Background
Max Hermann Bauer was born in Quedlinburg on January 31, 1869, the son of an estate owner.
Max Hermann Bauer was born in Quedlinburg on January 31, 1869, the son of an estate owner.
Bauer entered the army in 1888 and made a career in the artillery branch: he attended the Engineer and Artillery School at Charlottenburg and from 1905 to 1908 served as artillery expert in the General Staff.
In 1908 Bauer was assigned as special artillery aide to Colonel Erich Ludendorff in the mobilization and deployment section of the General Staff and entrusted with converting the foot artillery into heavy mobile artillery with 42 cm guns. Bauer was promoted major in 1911 and thereafter served as staff officer at Colmar.
Bauer entered the war as artillery expert in the General Staff under General Helmuth von Moltke, and earned his military reputation by effectively deploying heavy guns during the invasion of Belgium - particularly the reduction of Liège - and by overcoming the munitions shortage during the early weeks of the war. Partly owing to this, Bauer, in July 1915, was appointed chief of Section II of the General Staff, responsible for artillery. However, Bauer's role far surpassed his technical function. A born intriguer, rabid anti-Semite and fervent antifeminist, Bauer maintained intimate ties to the captains of industry and did not shrink from using the Rhenish magnates to advance his desires for a military dictatorship. Bauer intitially also allied himself with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in order in the fall of 1916 to oust the chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, the iron-willed Bauer deplored what he termed Falkenhayn's "hand to mouth strategy" and the senseless slaughter at Verdun.
In July 1917, Bauer mobilized the new army commanders, General Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, to dismiss Bethmann Hollweg over the chancellor's proposed franchise reform for Prussia and his "defeatist" stance on the matter of territorial annexations. Lieutenant Colonel Bauer cleverly persuaded Crown Prince Wilhelm on July 12 to interview known parliamentary opponents of the chancellor while he hid in an anteroom and kept notes of the conversations; mean-while, Bauer also spread the notion that Hindenburg and Ludendorff would resign unless the chancellor was dismissed. Within hours, Bauer reaped his reward; Bethmann Hollweg resigned.
Bauer worked diligently to fulfill the provisions of the mammoth Hindenburg Program's call for increased munitions output and to enforce the Auxiliary Service Law that made all German males between the ages of fifteen and sixty liable for "patriotic service." Neither did Bauer shrink from deploying Belgian forced labor in German industries. Throughout this period the energetic colonel continued his political intrigue, using Ludendorff's authority as cover. His list of enemies included Wilhelm Groener, Chancellor Count Georg von Hertling as well as Generals Heinrich Scheuch, Hermann von Stein, and Civil Cabinet head Rudolf von Valentini.
By February 1918, Bauer's machinations reached even the House of Hohenzollern as the colonel informed the crown prince that the Kaiser had become "our doom" and slyly suggested, albeit without success, that Wilhelm II be replaced by his eldest son. And early in October 1918, Bauer intrigued against Ludendorff, counseling officers as well as politicians to dismiss the "silent dictator."
Colonel Bauer resigned from the military in June 1919 in order to collaborate with Ludendorff on the notorious "stab in the back" legend concerning Germany's defeat in the war as a result of "defeatist" forces on the home front. In March 1920, he took part in the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin and consequently had to flee the country, first to Austria and later to Hungary. Bauer simply could not resist political intrigue and at times conspired against regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria; he also maintained close ties to conservative forces in the Ukraine. After the failure of Adolf Hitler's beer hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923, Bauer embarked on an exile that took him to Russia, Madrid (1924), Argentina (1925), and China (1927) as military adviser. He returned to Germany, but in 1929 was summoned to China by Chiang Kai-Shek; Bauer died in Shanghai of smallpox on May 6, 1929.
Bauer's memoirs constituted a bitter condemnation of the entire conduct of the war. One historian has summarized the colonel's wartime aims as "a military dictatorship under Ludendorff, the exclusion of the Reichstag from active politics, and the total militarisation of the economy." It is safe to say that Bauer represented the most drastic example of the ruthless, intriguing, political "demigods" of the General Staff.