Ludendorff, Mathilde Friederike Karoline, née Spieß

Doctor, Writer

born: 04.10.1877 in Wiesbaden

Died: 12.05.1966 in Weilheim (Upper Bavaria)

Ludendorff spent her childhood and youth in Wiesbaden, became a teacher and taught at a girls' boarding school in Biebrich. She then completed her A-levels, studied medicine at various universities and obtained her doctorate in Munich in 1913. For a time she ran her own neurology practice, but in 1916 she began to study philosophy and Darwin and Haeckel intensively.

In 1926, she married the Prussian General Erich Ludendorff, who had exerted great influence on German warfare in the First World War since 1916 and was an early supporter of National Socialism. Together with her husband, she campaigned for religious renewal on a national Germanic basis. Ludendorff was a well-known representative of the völkisch movement and a staunch anti-Semite. Her world view, which she disseminated in numerous writings published by her own publishing house, combined racist and anti-Semitic elements with German ethnic elements. In their eyes, German "racial heritage" and ancient Germanic religiosity were a prerequisite for attaining knowledge of God.

In the statutes of the "Tannenbergbund" published in 1927, the couple proclaimed a kind of action program and declared Freemasonry to be another opponent of the "German race". The "Deutschvolk" association, founded in 1930 and banned three years later, was re-formed in 1937 as the "Bund für Deutsche Gotterkenntnis (Ludendorff)" following Erich Ludendorff's personal intervention with Hitler.

After the war, Ludendorff was classified as the main culprit in a court case and later as an incriminated person. The "Bund für Gotterkenntnis" was re-established in 1945, classified as anti-constitutional and dissolved in 1961, but was re-admitted by the Federal Administrative Court in 1971.