Paul von Hindenburg

6 Key excerpts on "Paul von Hindenburg"

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  Great Contemporaries

  • Winston S. Churchill(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • RosettaBooks

    (Publisher)

  The transition from Papen to Schleicher 43 (now murdered) {121} and from Schleicher to Hitler were but an affair of months. In the last phase we see the aged President, having betrayed all the Germans who had re-elected him to power, joining reluctant and indeed contemptuous hands with the Nazi leader. There is a defence for all this, and it must be made on behalf of President von Hindenburg. He had become senile. He did not understand what he was doing. He could not be held physically, mentally or morally responsible for opening the floodgates of evil upon German, and perhaps upon European, civilization. We may be sure that the renowned veteran had no motive but love of his country, and that he did his best with declining mental strength to cope with problems never before presented to a ruler. ❧ ❧ ❧ Dusk deepens into dark. It is time to sleep. Nightmares, hideous choices, unanswerable riddles, pistol-shots disturb an old man’s torpor. Where is the path? Always uphill! Worse to come? Vorwärts 44 —always vorwärts —then silence. 1. Field Marshal Paul Ludwig Hans von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg (1847–1934). 2. The statue of Hindenburg, erected in Berlin’s Tiergarten in summer 1915 (Churchill mistakes the year), was an emblem of German determination in the Great War, but by 1917 its wooden scaffolding and steps were being stolen for firewood. After the war, it was dismantled, and in 1938 the head was found on a rubbish heap. 3. In 1866, Königgrätz (also known as Sadowa), a town in Bohemia sixty-five miles east of Prague, was the site of the decisive battle of the Austro-Prussian War, in which the Prussians defeated the Austrians in the second of Bismarck’s wars of aggrandizement

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  Soldiers as Statesmen

  • Peter Dennis, Adrian Preston(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Hindenburg Martin Kitchen

  When Paul von Beneckendorf und von Hindenburg retired as the commanding general of IV Army Corps in 1911 at the age of sixty-four it seemed that a successful but unspectacular career had come to an end and that he could now enjoy a life of relative obscurity as a retired general in Hanover. Hindenburg was a man who was completely unknown to the vast majority of Germans. He was without influential friends, and having dared to criticise the Kaiser in the Imperial Manoeuvres in 1908 he was somewhat out of favour at court. His Army colleagues respected him, and the great Schlieffen had spoken highly of him, but all agreed that he had risen as high as his talents would merit and no one expected to hear anything more of this retired general, à la suite to the Dritte Garde Regiment zu Fuss.

  On 22 August 1914 Hindenburg received a telegram from the Kaiser asking him to accept the command of the Eighth Army in East Prussia. Bored with his life in retirement and anxious to play his part in the war, he accepted eagerly. A new career was to begin which was to take him to unexpected heights. From the obscurity of retirement he was rapidly to become an almost mythical figure, a signifier of the hopes and aspirations of millions of Germans, the inspiration for heroic sacrifice, the guarantor of victory.

  His appointment had little to do with his own abilities as an army commander. The failure of Prittwitz and his chief of staff, Waldersee, against the Russians in East Prussia had caused something of a panic, and the influential East Prussian landowners demanded action so that the Russian invader might be driven from their estates. There was agreement at Headquarters that the brilliant, outspoken and unpredictable Ludendorff should be sent to East Prussia as chief of staff, but who should be his superior officer? After some discussion the suggestion of Colonel von Fabeck, who knew Hindenburg well, was accepted. It was agreed that Hindenburg, although lacking any outstanding ability or qualities of military intellect, was known to be absolutely reliable, competent and with steady nerves, and as such would be an admirable restraining influence on Ludendorff, the two men complementing and strengthening one another.

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  The Weimar Republic

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The committee that framed the constitution of the Weimar Republic opted for a strong executive Presidency and a subordinate Chancellorship. This was intended to provide continuity with the monarchy of the old Kaiserreich and was in complete contrast to the weaker and more formal presidency of the German Federal Republic after 1948. The role of the President was to create a safe environment for the new Republic’s survival and for the domestic and foreign policies pursued by its Chancellors. On the assumption that there might well be crises threatening the overturn of the state, he was given emergency powers (see pages 48–9). This meant that particular importance attached to the personality, attitudes and policies of the two incumbents — Friedrich Ebert (1919–25) and Paul von Hindenburg (1925–34).

  There was a significant contrast in the backgrounds of the two men before they became President. Neither had a university education (in contrast to the Republic’s twelve Chancellors, two-thirds of whom had a doctorate). Ebert had been apprenticed as a saddlemaker and established his political career as a trade unionist. Elected to the Reichstag in 1912 to represent the SPD, he had initially supported the war effort before becoming increasingly concerned about the drift to military dictatorship under Hindenburg and Ludendorff. He did not see military service himself, something later thrown at him by the political right. In 1916 he became the leader of the SPD in the Reichstag and tried desperately to prevent the split between the two wings of the party. His was the main SPD voice in the cabinet of Prince Max and he then became provisional Chancellor of the new republic that was proclaimed, against his wishes, by Scheidemann on 9 November. He remained head of the provisional government until January 1919.

  Hindenburg was already in military service when Ebert was born. He served in the Austro—Prussian War (1866) and the Franco—Prussian War (1870–71). Forty years later, he retired as lieutenant general in 1911. He was recalled to active service during the First World War, establishing a military reputation for the German victories against the Russians at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. In August 1916 he was appointed Chief of General Staff. With Ludendorff and the Kaiser, he formed the military government which replaced the Chancellorship of Bethmann Hollweg in 1917. Following Germany’s defeat, Hindenburg entered a second retirement until 1925, when he once again entered politics on the death of Ebert.

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  War Stories III

  The Heroes Who Defeated Hitler

  • Oliver North, Joe Musser, Joe Musser, Joe Musser(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Regnery History

    (Publisher)

  Reichstag, the German parliament. Beset by the catastrophic effects of the worldwide “Great Depression,” six million unemployed workers, and the rising specter of Communist-inspired revolution, Paul von Hindenburg, a World War I hero and the figurehead president of the republic, installed Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933.

    Nazi brownshirts saluting Hitler (1935). dp n="14" folio="3" ?

  The following month the Reichstag was destroyed by fire. The Nazis claimed that the fire had been set by Communists and used the incident to pass the infamous “Enabling Bill,” which suspended legislative authority and gave Hitler near absolute power to make new laws. In June of 1934 he had all of his rivals in the SA brutally murdered, and when Hindenburg died in August of that year, Hitler combined the offices of chancellor and president in a new post: Führer. From that moment on, war was practically inevitable.

  Hitler immediately set about consolidating his hold on absolute power. By 1935 his public works projects: railroads, motorways (he called them autobahnen), airports, military conscription, and armaments industries, had cut German unemployment to a fraction of that in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Europe’s leaders did little but debate about what to do about the growing menace in the heart of the continent.

  The French, alarmed at Hitler’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and his unilateral abrogation of the Versailles Treaty, did little but double the term of service for their army conscripts and speed up work on their border fortifications—the Maginot Line. The British, in the first of many acts of appeasement, agreed that Germany was no longer bound by naval restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty. In Moscow, Josef Stalin was busy purging his military and establishing a totalitarian police state that oppressed, tortured, and killed millions. In Rome, Hitler’s philosophical ally and fellow fascist, Benito Mussolini, was engaged in his own imperial ambitions in Africa. Militarism and expansionism also gained ground in Asia, as the Japanese expanded their territorial ambitions in the heart of China from Manchuria, which it had occupied in 1930.

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  Memoirs of Franz von Papen

  • Franz von Papen, Brian Connell(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Lucknow Books

    (Publisher)

  Many officers with whom I had trained or served had come to hold high appointments in the Reichswehr. By tradition and instinct the armed forces were required to be a completely non-political instrument. Once the monarchy had disappeared as the culminating point in their hierarchy, and party politicians had taken over the representation of the Reich, it was not easy to keep this instrument of law and order divorced from the conflict of opinions. It should not be forgotten that in the civil disorders of the early ‘twenties, when the very framework of the State seemed to be crumbling, the Army played a decisive rôle behind the political scene. The election of Field-Marshal von Hindenburg to the Presidency served to stabilize the situation. Between 1925 and 1930 it continued to become normal, but under the threat of a new crisis, calculated to disrupt the foundations of our social life, the Army again became an important factor. We shall see that the Reichswehr did not intervene as a body in the affairs of State, but that the opinions of its outstanding personality, General von Schleicher, had a decisive influence on the decisions of the President. The growing tension between the right wing parties, particularly the Nazis, and the Government was viewed by the Army with increasing concern. Schleicher sought someone to head the Government who had close contacts with the centre parties while preserving the sympathies of the right. What was needed was a man of conservative tendencies, closely allied to the Zentrum Party, which was one of the pillars of the Weimar Coalition.

  It may be something of an over-simplification, but it is probably true, to say that Schleicher’s suggestion to offer the Chancellorship to me more or less represented the vote of the Army.

  Its three outstanding officers in the post-war period were Hindenburg, General von Seeckt and Schleicher. I had not known Hindenburg before the war. As a member of the General Staff I came into contact with the leading personalities of Supreme Headquarters, including Ludendorff, who was head of the planning and operational section at the time. During the war, when I had to report from time to time to Supreme Headquarters or visited my friend Lersner, who was the Foreign Office liaison officer there, I not infrequently saw the senior officers. After the Easter battle of Arras I was called upon to make a personal report to Ludendorff, and also saw Hindenburg. In August 1918, after the critical failure of the spring offensive, when I hurried back from Palestine to report on my fears for the situation there, I saw Hindenburg again. I remember how impressed I was by his calm and determined attitude in the face of the rapidly deteriorating military situation.

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  History Of The German General Staff 1657-1945 [Illustrated Edition]

  • Walter Görlitz, Brian Battershaw, Walter Millis(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Lucknow Books

    (Publisher)

  There is a great deal in this observation, for since Moltke’s day people had come to look on the General Staff as an institution from which even the impossible could be expected, and these statues really did somehow seem to people to represent something greater than the ordinary run of men. In those final years of the declining Hohenzollern régime, the big, broadly built man who was the last Chief of the royal Prussian General Staff did seem to be in some way not a mere man, but an embodiment in human form of the remaining strength of the State, a refuge to the faltering and a hope to those of little faith. Yet Hindenburg dated; he belonged to an era that was already dead. When he said, as he often did, that he felt most at home in the Germany of Bismarck and William I, he did not speak idly, and this was the great difference between himself and Ludendorff, for the figure of Ludendorff, whose almost brutal powers of work and quite extraordinary organizing ability subserved a mind that was essentially one-sided, tends rather to suggest that essentially modern thing, the great technical expert who, if he is to function and fructify, needs the guiding hand of some person of broader and more balanced outlook. Hindenburg was not altogether capable of playing this latter part.

  Even so, the two personalities were complementary to each other, so much so that, despite the fact that their human relationship was far less ideal than people supposed, it is no more possible to dissociate the two names than it is those of Blücher and Gneisenau, though that was a partnership between two men of a very different kind. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had little in common save their background. Both were descended from uprooted and impoverished families of landowners. The Beneckendorffs had once possessed numerous estates both in Eastern and Western Prussia, and in addition had by intermarriage acquired those of the vanished family of von Hindenburg; but they had lost almost everything in the agrarian crises that followed the wars of liberation. Thus, like that of so many Junker officers, the greater part of von Hindenburg’s life stood under the law of poverty, and his silent longing to re-acquire the family estate at Neudeck could only be satisfied in old age.

  Apart from the fact of professional success, his career is in no way remarkable—a lieutenancy in the 3rd Foot Guards, two spells on the General Staff, headship of the General War Department of the Prussian War Ministry (this was the only occasion on which he made contact with the world of politics), after which he became Chief of Staff to an army corps, then commander of a division. Finally, from 1903 to 1911 he commanded the 4th Army Corps in Magdeburg. His world throughout his life remained that of the Prussian Army and of the General Staff. He knew no other—least of all, that of humanist culture, about which he roundly declared a man need not bother his head. Indeed, he cheerfully admitted that, apart from military works, he had in the whole of his adult life never read a decent book. He was a characteristic product of the culture from which he came, full of the consciousness of his rank, tactful and dignified, a Christian in outlook, but a Protestant Christian, sober in habit, unimaginative and marked by a certain peasant-like narrowness of mind. He was what the Germans call ein amusischer Mensch, a man untouched by the liberal arts, though a truly great general should surely have within him something of the creative and imaginative power of the artist. Ludendorff, too, was ein amusischer Mensch. His father was a landowner who, like so many of his kind, had gone through bankruptcy in the ‘eighties and ended up by earning his bread in the hail insurance business, and the son had unconsciously absorbed much of the narrow nationalism and social resentment that characterized this kind of person. In his memoirs, Ludendorff has left us a description of his father’s study while the latter still possessed an estate on those bare East Elbian plains. It was wholly devoid of any cultural equipment. The elder Ludendorff had served as an officer of the reserve in the campaign of 1870, and the room contained, over and above essential furniture, nothing more than a few warlike mementos of that experience, to wit, a sword, a mitrailleuse

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