23 Facts About Mathilde Ludendorff

Mathilde Ludendorff was a leading figure in the Volkisch movement known for her unorthodox and conspiratorial ideas.

Mathilde Ludendorff attended a private and a public school for girls.

Mathilde Ludendorff saved enough money to attend evening classes at the Gymnasium for Girls in Karlsruhe from 1900 until 1901, to gain her Abitur.

Mathilde Ludendorff graduated in 1913 with a PhD degree in neurology with a thesis examining the hereditary nature of mental differences between genders.

Mathilde Ludendorff's husband died in 1917 during an accident in the mountains.

Mathilde Ludendorff made her living with an office in Munich.

Mathilde Ludendorff's wife became her psychiatric patient but after they divorced, she married Ludendorff on 14 September 1926 in Tutzing.

Mathilde Ludendorff became a strong critic of the religions existing in the Germany of her time and officially left Lutheranism in 1913.

Mathilde Ludendorff attacked the work of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and argued that occult practices had been responsible for the development of mental illness in a number of her patients.

Mathilde Ludendorff dealt with this topic at length in her work Insanity Induced Through Occult Teachings.

Mathilde Ludendorff targeted anthroposophy, notably in her 1933 essay The Miracle of Marne.

Mathilde Ludendorff criticized the works of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an Indologist who supported volkisch ideas, but who had emphasised the Indo-European origins of the Germans.

Mathilde Ludendorff criticized the lack of depth and tendency towards jargon in his seminal 1932 work Der Yoga als Heilweg and argued that the teachings of Krishna and Buddha had in fact been adopted by the writers of the Old and New Testaments, making Indian religion off-limits given her aversion to Christianity.

Mathilde Ludendorff believed that the Dalai Lama was controlling Jews in their supposed attempts to destroy Germany through Marxism, Roman Catholicism, capitalism and Freemasonry.

Mathilde Ludendorff had no truck with the ideas of Positive Christianity, feeling that Christian beliefs could never be reconciled to the Aryan ideal that she believed in.

Mathilde Ludendorff stressed this by portraying Jesus as a Jewish preacher who had not died on the cross in her 1931 book, Erlosung von Jesu Christo.

Mathilde Ludendorff considered the Bible a fraud and called for a pantheism rooted in blood and soil rhetoric, in which the soul of God permeated the land as a whole.

Mathilde Ludendorff published The Secret Power of the Jesuits and Its Decline with her husband, although this work revealed many of the prejudices still latent in the old general.

Whilst Mathilde Ludendorff despised Christianity, Erich, despite his conversion to Gotterkenntnis, retained a strong sense of German Protestantism, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church was a much stronger threat to the couple's volkisch ideals; even though avowedly non-Christian, he was seen as a Protestant crusader by both the arch-conservatives of the Protestant League and their opponents in organised Catholicism.

Mathilde Ludendorff was largely sidelined after her husband's 1937 death, as Adolf Hitler had long since broken from the general.

Mathilde Ludendorff continued to express anti-Semitic ideas after the war and was found guilty during the Denazification process, although her judgement was lessened in 1951.

Mathilde Ludendorff founded a Bund fur Gotterkenntnis which could be traced back to 1951 and had as many as 12,000 members.

Mathilde Ludendorff died in Tutzing in 1966, five years after the judgement.