Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (9 April 1865 – 20 December 1937) was a
German general, the victor of the Battle of Liège and the Battle of Tannenberg. From August 1916, his
appointment as Quartermaster general (Erster
Generalquartiermeister) made him the leader (along with Paul Hindenburg) of
the German war efforts during World War
I until his resignation in October 1918, just before the end of
hostilities.
After
the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader, and a promoter of
the stab-in-the-back legend, which posited that
the German loss in World War I was caused by the betrayal of the German Army by Marxists and Bolsheviks
who were furthermore responsible for the disadvantageous settlement negotiated
for Germany in the Versailles Treaty. He took part in the
unsuccessful coup d’état with Wolfgang
Kapp in 1920 and the Beer
Hall Putsch of Adolf Hitler in 1923, and in 1925, he ran for the
office of President of Germany against his former
superior Hindenburg, whom he claimed had taken credit for Ludendorff's
victories against Russia.
From
1924 to 1928 he represented the German Völkisch Freedom Party in the German Parliament. Consistently
pursuing a purely military line of thought, Ludendorff developed, after the
war, the theory of “Total War,” which he published as Der Totale Krieg
(The Total War) in 1935. In this work, he argued that the entire
physical and moral forces of the nation should be mobilized, because, according
to him, peace was
merely an interval between wars. Ludendorff was a recipient of the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross and the
Pour le Mérite.
INTERNET SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Ludendorff
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