Ludendorff dismissed

On 26 October 1918, at Bellevue Palace in Berlin, Emperor Wilhelm II accepted the resignation of General Erich Ludendorff, First Quartermaster-General of the army. Since August 1916, when together with Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg he took over the Supreme Army Command, it was he who had actually directed Germany’s war, and in the last two years largely the Reich’s policy as well. Formally he left at his own request; in reality his removal had been demanded by the chancellor, Prince Max von Baden. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 27 October, but German sources and Ludendorff’s own memoirs point unequivocally to 26 October. Hindenburg remained at his post.

The general changes his mind

At the end of September it was Ludendorff who had demanded an immediate request for an armistice, and on 4 October the government sent its notes to Wilson. By the middle of the month the general saw the situation differently. The front in the west was falling back but not collapsing, and Ludendorff began to believe that the army could hold out through the winter on a shortened line. At the meeting of the war cabinet on 17 October he argued that the army could fight on, and the chancellor opposed him. Meanwhile Washington’s successive replies were growing ever harder. In his note of 23 October President Wilson agreed to pass the correspondence with Germany on to the Allies, but stipulated that the only possible armistice was one that would make it impossible for Germany to resume fighting. He added that if the United States had to deal with the “military masters and the monarchical autocrats” of Germany, it would demand not peace negotiations but surrender.

The order of 24 October

On the evening of 24 October at Spa a proclamation to the army, already signed by Hindenburg, was brought to Ludendorff for countersignature. It declared that Wilson’s reply was a demand for unconditional surrender and therefore “unacceptable to us soldiers”. It argued that the will to destroy Germany that had unleashed the war in 1914 still persisted, and that the enemy used the slogan of a “peace of justice” only to break German resistance. For the soldiers, Wilson’s reply could therefore only be “a challenge to continue our resistance with all our strength”. Ludendorff later claimed that he was surprised by the tone of the text, but the officer who had prepared it assured him that it was in line with the government’s views, so he signed. The proclamation contradicted the policy of the chancellor, who was at that very moment trying to bring about an armistice.

Colonel Wilhelm Heye of the Supreme Army Command stopped the distribution of the order, but it was already too late. According to Ludendorff, the text leaked at Kovno, where the military communications hub was already controlled by men linked to the revolutionary movement, and reached the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. At noon on 25 October a storm broke out at the sitting of the Reichstag. The deputies saw the proclamation as proof that the military were still pursuing their own policy over the government’s head, and at the very moment when Wilson was asking who really governed Germany.

A day in Berlin

Hindenburg and Ludendorff, meanwhile, had come to Berlin, although the chancellor had expressly asked them not to. On 25 October they put to the Emperor their view that the fight must go on. Wilhelm II took no decision and referred them to the chancellor. Prince Max was ill with influenza, so in the evening they were received by the vice-chancellor, Friedrich von Payer, in the presence of Admiral Reinhard Scheer and the Minister of War. Ludendorff warned against trusting Wilson, against Bolshevism and against undermining the Emperor’s position, but he understood that the government no longer intended to fight. On leaving the meeting he told the officers waiting downstairs: “There is no hope. Germany is lost.”

The chancellor then brought matters to a head. According to historians, he told the Emperor that if Ludendorff did not go, the whole government would resign. Hindenburg, on the other hand, was to stay in order to keep the army together.

The audience at Bellevue Palace

At eight in the morning on 26 October Ludendorff wrote his request to resign. Hindenburg, who came to see him at nine as he did every day, saw the letter and persuaded him not to send it and not to abandon the Emperor and the army at such a moment. Soon afterwards both were summoned to Bellevue Palace. According to Ludendorff, the Emperor seemed “completely changed” compared with the day before and, in a private conversation, sharply criticised the proclamation of 24 October. The general replied that he had lost the monarch’s confidence and asked to be relieved. Wilhelm II accepted the resignation at once. When Hindenburg also offered to go, the Emperor refused.

Ludendorff regarded this as betrayal. According to witnesses, he refused to return to the General Staff building in the same car as the field marshal, with whom for more than four years he had formed the most famous command partnership of the war. On his return he told his officers that in two weeks Germany would no longer have an emperor. In the evening he left for Spa, and on 27 October he took leave of the staff.

The end of the “silent dictatorship”

On the same day the Reichstag passed constitutional amendments making the chancellor responsible to parliament and making officers’ appointments subject to the countersignature of the Minister of War. They came into force on 28 October. Many historians regard Ludendorff’s departure as the symbolic end of the “silent dictatorship” of the Supreme Army Command. The German historian Manfred Nebelin wrote that the scene at Bellevue Palace restored the primacy of politics over the military, lost since the fall of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in 1917. Ludendorff’s successor, appointed a few days later, was General Wilhelm Groener, who since the spring of 1918 had been chief of staff of the German forces in Ukraine.

Ludendorff himself had no intention of taking responsibility for the defeat. In November, after the outbreak of the revolution, he left for Sweden with a false passport. After returning to Germany he became one of the main proponents of the stab-in-the-back myth, according to which the army, undefeated in the field, had been betrayed by the politicians at home. Historians point out that it was he himself who at the end of September had told the Emperor that the war could no longer be won.