Hindenburg disliked the Nazis, yet his signature gave Hitler power
Recalled from retirement in 1914, Paul von Hindenburg won at Tannenberg and became Germany's national idol. As president he opposed Hitler, yet in 1933 he made him chancellor, then signed the decrees that dismantled civil liberties. When he died, Hitler absorbed the presidency and ruled alone.
Hindenburg came from minor Prussian nobility in Posen, now Poznań in Poland, born on 2 October 1847. He entered cadet school at 11, served as a page to a Prussian queen dowager at 18 and joined the Third Foot Guards. At Königgrätz in 1866 a bullet pierced his helmet and knocked him out; he bandaged his head with a towel and carried on, earning a decoration. He also fought at Saint Privat in the Franco-Prussian War.
The Kriegsakademie admitted him in 1873, and he spent years on the General Staff under Alfred von Schlieffen, taught tactics and wrote field regulations on engineering and heavy artillery later used in the First World War. A staff ride in 1888 taught him East Prussia's lakes and sandy barrens. In 1908, commanding a corps in manoeuvres, he beat one led by the Kaiser. He retired in 1911.
War brought him back in August 1914 to rescue the Eighth Army in East Prussia, with Erich Ludendorff as chief of staff. Adopting a plan from Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, they swung most of the army south against the exposed flank of Samsonov's Russian Second Army. Tannenberg destroyed that army, taking 92,000 prisoners for 14,000 German casualties. Made field marshal and later chief of the General Staff in 1916, he and Ludendorff used the Kaiser's sweeping delegation of authority to run what amounted to a military dictatorship, until defeat at the Second Marne and in the Allied Hundred Days.
Elected president of the Weimar Republic in 1925, he dissolved the Reichstag twice in 1932 and, in January 1933, reluctantly appointed Hitler chancellor in a coalition with the German National People's Party. After the Reichstag fire he approved a decree suspending civil liberties, and he signed the Enabling Act granting emergency powers. He died on 2 August 1934, after which Hitler folded the two top offices into one and took the title Führer.
Source: Paul von Hindenburg
