Background
Mathilde von Kemnitz was born on October 4, 1877 in Wiesbaden.
Mathilde von Kemnitz was born on October 4, 1877 in Wiesbaden.
After the war she resumed her propaganda against Christianity, freemasonry and Judaism in Bavaria, embracing such outlandish and bizarre theories as the idea that Wall Street bankers had financed Hitler's electoral campaigns. In November 1949 she appeared before a de-Nazification court in Munich and on 5 January 1950 she was found guilty as a ‘Major Offender' and sentenced to two years’ directed labour. The revived Ludendorff movement was eventually banned by the Federal government in May 1961.
Her husband, Ludendorff, founded the Tannenbergbund in 1926, disseminating countless pamphlets and books attacking the ‘supranational' powers of Judaism, freemasonry and Jesuitism, and producing a literature so eccentric that even the Nazis disavowed some of his more insane ravings. According to Ludendorff, occult forces ‘above the State' had engaged in diabolical intrigues against the German nation which had climaxed in November 1918. The ‘supranational powers' had planned the assassination at Sarajevo which sparked off World War I, the Russian Revolution, the entry of America into the war, the Versailles Treaty and other happenings in order to secure Judeo-Masonic world-rule. In his more extravagant fantasies, Ludendorff concluded that Mozart and Schiller had been assassinated by ‘the Cheka of the supranational secret society'. Ludendorff's growing persecution-mania led to his discovering ‘Jews', ‘Freemasons' and ‘Romanists’ among his own friends and fellow-combatants. Although Ludendorff was a Nazi hero because of his role in the putsch, such obsessions provoked top Party leaders like Alfred Rosenberg to ridicule his ‘psychosis’ and ‘perverted political imagination'. For his part, Hitler, at a public meeting in Regensburg in 1927, claimed that Ludendorff was himself a Freemason, a charge which was left unanswered. Relations beween Hitler and Ludendorff deteriorated to the point that the latter warned President von Hindenburg in 1933 that this sinister individual [ Hitler] will lead our country into the abyss and our nation to an unprecedented catastrophe'. Nonetheless, following his death in Tutzing, Bavaria, on 20 December 1937, Ludendorff received a State funeral and was eulogized as a ‘great patriot’.
The pseudo-religious movement he had founded, Deutsche Gotteserkenntnis (Community of Believers), a new Germanic religion which worshipped the old pagan Norse gods, was officially recognized in 1939 by the Nazi regime.