Dragonslayer

The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich

Jay Lockenour

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501754609
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Primera Guerra Mundial

In this fascinating biography of the infamous ideologue Erich Ludendorff, Jay Lockenour complicates the classic depiction of this German World War I hero.

Erich Ludendorff created for himself a persona that secured his place as one of the most prominent (and despicable) Germans of the twentieth century. With boundless energy and an obsession with detail, Ludendorff ascended to power and solidified a stable, public position among Germany's most influential. Between 1914 and his death in 1937, he was a war hero, a dictator, a right-wing activist, a failed putschist, a presidential candidate, a publisher, and a would-be prophet. He guided Germany's effort in the Great War between 1916 and 1918 and, importantly, set the tone for a politics of victimhood and revenge in the postwar era.

Dragonslayer explores Ludendorff's life after 1918, arguing that the strange or unhinged personal traits most historians attribute to mental collapse were, in fact, integral to Ludendorff's political strategy. Lockenour asserts that Ludendorff patterned himself, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, on the dragonslayer of Germanic mythology, Siegfried—hero of the epic poem The Niebelungenlied and much admired by German nationalists. The symbolic power of this myth allowed Ludendorff to embody many Germans' fantasies of revenge after their defeat in 1918, keeping him relevant to political discourse despite his failure to hold high office or cultivate a mass following after World War I.

Lockenour reveals the influence that Ludendorff's postwar career had on Germany's political culture and radical right during this tumultuous era. Dragonslayer is a tale as fabulist as fiction.

1

Mythic Life

Erich Ludendorff lived a life of legend. Partly through action, partly through self-conscious construction, often with the assistance of others, he fashioned a life story that secured his place as one of the most prominent (and despicable) Germans of the twentieth century. Between 1914 and his death in 1937, Erich Ludendorff was a war hero, a dictator, a right-wing activist, a failed putschist, a presidential candidate, a publisher, and a would-be prophet. He guided Germany’s effort in the Great War between 1916 and 1918 and then set the tone for a politics of victimhood and revenge in the postwar era. Other major characters appear in Ludendorff’s story. He witnessed firsthand the downfall of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last king of Prussia and German emperor. Ludendorff served under legendary military figures such as Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Helmut von Moltke the Younger, and Field Marshal (and later Reich president) Paul von Hindenburg. Ludendorff jousted with the famous military historian Hans Delbrück and Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Adolf Hitler appears in the tale as both protégé and bitter rival. Ludendorff’s second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz, née Spiess, exerted a powerful editorial influence.

Through 1925, Ludendorff told his story primarily through action. He earned the prestigious military award Pour le Mérite for his role in the capture of the Belgian fortress at Liège in August 1914. He led German armies to victory at the Battle of Tannenberg later that fall. He pushed Russian armies out of East Prussia and Poland in 1915. After 1916, he directed the entire war effort from his position as first quartermaster general of the German Army. He called for unrestricted submarine warfare against the United States. Ludendorff brought German industry and media into the service of the war. He masterminded Germany’s last desperate effort to win the war, Operation Michael, in 1918. On September 28, 1918, he recommended that the German Empire seek an armistice with its enemies, bringing about the end of the war a little over six weeks later.¹

Ludendorff has been compared by contemporaries as well as historians to the greatest warriors of history. The variety is bewildering: from the sovereign-strategist Frederick the Great to the slave-rebel Spartacus. From the genius Napoleon Bonaparte to the organizers Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau. From the German nationalist icon Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg to the protocapitalist mercenary Albrecht von Wallenstein.² To some, he was the German Oliver Cromwell.³ His name carried nonmilitary associations as well. Ludendorff was the “Atlas” who bore the burdens of Germany on his shoulders during the war. Sympathizers of his worldview classed him alongside Friedrich Nietzsche as an intellectual.

In June 1917, H. L. Mencken wrote for the Atlantic Monthly a column reporting on his recent experiences in Berlin, before the United States had entered the war. He described a gathering of reporters in January of that year at which his colleagues discussed the recent declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. “I chiefly listened,” wrote Mencken, “and the more I listened the more I heard a certain Awful Name.” Ludendorff. His fellow reporters yammered on about the mysterious figure behind the scenes. “Ludendorff is the neglected factor in this war—the forgotten man,” they said. “The world hears nothing about him, and yet he has the world by the ear.”⁴

Ludendorff maintained that grip for many years. He championed the cause of the radical right wing in Germany throughout the early 1920s and lent his name and considerable prestige to various efforts to overthrow the Weimar Republic. From behind the scenes, he masterminded the abortive Kapp Putsch of 1920. From the head of a marching column, he led Adolf Hitler’s motley band of National Socialists through the streets of Munich in 1923. In photographs of Ludendorff and Hitler’s subsequent trial for treason, Ludendorff, in full military regalia, appears center frame.⁵

After 1918, however, he also began a campaign of self-conscious construction aimed at retelling the story of his life according to his own fantasies. Ludendorff experienced Germany’s defeat in the Great War as a profound personal crisis. Many of his military colleagues agree that he suffered a mental collapse in September 1918, caused by the strain and impending failure of his wartime efforts. That collapse and his subsequent flight to Sweden to escape the revolutionary violence that swept Germany in November 1918 were indelible stains on his honor, so dearly prized in the circles in which he moved, as well as on his manhood.

In a fit of authorial energy, he penned the first volume (and first of many versions) of his memoirs in a mere three months.⁶ The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was quickly translated into many languages. But Meine Kriegserinnerungen (My War Memories) was only the first salvo fired by Ludendorff in a long campaign to tell the “real” story of the war, Germany’s subsequent history, and (more importantly for him) Ludendorff’s place in that history. Subsequent works elaborated the themes laid down in his memoirs: the valiant German army, the brilliant German leadership (at least after 1916 when he was in charge), and the failure of the home front. To make this latter point, Ludendorff pointed increasingly to Jews, Freemasons, and Catholics as participants in a vast conspiracy to undermine German power. With his second wife, Mathilde, he draped the trappings of a pagan religion around this conspiracy theory and appointed himself prophet of a movement to harden the German “soul” against the attacks of these “supranational powers.”⁷ His enormous and diverse portfolio makes Ludendorff a frustrating and enigmatic subject for historical study. He published dozens of confrontational, self-justifying, and often inscrutable books and pamphlets. His highly developed sense of personal honor led him into countless battles, in print, in the courtroom, and elsewhere, over perceived slights. His pagan religious philosophy, his messianic fantasies, and his paranoid conspiracy theories practically defy rational analysis.⁸

In the face of these facts, most biographers and historians of Ludendorff have relied on the alleged mental collapse in 1918, brought on by the strain of managing Germany’s war effort from his perch on the Army Supreme Command (OHL), to explain Ludendorff’s subsequent behavior. Using the device of mental illness, his descent into political radicalism, pagan religion, and crackpot conspiracy theories is relatively easily explained. Most historians treat his life after 1918, including his flirtation with Adolf Hitler, as a mere epilogue—the descent of a once-powerful man into a sad and lonely isolation. D. J. Goodspeed suggests he may have had a stroke.⁹ Roger Chickering diagnoses “paranoia or ‘delusional disorder.’ ”¹⁰ Richard Watt dismisses him as “half insane.”¹¹ His most recent biographer wisely avoids a diagnosis but quotes Heinrich Mann calling the postwar Ludendorff a “lunatic” and includes Heinrich’s younger brother Thomas’s judgment that Ludendorff was “not to be taken seriously” after the war.¹²

Clearly, Ludendorff experienced a crisis in September 1918 that led him to seek the help of a psychiatrist.¹³ He had difficulty sleeping. He suffered fits of crying. His colleagues worked in fear of his raging temper. It surprised no one that he should be suffering from nervous exhaustion, given his workload over the previous four years. It should be noted that even if he did show signs of exhaustion and suffered a crisis at some point, many observers testified to quite normal behavior in the days and weeks after the alleged breakdown.¹⁴

That Ludendorff’s “nerves” became the focus of such attention both during and after war doubtless wounded him deeply. As Paul Lerner points out, in the German Empire, nerves were a “metaphor for vitality and fitness” and “a well-balanced nervous system were the keys to successful military service.” Lerner quotes Kaiser Wilhelm II himself from a speech in 1910: “It is through nerves that [the next war’s] outcome will be decided.”¹⁵ Nervous ailments were diagnosed as hysteria and attributed to a lack of willpower.¹⁶ But it is not necessary to posit mental illness (in fact it is in some ways counterproductive or even exculpatory) to explain Ludendorff’s pronounced antisemitism and flirtation with Adolf Hitler. Long before his alleged 1918 crisis, Ludendorff and those around him saw themselves at war not merely with the Entente but also with shadowy forces aimed at destroying Germany.

In order to achieve a more complete understanding of Ludendorff’s place in German history after 1918 (including the post-1945 history of the Federal Republic of Germany), this work will take a biographical approach that differs from traditional biography in two ways. First, it will reduce to a bare minimum the story of the First World War, arguably the most eventful and important years of our subject’s life. Ludendorff’s roles and activities from 1914 to 1918 are very well known, and a recent German biography by Manfred Nebelin should be considered definitive on the subject.¹⁷ Rather than rehearse that well-known story in detail, I chose instead to focus on two battles from 1914, Liège and Tannenberg, which appear out of all proportion in Ludendorff’s postwar writings. These battles establish characteristics—bold, courageous action and operational genius in defense of Germany—that Ludendorff wanted to associate with his mythos. I also survey his role in the Third Supreme Command after 1916, which earned him (in the minds of many, including himself) the sobriquet “Feldherr,” or “master of battle,” which became the preferred form of address among his followers. The title testified to Ludendorff’s presumed strategic genius that allowed him to comment with authority on world affairs and the changing nature of war.

Second, this work gives significant attention to Ludendorff’s importance as a prolific writer—of autobiography, political commentary, pseudo-philosophy and -history, and prophecy. A glance at the bibliography will show the dozens and dozens of books and pamphlets he authored between 1918 and 1937, many coauthored with his second wife Mathilde and appearing in their publishing house, Ludendorffs Verlag, established in 1929. Ludendorff was also the principal contributor to the many periodicals that issued from his various organizations, including Deutsche Wochenschau and Ludendorffs Volkswarte. Two subjects dominated his oeuvre: autobiography/commentary intended to defend and burnish his own reputation; and second, the machinations past and present of the “supranational powers”—the Catholic Church, Freemasonry, and Jews.

One does not find in the historical record prior to 1918 anything to rival Ludendorff’s later rants against Jews, Freemasons, and Jesuit agents. But there is no doubt that those with whom Ludendorff worked and lived before 1918 held antisemitic beliefs that must be described as more than “typical” for elite German and European society. The most notable offender in this regard is certainly Colonel Max Bauer, who served Ludendorff as an artillery specialist as well as political adviser. Bauer was especially vitriolic in his wartime denunciations of Socialists, “Jewish liberals,” and “Jewish demagogues” who were undermining the war effort.¹⁸ Generals Max Hoffmann and Wilhelm Groener as well as other colleagues of Ludendorff shared these suspicions, even if they voiced them less vehemently. By the end of the war, Kaiser Wilhelm himself decried President Woodrow Wilson’s support for Freemasonry and “international Jewry” in their efforts to put the Bolsheviks in powe...