Erich Ludendorff

There are several biographies about Erich Ludendorff. What most of them have in common is that they stop at the year 1918, the end of the First World War. This is un-justified. At the peak of his long career, between 1915 and roughly 1925, Ludendorff developed into the strongest man on the ‘right’. Thus, the years after the war were also of great importance. He was not only an important general who, with Paul von Hin-denburg, was in supreme command of Germany’s de facto military leadership after General von Falkenhayn’s resignation, but he was also the main conspirator against the Weimar Republic after World War I. He worked directly with the murderers of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, he was close to the murderers of Walter Rathenau, he led two coup attempts, the Kapp putsch and the Feldherrnhalle putsch and he almost did so again, this time against Hitler in 1935 .

Ludendorff was also a publisher and distributor of defamatory writings of unprece-dented vehemence, such as the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, which created grounds for the holocaust, and he was also an unprecedented conspiracy theorist. Moreover, Ludendorff was already negotiating with the German government in the infamous Wannseevilla, 17 years before the ‘Final Solution’ was decided there, and in his house the most fatal friendship of the 20th century was made: that between Heinrich Himmler and Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss. If we link this to Ludendorff’s role in the com-munist revolution, and the blinded train which Lenin used to travel from Switzerland to St. Petersburg, the image of this man is a lot more versatile than just the general that history knows him as.

For a long time, Dr. Perry Pierik immersed himself in the life of this controversial man, whose influence is still barely understood. Hitler did not appear out of the blue in 1933. The so-called “missing years” of the “Führer” were in reality the dictate of Erich Luden-dorff. Pierik wrote and edited numerous books about the First and Second World War.