Tan cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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This is a greatly understated book. Was Hindenburg a flawed character who above any other allowed Hitler to obtain power in 1933??

Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg  October 1847 – 2 August 1934, was a German Field Marshal and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during World War I and later became President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934. During his presidency, he played a key role in the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 when, under pressure from advisers, he appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

Paul von Hindenburg was born on 2 October 1847 to a family of minor Prussian nobility in Posen. Upon completing his education as a cadet, he enlisted in the Third Regiment of Foot Guards as a second lieutenant. He then saw combat during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. In 1873, he was admitted to the prestigious Kriegsakademie in Berlin where he studied for three years before being appointed to the Army’s General Staff Corps. Later in 1885, he was promoted to the rank of major and became a member of the Great General Staff. Following a five-year teaching stint at the Kriegsakademie, Hindenburg steadily rose through the army’s ranks to become a lieutenant-general by 1900. Around the time of his promotion to General of the Infantry in 1905, Count Alfred von Schlieffen recommended that he succeed him as Chief of the Great General Staff but the post ultimately went to Helmuth von Moltke in January 1906. In 1911, Hindenburg announced his retirement from the military.

Following World War I’s outbreak in July 1914, he was recalled to military service and quickly achieved fame on the Eastern Front as the victor of Tannenberg. Subsequently, he oversaw a crushing series of victories against the Russians that made him a national hero and the centre of a massive personality cult. By 1916, Hindenburg’s popularity had risen to the point that he replaced General Erich von Falkenhayn as Chief of the Great General Staff. Thereafter, he and his deputy, General Erich Ludendorff, exploited Emperor Wilhelm II’s broad delegation of power to the German Army to establish a de facto military dictatorship that dominated national policy for the rest of the war. Under their leadership, Germany secured Russia’s defeat in the east and achieved advances on the Western Front deeper than any seen since the conflict’s outbreak. However, by the end of 1918, all improvements in Germany’s fortunes were reversed after the German Army was decisively defeated in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Allies’ Hundred Days Offensive. Upon his country’s capitulation to the Allies in the November 1918 armistice, Hindenburg stepped down as Germany’s commander-in-chief before retiring once again from military service in 1919.

In 1925, Hindenburg returned to public life to become the second elected president of the German Weimar Republic. While he was personally opposed to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, he nonetheless played a major role in the political instability that resulted in their rise to power. Upon twice dissolving the Reichstag in 1932, Hindenburg ultimately agreed to appoint Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 when the Nazis won a plurality in the November elections. In response to the Reichstag Fire allegedly committed by Marinus van der Lubbe, he approved the Reichstag Fire Decree in February 1933 which suspended various civil liberties. Later in March, he signed the Enabling Act of 1933 which gave the Nazi regime emergency powers. After Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler combined the presidency with his office as chancellor before proceeding to declare himself Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes (i.e. “Leader and Reich Chancellor of the German People”) and transformed Germany into a totalitarian state.

Emil Ludwig (25 January 1881 – 17 September 1948) was a German-Swiss author, known for his biographies and study of historical “greats.”

Emil Ludwig (originally named Emil Cohn) was born in Breslau, now part of Poland, on 25 January 1881. Born into a Jewish family, he was raised as a non-Jew but was not baptized. “Many persons have become Jews since Hitler,” he said. “I have been a Jew since the murder of Walther Rathenau [in 1922], from which date I have emphasized that I am a Jew.” Ludwig studied law but chose writing as a career. At first he wrote plays and novellas, also working as a journalist. In 1906, he moved to Switzerland, but, during World War I, he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt in Vienna and Istanbul. He became a Swiss citizen in 1932, later emigrating to the United States in 1940.

After the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian for the assassination of Talat Pasha, the main architect of the Armenian genocide, Ludwig wrote, “Only when a society of nations has organized itself as the protector of international order will no Armenian killer remain unpunished, because no Turkish Pasha has the right to send a nation into the desert”.

During the 1920s, he achieved international fame for his popular biographies which combined historical fact and fiction with psychological analysis. After his biography of Goethe was published in 1920, he wrote several similar biographies, including one about Bismarck (1922–24) and another about Jesus (1928). As Ludwig’s biographies were popular outside of Germany and were widely translated, he was one of the fortunate émigrés who had an income while living in the United States. His writings were considered particularly dangerous by Goebbels, who mentioned him in his journal.

Ludwig interviewed Benito Mussolini and on 1 December 1929 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. His interview with the founder of the Republic of Turkey appeared in Wiener Freie Presse in March 1930, addressing issues of religion and music. He also interviewed Joseph Stalin in Moscow on 13 December 1931. An excerpt from this interview is included in Stalin book on Lenin. Ludwig describes this interview in his biography of Stalin.

Ludwig’s extended interviews with T.G. Masaryk, founder and longtime president of Czechoslovakia, appeared as Defender of Democracy in 1936.

At the end of the Second World War, he went to Germany as a journalist, and it is to him that we owe the retrieving of Goethe’s and Schiller’s coffins, which had disappeared from Weimar in 1943/44. He returned to Switzerland after the war and died in 1948, in Moscia, a neighbourhood, part of the commune of Ascona, in the canton of Ticino, which is the Italian part of Switzerland. In 1944, Ludwig wrote a letter to The New York Times where he urged that “Hitler’s fanaticism against the Jews could be exploited by the Allies. The Three Powers should send a proclamation to the German people through leaflets and to the German Government through neutral countries; threatening that further murdering of Jews would involve terrible retaliation after victory. This would drive a wedge into the already existing dissension of the generals and the Nazis, and also between ultra-Nazis and other Germans.”

In a May 1948 Tempo magazine article, Ludwig theorized that Hitler could have survived by having a body double killed and cremated in his place. The same year, presiding judge at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg Michael Musmanno dismissed Ludwig’s theory in an article stating his own definitive view that Hitler had died; Musmanno elaborated these opinions in a book two years later.

Ludwig died in his sleep near Ascona on 17 September 1948.