School of War - Ep 44: Jay Lockenour on Erich Ludendorff

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Ep 44: Jay Lockenour on Erich Ludendorff  ▪️ Jay Lockenour, associate professor of history at Temple University and author of Dragonslayer: The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, joins the show to talk about the life of the infamous German general and politician.  ▪️ Times  • 01:30 Introduction • 02:00 Ludendorff’s Significance • 03:08 Ludendorff’s Early Life • 05:02 Not Quite A Matinee Idol  • 07:13 The German General Staff • 11:43 A General Without Portfolio • 17:50 The War And The Myth  • 22:23 For The Record - The German Military Lost  • 26:12 The Early 1920’s • 29:49 Erich And Adolf     • 34:10 Ludendorff And The Right • 37:00 The Holocaust And Ludendorff

Stabbed in the back, after the First World War, the German right and the German military consoled themselves with the notion that, in fact, Germany had been successful on the battlefield, only to be defeated at home by a complex and shadowy conspiracy of socialists and minorities who wished evil to the German Empire. Such a vision fueled the reinvigoration of the German right and the rise of the Nazi party. And at the center of it all stood a titanic figure in German military history and politics, Eric Ludendorf, the hero of Liege and of Tannenberg, effective dictator of Germany from 1916 to 18, and its so-called battle lord. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm joined today by Jay Lockenauer. He's associate professor of history at Temple University. He's the author of Soldiers as Citizens. He's the former host of the new books and military history podcast. An author most recently of Dragon Slayer, The Legend of Eric Ludendorf, and the Y.M.R. Republic. and the Third Reich. Jay, thanks so much for joining. Yeah, thank you. So I expect that any number of our listeners will vaguely associate the name Ludendorf with, you know, the German Empire,

German history of the early part of the 20th century, and may not know a great deal more. Describe, if you would, the world into which Eric Ludendorff was born and came of age and the military that he joined. Right. So Ludendorf was essentially, he was the dictator of Germany. from 1916 to 1918 during the First World War. He was the brains of the Third Supreme Command, ostensibly led by Paul von Hinnitberg, who is an enormously important figure and about whom there is a recent and terrific biography.

But Ludendorf, he gets kind of swept under the rug after 1918. Most biographers cover his wartime experience quite thoroughly and excellently, and then they see him kind of going crazy and flirting with Hitler and so forth after the war. And when I discovered his story through a coincidence, I became interested in resurrecting that post-war story of Eric Ludendorf that period from 1918 on, when I argue he becomes the embodiment of German fantasies of revenge. for the war that shouldn't have been lost in his view and in the view of many other Germans. Your book, which I recommend to our listeners, it's really a very interesting weave of not just

military history, but also political and political history and literary analysis, the way in which you kind of show Ludendorff using a German epic to create a bit of a myth of himself. It's really very much worth everyone's time. and relevant as well, I think, to things that are going on today. Can you, can you, before we get into the myth-making and the stabbing in the back and all of that, we go back to the end of the 19th century and could you paint a picture for folks of the world into which Ludendorff, you know, was born and entered the military? What is the late German, well, I actually suppose that's not quite the right to put it,

what does the imperial German army look like? And what is Ludendorff's upbringing look like? Yeah. So, I mean, that's a well-known part of his story is that he's not an aristocrat. In fact, there are a number of books in researching this story that called him Eric von Ludendorffle, as if he had an aristocratic background. And I think he would have bristled that notion. In fact, he was quite proud of his non-aristocratic upbringing. That's part of this, the dragon slayer story is that he rose from relative obscurity to the, be, I mean, quite against the wishes, I would think of a lot of people in the German general staff, this major figure that he didn't have an aristocratic upbringing, he didn't have the family background that most of his peers had. And yet he succeeded in spite of that. And I think for all that I think he's a despicable character, I could say he would have been particularly proud of that, of that aspect of his upbringing. So something like in the late

19th century, 65% of the upper, upper crust of the German officer corps would have been aristocratic. And he was from that non-aristocratic side and made it there by his own talent. I mean, I obviously, I tell his story and he tells his story in such a way that he emphasizes his own successes. But you can sense it that people, They both resented him. I mean, he wasn't, he didn't have particularly many friends. And yet he was this incredibly successful, got promoted before, you know, before the, the, the time in rank would have dictated that consistently throughout his career that people

recognized his, his talent. I don't know how intentionally humorous it was, but your depiction of him and his, his character early in the book, in particular, when you're talking about him, when he's young, was humorous to me. I mean, he kind of embodies this almost very English stereotype of a Prussian officer, you know, humorless, dogged, charmless. And then you're talking about the way in which he thinks of himself as Sigfried, and you show the photograph of the actor who plays Siegfried,

of Hansen-Dashing German actor, playing Siegfried in, you know, the German cinema, the early 20th century, next to a photograph of Ludendorf himself. You make the case that his contemporary study was handsome, I have to say the photograph that's in the book does not fully prove your point. You know, it's beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You know, people around him, it's in a way like Hitler. So I had as my model for this book, an excellent and much better book by Ian Kershaw called

The Hitler Myth about the kind of persona of Adolf Hitler. And as a German historian, it's hard for, it's hard as an American, it's hard to imagine Hitler as a handsome person and yet people describe them that way and people describe Ludendorf that way as this this clear eye clear blue-eyed Nordic god and you look I look at it and I see a fat delpy old German guy so but as historians we we we take our our evidence where we find it and and that's that's the testimony that people offer so we have to we have to serve that forward I guess you do encounter particularly in the military, you encounter types who are when seeing static, when seeing not moving, you wonder what the appeal is and it's actually their energy, like literally their movement

that throws them into a different light. But we'll, I guess, have to give his contemporaries the benefit of the doubt. So in he goes, as a young adolescent into series of schools, into the military, as you point out, he does very well. and then it's in 1894, he's assigned to the general staff. Could you talk a little bit about what that meant for Ludendorf's career and listeners who may have heard of the German general staff and be vaguely aware of its significance? But why was it, why was it significant?

What was unusual about this organization? The general staff, I mean, it comes out of a period in the early 19th century reacting essentially to what was described as the genius of Napoleon, that here was this person, who embodied, you know, genius in warfare and how, how, and I think of it this way. I'm not sure contemporaries saw it this way, but the Germans tried to institutionalize that. They tried to say, well, we can't count when they're being Napoleon around when we need one. So let's build one out of parts. And so the German general staff is a kind of effort to replicate military genius on an institutional level.

And people like Ludendorff, you know, go into that institution as the kind of the brains of this bureaucracy that's supposed to represent military genius. And, you know, like I said, he is a despicable person in lots of ways. But that success and that entry into that institution, particularly as an non-aristocrat, as I'll say again, was a mark of his talent. He goes in, if you want me to go on, you stop me if you want. No, no, I think it's interesting, actually. He goes in with a particular fascination with technology,

and this is the one, if people don't know him from the history, they might know him from Wonder Woman, the movie, where he kind of blows my mind that he shows up there, and yet I try to give movie makers the benefit of the doubt. Like he was, he was a promoter of technology. He was interested in aircraft. He was interested in heavy artillery, which plays a role in the early part of the war. So that's, that was, you know, he found his home there.

And how was the staff organized and what roles did he have there? Because he was there as a relatively junior officer and then more in the, in the middle of his career in 19-0. Yeah. So he eventually becomes the chief of the, the chief of the, the operations section, which is the war planners essentially planning for the future wars. And so he inherits Schleifen's famous plan from 1905 and becomes a kind of champion in his own right. I mean, of that plan and an executioner. He runs afoul of some of the political leadership in the 1912, 13 and gets ousted from the general staff and sent to a command position.

but is quickly called back when the war starts and placed in command out in liege, which is where the initial important battle of the war is supposed to take place, that he in fact planned. So he's gone but not forgotten and comes back to the critical point. And just to stick with the pre-war period for Roma, because I'd like to come to World War I and then, of course, the aftermath, which is what your book really focuses on. You know, how today, you know, 2022, you know, for Americans, we have the Pentagon, we have the joint staff, you know, the notion there is a large standing staff apparatus that plans contingencies as its work, you know, that we is prepared to go to war, you know.

We have a plan. I'm stating Canada, by the way. Yeah. I don't know what it is. It's somewhere. You're going to pick outrageous examples. I don't know if that would be the most outrageous. I take your point.

We have plans for everything. At the turn of the 20th century. where the Germans, was this unusual that the Germans were doing this? No. And in fact, the Germans had become, by that point, kind of a model. Because of their successes in the 1870s and unifying the country, the Prussian military model had some sway, the Japanese model, their army after the Prussian model. Americans are endlessly fascinated with the Prussian example and Klausovitz and all that

was certainly nowadays is required reading for the U.S. Army. So that that German model was there for people to imitate. Got it. So let's let's let's get to the war then. So there he was a few years earlier figuring out what it would take in his view to make the Schliefell-Pen actually effective in planning assaults on these fortresses in Belgium. What was the fortress system on the on the Belgian frontier? Assess the problem to the German. military that this fortress system imposed. Because again, I think looking back on it from the present day, you think of fortresses and you think of modern warfare and you think, well, modern offensive weapons and tactics ought to make pretty short work of things that are in effect, castles.

And I suppose in a way, that's true. And another way, it was a challenge. Like, can you kind of walk us through that and how Ludendorf distinguished himself? Yeah. So, I mean, I teach about castles too. Castles have high, thin, walls designed to keep out people. And when gunpower weapons come around, they become obsolete. So by the end of the 19th century, you have what are essentially fortress complexes, like Lijij in Belgium and Verdun and other places along these border territories that were designed to resist heavy artillery, steel-reinforced concrete, although the Germans did a fascinating study of the fortresses at Lijijin Namur and found their French construction obsolete. And the Germans have designed these weapons, these Krupp and Austrian

Skoda siege complexes. We don't talk about combined arms in the same way now, but it was in a sense that this kind of networked infrastructure where the fortresses were sited within range of each other's artillery in theory so that they could support each other. If one was attacked, they could be brought under fire by at least two others. I mean, I can go into details. There are false with the Belgian complex, and it's kind of controversial about whether they actually held up the Germans or they didn't Ludendorf didn't think that they held up very well.

There are people that disagree. But I don't know how much more you want to know about that. Well, what actually, yeah, no, I actually think it's all quite interesting. So as much as you want to share and what actually happened as well. Yeah. So one of my most interesting sources was the Belgian commander of those fortresses, General Lamont. He was captured by the Germans after the fortress he was in, exploded basically either because of a, probably because of German fire, striking their, their ammo, their armory,

and exploding it from within. He, I wasn't able to squeeze this into the book, but he's, he's more famous than Lady Gaga. I just want to get that on record. He got his figure in Madden Chousseau's wax museum within six weeks into the battle. And it took Lady Gaga after her first successful album, like six months, had a wax figure there. So General Levin and his Gallic mustache was in there first. It was, you know, it was a, it was an important battle. It was one that Germans needed to win as quickly as possible in order to open up the railways and support that they needed to get into France to make the Schlieffen plan happen. So, and again, that's part of the reason for the controversy.

And what was Luden Norse's role specifically? I mean, why is it that he personally was distinguished in the aftermath? So he had been in a command, a troop command in Strasbourg, in what, you know, Alsace Lorraine, this region was annexed by Germany after the war in 1870. He'd been kind of exiled there because he'd made some enemies calling for a larger army and some additional funds for the army in 1912, 1913. And so they kind of banished him out of the general staff to this troop command. But he was called up right away to the army that was going to attack Glejj,

partly because he had been the architect of this plan. And it's a strange position. It's one that doesn't really exist in some armies, the kind of general without portfolio. He was just there and could tell people what to do. if he thought it was necessary. And so he went from place to place, you know, wherever the fighting was oddest and and literally took commanders and troops in the, you know, in streets that were blocked

by by Belgian infantry and cleared them and then would go back and talk to the commander of the second army. And he was just kind of all over the place. And partly so this becomes part of his legend. So I don't want to, you know, it should be clear to listeners that my book is not about the war, which I had trouble with at first. I had to convince people that this was not a book about the war. It's about his post-war legend making, and this battle becomes an important part of his legend and becomes linked in his mind and his followers' minds with the Beer Hall Pitch

in 1923, where he marches with Hitler, where the march through Munich is really his idea. And they, you know, in his telling, they both embody this kind of courage and this, this initiative that he, that he carries out to save Germany. That, you know, liege is just like 1923 in Berlin, I mean, in Munich. And sort of, you know, part of a pattern of tactical, operational brilliance that's ultimately, you know, in the myth that he foments. undermined, right, by a variety of forces. Right. The step. Yeah.

And so what? Really, it's kind of two parts. There's Lijiaz is kind of the operational, the courage, the personal, the personal battle front experience. And then Tannenberg, the battle of Tannenberg in Russia becomes the kind of strategic operational genius where he defeats a much larger force and rescues Germany in this defensive struggle. So it's both of those battles.

are carefully chosen to enhance his legend. And this is also, this is the same month, right? August of 1914 is quite the month. So he's plucked from Belgium and sent east because the Russians are giving the Germans trouble out east and there's there are doubts about the leadership out there. Yeah, and as Ludendorff would tell you, he was called first. In fact, you know, Moltka, who was the chief of the general staff at the time, Moldka, the younger, selects Ludendorff and then finds Hindenberg to be the Supreme Commander because Hindenberg has a

seniority in the aristocratic name and so forth. But Lutendorf would tell you, you know, his train ticket was plunged first and Hindenberg just sort of jumped the train on the way. So let's start talking about the myth making then. So you have Lij, you have Tannenberg, and then you have him, as you point out, presiding as effectively dictator of the German state. What is his argument after the war? Is it, you know, is it as simple as the military had this thing licked and then a series of, you know, conspiracies from Catholics and Jews and Freemasons and so forth sold us out? To walk us through the myth and then we'll talk through the reality. Yeah. So, I mean, that was his, it takes some time to develop. In fact,

his early writings are not particularly anti-Semitic, and it's not until, you know, there's a parliamentary procedure investigation into the causes of the defeat, and he and Hindenberg both testify, and Hindenberg is sort of fed these words by Ludendorff and Ludendorff's lawyer that the army had been stabbed in the back. And it takes a while for it to come to its full-fledged form where it's it's jews and socialists and catholics and freemasons that that had conspired to undermine the morale the home front and and call for an armistice and and a surrender which ultimately i mean it's i mean this is the the truth of it is ludendorf calls for an armistice luten dwarf wants to save the army and and it decides that's the only way to do it and then had a second thoughts and

and tries to explain it all after the fact in this kind of underhanded way. But yeah, no, he, it's when he marries his second wife, Matilda, that this becomes a sort of full-fledged, you kind of Ironclad conspiracy with Catholics and Freemasons and so forth, and for him, oddly, you know, for most, most of us, if we think about German history in that time period, it's the anti-Semitism and so forth. But it was really Catholics that disturbed Luther.

which is part of why he becomes marginalized. He's so devoutly anti-Christian that most Germans who are Christian themselves can't handle him. He's, that's what undoes him. Whereas Hitler, for example, I think was a little more strategic about it, whatever his real beliefs might have been. He was at least wary most of the time about alienating most Germans who were Christian. But to Ludendorf, Christianity was a hoax. It was a Jewish conspiracy designed to alienate Germans from their real spirituality.

Now, how Matilda would have put it and how Ludendorff believed by the end of his life. You have a great quote from a journalist after the Second World War about Matilda, which I just turned to the page. She says, yes, the occupation forces are inclined to agree with Madam that she truly had been persecuted by Nazism, because I guess for a period there, she had slipped through the net of denoxification efforts. But to continue the quote, although a more careful examination would prove that poor Nazism had been persecuted by the Ludendorfs for being lukewarm. Is that seem basically accurate? No, I mean, this is what hooked me into this story was I got asked many years ago to write some encyclopedia entries on Eric Ludendor for an insectopedia of anti-Semitism on Eric Ludendorff about whom I thought I knew a lot. And then his second wife and their publishing company.

And I'm like, who is his second wife? I'd never heard of her. And why did he have a publishing company? It was in uncovering that story. And I was like, oh, my God, this is, you know, it was just so fascinating and strange. And they're still around. I mean, I won't publicize their website, but you can still buy their, especially Matilda's books on the internet, the publishing company is still around.

Could we just almost for the record, would you make the case that it is simply not the case that the German military would have triumphed in, you know, 1918, had it not been for the conspiracies holding them holding the, or if not for, let's put it more neutrally, if not for, you know, non-military, civilian elements holding them back? Absolutely. Every legitimate German historian will back me up that the German army was defeated in 1918. And Ludendorf knew it. Ludendorf knew it. Ludendorf is the one who asked for an armistice in October. And in September, actually. So, and partly to save the army, you know, to fight against revolutionaries.

What was going on in the Southern Union, the converginging civil war there, they could see the writing on the wall. And they're like, we're going to need an army to prevent the communists from taking over. And so even if, even, you know, whatever is going on with the, the war effort, our army has other jobs and that it needs to be preserved for. So, I mean, the desertions, you know, Americans, I think, are a little bit too, you know, proud of themselves for the contribution they're making. But they're, you know, the arrival of the Americans in, in France made a difference. and the Germans, that Michael offensive that was Ludendorf Springchild in the spring of 1818 had failed and Ludendorf recognized it. They were absolutely defeated.

You know, as a Marine, I have an even more extreme and specific take on the question of 1918. I don't know if you've had the pleasure of visiting the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia. I know, but I know the Marine story quite well. But what's special about the museum is if you visit it and you visit their World War exhibition and that were the source of your knowledge about 1918, you could be forgiven for concluding that the German offensive was on the verge of taking Paris when luckily the Marines arrived at Bellow Wood

and turned the whole thing back. And yes, there were some troops in the Army there as the French Army around somewhere as well, and we're grateful to them for their assistance. But it really was. But also the exhibition amazingly seems to, it suggests that 3rd Battalion 5th Marines invents fire and movement

in the course of their assault on the wood that pinned down, they sort of spontaneously discover the buddy rush and associated these are tactical combined arms efforts. It's a trip. And all true, of course, I should say, for the record. To the American military contribution in World War II, it was essential. But whenever, so we get graduate students at Temple studying American military history, and I'm like,

okay, what's going on on the other side? You know, you tell me about the German, side and and it's the enemy is collapsing at the same time that the Americans are figuring out what they should do and and doing it and good good on then but the Germans are are hollow by that point and the court just to just to emphasize it because it seems important that the core of the German decision making is we are going to face something like a socialist communist revolution at home this contagion is spreading from the east and that needs to to be our primary concern.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, four years of this destructive war, they have to have something to show for it. But, yeah, I think ultimately not enough attention is paid by historians to the example of what's going on in the Southern Union. And the kind of, you know, the extrapolation as the leadership is extrapolating, what's going to happen here is pretty monumental for the Germans. So then, so we have the armistice, the war ends, German politics, in fact, do go off the rails. What happens to Ludendorf in these early years, 19, 1920?

Yeah, so, I mean, this, one of the, one of the readers of the manuscript, and they're anonymous, so I don't know who they were, but like, it opened my eyes after having worked on this for 10 years, almost, to Ludendorf as an author. And what a prolific, embarrassingly. So for someone, you know, who took 20 years to write my second book, he wrote his memoir in three months, 600 and something pages while he was hanging out in Sweden. And without much documentation, like all just from memoir, he writes this book, which is amazing.

And then follows that on. And that's the story I traced through the 20s and 30s is his kind of authorial output, really, because his, he doesn't have one of the complications of writing the story is he doesn't have, you know, papers like a great man in history. You know, George Washington, you, there's no, there's no archive you can go to that has his stuff. It's just, you know, the family, partly because the family still espouses this philosophy of this anti, this conspiratorial philosophy, doesn't recognize the legitimacy of the federal republic. And so, you know, it's a, it's a whole crazy story. So I had to, I had to rely in some ways on his, on his published output.

Wow. Okay. So what's he, he writes the memoir and then what's he, what's he saying? What's he, what's he publishing up? So, I mean, the memoir is, there, there's all, you know, everyone writes their memoir after the first war. You get a, you get a whole slew of these. Meth. Ludinoff has the advantage of coming out first in some ways and it's widely translated and widely read. Then he starts publishing a couple more pieces that are come out in the mainstream press by the mid-1920, he found his own publishing company and starts publishing a newspaper and or you know kind of a yeah a newsletter I guess what might be a better description of it and then lots and lots of little booklets on a variety of subjects and and it's very and I think this is really the the contribution of the book is really he's he's a very clever clever marketer of his own legend and in this story about the stab in the back and so forth, that he tells it a variety of different ways. And he supports other authors that tell this story about how Germany wasn't really defeated

and it was this conspiracy that resulted in the unjust loss of the First World War. And Tommy, and, you know, I think the perfect example is his book, Total War, which comes out in 1935 and kind of coins the term in German describing this new style of warfare that comes out of the First World War, timed to coincide with Hitler's announcement of conscription and the creation of Luftwaffe in 1935. So it's marketing. It's an amazing marketing phenomenon. And he's involved in these two pitches in the 20s, early 20s, the second of which obviously directly involves Hitler. What maybe, you know, we, we think about the 20s and 30s, Germany, we think about the Nazis, but the Nazis initially

are sort of one part of a broader landscape. What is the right-wing landscape in Germany in the 20s? Where does Ludendorf fit into it? And then ultimately, what is his relationship to Hitler? Right. So Ludendorff is, he is the right-wing in Germany prior to 1925. Where, you know, Hitler is a nobody. Hitler, in fact, becomes prominent partly because of Ludendorf, so his association with Ludendorf, I couldn't find the smoking gun, but I know for a fact that Ludendorf was using his industrial connections to fund groups like the Nazis, bundling money from these wealthy right-wing industrialists to not just the Nazis, but including the Nazis. And then giving his credibility to these groups and eventually, ultimately to the

Nazis. Lutendorf is the household name, but he's polarizing their lives. lot of people that don't like him because of the war, because of his dictatorial authority, people on the left particularly don't like him, but he's, he is the right wing. I mean, the Kaiser becomes irrelevant. Terpitz kind of tries the admiral. He's around, but it's really Lundorf that embodies this kind of nationalist, right wing, revanchist ideology. And then it's, it's the trial. And ultimately, and there's no, even as if someone who's written a whole book about Ludendorf, there's no escaping the fact that Hitler surpasses Ludendorff at the trial. And Ludendorff looks kind of sadly apologetic and it doesn't come off very well. And Hitler really grabs the platform and

takes over at that point. But until 1925 at least, Ludendorf is the guy. and then I argue, I think his presence lingers even after 1925 in the trial and the ascension of Hitler. He remained this figurehead for a kind of conservative nationalist right-wing idea of revenge. Is this issue I want to get at, and I'm not entirely sure exactly how to get it because it's complicated, but it was obviously convenient. You'll know more about this than me as the professional, but it was obviously convenient after the Second World War for Germans, particularly people associated with the German military,

which a large number of Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War, to characterize the First World War as fundamentally defensible. If the Germans were in the wrong, kind of everyone was also in the wrong. You know, the British Empire was in the wrong and so forth. And the British would back them up on that. I mean, there was a, even by the mid-1920s, the kind of historiography of the origins of the war had turned to like, we all share some of the blame. Sure.

And by the time of the Soviet revolution, you know, you could blame, you could point the finger at Russia pretty squarely. So, you know. Sure, sure. Well, okay. So that's, but here's how the complexity of them drive is that's only a piece of it. So you have that, that notion that World War I, you know, a bit of a gimmee for the Germans, even if you can't defend World War II.

And then sort of connected to that, there's this notion that the German military, the professional officer class, the old. line conservatives, the aristocrats, etc. Yes, of course, in the Second World War, they got involved in things they ought not to have been involved in and were complicit in any number of crimes. But when it comes down to it, you know, it was really Hitler and the Nazis. The German military itself retained a kind of integrity such that after the Second World War, they could be portrayed sympathetically in all manner of American movies, right, in a way that, you know, the Japanese army rarely was. So you have this kind of complex, you know, attitude that the German officer

Corps is somehow less complicit. There's there's there's there's there's there's there's there's really not a clear line from them to the Nazis they're off the hook in some ways but ludendorf as a particular figure actually connects a lot of things that that the account I just laid out would prefer to keep separate right he is a bit of a through line from the officer corps and german conservatism and the german military through to Nazism and radical right-wing politics of the 20s and 30s. I guess the part of the counterargument of that would be, well, he's not an aristocrat. So he's kind of got some sort of seeds and populism in him from the start anyway. But how do you respond to that? Wow. So first of all, I mean, there's this whole story about the clean Vermecht, right? That the Vermecht hadn't really been

involved in the crimes and the Nazis, which is not true. And historians knew it wasn't true right away. It has taken longer and it still persists in some ways in a kind of public consciousness. And there was the attempt to kill Hitler in 1944 that was spearheaded by the military for complicated reasons that it would take more than 10 minutes to explain that gives the military a kind of credibility vis-a-vis its anti-Nazi credentials. But I think that's what's so fascinating about Wundorf. He's anti-Nazi. He's anti-Nazi. But from a an even more right-wing anti-Semitic position. So he, he, his wife is, as you mentioned earlier, is denotified as a, as a resistance figure initially

because she and Eric had written overtly explicitly anti-Nazi books and the cartoons and things like that that are there for everyone to see. And yet they were also, they thought Hitler and the Nazis were part of the Nazi, of a Jewish Catholic conspiracy to destroy Germany. So it's very complicated. And I would say, you know, in some ways, this is more about my first book, which is much less interesting because it was a dissertation at one point than my second book about Wundendorf. But there are a lot of deep-seated connections between what the Nazis represented and what the German military fundamentally represented before the war and after the war.

And it's there for everyone to see after 1945s. Well, what are some of the connections? So, I mean, the German military was totally on board with the Nazis in terms of the restoration of German power and what that necessitated, which was war. And war in the east was where it was, you know, that was where it's going to come. You won't find every officer on record as a virulent anti-Sinite, but they were certainly okay with it. And so it's very, it's very deep-rooted.

The kind of, so one of the things, and again, this is going back to my first book in some ways more than the second one, but a kind of, there's an authoritarianism to their, to their worldview that is antithetical to democracy and pluralism and what we'd associate with. with modern, even with modern Germany, but certainly with a kind of Western-oriented democratic society. It was their anti-communism that really kept them on board long enough for kind of democracy to become a little bit more of a habit. But that's, it's a huge question. Fair enough. I could teach a whole class. Fair enough. I would take it. It's interesting subject matter. So the German military believed in a kind of an elite. They had an elitist vision of society, that there were sort of natural leaders.

And those people should be allowed to lead and control. And that's fundamentally anti-democratic. So they had to struggle with that. And I think Dorf is just the, you know, at times X manifestation of that. And then just in terms of war, aims between the first World War and the second World War. I mean, by the time Ludendorf is really running the show, 1916 to 18, I mean, the war aims are not identical to Hitler's aims. You know, there is no final solution for one obvious difference, right? There is no effort to murder all the

Jews of Europe. I don't think Ludendorf could have imagined the Holocaust. Interesting. For all of his smarts, wherever they might have been, he couldn't imagine that. What do you mean by that? Can you say more? I see that as an evolution of people like Himmler and Hydrich and Eichmann and Hitler, obviously. And I think Lundorf's imagination was in the past. It didn't envision that kind of modern horror. He was so anti-He was, he thought he was more anti-Semitic than Hitler, right? I mean, he thought Hitler was part of the Jewish conspiracy.

And yet, death camps at, you know, Sheld know, were not in his imagination. That's interesting. Because the question I was going to ask, or just get your view on is, you know, while the war aims of the German Empire, circa, you know, 1916 or so, are not those of the Nazis. That said, it's not, it's also not possible to just let them off the hook, right? I mean, they were contemplating, again, you're going to know a lot more than me, they were contemplating a, you know, a continental empire in particular to the east that involved Slavic subjugation, right? You know, this was not, as it were, these were not normal geopolitical aims in sort of the tradition of some of their, some of their neighbors. Maybe the Russians accepted.

Fair? Or am I off base? No, yeah, fair enough. Read, read Veas-Lulevichus' warland on the eastern front. It's about Ludendorffs in the, with the territory that the Germans called Oberost, the, you know, basically the Baltic nations and their plans for that area as a kind of precursor for what the Nazis were thinking about. Again, I think without the genocide, I mean, ultimately, you could extrapolate out and say, yeah, it's the people that are there that are the problem from the Germans view, and they might

have eventually come to that. But they're trying to administer this vast eastern territory of great agricultural value, and it's the same way that the Nazis thought about it. That's a great book. Cambridge Press, probably 90s. This has been old now, but. I appreciate it. What you say about the family as well, and, you know, the presence of these publications. It is striking to muse on what sort of, you know, dragons lie sleeping in European politics even, even today. And, and, you know, Ludendorf toyed with the idea of a kind of central European counter-revolutionary white republic cooperating with, you know, Italy and Hungary and in places like that. And it's, you know, those ideas are still around.

Jay Loch Naur, author of Dragon Slayer, The Legend of Eric. Ludendorf in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. I really appreciate you taking time today. It was a really interesting conversation. I learned a lot. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.