Ludendorff, Erich von

German general, chief of staff to Hindenburg in World War I, and responsible for the eastern-front victory at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914. After Hindenburg's appointment as chief of general staff and Ludendorff's as quartermaster-general in 1916, he was also politically influential and the two were largely responsible for the conduct of the war from then on. After the war he propagated the myth of the ‘stab in the back’, according to which the army had been betrayed by the politicians in 1918. He took part in the Nazi rising in Munich in 1923 and sat in the Reichstag (parliament) as a right-wing Nationalist.