Mathilde Ludendorff

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Mathilde Ludendorff (drawing by Ada von Pagenhardt, 1933)

Mathilde Friederike Karoline Ludendorff (born October 4, 1877 in Wiesbaden , † May 12, 1966 in Tutzing ; born Mathilde Spieß , married and widowed von Kemnitz , married and divorced little ones ) was a German teacher, doctor and writer. Erich Ludendorff's second wife was a well-known representative of the nationalist movement . She founded the national movement of the “German God Knowledge” and, together with her third husband, Erich Ludendorff, published conspiracy- oriented writings on the political work of the “supranational powers” ​​of Judaism , the Jesuits and the Freemasons , which she called and understood claimed.

Live and act

Youth and early years

Mathilde Ludendorff was born as Mathilde Spieß in 1877. The daughter of the Protestant pastor Bernhard Spieß spent her childhood and youth in Wiesbaden, where she attended a private girls 'institute and the municipal girls' school. Regardless of the relatively modest circumstances in which the family lived, the parents enabled Mathilde and her sisters to receive practical training, which was still very unusual at the time. After a crash course at a school teachers 'seminar from 1893 to 1895, Spieß taught at a girls' boarding school in Biebrich from 1896 . After she had saved enough money to catch up on the Abitur, which she received after attending the Karlsruhe Girls' High School from 1900 to 1901, she began studying medicine at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1901/1902 , where Among other things , August Weismann was one of her lecturers ( lectures on the theory of descent ).

In 1904 Spieß continued her medical studies in Berlin , where she married the zoologist and anatomist Freiherr Gustav Adolf von Kemnitz that same year. In 1905 the company moved to Munich . Their marriage resulted in a daughter Ingeborg (1906–1970) and twin sons Asko (1909–1992) and Hanno (1909–1990). She resumed her interrupted studies in Munich in 1911, where she completed her state examination in 1912, completed her half-day medical internship at the Gynecological University Clinic in Bonn, and was approved and completed her doctorate in 1913. She then worked from 1913/1914 as a volunteer assistant to the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and briefly ran her own practice in 1914. After she fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1915 and it was cured, she took over the medical management of the officers' convalescent home in Partenkirchen and Garmisch in 1915 and opened her own neurosurgery practice. In 1917, in parallel to her intensifying preoccupation with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer , she founded a private health clinic in 1917. She strived for the connection of philosophy, biological development theory ( Charles Darwin , Ernst Haeckel ) and racist-anti-Semitic world view to a German-folk doctrine of faith.

After the death of her first husband, von Kemnitz, who died in a mountain accident in 1917, she married Major a for the second time in 1919. D. Edmund Georg Kleine. However, this connection failed after just two years and was divorced in 1922. Mathilde Kleine then worked as the owner of the practice in Munich. Among other things, she published articles on the Hitler putsch and the Hitler trial in national newspapers .

In the context of lectures, especially on the women's issue, she got to know General Erich Ludendorff in the post-war period, who in the second half of the First World War had been de facto the head of the German warfare and whose wife treated her as a neurologist. After Ludendorff's first marriage was divorced in 1925, he and Mathilde Kleine married, from the date of marriage: Mathilde Ludendorff, in 1926.

Volkish feminism

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Mathilde Ludendorff represented a national feminism . In her doctoral thesis, The Asthenic Infantilism of Women in Its Relationship to Reproductive Activity and Mental Activity (1913), she dealt with gender-specific differences in the mental abilities of men and women. They took therefore critical look at the Scriptures About the physiological imbecility of the woman of Paul Julius Möbius . She advocated the thesis that the established differences in the intellectual abilities of men and women are the result of upbringing and social processes. In order to be able to scientifically determine gender-specific differences, equality between the sexes must first be established. She established this thesis in other books such as The Woman and His Determination. A contribution to the psychology of women and the reorientation of their duties (1917), Erotic rebirth (1919) and Des Weibes Kulturtat (1920). Some of these books appeared under the author's name “Dr. M. von Kemnitz ”, their married name at the time, so as not to arouse the suspicion that they were written by a woman.

Ludendorff oriented himself on the rationalist image of witches of the 19th century, which did not attribute any reality to the witchcraft. In the witch hunt she saw Christian cruelty against German women. The witch craze was of oriental-Jewish origin and spread by the church to decompose paganism with the aim of taking action against Germanic women.

In 1920 she organized the 1st general women's council in Munich and thus contributed to the establishment of the "World Federation of National Women". In the book Des Weibes Kulturtat the lectures that she gave at this women's council are printed and supplemented by contributions to the discussion. However, the international women's movement declined to work with her because it did not advocate the right to vote for women :

“Apart from the right to study, I was not concerned with the 'women's rights' of the 'emancipated'. Yes, I did not take part in the hot struggles of women to be allowed to be 'voting cattle', on the contrary, I showed women at a young age that the core issues of freedom of women are the maturity in marriage and the duties People are, but the right to vote is nothing more than deceit against the people, but double deception against women. "

"Haus Ludendorff" - collaboration with Erich Ludendorff

Through General Erich Ludendorff, she also had several personal encounters with his fellow putschist from 1923, Adolf Hitler, in the national movement . Together with her husband, she gave numerous lectures at events of the nationalist movement and the "National Socialist Freedom Movement". After Hitler was released from prison in 1924, there was a break between Hitler and Ludendorff.

In addition to her ideological works (main work Triumph des Immortlichkeitwillens ), Mathilde Ludendorff also published many political writings, books and essays, predominantly folkish content, shaped by conspiracy theories against Jews , Jesuits and Freemasons , of which she assumed that they worked as "supranational powers" in part collectively , partly competing with each other to drive Germany and other countries to ruin. Neo-pagan religious ideas also played a large role in Mathilde Ludendorff's thinking. It was based on their conviction that each race reveals the knowledge of God in a particular way. “Mixing races” leads to the loss of this special knowledge of God. From 1931 Mathilde Ludendorff acted as editor at Ludendorffs Verlag in Munich , where various writings of her husband continued to appear until 1940.

Her thesis that the supposedly Jewish-dominated Freemasons had murdered several well-known German cultural greats in order to weaken German national consciousness caused a sensation since 1928. The Freemason Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have tolerated the alleged poisoning of his poet friend Friedrich Schiller by Freemasons. This damaged Goethe's reputation in the Third Reich so badly that at the end of 1935 the Weimar-based Goethe Society published a counterstatement with numerous documents from the Goethe and Schiller Archives . Since this fueled the controversy, the Goethe Society obtained a ban on the entire discussion from the Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1936 , so that Ludendorff's book and the counter-statement were confiscated.

In 1925 Konstantin Hierl founded the Tannenbergbund , whose patronage was Erich Ludendorff and for which Mathilde and Erich Ludendorff gave numerous lectures. Mathilde Ludendorff transformed the Tannenbergbund into a "German-Germanic religious community" over time. Konstantin Hierl left the Tannenbergbund in 1927. In 1930 the ideological association Deutschvolk was founded, the forerunner of today's covenant for knowledge of God . As a political fighting union, the Tannenbergbund was not directly linked to the German people. Both organizations were banned in 1933 after various criminal charges had been filed by the state and the church.

Between 1929 and 1933 there was violent political opposition between the National Socialists and the Ludendorffs, which was strongly personal. The Ludendorffs publicly fought against National Socialism in their magazine Ludendorffs Volkswarte, founded in 1929 with a circulation of up to 100,000 copies. In 1933, Ludendorff's observatory was banned after several threats. Since 1936, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had Mathilde Ludendorff's ancestors examined because he suspected she might be Jewish. The racial legislation , particularly directed against the Jews, was approved. In the foreword to the book "The Jewish Power, Her Nature and End" she wrote on April 9, 1939:

Since the defensive struggle of the German race against the Jewish people in the Third Reich found its guarantee in strict laws, we have seen with horror that there are millions of Germans who even today indulge in the deceptive hope that the Jew is no longer one at all World danger. In the meantime, the clever man is still digging through his secret combat bands in the people and even more digging in all the peoples in which he still rules, against our powerfully resurrected German Empire.

Shortly before his death, Hitler gave Erich Ludendorff permission to found a new national religious association, which in 1937 was named Bund für Deutsche Götterwissennis . Mathilde Ludendorff played the leading role in this association and the successor organizations. After 1945 the association was banned by the occupying powers.

Activities after the war

In 1949, as part of denazification, a court proceedings were opened against Mathilde Ludendorff , in which she distanced herself from the crimes of the Third Reich. In order to differentiate herself from Hitler, she claimed that her ideas contained a moral , granted every people a “national identity” and represented the principle of “sanctity”: “The existence of all people is sacred.” She is not an anti-Semite out of “barbarism”. On more than 80 pages of her defense, she set out the attitude towards non-Jews from the religious rules of the Jews, and thus reaffirmed her anti- Jewish attitude. She spoke of the "horrific crimes" of the National Socialists, but at the same time referred to the Nazis as being influenced by the "secret supranational powers", especially the Catholic Church, which worked in favor of universalistic concepts against the independent peoples. She was nonetheless found to be the "main culprit". In a revision procedure of the Spruchkammer decision in 1951, she achieved a weakening of the verdict on a "burdened" person. In 1963 this judgment was then overturned.

The "Federation of German knowledge of God" was in 1951 by Mathilde Ludendorff as a federation for God realization refounded law. In 1961 this union for God knowledge (Ludendorff) was classified as unconstitutional and banned. In 1977 the ban was lifted due to procedural errors, but the association is being watched by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution , which considers it to be right-wing extremist .

reception

In a cover report of the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel , Mathilde Ludendorff was described as "the great grandmother of German anti-Semitism " in 1960 . Her books and writings are published by the Hohe Warte publishing house, which was founded by her son-in-law Franz Karg von Bebenburg .

Works

  • with Walter von Gulat-Wellenburg : Modern medium research. Critical considerations on Dr. v. Schrenck-Notzing's "Materialization Phenomena". JF Lehmann, Munich 1914
  • The woman and her destiny. A contribution to the psychology of women and the reorientation of their duties , 1917
  • Erotic rebirth , 1919 (revised 1959 as Der Minne Eresung )
  • Woman's Cultural Act , 1920
  • Triumph of the will to immortality , (1921), 1959
  • The origin and essence of the soul
    • 1st part creation history , (1923), 1954 (title of the first edition: creation history )
    • Part 2 of the human soul , (1925), 1941
    • 3rd part self-creation , (1927), 1954
  • The secret of the Jesuit power and its end , 1929 (together with Erich Ludendorff)
  • The soul working and shaping
    • Part 1 The Child's Soul and Parents' Office - A Philosophy of Education , (1930), 1953
    • Part 2 The People's Soul and its Power Shapers - A Philosophy of History , (1933), 1955
    • Part 3 The God Song of the Nations - A Philosophy of Cultures (1935), 1955
  • Induced insanity through Occult teachings , (1933), 1970
  • Christian cruelty to German women , 1934 (with Walter Löhde)
  • The power of the Jews, their essence and end , 1939 (Erich and M. Ludendorff, eds. M. Ludendorff)
  • The Triumph of Physics - A Triumph of the Knowledge of God in My Works , 1941
  • Miracles of biology in the light of the knowledge of God in my works , 2 vols., 1950 u. 1954
  • The Song of Songs , 1957
  • In the realms of the Revelation of God , 1959
  • The afterlife of the human soul
    • Part 1: Man, the great venture of creation , 1960
    • Part 2: Inaccessibility of the Perfected , 1961
    • Part 3: On the Glory of the Goal of Creation , 1962
  • (with Erich Ludendorff): The powerful religiosity of the German people before 1945. Documents on religious and intellectual history 1933–1945 . Compile. Erich Meinecke. Freiland publishing house [relevant publisher], Viöl 2004

literature

  • Sabine Hering : “German and nothing but German” Mathilde Ludendorff without “halo and witch's mark”. In: Ariadne - Almanac of the archive of the German women's movement. Issue 18 (1990?) (Topic: Interfaces and pain limits. The "old" and the "new" women's movement under National Socialism), pp. 40–46.
  • Hans Kopp: History of the Ludendorff Movement, first volume 1925-1939. Verlag Hohe Warte. Franz von Bebenburg KG, 1975.
  • Ilse Korotin : The world should recover with the mother spirit. Philosophical dispositions on the image of women under National Socialism Böhlau, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 1992
  • Ilse Korotin: The construction of a national ethic using the example of Mathilde von Kemnitz-Ludendorff. In: Peter Muhr et al. (Ed.): Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Emigration: Festschrift for Kurt Rudolf Fischer on his 70th birthday Vienna 1992, pp. 148–179.
  • Ilse Korotin: The political radicalization of the gender difference in the context of “Conservative Revolution” and National Socialism. Mathilde Ludendorff and “Völkische Feminismus”. In: Eickhoff, Volker; Korotin, Ilse (ed.): Longing for fate and depth. The Spirit of the Conservative Revolution Picus, Vienna 1997, pp. 105–127.
  • Andreas Mettenleiter : Testimonials, memories, diaries and letters from German-speaking doctors. Supplements and supplements III (I – Z). In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 22, 2003, pp. 269-305, here: p. 278.
  • Ursula I. Meyer: Mathilde Ludendorff. The nationalist image of man. In: this: The world of the philosopher 4th volume: Modern times: Das 20. Jahrhundert ein-FACH-verlag, Aachen 1998, pp. 87-104.
  • Rudolf Radler:  Ludendorff, Mathilde, née Spieß. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-428-00196-6 , pp. 290-292 ( digitized version ).
  • Frank Schnoor: Mathilde Ludendorff and Christianity. A radical nationalist position during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi state. Hänsel-Hohenhausen, Egelsbach u. a. 1998, ISBN 3-8267-1192-0 (German university publications ; 1192)
  • Annika Spilker: Right-wing extremist engagement and ethnic-anti-Semitic political ideas around Mathilde Ludendorff (1877–1966) and the women's groups in the Tannenbergbund. In: Daniel Schmidt, Michael Sturm , Massimiliano Livi (Hrsg.): Wegbereiter des Nationalozialismus. People, organizations and networks of the extreme right between 1918 and 1933 (= series of publications by the Institute for City History . Volume 19). Klartext, Essen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8375-1303-5 , p. 221 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Free University of Berlin: Doctors in the Empire
  2. ↑ a b c d Wolfgang U. Eckart : Mathilde Ludendorff born. Pike,. In: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the present. 3. Edition. Springer Heidelberg, 2006, pp. 216 + 217. Medical glossary 2006 , doi: 10.1007 / 978-3-540-29585-3 .
  3. ↑ a b Felix Wiedemann: Germanic manner is woman, priestess, shaman. The image of the witch in neo-paganism. In: Uwe Puschner, G. Ulrich Großmann (Ed.): Völkisch und national. On the topicality of old thought patterns in the 21st century . Darmstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-534-20040-5 , p. 269 f.
  4. ↑ Herbert Scheffler: The Mathilde Ludendorff case , article from June 26, 1947 from on time online
  5. ↑ Dr. med. Mathilde Ludendorff: The unpunished sacrilege against Luther, Lessing, Mozart and Schiller. A contribution to German cultural history. 52-55 A thousand copies. Ludendorff, Munich 1936.
  6. ↑ Max Hecker: Schiller's death and burial. Represented on behalf of the Goethe Society according to the testimonies of the time. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1935.
  7. ^ A b W. Daniel Wilson: Jew friend, Jew enemy - or Jew? Goethe and Judaism under National Socialism. In: Goethe and the Jews - the Jews and Goethe. Contributions to a relationship and reception story. Edited by Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Steffen Höhne. de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-052803-9 , pp. 235–253, here pp. 239–242. (degruyter.com)
  8. ↑ Source: Federal Agency for Civic Education ( Memento from June 21, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Der Spiegel 8/1960
personal data
SURNAME Ludendorff, Mathilde
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spieß, Mathilde Friederike Karoline; Kemnitz, Mathilde Friederike Karoline von; Kemnitz, M. v .; Kleine, Mathilde Friederike Karoline; Ludendorff, Mathilde Friederike Karoline
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German neo-paganist, politician, psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesbaden
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1966
Place of death Tutzing