Erich Ludendorff, the First Quartermaster of the Imperial German Army, inventor of the “stab in the back” theory and front man for Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch is overdue for a good book which accurately outlines his role in the First World War and the postwar chaos which ensued.
Unfortunately, after the publication of The First Nazi he is still waiting for such a study.
The book reads as if it was written BY teenagers FOR teenagers. There is an error in fact on the first page of Chapter One: “Sarejevo, the capital of Serbia.” Throughout Serbia’s history Sarajevo has never been the capital of Serbia. Why is this? Because Sarejevo is actually in Bosnia. Also, the assassin of Archduke Ferdinand was terrorist and was describes as such at the time, NOT a “patriotic student.” Nor, at the age of nineteen, was he a “boy” as described later in the book. AND I don’t believe there was ever any interest in Russia annexing Bosnia (the 1908 “occupation crisis” involving Austria, Turkey and Russia was a dead letter by 1914).
And this is just the start of the book.
The December 1914 landscape is described as “gutted by bombs” when no aircraft was yet flying to drop bombs… the landscape was actually gutted by ARTILLERY. On page 25 the book describes the unleashing of a “mechanized German Army” in 1914 when no such mechanized force yet existed (in fact, the German army which invaded Poland in 1939 could, at best, be described as “motorized” if you didn’t count horse-drawn artillery).
The authors do NOT discuss the German general staff, nor the privileged place that the Army had in Germany. This would have helped to explain significance of Falkenhayn’s replacement as Chief of the General Staff… by Hindenberg. This body had tremendous power as the war went on, with war industries subordinated to the needs of the military and propaganda overruling the public’s “need know,” but the Reichstag still sat in Berlin and the idea that Ludendorff, effectively Hindenburg’s executive officer, “passed laws” (page 51) is patently absurd. There is no explanation as to the mechanism which made Ludendorff “dictator of Germany”, ignoring the Kaiser, ignoring the Reichstag, even ignoring his first-line supervisor Hindenburg, whose decisions he was to execute.
The authors do not understand what the role of a chief of staff is (or, if they do, they are making no attempt to explain it to the reader) and this is a bad flaw if you are trying to put Ludendorff in perspective. The authors also write about the Battle of Verdun and how almost 1,000,000 men died "for nothing." Actually, the 400,000 German soldiers died for nothing because they lost the battle; 500,000 French soldiers died saving France. This is assuming that 900,000 men died… more likely the authors used the number of CASUALTIES, which includes the wounded, missing, captured and dead. A very sloppy mistake.
Speaking of sloppy mistakes, the authors on page 123 discuss how the King Baudouin I of Belgium seized the Congo as his personal property. It was actually King Leopold II. King Baudouin actually reigned in the middle of the 20th Century and there was no OTHER Baudouin. On Page 120 the authors discuss the reign of Duke Wilhelm Karl of Enrich who served as King of Lithuania from October 9th to December 14th 1918… “a total of thirty six days.” Now I can understand getting geography wrong, and I know that not everyone knows the kings and queens of Belgium by heart but I do at least expect simple math skills. Oh, and the dates given? They’re wrong.
On page 169 the prerequisites for an Armistice were given as the withdrawal by German forces of all occupied territory, including Alsace and Lorraine. Except that Alsace-Lorraine had been German since the Franco-Prussian War and was NOT occupied territory. In a section about the German negotiations with the Bolsheviks the authors talk about an incident in which the Germans shelled one of their own camps because the soldiers had become disaffected by Communist propaganda. The only source of this story seems to be a previously unpublished article written by John Reed, a contemporary Bolshevik propagandist.
There is almost nothing about when or how Hitler met Ludendorff. Hitler is described as being in Berlin in the aftermath of the war, destitute, having sold his overcoat and selling handmade postcards to make a few pfennigs. In fact Hitler was in a military hospital at the end of the war and was sent to Munich to demobilize (and was still, in fact, in the pay of the German Army for a time). The description sounds very much like Hitler PRIOR to the war… in Vienna.
This book has so many mistakes that it distracts from the supposition that Ludendorff’s anti-Semitic beliefs somehow rubbed off on Hitler. And the authors spend only a bare two pages on the putsch which saw Hitler and Ludendorff actually operate together. While there is all sorts of trivia about German authors of western novels and Prinzip’s medical condition almost no time can be devoted to Ludendorff and what he hoped to accomplish in Munich by allying himself with Hitler.
This book is so badly composed that I would double-check the supposed titles of Ludendorff’s published works after the war to make sure they didn’t list things written by Goebbels.
