Ludendorff and hindenburg
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Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) was born near Poznan on 9 April 1865.
Commissioned into the infantry in 1883 and a member of the General Staff from 1894, Ludendorff served as head of the deployment section in 1908. A highly militaristic man, Ludendorff held that peace was merely the interval between wars, and that the nation's chief duty was to provide the means with which to conduct war. In the pre-war period Ludendorff assisted with the fine-tuning of the invasion strategy for France, the Schlieffen Plan.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War he was made quartermaster general to von Bulow's Second Army, responsible for capturing the Liege forts, without which the Schlieffen Plan could not succeed. This task successfully accomplished, Ludendorff was sent to East Prussia where he worked with Paul von Hindenburg as his Chief of Staff.
Hindenburg, who relied heavily upon Ludendorff in crafting his victories at Tannenberg (1914) and the Masurian Lakes (1915), later appointed Ludendo
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Erich Ludendorff (1865 - 1937)
Erich Ludendorff ©A talented military strategist, Ludendorff's early success in World War One were obscured by Germany's defeat and his pro-Nazi political activities in the post-war period.
Erich Ludendorff was born on 9 April 1865 near Posen in Prussia (now Poznan, Poland). He went into the army at 18 and, in 1894, he was appointed to the German general staff. Here he helped revise the Schlieffen Plan, Germany's strategy for victory over France and campaigned for greater military expansion in anticipation of war.
When war broke out in 1914, Ludendorff was made quartermaster general to Von Bulow's Second Army but when the Russians threatened to overrun the German Eighth Army in East Prussia, Ludendorff was appointed their chief of staff, serving under Paul von Hindenburg. Their spectacular victories over the Russians at Tannenberg (1914) and at the Masurian Lakes (1915) brought Hindenburg worldwide renown - although arguably much of the credit belonged to Ludendorff. In 1916, when Hindenburg was appointed chief of staff, he made Ludendorf
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Ludendorff, Erich
By Roger Chickering
Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (1865-1937)
German General Ludendorff, victor of the battles of Liège and Tannenberg and later Quartermaster General, essentially started the “stab-in-the-back” myth as his answer to why Germany lost the war.
Sawatzki, Karl: Porträt Erich Ludendorff, black-and-white photograph, n.p., 1918; source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2008-0277, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-2008-0277,_Erich_Ludendorff.jpg.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en.
Ludendorff, Friedrich Wilhelm
Prussian (German) general
Born 09 April 1865 in Kruszewnia (Provinz Posen), Kingdom of Prussia
Died 20 December 1937 in Munich, Germany
Summary
Erich Ludendorff was the effective commander of the German armed forces during the war. He also became a quasi-dictatorial figure, the ruthless symbol of the army’s political power. After the war he became the new republicaCopyright ©tiedame.pages.dev 2025