Between the Wars - Erich Ludendorff

Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (9 April 1865- 20 December 1937) was a German general, victor of the Battle of Tannenberg. After the war, Ludendorff became a prominent nationalist leader, and a promoter of the stab-in-the-back legend, convinced that the German Army had been betrayed by Marxists and Republicans in the Versailles Treaty. He took part in the unsuccessful coups of Wolfgang Kapp in 1920 and the Beer Hall Putsch of Adolf Hitler in 1923, and in 1925 he ran for president against his former colleague, Paul von Hindenburg. Consistently pursuing a purely military line of thought, Ludendorff developed, after the war, the theory of 'Total War' which he published as Der Totale Krieg (The Total War) in 1935, in which he argued that the entire physical and moral forces of the nation should be mobilized, because, according to him, peace was merely an interval between wars.