Creedomilitaria

Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) was born near Poznan on 9 April 1865.

Commissioned into the infantry in 1883 and a member of the General Staff from 1894, Ludendorff served as head of the deployment section in 1908. A highly militaristic man, Ludendorff held that peace was merely the interval between wars, and that the nation's chief duty was to provide the means with which to conduct war. In the pre-war period Ludendorff assisted with the fine-tuning of the invasion strategy for France, the Schlieffen Plan.

Upon the outbreak of the First World War he was made quartermaster general to von Bulow's Second Army, responsible for capturing the Liege forts, without which the Schlieffen Plan could not succeed. This task successfully accomplished, Ludendorff was sent to East Prussia where he worked with Paul von Hindenburg as his Chief of Staff.

Hindenburg, who relied heavily upon Ludendorff in crafting his victories at Tannenberg (1914) and the Masurian Lakes (1915), later appointed Ludendorff his quartermaster general when he was appointed Chief of Staff of the German Army in late August 1916, replacing Erich Falkenhayn.

Shortly after becoming Chief of Staff, Hindenburg, working with Ludendorff and leading industrialists, created what was effectively a military-industrial dictatorship, the Third Supreme Command, largely relegating the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, to a peripheral role. Ludendorff was the chief engineer behind the management of the German war effort during this time, with Hindenburg his pliant front man.

Ludendorff was a supporter of unrestricted submarine warfare, an especially controversial policy with the then-neutral Americans, ultimately responsible for bringing the U.S. into the war. An aggressive commander, Ludendorff pressured the Kaiser to dismiss those in the armed forces who favoured a negotiated peace settlement; Wilhelm agreed, with Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg a casualty of Ludendorff's 'defeatist' campaign.

With Russia's withdrawal from the war in 1917, Ludendorff played

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