Erich Ludendorff

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