Jay Lockenour - Dragonslayer: The Legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich

A volume in the series

Battlegrounds: Cornell Studies in Military History

Edited by David J. Silbey

Editorial Board: Petra Goedde, Wayne E. Lee,
Brian McAllister Linn, and Ling-Hang Nguyen

A list of titles in this series is available at cornellpress.cornell.edu .

Copyright 2021 by Cornell University

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First published 2021 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lockenour, Jay, 1966 author.

Title: Dragonslayer : the legend of Erich Ludendorff in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich / Jay Lockenour.

Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series: Battlegrounds : Cornell studies in military history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025192 (print) | LCCN 2020025193 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501754593 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501754609 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501754616 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Ludendorff, Erich, 1865-1937. | GeneralsGermanyBiography. | GermanyPolitics and government19181933. | GermanyHistory19181933.

Classification: LCC DD231.L8 L59 2021 (print) | LCC DD231.L8 (ebook) | DDC 355.0092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025192

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025193

Cover illustration: German Day September 2, 1923. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-00162, photographer Georg Pahl.

For Andrea

My interest in Erich Ludendorff began in the late 1980s when as an undergraduate at the University of California, I wrote my senior thesis on Hindenburg and Ludendorffs Third Supreme Command with guidance from the late Gerald Feldman. I am enormously indebted to Feldman and two other giants of our profession who are no longer with us, Russell Weigley and Dennis Showalter. All three provided not only models of professional behavior and scholarship, but also guidance at critical moments in my career.

I am grateful to Richard S. Levy, who years later, at Feldmans prompting, asked me to contribute articles on Erich, Mathilde, and their publishing company for his Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution(ABC-CLIO, 2005). Research for those essays opened my eyes to the fascinating postwar careers of the couple, their associates, and followers. To Paul Steege, David Imhoof, Julia Sneeringer, Heikki Lempa, Rita Krueger, Belinda Davis, Paul Hanebrink, Melissa Feinberg, Jeffrey Johnson, Greg Eghigian, Andy Lees, and other occasional attendees of our Philadelphia Area Modern Germany Workshop a big thank you for all the insightful comments. Thanks to current and former colleagues Beth Bailey, David Farber, Richard Immerman, and Gregory Urwin for reading chapters and book proposals. Temple graduate students Lynnette Deem and Erik Klinek served as research assistants for the project. Special thanks to Jonathan Zatlin who generously took time from his own research to provide materials from the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland. Archivists and staff at the various archives I visited were uniformly helpful. Klaus A. Lankheit of the Institut fr Zeitgeschichte proved an enormously helpful guide to their collections. Thanks to Mike Bechtold for the beautiful maps.

Finally, I could not have written this book without the patient support of my wife, Andrea, who not only tolerated my frequent absence on research trips but also softened the emotional and physical toll wrought by such a difficult and time-consuming task.