Erich Ludendorff
Downfall

On 29 September 1918, Ludendorff and Hindenburg suddenly told an incredulous Kaiser that they could not guarantee the integrity of the Western front "for two hours" and they must have an immediate armistice. A new Chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, approached President Woodrow Wilson, but Wilson's terms were unacceptable to the German leadership, and so the German army fought on. The chancellor told the Kaiser that he and his cabinet would resign unless Ludendorff was removed, but that Hindenburg must remain to hold the army together. The Kaiser called his commanders in, curtly accepting Ludendorff's resignation and then rejecting Hindenburg's. Fuming, Ludendorff would not accompany the field marshal back to headquarters: "I refused to ride with you because you have treated me so shabbily".

Ludendorff had assiduously sought all of the credit; now he was rewarded with all of the blame. Widely despised, and with revolution breaking out, he was hidden by his brother and a network of friends until he slipped out of Germany disguised in blue spectacles and a false beard and fake Finnish passport, settling in a Swedish admirer's country home until the Swedish government asked him to leave in February 1919. Within seven months, he wrote two volumes of detailed memoirs. Friends, led by Breucker, provided him with documents and negotiated with publishers. Groener (who is not mentioned in the book) characterized it as a showcase of his "caesar-mania". He was a brilliant general, according to John Wheeler-Bennett, stating that he was "certainly one of the greatest routine military organizers that the world has ever seen", but he also said he was a ruinous political meddler. The influential military analyst Hans Delbrück concluded that "The Empire was built by Moltke and Bismarck, destroyed by Tirpitz and Ludendorff."
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