See below
Explanation:
General Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) was a top German military commander in the latter stages of World War I. Educated in the cadet corps, Ludendorff was named chief of staff to the Eighth Army after the outbreak of war and earned renown for the victory at the Battle of Tannenberg. He became the nominal deputy to chief of the general staff Paul von Hindenburg and overhauled the army’s tactical doctrines, but resigned in October 1918 after the failure of the Ludendorff Offensive. In his later years, he served in Parliament as a member of the National Socialist Party and wrote “Der Totale Krieg” (The Nation at War).
Erich Ludendorff embodied the strengths and weaknesses of the imperial German army in the twentieth century. He is frequently described as representing everything negative in the rising generation of officers: bourgeois by birth, specialist by training, and philistine by instinct. Appointed head of the Mobilization and Deployment Section of the General Staff in 1908, he was a leading advocate of expanding the army. The War Ministry’s reluctance to support that policy reflected concerns wider than the often-cited reluctance to risk diluting the officer corps with social undesirables. Ludendorff did succeed in getting army estimates increased in the face of a Reichstag whose parties, from Right to Left, above all disliked voting for taxes. He paid the price of his convictions in 1913 by being transferred to command an undistinguished regiment in the industrial city of Dusseldorf–a kind of punitive assignment frequently used to teach recalcitrants their manners.
