Ludendorff helped invent the lie that Germany was stabbed in the back
For two years Erich Ludendorff effectively ran Germany's First World War. When it collapsed in 1918, he blamed traitors at home rather than defeat in the field, spreading the stab-in-the-back myth. He then marched beside Hitler in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and helped pave the way for the Nazis.
Born in 1865 near Posen in Prussia, now part of Poland, to a family of Pomeranian merchant descent, he grew up on a small farm with a gift for mathematics, shared by his brother Hans, who became a noted astronomer. At cadet school in Plön he was placed two years ahead of his age and stayed top of his class. Commissioned in 1885, he entered the War Academy in 1893 and within a year was recommended to the General Staff, where he later headed the mobilisation section and helped shape the Schlieffen Plan. He married Margarethe Schmidt in 1910 after offering her his umbrella in a rainstorm.
Pushed off the General Staff for political meddling, he restored his reputation in battle. In August 1914 he led the capture of Liège and won the Pour le Mérite, then, serving under Paul von Hindenburg in the east, played a central part in crushing Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.
In August 1916 he engineered Hindenburg's elevation to head of the Supreme Army Command and his own post as First Quartermaster General. Together they ran what amounted to a military dictatorship, with Ludendorff steering strategy and the whole war economy. He knocked Russia out of the war and in 1918 launched Western Front offensives that gained more ground than anything since 1914. The Allies' Hundred Days Offensive reversed it all, and with revolution brewing, Kaiser Wilhelm II forced him out.
Afterwards he became a nationalist figurehead, claiming defeat and the Versailles settlement were the work of a conspiracy of Marxists, Freemasons and Jews. He joined the failed Kapp Putsch of 1920 and Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch, then lost the 1925 presidential election. In retirement he wrote The Total War, arguing that peace is only a pause between wars and a nation must stay permanently ready to mobilise everything. He died of liver cancer in Munich in 1937, and Hitler staged a state funeral he had explicitly refused.
Source: Erich Ludendorff
