Was the Hindenburg-Ludendorff "silent dictatorship" of 1917-18 verging on proto-Nazism in terms of programs, prejudices, intentions for postwar order?

[raharris1973]

Was the Hindenburg-Ludendorff "silent dictatorship" of 1917-18 verging on proto-Nazism in terms of programs, prejudices, intentions for postwar order?

I've read vague allegations, mostly without substantive details, but relying on adjectives like "dictatorial", "authoritarian" for describing its politics and "managed" or "command" to describe its economy to hint the silent dictatorship was a stepping stone toward Nazism.

But one historian, Williamson Murray, got a little more specific in an article in Military History Quarterly, saying:

Has anyone else ever seen any account of this type of planning by the WWI German command to deport western Slavs and eradicate Jewish influence one way or the other, a sort of proto-Generalplan Ost and Holocaust? Or was this an author perhaps getting a bit carried away?

The only things I know for sure about Ludendorff is that in wartime he used his bureaucratic command influence to press for maximum munitions production, knocking the economy out of balance, pressed for German imposed victory over negotiated peace (and so grasped at expedients like unrestricted submarine warfare) until nearly the end, when he had a breakdown and told the Kaiser and government they must sue for peace, he belatedly tried to reverse course and argue to keep fighting when he'd convinced everyone to give up hope and the country was on the verge of mutiny and revolution, he fled the country in disguise, and postwar he built up the stab in the back myth, was into fringe right-wing politics, partnered up with Hitler in the Beer Hall putsch, and was personally weirder in his Aryanism-Nordicism than certainly Hindenburg and even the Nazis, openly advocating a German return to paganism, which postwar, kept him a marginal political figure. All the things in this paragraph, I've read in two or more sources, but the idea of racial reengineering of western Russia and anti-semitic action I have only seen in this one place.

Is it attested elsewhere? Would Ludendorff have really tried to press such a program, in the event, somehow, of late German victory after Ludendorff was in a key leading position? Would he have had any chance of carrying it through or would such plans have broken down due to resistance elite and grassroots political forces and logistical impracticalities?

 

[ghappy1000]

Ludendorff likely wouldn't enacted such a policy since his plans for that policy weren't cited elsewhere and he would be opposed by the resistance elite.

 

[Fleurs de Merde]

IIRC Tooze talks about that sort of "grossraum" concept circulating in the German high command a lot in The Deluge - been a while, but it's a great source on German late war geostrategic/economic thinking. You also have some scholarship suggesting a linkage between WW1 Ober Ost and later Nazi occupation policy. Obviously not as radical as the Nazi intentions, but that particular volkish strain was always very much alive in German military politics.

 

[Pelranius]

Hindenburg set a lot of the strategic direction for the tandem junta. He might try to kick Ludendorff kicked out of power after the war.

 

[Electric Monk]

IIRC Tooze talks about that sort of "grossraum" concept circulating in the German high command a lot in The Deluge

Since I am currently reading it here’s the quote:

“In truth, the Kaiser’s anti-Semitic flare-up on 13 February was no one-off. Over the winter of 1917–18 he had come increasingly under the influence of extremist nationalist propaganda and his daily notes to his subordinates were now commonly laced with diatribes against ‘Jewish subversives’. Even more seriously, in the weeks before the Bad Homburg conference Ludendorff had finally confronted the question of what to do with the large Polish and Jewish populations in the Polish territory he was determined to annex. His solution was taken from the pages of pan-German fantasy. As many as 2 million people would be uprooted from their homes, with particular care being taken to ensure that the large and politically dangerous Jewish population was neutralized. Ludendorff hoped that they might be ‘caused to emigrate’ to the United States.”

Excerpt From
The Deluge
Adam Tooze

Tooze himself sources it to:
“I. Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 1914–1918. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lübeck, 1960), 132–4.”

 

[Ana Luciana II]

Certainly the military dictatorship’s attitude towards the disabled and mentally ill (thousands of patients in asylums were abandoned, or starved to death, due to the institutional neglect since the mentally ill were of no use to the war effort) presaged Aktion T4 and other later euthanasia projects.

 

[Alien and Sedition Bat]

Because of the naval blockade in World War One, and Germany's failure to conquer France, Germany had to adopt an extreme form of total mobilization in the last years of World War One while also avoiding mass starvation. I don't know enough to say if (or to what degree) the neglect of disabled people in Germany at that time was a precursor of what happened under Hitler, who authorized the killing of the disabled in October 1939.

It should be noted that the most successful example of total mobilization was in Britain--in World War Two; Britain was able to do it because they still had control of the seas, in spite of U-boats, and a close relationship with the United States. Britain's total mobe was done very efficiently, in a humane manner without murders, and in a system under parliamentary control.

Ludendorff wrote a speculative near-future novel in the 1920s, I recall, that has Britain, Germany and Czechoslovakia allied against the Soviets?, French? and other powers. I read it a quarter century ago. Don't recall any extreme lebensraum stuff but maybe I missed it. Ludendorff allied with Hitler for the beer hall putsch but later distanced himself from the Nazis.

Ludendorff had experienced a mental breakdown at the end of World War One. He became associated with a woman psychiatrist whom he married in 1926 (Dr Mathilde Ludendorff; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathilde_Ludendorf ) She had grandiose right wing anti-Semitic and anti-Christian beliefs which she expressed in a series of philosophical books. While under her influence, Ludendorff wrote a book on the Freemasons and the Jews in which he argued that the Jews controlled the Freemasons and used them, through a kind of brainwashing process, to turn gentiles into artificial Jews. The theory was a nasty one but probably too arcane to be of much use to the Nazis.

After General Ludendorff's death in 1937, his wife was "largely sidelined" by the regime according to Wikipedia. She was found guilty however in the post-war denazification process. She founded an anti-Semitic religio-political bund, with a name variously translated as God-Knowledge or God-Cognition. It was banned by a Bavarian court and continued to be banned for some years after her 1966 death.

Hope this is useful.

 

[Greg Grant]

I think we need to separate the two men and their approaches, for while they worked in tandem they were not the same man, it just seemed as if they were because of their close cooperation. Also, while both favored the idea of a military dictatorship as a way to "stabilize" the situation as they saw it, ideologically they were not Nazis at this time. The whiff of proto-Nazism can be detected in most military dictatorships in Europe, but I do not think it was honed. Ludendorff was a bit like Red Queen in that he believed six impossible things before breakfast. He attempted to systematically impose a certain type of vision on the War Lands in the East during the Occupation, and that vision was a utopian military state, with everything subordinated to the will of the German military to better prosecute the war. Now, war is chaos, always. And the Great War was great chaos. So here we have a man attempting through a combination of hubris and the notion all things can be handled if sufficiently planned out.

Ludendorff likely fancied himself an autocrat, but in reality he ceded authority to a succession of quacks and all around con-men whom he imported to run his state. To attract the best and the brightest, as he saw it, he grabbed civilians. Theology professors, philosophers, cranks, failed civil servants, and random people who just happen to catch his eye. A German archivist wrote an article on the history of Lithuanian region in some periodical Ludendorff happened to read, and the next thing said man, he was imported into German occupied Lithuania as an expert to be consulted on how things were done in Lithuania. It was that sudden, and it was that slap-dash. There was a system of trial and error, and the word was out in Germany - if you're young and ambitious, go East young man and get yourself attached to Ludendorff, and you will be able to advance and have freedom of action. Ludendorff's nightmare centered around the idea the bloody civilians of the German government were going to come in and take it all away from him. He was said to have exclaimed, "They took away Poland from me, they won't take Lithuania and Courland." So throughout all this, there is an air of manic desperation. Momentarily expedient work-arounds become policy. One guy suggestion a localized solution becomes something the whole region must now do. Biases becomes official rulings. As I said, chaos.

Now, to Ludendorff, in the East, the words "German," "military" and "expert" were synonymous. The natives were there to be civilized, but not trusted to be able to work things for themselves. But some natives have German names, and some of the Prussian have rather Baltic sounding names. To avoid faux-pas, all official titles in the East of work carried out by the military and civilians imported by Ludendorff had to have a prefix of "German." And there was separation of ethnic groups, to ensure no native could ever command a German. But this was nationalist, not ethnic, which is a messy and blurry division in Europe, but there is a distinction. Ludendorff needed men who could speak local, and in practical terms it meant plenty of German Jews were sent East to help with War Lands. They spoke Yiddish (different accent than those of local Lithuanian and Polish Jews, but understandable enough) and were used as an instrument of the German military and if Ludendorff had any qualms about it, he sure kept them to himself until well after the Great War. But there were other issues with using "ethnic" Germans to carry out the military duty. German Poles had decidedly mixed feelings about German occupation of Poland, and loyalties were at times confused, especially among academics and civilians. A completely separate problem existed with German Lithuanians dragooned into helping about. Most German Lithuanians were Protestant, and held some rather problematic views regarding Catholic non-German Lithuanians, which caused unnecessary friction, to the point, Catholic Lithuanians said they preferred to dealing with "real Germans" - Berliners and the like, over deputized German Lithuanians. Once again, chaos.

Oh, and among the Germans there were disagreements on how to execute policy, with splits along political lines, and regional ones. Prussians thought they knew best, because they thought they lived in the East and understood how things were done in the East (spoiler alert, they didn't) and this caused issues with other Germans, such as Bavarians who had their own prejudices, as did Frisians. Also, Ludendorff's lads ran into problems with actual military leaders who were in charge of what was essentially a frontline. And Ludendorff loved that. He wanted to play supreme arbiter, which only caused more friction. Once again, dumping a grab-bag of people with different dreams, hopes and ideas, all from different parts of Germany, from different upbringing, but all young, ambitious and eager to prove themselves produced chaos. At one point, the man in charge of Courland pissed off the people at headquarters so much, some bright lad decided to find a way to sever his telephone line. So much for brilliant order. Now in this chaos, I am sure there were volkish proto-Nazi scumbags who already had a gleam in their eye about mass deportations and creation of a pure-German state. And in some places, as I said, such things were likely made policy, but not across the board.

I do, however, buy the argument Ludendorff was learning from his experience in the East at how to not run a military dictatorship, what worked and what did not. The extent of propaganda's effectiveness. Man-management. Relations with the locals. This was the grand and awful experiment. But I see it as a military dictatorship as a colonial power, rather than proto-Nazism.

My two cents.

 

[Nivek]

Seriously what bite you in 2024? Such anti German revisionism

 

[raharris1973]

I think we need to separate the two men and their approaches, for while they worked in tandem they were not the same man, it just seemed as if they were because of their close cooperation. Also, while both favored the idea of a military dictatorship as a way to "stabilize" the situation as they saw it, ideologically they were not Nazis at this time. The whiff of proto-Nazism can be detected in most military dictatorships in Europe, but I do not think it was honed. Ludendorff was a bit like Red Queen in that he believed six impossible things before breakfast. He attempted to systematically impose a certain type of vision on the War Lands in the East during the Occupation, and that vision was a utopian military state, with everything subordinated to the will of the German military to better prosecute the war. Now, war is chaos, always. And the Great War was great chaos. So here we have a man attempting through a combination of hubris and the notion all things can be handled if sufficiently planned out.

Ludendorff likely fancied himself an autocrat, but in reality he ceded authority to a succession of quacks and all around con-men whom he imported to run his state. To attract the best and the brightest, as he saw it, he grabbed civilians. Theology professors, philosophers, cranks, failed civil servants, and random people who just happen to catch his eye. A German archivist wrote an article on the history of Lithuanian region in some periodical Ludendorff happened to read, and the next thing said man, he was imported into German occupied Lithuania as an expert to be consulted on how things were done in Lithuania. It was that sudden, and it was that slap-dash. There was a system of trial and error, and the word was out in Germany - if you're young and ambitious, go East young man and get yourself attached to Ludendorff, and you will be able to advance and have freedom of action. Ludendorff's nightmare centered around the idea the bloody civilians of the German government were going to come in and take it all away from him. He was said to have exclaimed, "They took away Poland from me, they won't take Lithuania and Courland." So throughout all this, there is an air of manic desperation. Momentarily expedient work-arounds become policy. One guy suggestion a localized solution becomes something the whole region must now do. Biases becomes official rulings. As I said, chaos.

Now, to Ludendorff, in the East, the words "German," "military" and "expert" were synonymous. The natives were there to be civilized, but not trusted to be able to work things for themselves. But some natives have German names, and some of the Prussian have rather Baltic sounding names. To avoid faux-pas, all official titles in the East of work carried out by the military and civilians imported by Ludendorff had to have a prefix of "German." And there was separation of ethnic groups, to ensure no native could ever command a German. But this was nationalist, not ethnic, which is a messy and blurry division in Europe, but there is a distinction. Ludendorff needed men who could speak local, and in practical terms it meant plenty of German Jews were sent East to help with War Lands. They spoke Yiddish (different accent than those of local Lithuanian and Polish Jews, but understandable enough) and were used as an instrument of the German military and if Ludendorff had any qualms about it, he sure kept them to himself until well after the Great War. But there were other issues with using "ethnic" Germans to carry out the military duty. German Poles had decidedly mixed feelings about German occupation of Poland, and loyalties were at times confused, especially among academics and civilians. A completely separate problem existed with German Lithuanians dragooned into helping about. Most German Lithuanians were Protestant, and held some rather problematic views regarding Catholic non-German Lithuanians, which caused unnecessary friction, to the point, Catholic Lithuanians said they preferred to dealing with "real Germans" - Berliners and the like, over deputized German Lithuanians. Once again, chaos.

Oh, and among the Germans there were disagreements on how to execute policy, with splits along political lines, and regional ones. Prussians thought they knew best, because they thought they lived in the East and understood how things were done in the East (spoiler alert, they didn't) and this caused issues with other Germans, such as Bavarians who had their own prejudices, as did Frisians. Also, Ludendorff's lads ran into problems with actual military leaders who were in charge of what was essentially a frontline. And Ludendorff loved that. He wanted to play supreme arbiter, which only caused more friction. Once again, dumping a grab-bag of people with different dreams, hopes and ideas, all from different parts of Germany, from different upbringing, but all young, ambitious and eager to prove themselves produced chaos. At one point, the man in charge of Courland pissed off the people at headquarters so much, some bright lad decided to find a way to sever his telephone line. So much for brilliant order. Now in this chaos, I am sure there were volkish proto-Nazi scumbags who already had a gleam in their eye about mass deportations and creation of a pure-German state. And in some places, as I said, such things were likely made policy, but not across the board.

I do, however, buy the argument Ludendorff was learning from his experience in the East at how to not run a military dictatorship, what worked and what did not. The extent of propaganda's effectiveness. Man-management. Relations with the locals. This was the grand and awful experiment. But I see it as a military dictatorship as a colonial power, rather than proto-Nazism.

My two cents.

You've taught me a bunch about Ludendorff here, but not much about Hindenburg, what's his deal?

 

[raharris1973]

Seriously what bite you in 2024? Such anti German revisionism

I'm raising a bunch of scenarios *about* Germany in the world wars lately. In several of them there is a lean toward portraying the Germans as the bad guy or having them do worse, in several of them there is a lean toward portraying the Germans as the good (or better) guy [these are the imperial & Weimar Germany ones, not Nazi], or having them do better. This thread is not even taking a side, it is an investigation into an anti-German claim that based on all my lifetime of background reading has a superficial veneer of plausibility, but also has the whiff of bullshit and an author being over-imaginative & speculative, because of lack of evidence and corroboration presented.

Besides, taking a POV in scenarios and discussions that early 20th century imperial and Nazi Germany are 'the bad guys' is hardly revisionism, it is kind of the traditional interpretation. Arguments that, 'nah, Germany was misunderstood and really in the right here', would be more revisionist. - and relative to the pre-WWI situation, I've out a couple of those in recent weeks too.

Maybe *you* are just seeing the world through anti-British (or whatever) lenses - so things not conforming with that look anti-*whomever* to you.

 

[Fire and shadow]

Seriously what bite you in 2024? Such anti German revisionism

https://imgur.com/a/JMMMYzA

 

[Greg Grant]

You've taught me a bunch about Ludendorff here, but not much about Hindenburg, what's his deal?

Unfortunately I don't know a great deal about Hindy. I have a fat book on him, which sits on my shelf, for some reason next to the Crick biography of Michael Howard, and I have not been able to read through it. Hindy's personality lacks the manic dynamism and sheer "wait, what?" of Ludendorff. One day I shall dive into it, but I do not know much about him beyond the popular information.

 

[raharris1973]

https://imgur.com/a/JMMMYzA

You are trying to show some media, but I for one don't see it.

 

[Halagaz]

I would say "yes and no".

There were plans to - for example - annex a large border strip from Polish territories to Germany, colonizeit with Germans, and fully or partially expel its original population.

There was a plan for a rather nasty colonization of the Baltics - in which the existing German aristocracy and hundreds of thousands of newly settled German colonists were to rule as a neo-feudal master race over the native Balts.

There was racism against Slavs, Balts and (not as much, but increasingly so) anti-semitism - not just "prejudice" racism but structural racism which intertwined with a lot of policy.

However, I am not aware of these ideas being tied to Hindendorff and Ludenburg in particular. They had a hand in the Polish Border Strip plan, but they were by no means the only ones - it had the participation and support of the Kaiser, the Chancellor, most of the cabinet, the other military authorities...the East Prussian local government...various special interest groups...

I am also not aware of this supposed plan to resettle all Western Slavs to Siberia. That would kind of surprise me tbh, it's a bit too early for that kind of megalomania. Perhaps somebody came across the Polish Border Strip plans and (mis)interpreted them as plans for the entirety of German-dominated Slavic lands?