He took the lead in overhauling the army’s tactical doctrines. Going in person to the front to discover what was going wrong, he sponsored a system of flexible defense that took heavy toll of the French and the British armies in 1917.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The General Staff and its Problems

    (The History of the Relations Between the High Command and...)

  • The General Staff and its Problems

    (The History of the Relations Between the High Command and...)

  • Vernichtung der Freimaurerei durch Enthüllung ihrer Geheimnisse

    ((German Edition))

  • Ludendorff's Own Story, August 1914-November 1918: The Great War From, Vol. 1
  • Ludendorff's Own Story, August 1914-November 1918, Vol. 2
  • Auf dem Weg zur Feldherrnhalle. Lebenserinnerungen an die Zeit des 9.11.1923 1937

Politics

Ludendorff played an active part in German politics. His involvement was facilitated by the inability of Kaiser Wilhelm II to fulfill the role of a pivot figure, above the everyday frictions between soldiers and statesmen, and by the fierce rivalry among the political parties, which prevented the emergence of any effective civilian rival. In July 1917, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg was dismissed. His nondescript successors did little but dance to Ludendorff’s piping.

The general was for a time successful in orchestrating public support for the war effort. Trade unions and industrialists alike accepted an arms program so comprehensive that within months the impossibility of its execution was obvious. They accepted the starvation of their families in the Hunger Winter of 1917. They accepted the militarization of everyday life to a degree unthinkable in 1914. But this effort could be no more than temporary: the last spark of an exhausted system.

After the war Ludendorff, along with Colonel Bauer, became the focal point of the national and racial völkisch movement. In March 1920, he participated in the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin and, in November 1923, joined Adolf Hitler's aborted Beer Hall Putsch in Munich each time his wartime reputation spared him incarceration. From 1924 to 1928 he was a National Socialist member of Parliament. Ludendorff and Hitler had already parted ways by the time of the Nazi takeover of power in 1933. Ludendorff was no longer sympathetic to the Nazi Party. Hitler and many of his inner circle had distanced themselves from Ludendorff over his increasingly erratic and bizarre.

Views

Ludendorff had become known as the enfant terrible of the German army, a soldier whose obsession with the imperatives of warfare knew no compromise. He believed that warfare governed human affairs. At both the tactical and strategic levels, the waging of war was, he was convinced, a matter of concentrating superior force in battles, which, if properly prepared and conducted, won wars. Ludendorff advocated the 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.

With his second wife, Dr. Mathilde von Kemnitz, Ludendorff founded the mystico-religious Aryan-German Tannenberg League, which actively campaigned against Jews, Marxists, Freemasons, and Jesuits. He was among the many who portrayed Germany’s new civilian government as responsible for Germany’s defeat. Almost immediately, Ludendorff began to proclaim in speeches, books, and articles the myth of the "Stab-in-the-Back." He argued that Germany had not been militarily defeated but rather had been sabotaged by liberals, communists, war profiteers, and Jews on the home front. In this way, he also sought to avoid his own responsibility for the defeat. Even while in command, Ludendorff had told senior officers that "those circles [meaning liberal politicians and their allies] must be brought into the government…whom we have above all to thank for having brought us to this point."

Other right-wing groups, such as the Pan-German League, picked up his rhetoric. Pan-German League president Heinrich Class announced that "the situation should be used for a fanfare against Jewry and the Jews as lightning conductors for all injustices." Ludendorff’s high-profile support of this malicious interpretation led him into Nazi circles in the 1920s, as did his Social Darwinist view of war.

Quotations: "I decline Christianity because it is Jewish, because it is international, and because, in cowardly fashion, it preaches Peace on Earth."

"Leadership: Lions led by donkeys."

"I will give up troops gladly as long as I know that they will be used in the right place to bring victory."

"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."

"The days of the Cross are counted. We must deliver the German nation from the pernicious influence of Christianity."

"A field Marshall is born, not made!"

Personality

A man of enormous powers of concentration and energy, Ludendorff was also a narrow technical specialist with a limited horizon. He possessed the mental arrogance of the self-made man.

Physical Characteristics: Ludendorff's stocky figure with its close-shaven head and omnipresent monocle was to become a national symbol.

Quotes from others about the person

• John Lee: "He became the perfect regimental commander...the younger officers came to adore him."
  
  James Charles Roy: "Erich Ludendorff was not a sentimentalist. He had come to take charge, to issue orders, to win a crucial victory."
  
  Winston Groom: "Erich Ludendorff was considered the brains of the new German command. He pushed for the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare, which ultimately brought America into the conflict."

Connections

Ludendorff had always had a weakness for the female sex. His first wife, a striking beauty, divorced her husband in order to marry Ludendorff. In 1926, however, he insisted on dissolving this marriage and married the neurologist and popular philosopher Mathilde von Kemnitz. Ludendorff succumbed completely to this eccentric woman, who regarded him as the real "commander in chief" of the Germans and had developed a belief in the activities of "supernational powers" - Jewry, Christianity, Freemasonry.

Father:

August Wilhelm Ludendorff

(1833 - 1905)

Mother:

Klara Jeanette Henriette von Tempelhoff

(1840 - 1914)

Brother:

Hans Ludendorff

(Dunowo, 26 May 1873 - Potsdam, 26 June 1941)

Friedrich Wilhelm Hans Ludendorff was a German astronomer and astrophysicist. He authored several astronomical and astrophysical works (the first was about asteroids, following his graduation in 1896), but is better known for the Ludendorff Catalogue, that lists the most important stars in the globular cluster Messier 13, published in 1905.

ex-wife:

Margarethe Schmidt

Wife:

Mathilde Ludendorff

(born Mathilde Spiess; October 4, 1877 - June 24, 1966)

Mathilde Friederike Karoline Ludendorff was a German psychiatrist. She was a leading figure in the Völkisch movement known for her esoteric and conspiratorial ideas.

stepson:

Heinz Pernet

(September 5, 1896 - June 30, 1973)

Heinz Pernet was a German military officer. He was a top figure in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923. He was among the nine men tried and convicted along with Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff in 1924. He later became an SA-Brigadeführer.

References

• German Military and the Weimar Republic: General Hans von Seekt, General Erich Ludendorff and the Rise of Hitler A book by Karen Schaefer
  2020
• The First Nazi: Erich Ludendorff, The Man Who Made Hitler Possible One of the most important military individuals of the last century, yet one of the least known, Ludendorff not only dictated all aspects of World War I, he refused all opportunities to make peace; he antagonized the Americans until they declared war; he sent Lenin into Russia to forge a revolution in order to shut down the Russian front; and in 1918 he pushed for total military victory, in a slaughter known as "The Ludendorff Offensive." Ludendorff created the legend that Germany had lost the war only because Jews had conspired on the home front. He forged an alliance with Hitler, endorsed the Nazis, and wrote maniacally about how Germans needed a new world war, to redeem the Fatherland. He aimed to build a gigantic state to dwarf even the British Empire. Simply stated, he wanted the world.
  2016
• Tannenberg: Erich Ludendorff and the Defense of the Eastern German Border in 1914 In this short monograph the author Perry Pierik has tried to reflect the history of the battle at Tannenberg. Almost 70 years after Ludendorff passed away and almost 90 years after the battle, it helps us to remember the difficult genesis of Europe we know now.
  2003
• The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I During the first two years of World War I a German general called from obscure retirement, Paul Von Hindenburg, aided by his deputy, Erich Ludendorff, won imperial fame from his successful campaigns on the eastern front. In 1916 Kaiser Wilhelm named Hindenburg to head the all-powerful Great German Staff with Ludendorff his deputy. At first all went well. But as food and other resources including replacements diminished, and as America entered the war, the top command increasingly panicked. In the summer of 1918 German armies in the west opened an all-out defensive. This failed and German surrender followed —as did the fall of the German empire.
  1991
• Ludendorff: The Tragedy of a Military Mind First published in its English translation in 1932, this book by Austrian writer and journalist Karl Tschuppik is an analysis of Erich Ludendorff. The author demonstrates the power the High Command had over the Chancellor and Kaiser, and the book provides a useful in understanding the High Command’s power and for obtaining quotations regarding the High Command’s power.
  1932