Erich Ludendorff Quotes

The fifth act of the great drama in Flanders opened on the 22nd October. Enormous masses of ammunition, such as the human mind had never imagined before the war, were hurled upon the bodies of men who passed a miserable existence scattered about in mud-filled shell-holes. The horror of the shell-hole area of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering. And through this world of mud the attackers dragged themselves, slowly, but steadily, and in dense masses. Caught in the advanced zone by our hail of fire they often collapsed, and the lonely man in the shell-hole breathed again. Then the mass came on again. Rifle and machine-gun jammed with the mud. Man fought against man, and only too often the mass was successful.

I will give up troops gladly as long as I know that they will be used in the right place to bring victory.

During the years of the so-called peace, politics—total politics—have only a meaning in as much as they prepare for total war.

Kriegsführung und Politik (Berlin, 1922), p. 337, quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 27

What the enemy allows to us and praises in us, must be bad for us.

He is the only man...who has any political sense. Go and listen to him one day.

For example, Italy and Soviet Russia, superficially considered, each seem to constitute a united people. But any scrutinising glance will perceive there tensions which will disintegrate the peoples of these two States immediately the outbreak of war permits them to explode.

The un-Germanness in and about us...lies primarily in a lack of racial sense ... in international, pacifistic and defeatistic thinking and, finally, in the considerable advancement of the Jewish people within our boundaries.

There is but one hope, and this hope is embodied in the national groups which desire our recovery.

By the Revolution the Germans have made themselves pariahs among the nations, incapable of winning allies, helots in the service of foreigners and foreign capital, and deprived of all self-respect. In twenty years' time, the German people will curse the parties who now boast of having made the Revolution.

We must all understand that only manly discipline—unconditional subordination to selfless leaders guided only by their public spirit, relegation of our own thoughts, and confidence in the Führer—can guarantee that the moral force of the individual shall be aggregated into a power that will effect the re-building of the nation and the Fatherland.

Kriegsführung und Politik (Berlin, 1922), p. 334, quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 114

I reject Christianity because it is Jewish, because it is international, and because, in cowardly fashion, it preaches Peace on Earth.