Erich Ludendorff

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carry out. In 1917, as the Russian government collapsed, they helped political leader Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) enter Russia so he could lead a socialist revolution there. This was a strategic move by Ludendorff and Hindenburg since they knew that the socialists would not support the war. After leading a successful overthrow of the Russian government, Lenin’s negotiator, Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) signed a peace treaty with Germany in 1918 that removed Russia from the war. By eliminating the fight against Russia on the Eastern Front, Ludendorff and Hindenburg could turn their full attention to the fighting on the Western Front. The Last Offensive For spring 1918, Ludendorff and Hindenburg planned a huge German offensive that they hoped would finally force the Allies to retreat. Ludendorff wanted to strike quickly, before American forces could arrive to fortify the Allied troops. Beginning on March 21, 1918, the Germans launched their spring offensive with fierce attacks on the Somme River, the Belgian town of Ypres, and the Chemin des Dames. They had great success, pushing the Allies back more than forty miles in some places, but at a stunning cost—the Germans lost more than six hundred thousand men in less than three months of fighting. Even so, Ludendorff and Hindenburg ordered the onslaught to continue. Two more major assaults were launched in June and July, and both were disasters. The Allies stood firm and in some places pushed the Germans back. German soldiers, convinced that their leaders were sending them to slaughter, deserted in great numbers. By mid-July the German push had turned into a massive German retreat. On hearing of the setbacks, the German Chancellor, Georg von Hertling, wrote that “even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost,” as quoted in Martin Gilbert’s The First World War. Though they were far from the battlefields, Ludendorff and Hindenburg recognized that the end was near for the German war effort. According to James Stokesbury, author of A Short History of World War I, when Ludendorff learned of the German retreat in late July 1918, he went to see Hindenburg and asked him what Germany ought to do. “Do Do!” Hindenburg bellowed. “Make peace, you idiot!” But it was not that easy. Ludendorff knew that Germany needed to enter peace 102 World War I: Biographies
negotiations in a position of power. To do so, they would have to hold their ground on the Western Front and convince the Allies that Germany was an equal in power and not a defeated nation. Ludendorff and Hindenburg tried to marshal the remaining German troops to keep the enemy from entering Germany. Through the late summer and into the early fall, Ludendorff and Hindenburg engineered a slow retreat in which the German army contested every inch of ground that they gave away. But with American troops adding fresh strength to the Allied line, the German cause was hopeless. Ludendorff grew increasingly distraught. According to Asprey, Hindenburg’s physician became “concerned with Ludendorff’s erratic ways marked by vicious outbursts of temper, restless nights broken by angry telephone calls to individual commanding generals, on occasion too much drinking, and crying spells.” By late September generals began to report that Germany was facing total defeat. When one such report came in, writes Asprey, “There is some evidence that Ludendorff suffered a genuine fit, foaming at the mouth and collapsing on his office floor.” Shameful End Though Ludendorff desperately tried to find some grounds on which to negotiate peace, it soon became clear that the Allies would not bargain with the military dictators who had led the German war effort. On October 25, 1918, in a humiliating interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II, Ludendorff was forced to resign. On November 9, Hindenburg resigned and the kaiser abdicated (gave up his throne). A new chancellor (a high state official) was appointed to negotiate peace terms, and Germany signed an armistice (peace treaty) on November 11, 1918. Despite the best efforts of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, the Germans had lost. Ludendorff was not well liked in immediate postwar Germany. Threatened by revolutionaries who blamed Germany’s problems on the generals, he fled the country wearing a wig and colored glasses and settled in Sweden. While in Sweden Ludendorff wrote his memoirs, in which he offered what has become known as the “stab-in-the-back” thesis, an explanation for the German defeat that suggests that unpatriotic Erich Ludendorff 103
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Erich Ludendorff

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