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Old March 26th, 2023 #41
alex revision
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US General to punish atrocity propagandist

Seven months before the November 11, 1918, armistice that brought fighting to an end in the Great War, the U.S. government issued another batch of Liberty Loans, the third lot they'd issued during World War One. The American public were once again encouraged to do their patriotic duty and purchase the interest bearing bonds to support the war effort, and a huge publicity drive accompanied the launch, with celebrities and newspapers all reminding the citizenry of the need to bash the bosch. A group of U.S. soldiers on leave from the fighting in Europe—known as 'Pershing Veterans', after the American military chief—were also enlisted to promote Liberty Loans.



Rockford Morning Star (Rockford, IL), Thursday, May 2, 1918, p. 1.

One of the "Pershing veterans", a sergeant, was credited with having claimed before American audiences:

Quote:
"The Germans gave poisoned candy to the children to eat and hand grenades to play with. They show glee at the children's dying writhings and laugh aloud when the grenades explode. I saw one American boy about 17 years old who had been captured by the Germans, come back to our trenches. He had cotton in and about his ears. I asked some one what the cotton was for. The Germans cut off his ears and sent him back to tell us they want to fight men, was his answer. They feed Americans tuberculosis germs."
Over in France, General Pershing got wind of this claim, and sent a telegram back home stating:

Quote:
"As there is no foundation whatever for such statements based on any experience we have had, I recommend that this sergeant, if the statements quoted above were made by him, be immediately returned for duty here and that the statements be contradicted."


The Boston Herald and Journal (Boston, MA), July 11, 1918, p.12.

https://www.islam-radio.net/historia...h-atrocity.htm
 
Old April 26th, 2023 #42
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Default True Cause of World War 1

The True Cause of World War 1


The Lies That Form Our Consciousness and False Historical Awareness


Paul Craig Roberts.



My generation associated dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984, with the Soviet Union, a country in which explanations were controlled and criticism of Stalin would land a person in the Gulag. We thought of the United States and our life here much differently. But with the passage of time the difference between life in the Soviet Union in the 20th century and life in the Western world today is disappearing. Today, the journalist Julian Assange is undergoing the same kind of state terror and torture as any Soviet dissident, if not worse. The Western media is as controlled as the Soviet media, with print, TV, and public radio serving as a propaganda ministry for government and the interest groups that control government. Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter are systematically denying their platforms to those who express views not supportive of the ruling order and its agendas. It has turned out to be easy to get rid of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech as the media have neither the ability nor the intention of exercising it.


It was a mistake for my generation to associate Orwell’s Memory Hole and falsified history only with fictional or real dystopias. Falsified history was all around us. We just didn’t know enough to spot it. What living and learning has taught me is that history tends to always be falsified, and historians who insist on the truth suffer for it. It has been established that many of the ancient historians are unreliable, because they were “court historians” who sought material benefit by writing to please a ruler. In my time many an historian has written for income from book sales by enthralling the public with tales of glorious victories over demonized enemies that justified all the sons, grandsons, brothers, fathers, uncles, husbands, friends, and cousins who were sacrificed for the sake of capitalist armaments profits. No publisher wanted a truthful account that no one would buy because of the stark portrayal of the pointlessness of the deaths of loved ones. Everyone, or almost so, wants to think that their loss was for a noble cause and was “worth it.”


With few exceptions, English speaking historians have put the blame for both world wars on Germany. This is false history. The first real historian of World War I, or what was called at the time the Great War or the World War, was Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes was Professor of Historical Sociology at Smith College and the William Bayard Cutting Fellow in History at Columbia University. His book, The Genesis of the World War, was published in 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York.


Instead of covering up, as expected, the allied crimes and treachery against Germany, Barnes told the truth. The German Kaiser, a relative of the British and Russian royal families, was known throughout the world as a peacemaker, praised by the New York Times for that role. It is a known and indisputable fact that the German government acted for peace until Germany, the last power to mobilize, had to mobilize or be overrun by Russia and France, who were allied with the British against Germany. Never before in history has the very last power to mobilize been blamed for starting a war. But facts never get in the way of court historians.


The genesis of the war was the desire on the part of two of the Russian Tsar’s ministers for Constantinople and the French president for territory, Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. These schemers used Austria’s response to the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Serbia, which they likely orchestrated, to declare war as Germany was the protector of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.


American president Woodrow Wilson secured an armistice to the World War, which had senselessly destroyed millions of lives, by promising Germany that if she agreed to an armistice, there would be no territorial losses for Germany and no reparations. When Germany agreed to the armistice, it was Germany that occupied territories of the opposing camp. There were no foreign troops on German territory.


As soon as Germany disengaged, the British put into effect a food blockade that forced starving Germans to submit to the exploitative Versailles Treaty that violated every promise that President Wilson had made.


Some intelligent people, including the most famous economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, said that the Versailles Treaty, an exercise in coverup for who caused the war, guaranteed a future war. And they, not the grasping corrupt establishment, were right.


For his truth-telling efforts, Harry Elmer Barnes was declared by the court historians to be a German agent paid to write a false history. As Barnes’ voice was greatly outnumbered, the history of the Great War remained, for most, falsified throughout the 20th century.


Barnes was vindicated in 2014 when Christopher Clark at Cambridge University published The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Clark added to Barnes’ evidence that the Great War resulted from a plot by two Russian government ministers and the president of France to steal coveted territory from Germany and Turkey.


But one hundred years after the war who is around to care? All the people who died in the war as well as their bereaved families who suffered from the plot of three evil men are dead and gone. The consciousness of the world has already been distorted by a century of false history, a false history that set up Germany for blame again, this time for World War II.



1. The Lies That Form Our Consciousness and False Historical ...

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/201...-that-form-our...
09/05/2019 • The Lies That Form Our Consciousness and False Historical Awareness. Paul Craig Roberts. My generation associated dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984, with the Soviet Union, a country in which explanations were controlled and criticism of Stalin would land a person in the Gulag. We thought of the United States and our life here much differently. But with the passage of time the difference between life in the Soviet Union in the 20th century and life in the Western world today is disappearing. …

26 IV 2023.
 
Old April 27th, 2023 #43
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Default SECRET ELITE's Censorship of WW 1

SECRET ELITE's Censorship of WW 1 - HIDDEN HISTORY Conclusion - LIES, MYTHS AND STOLEN HISTORY

Conclusion - LIES, MYTHS AND STOLEN HISTORY



A 45 year-old ‘mining engineer’, Herbert Clark Hoover, was the Secret Elite agent charged with the mammoth task of removing incriminating documents from Europe. During the war, Hoover played a major role for the Secret Elite in operating an emergency food-supply organisation that was allegedly created to save starving Belgian civilians. In reality, the Commission for Relief of Belgium (CRB) had a much more sinister motive that will be revealed in our next book.


An American by birth, Herbert Hoover worked in an Arizona mine owned by the Rothschilds. His geological surveys won high praise, and he came to the attention of the Rothschild mining experts. Sent in 1897 to manage Australian gold mines, Hoover proved himself ruthless. He became notorious as a hard, callous manager who cost lives by cutting back on safety props and was cordially hated by even the toughest of the Australian miners.


In the early years of the twentieth century, Hoover moved to China and fraudulently gained control of the state-owned Kaiping coalmines. The Secret Elite in London backed Hoover’s activities to the extent the Royal Navy were sent in to protect his interests. The Chinese government eventually took legal action against him in the London courts, and Hoover was forced to confess that he had used repeated threats and brute force to claim ownership of the mines.


Though the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, which became ‘an octopus racketeering in the stock market, racketeering in the mines and racketeering in human lives’, Hoover expanded his own empire. He supplied the British South Africa Company with the Chinese labourers whose abuse cost Alfred Milner dear, and his Rothschild/Milner links were embedded in his racketeering excesses. His co-director of the mining company, and its highly profitable slave-driving sideline, was Emile Francqui, an ex officer in the forces of King Leopold of Belgium. Francqui had ‘distinguished’ himself in the brutal Belgium regime that massacred, tortured and mutilated millions of natives in the Congo to provide vast profits for Leopold’s company. The same Francqui later worked closely with his ‘humanitarian’ colleague, Herbert Hoover, to relieve the starving children in Europe – or so it was officially portrayed. Hoover’s bloody reputation was revised during the war to project the false image of an enlightened Quaker philanthropist, a caring man who had repatriated Americans stranded in Europe in August 1914 and gone to the head of the CRB. Hoover the ruthless, evil racketeer was reinvented as Hoover the saviour of starving children.


In early 1919, Herbert Hoover was given another important task by the Secret Elite as they set about removing documentary evidence about the origins of the First World War. They re-invented him again, this time as a scholarly individual who ‘loved books’ and wished to collect manuscripts and reports relating to the war because they would otherwise ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. No government gave official sanction to this removal of historical artefacts. It was dressed as a philanthropic act of preservation for the use of future historians. Indeed, like the thief in the night, stealth was the rule of thumb.


On the basis that it was kept ‘entirely confident’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate the great heist and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Hoover ‘donated $50,000 to the project, recruited a management team of ‘young scholars’ from the American army and secured their release from military service. This team used letters of introduction and logistical support from Hoover to collect material and establish a network of representatives throughout Europe. He persuaded General John Pershing to release 15 History professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest. They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’.


Hoover recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. Hoover’s $50,000 ‘donation’ would have paid for 70 of these agents for a year, and it has not been possible to discover from which sources he funded the other 930. Most likely they were American or British military personnel released to Hoover under the direct orders of the Secret Elite, in which case the ultimate source of their funding was the US and British taxpayer.


Hoover’s backers believed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’, but it would take a thousand years to catalogue it. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace’. They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origin and the workings of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. Other documents relating to the war itself were ignored. The secret removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem for the Secret Elite, and, surprisingly, once the Bolsheviks had taken control, access to Russian documents proved straightforward. Professor Miliukov, foreign minister in the old Kerensky regime, informed Hoover that some of the czarist archives pertaining to the origins of the war had been concealed in a barn in Finland. Hoover later boasted that ’Getting them was no trouble at all. We were feeding Finland at the time.’


The Secret Elite thus took possession of a mass of evidence from the old czarist regime and that undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on Sarajevo and Russia’s secret mobilisation. Likewise, damning correspondence between Sazonov and Isvolsky in Paris, and Sazonov and Hartwig in Belgrade, has been lost to posterity. As shown in Chapter 19, the Russian diplomatic papers from 1914 revealed an astonishing gap. Ambassador Hartwig’s dispatches from Belgrade for the crucial period between may and July 1914, when the decisions on Franz Ferdinand’s assassination were being finalized, were removed from the archives of the Russian foreign Ministry by an unknown person. These were documents of momentous importance that would have changed forever the myth of Sarajevo.


It might first appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove 25 carloads of material from Petrograd. According to the New York Times Hoover’s team bought the Bolshevik documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash, but there were darker forces at play which we will examine later.


The removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken , including the ‘complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’ – a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’, but the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s people also acquired 6,000 volumes of court documents covering the complete official and secret proceedings of the Kaiser’s war preparations and his wartime conduct of the German Empire.


Bt 1926 the ‘Hoover War Library’ was so packed with documentary material that it was legitimately described as the largest in the world dealing with the First World War. In reality this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authorisation and a key to the padlock were allowed access. In 1941,22 years after Hoover began the task of secreting away the real history of the First World War, selected documents were made available to the public. What was withheld from view or destroyed will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed it is a startling fact that few if any war historians have ever written about this illicit theft of European documents that relate to arguably the most crucially important event in European and world history. WHY?


Before his death in 1964, Hoover reflected that the institution had to constantly and dynamically point the road to ‘peace’, to ’personal freedom’ and ‘private enterprise’. His words betray an Orwellian doublespeak, a contradiction conjured from the past by the rewriting of history. To him and his elk, black was white, war was peace. ‘Personal freedom’ was restricted to the rich. It was the language of the Secret Elite.


What this Hidden History has revealed is not revealed in British historical writing. Perhaps one day it will be. What is taught in classrooms and lecture halls bears no resemblance to the narrative in this book. Some historians have worn a straightjacket, limited by their willingness to go no further than the official evidence provided by departments of state, government reports, selected documentation, officially sanctioned histories and well-cleansed memoirs. Those who consider that the only true history is that which can be evidenced to the last letter necessarily constrain their own parameters. The individual who attempts to climb a mountain by taking only the givin pathway may well discover that, far from reaching the summit, he/she has become a cross-country runner between markers deliberately set to confuse.


Ian Bell, the renowned Scottish journalist, wrote recently:

What is known has to be said. What happened has to be faced. History, that baffling mess, has to be confronted. The evidence for that miserable proposition has been accumulating for generations.


After a century of propaganda, lies and brain washing about the First World War, cognitive dissonance renders us too uncomfortable to bear the truth that it was a small, socially advantaged group of self-styled English patriots, backed by powerful industrialists and financiers in Britain and the United States, who caused the First World War. The determination of this London based Secret Elite to destroy Germany and take control of the world was responsible for the deaths of millions of honourable young men who were betrayed and sacrificed in a mindless, bloody slaughter to further a dishonourable cause. Today, tens of thousands of war memorials in villages, town and cities across the world bear witness to the great lie, the betrayal, that they died for ‘the greater glory of God’ and that ‘we might be free’. It is a lie that binds them to a myth. They are remembered in empty rollcalls erected to conceal the war’s true purpose. What they deserve is the truth, and we must not fail them in that duty.


from Book: HIDDEN HISTORY – The Secret Origins of the First World War
by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor.

Conclusion - LIES, MYTHS AND STOLEN HISTORY P357 - 361



27 IV 2023.
 
Old May 4th, 2023 #44
jagd messer
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Default Life in the trenches - 1914-1918

Life in the trenches - 1914-1918

David Lloyd George in his diary in December 1917, upon hearing the “impressive and moving description” by a reporter of the realities of the First World War on the frontline.


“Even an audience of hardened politicians and journalists were strongly affected. If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course, they don't know, and can't know,” he lamented. “The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds.”






In December 1917, Lloyd George remarked to C.P. Scott that: "If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know."


Knew what? This quote is sometimes put forward as an example of there being some vast conspiracy behind wars, but it seems like Lloyd George was talking more about the new horrors of war, and how the public would drop their support for the war if the found out just how horrible it really was. The conspiracy was to cover up the horrors of war, and to portray it in a more positive light. Here's the quote in the fullest form I've found, from The political diaries of C. P. Scott, 1911-1928.


I warn you that I am in a very pacifist temper. I listened last night, at a dinner given to Philip Gibbs on his return from the front, to the most impressive and moving description from him of what the war in the West really means, that I have heard. Even an audience of hardened politicians and journalists were strongly affected. If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds. The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with this bloody business: I would rather resign.



Gibbs was a journalist stationed at the front. He was sent home after the War Office began to censor reports from the front.


Some context:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWjournalism.htm

(9) C. P. Scott, recorded in his diary comments made by David Lloyd George after he had heard Philip Gibbs speak at a private meeting on 27th December, 1917.
 
Old June 11th, 2023 #45
Farwell Kirk
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ray Allan View Post
There is no "latest evidence", he was shot down by an Australian machine gunner named Cedric Bassett Popkin. This has been known since at least the 1960's.
 
Old August 29th, 2023 #46
jagd messer
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Default WW I Battles

The Battle Of The Somme



The Battle Of Passchendaele



The Battle Of The Verdun


Gallipoli


29 VIII 2023.
 
Old September 20th, 2023 #47
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Default Hindenburg and Ludendorff

Hindenburg and Ludendorff

Germany’s famed command team was the “odd couple” of World War I.


In the predawn hours of Au- gust 23, 1914, German General Paul von Hindenburg, recalled from retirement by Kaiser Wilhelm II, stood on the Hanover rail station platform awaiting a special train to take him to his new command, 8th Army in East Prussia. With the war less than three weeks old, German armies were fighting on two fronts. The main effort was a massive invasion of Belgium and France on the Western Front by seven German armies facing Belgian, French and British armies, while an economy of force defensive effort was being conducted on the Eastern Front to hold off advancing Russian forces until a quick victory in the West could permit the German armies there to be moved to the East to help fight the Russians. (See Battle Studies, p. 36.) Yet as Hindenburg received his new command in the East, the greatly outnumbered German 8th Army appeared to be facing imminent defeat.


The 66-year-old Hindenburg had grown portly during retirement and his outmoded blue Prussian uniform had required quick alterations by his wife before his departure. Now, as he waited on the platform, a single locomotive with two coaches steamed into the still-dark station. Major General Erich Ludendorff, a trim 49-yearold in a crisply tailored, regulation field-gray uniform, hopped off the train. The two men exchanged salutes and handshakes, and Ludendorff introduced himself as Hindenburg’s newly appointed 8th Army chief of staff. Thus began an extraordinary relationship of two experienced professionals who in many ways were the “odd couple” of World War I.


Hindenburg, an aristocratic Prussian officer, was stolid, modest and placid, while Ludendorff, a commoner, was arrogant, ambitious and driven. Yet this seemingly mismatched pair and their significant differences in personality and character actually complemented each other. Hindenburg displayed measured judgment and steadfast nerves, while Ludendorff, although analytically brilliant and able to grasp a situation quickly, was prone to paralyzing moments of anxiety and doubt. Ludendorff operated with high energy, driven to achieve goals with little tolerance for those in his way, while Hindenburg possessed a mature, statesmanlike quality that restrained Ludendorff’s often-mercurial temperament.


Together, this “odd couple” rose to become Germany’s premier command team that from midwar until the 1918 armistice dominated the country’s war effort.


HINDENBURG


Paul von Hindenburg.

Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was born October 2, 1847, at Posen in southeast Prussia. The son of a Prussian Junker (landed nobility), Hindenburg, through his maternal grandmother, descended from one of King Frederick William I’s “giant” Potsdam Grenadiers (elite soldiers chosen for their exceptional size and physique). At age 11, Hindenburg entered a Prussian Cadet Corps school, where early on he displayed a composed maturity. In 1863, he transferred to the Central School at Berlin, and eight years later he was commissioned a lieutenant in 3d Regiment of the elite Prussian Foot Guards.


Hindenburg first experienced combat in 1866 during the Austro-Prussian War when he skirmished against Austrian infantry and repulsed a cavalry charge by two Uhlan squadrons. Later, he fought in the war’s decisive Battle of Königgrätz, suffering a head wound and afterward receiving the Order of the Red Eagle award. In the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, Hindenburg received the Iron Cross medal for his bravery during the Prussian Guards’ charge at Privat and the siege of Paris.


After the Franco-Prussian War, Hindenburg spent the next 40 years in a peacetime army. Although he rose successfully in rank through higher staff positions and key command assignments, he accomplished no remarkable achievement that decisively affected the army. He graduated from the War Academy in 1877 and was assigned as a staff officer from 1881-85 at Königsberg and Posen, where he learned the terrain and the contingency war plans for the defense of Germany’s eastern frontiers. On the General Staff in Berlin, Hindenburg served as a War Academy instructor and worked under General (later Field Marshal) Alfred Count von Schlieffen, the famous architect of Germany’s two-front war plan.


In 1911, seeing no prospect of a war looming, Hindenburg retired at age 64.


LUDENDORFF

Born April 9, 1865, in Posen, Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff descended from Pomeranian merchants, although his father was a landowner with a reserve officer’s commission in the cavalry. Ludendorff had a talent for mathematics and enjoyed academic pursuits but avoided sports. Schoolmates considered him a loner. At age 12, he passed with distinction the entrance exam for cadet school, and three years later he attended the Military Academy near Berlin. Eight years later, Ludendorff was commissioned a 2d lieutenant in 57th Infantry Regiment. For eight years, he served in 2d Marine Battalion and 8th Grenadier Guards. Attending the War College in 1893, he earned selection for the General Staff. Two years later, promoted to captain, Ludendorff joined 9th Infantry Division staff. Upon promotion to major, he became the senior staff officer of V Corps in 1902.


Ludendorff ’s distinguished performance led to his appointment to the German Great General Staff under Count von Schlieffen, where he worked on mobilization plans for war contingencies. Ludendorff was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1907, and in 1908 he became head of the Second Section, Mobilization and Concentration of the Army for War.


In 1911, as a colonel, Ludendorff became chief of operations for General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, Count von Schlieffen’s successor as chief of the German Great General Staff. However, two years later Ludendorff’s political involvement with the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament) resulted in a stern reprimand and his removal from the General Staff. Yet his immediate reassignment as commander of 39th Fusilier Regiment suggests that his political actions – lobbying Reichstag members to approve more army funding – were likely based on instructions from senior German army officers. In April 1914, promoted to major general, Ludendorff commanded an infantry brigade.


On June 28, 1914, Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by a Serbian national in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, precipitated the diplomatic crisis that led to the outbreak of World War I that August. Ludendorff became the deputy chief of staff of German 2d Army, which advanced to invade France through Belgium’s heavily fortified positions around Liege. As the army’s representative to an advanced force assigned to seize Liege, Ludendorff assisted in the city’s capture with a brave bluff that gained the surrender of the fortress’s defenders. Thus, in the first days of the war, Ludendorff had forged a well-earned reputation as an energetic, “can-do” officer who got results.


TANNENBERG AND THE EASTERN FRONT, 1914-16

By mid-August 1914, Moltke had lost confidence in the ability of German 8th Army’s commander, General Maximilian Prittwitz, to lead the successful holding action against the Russians in East Prussia. Moltke recalled Hindenburg for the command post and assigned Ludendorff to take charge of operations as 8th Army chief of staff. Ludendorff studied the situation while en route to meet Hindenburg and quickly dispatched directives to 8th Army.


For years, staff officers at the War Academy had conducted exercises on the operational plans for dealing with two Russian armies invading East Prussia. So it was no surprise that Ludendorff, once informed on the situation, dashed off orders to 8th Army. However, the army’s brilliant operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Max Hoffmann, anticipated these orders and had already initiated movement of two 8th Army corps. Having fought Russian 1st Army to a standstill, the two corps were repositioned to meet the advancing Russian 2d Army.


Upon arrival at 8th Army, Hindenburg and Ludendorff found the plan in motion and immediately visited their unit commanders. Although Ludendorff’s nerves began to fray when the two corps reported slower than desired progress, Hindenburg calmed his anxious chief of staff. Ludendorff need not have worried; the operation was a stunning success, and the August 26-30 Battle of Tannenberg was Germany’s greatest victory of the war. The Eastern Front triumph instantly made Hindenburg a popular hero throughout Germany, while Ludendorff gained high prestige within the General Staff.


While Russian armies were cleared from East Prussia by mid-September, the Germany-allied Austrian army’s collapse on the Carpathian front caused a strategic crisis. Floundering from the Schlieffen Plan’s failure to win quick victory on the Western Front, Moltke ordered Ludendorff to form a new “southern” army covering the gap between 8th Army and the crumbling Austrians. Moltke, however, was blamed for the failure in the West and was replaced by Lieutenant General Erich von Falkenhayn as chief of the German Great General Staff on September 15.


The following day, Falkenhayn announced the creation of the new German 9th Army (composed mostly of 8th Army units) under Hindenburg as commander, with Ludendorff continuing as his chief of staff. With German 9th Army in the center, the nearly 500-mile-long Eastern Front represented an immense operational area in terms of space and depth. In early October, the Russian High Command concentrated its forces around Warsaw and then attacked toward Silesia, taking the war directly into German territory. Initially, Hindenburg and Ludendorff mistakenly believed the Russians were not in great strength near Warsaw and that the Germans could encircle them from the north. Thus, the large Russian redeployment along the Vistula River came as a surprise, and the September 29-October 31 Battle of Warsaw (also called the Battle of the Vistula River) was a Russian victory.


Undeterred, Ludendorff planned a resumption of the German offensive using railroads to quickly move forces for a Second Battle of Warsaw. Yet since the Russians withdrew southwest from Warsaw to Lodz, German forces pursued vainly without defeating the escaping enemy. Ludendorff, however, represented the disappointing result as a “victory” and requested more reinforcements to “finish off” the Russians. Meanwhile, the Kaiser arrived in Posen to promote Hindenburg to field marshal and Ludendorff to lieutenant general.


Falkenhayn created a theatre headquarters, OberOst, to manage the war on the Eastern Front, with the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team in command. The pair, however, immediately planned major operations in the East that Falkenhayn did not want since that would siphon off troops and resources from the Western Front. Hindenburg therefore circumvented Falkenhayn, using his personal direct access to the Kaiser. Falkenhayn was forced to transfer four German army corps from the West to the East.


In February 1915, the encirclement of Russian 10th Army in battles around the Masurian Lakes resulted in a German victory that earned Hindenburg the coveted Pour le Mérite medal from the Kaiser. Yet Falkenhayn was unimpressed by the success at the Masurian battles, where he saw new troop formations wasted for what he considered little gain.


Paul von Hindenburg

As the pace of Eastern Front operations subsided by March 1915, Hindenburg went on elk hunts, visited his wife in nearby estates and sat for two large portraits (with an eye on posterity, he ensured the paintings had his medals right and that they captured all the buttons on his greatcoat). The job-obsessed Ludendorff grudgingly attended Hindenburg’s frequent dinner parties, but when Hindenburg retired to the parlour after dinner, Ludendorff returned to his office and laboured until past midnight.


By spring 1915, all armies were exhausted from offensive operations and stalemated by defensive earthworks and opposing trenches. Falkenhayn planned for a year of offense in the West and defense in the East, but he discovered it was hard to compete against the prestige of Hindenburg and Ludendorff and their aggressive Eastern Front strategy.


Ludendorff hated Falkenhayn and found it impossible to work with him. Increasingly frustrated, Falkenhayn ordered Ludendorff transferred to the Austro-German army in Galicia and asked Hindenburg to resign. Predictably, Hindenburg not only refused to retire but also appealed to the Kaiser for Ludendorff’s return. Wilhelm II despised Ludendorff’s personal ambitiousness, but he nevertheless needed Hindenburg’s popularity with the German people. Thus, he forced Falkenhayn to work with Hindenburg and to return Ludendorff to OberOst headquarters.


As Western Front battles throughout 1915 failed to break the stalemate, Hindenburg and Ludendorff continued to undermine Falkenhayn’s war effort by managing to divert Germany’s strategic reserves to their Eastern Front.


By early 1916, after months of stalemate in France, Falkenhayn planned a brutal offensive at Verdun to “bleed the French army white.” He wanted a victory without exposing his army to comparable losses, but the months long slaughter at Verdun bled both armies through horrific casualties. When Falkenhayn’s Verdun plan failed, his credibility plummeted.


By August, victories on the Eastern Front led to Hindenburg replacing the discredited Falkenhayn as chief of the German Great General Staff. Ludendorff meanwhile became first quartermaster general in charge of all German army operational planning. This command team would lead Germany throughout the remainder of the war.


WESTERN FRONT AND HIGH COMMAND, 1916-18


As Hindenburg and Ludendorff took charge of Germany’s war effort in August 1916, they faced an alarming military situation. Disturbingly high casualties at the Somme (July-November 1916) and Verdun (February-December 1916) wrecked any plans for large-scale German offensives in either the West or the East. Their armies were overstretched; 6 million German troops faced 10 million Allied troops on the war’s far-flung battlefields.


In early September, Hindenburg and Ludendorff met with commanders on the Western Front at a major conference at the headquarters of Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Army group commanders, commanders of German 1st, 2d and 4th armies, and all chiefs of staff attended. The conference broadened Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s understanding of Western Front conditions, and the two grasped the absolute necessity for a balanced economy of resources across all military theatres. Ludendorff interpreted the situation as confirming his belief that occupying deep entrenchments lowered the fighting prowess of Germany’s soldiers. He favoured a flexible, more mobile defense – a thinly held forward zone with powerful, well-organized counterattacks to recover lost ground.


As the managers of Germany’s total war effort, Hindenburg and Ludendorff now faced far-reaching problems of mobilizing the whole country’s economy for a battle of national survival. Hindenburg became the front man, the face of Germany’s war effort, while Ludendorff supervised all staff work on military and political issues by personally assuming an enormous workload. The huge task overburdened Ludendorff to the point of physical exhaustion, while waiting for a strategic shift in the war strained his easily frayed nerves.


The Hindenburg-Ludendorff command team acted well beyond purely military concerns. The pair openly challenged Germany’s statecraft and the country’s industrial complex. They well understood that Germany was engaged in a war of attrition and that the Allies’ greater manpower resources gave the enemy the edge.


Ludendorff favoured using offensive “unrestricted submarine warfare” as a means to shift the strategic balance, arguing that this strategy did not risk the military catastrophe of bringing massive numbers of U.S. troops into the war. He believed that America needed a year or more to prepare even six divisions and get them to France. Hindenburg meanwhile even claimed that German submarines would prevent Americans from landing any troops in Europe. In July 1917, Germany notified America of its fateful decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare.


In early 1918, the German High Command, after a long period of mainly defensive posture in the West, planned the implementation of new, offensive warfare tactics. Ludendorff ordered the offensives to be based on “storm trooper” tactics – lightly equipped, rapidly moving infantry units that would infiltrate the forward edge of enemy positions under the cover of artillery, bypass enemy strong points, and swiftly press forward to seize enemy rear areas. It was a concept that Ludendorff had first seen in September 1916.


Germany, however, still needed to find the troops to make the Western Front offensives possible. Then, when Bolshevik revolutionaries seized control of Russia from November 1917 to March 1918, the subsequent collapse of Russia’s war effort in the East allowed massive numbers of German troops to be shifted to the Western Front. The stage was set for what became known as the Ludendorff Offensives of early 1918.


Although all European armies were down to their last reserves in manpower, Ludendorff, with Hindenburg’s agreement, proposed that Germany strike one great blow in the West before American troops appeared in overwhelming numbers. This “great blow” was a succession of offensives from March 21 to mid-July 1918 that set British and French armies back on their heels. Early successes prompted a joyful Kaiser Wilhelm II to award Hindenburg the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross with golden rays.


The German offensive stalled on the Somme at the end of April, so Ludendorff shifted the attacks against the French down the Oise valley toward Paris. The Allies slowly committed their reserves, including two American divisions and a U.S. Marine Corps brigade, which forced Ludendorff to halt the German attacks on June 3 – after his forces had lost another hundred thousand men. He resumed the offensive in July with a drive toward Paris, but the French, along with five large American divisions (each U.S. division was about the size of a European army corps), stopped the German advance at the July 15-August 6 Second Battle of the Marne.


With the Ludendorff Offensives having failed, in September 1918 the German army on the Western Front fell back to its final line of resistance, the Hindenburg Line. Now realizing that the flood of American troops arriving in France made Germany’s defeat inevitable, Ludendorff told Hindenburg there was no alternative but to seek an armistice. Hindenburg took the news silently.


On September 29, 1918, the command team advised the Kaiser, Chancellor and Foreign Secretary that Germany must seek peace. On October 3, the Kaiser appointed Prince Max of Baden to lead the government and to seek the best settlement terms possible. The prince, an opponent of Ludendorff, demanded from Hindenburg an admission in writing that there was no further chance of forcing peace on the enemy.


While the Prince formed his government, Ludendorff composed a proclamation to the army that defied the prince’s authority and rejected U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s peace proposals, claiming that unconditional surrender was “unacceptable to [German] soldiers.” A leaked copy reached Berlin, prompting an enraged Prince Max to ask the Kaiser to choose between him and the insubordinate Ludendorff. On October 26, Ludendorff was forced to resign. He told his wife, “In a fortnight we shall have no empire and no emperor left, you will see.”


In slightly over a fortnight, Ludendorff’s prediction came true. The armistice ending the fighting on the Western Front was signed November 11, 1918. Kaiser Wilhelm II announced his abdication November 28.


AFTER THE GREAT WAR

Hindenburg remained German army chief until June 1919, when he retired once again, this time to write his memoirs. He was persuaded to run for Germany’s president in the 1925 election as a national unity candidate, and he won by a narrow margin. In 1932, at age 84, he was re-elected, beating a rising politician named Adolf Hitler. Political considerations, however, forced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Germany’s chancellor in January 1933. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler made his fateful move and seized complete power in Germany.


In the turmoil following Germany’s World War I surrender, Ludendorff escaped to Sweden, where he wrote his memoirs. He later returned to Germany and joined an attempt to overthrow the floundering new democratic government, but the movement found little support. Ludendorff then moved to Bavaria, where he met Hitler and was persuaded to stand in the 1925 presidential election as a National Socialist candidate; however, of seven candidates, he finished last.

Ludendorff ’s life after that was mostly one of living in obscurity until his death in 1937 at age 72, at which time Hitler gave Ludendorff a state funeral.





Hindenburg and Ludendorff - History.Net


20 IX 2023.
 
Old September 30th, 2023 #48
jagd messer
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Default Paul von Hindenburg

Berlin Drops Hindenburg Honorary Title - for Role in Nazi Rise



BERLIN (AP) — He led Germany’s army in World War I and served for nearly a decade as the country’s president, but thanks to his role in Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Paul von Hindenburg is an honorary Berliner no more.

The Berlin state government on Thursday struck the Prussian aristocrat off of its honorary citizen list, citing his act as president in 1933 of appointing Hitler as chancellor, the dpa news agency reported.

Hindenburg was elected president in 1925 and served in that role until his death in 1934.


1934: Paul Ludwig von Hindenburg shaking hands with Adolf Hitler.

He defeated Hitler, as well as a communist contender, in a 1932 runoff election for president. Despite initial resistance, after the Nazi party won the largest number of seats in a later 1932 parliamentary election, he appointed Hitler chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933.

The Berlin government also cited Hindenburg’s role in signing decrees suspending civil liberties and granting Hitler more powers in its decision to take him off the honorary citizen list.

When Hindenburg died, Hitler became de facto president as well, cementing his leadership of the Nazi dictatorship.

Both Hitler and Hindenburg were added to Berlin’s honorary citizen list on the same day in 1933. Hitler was removed in 1948, three years after the end of World War II.


13th November 1933: Paul von Hindenburg (1847 – 1934), the 2nd president of the Weimar Republic leaves the polling station after voting in the German General Election. Adolf Hitler had already been elected Chancellor, and was beginning to assume dictatorial power.


All German honours now reserved for Mohammerheads...


The Berlin left-left-green government once again tackling the huge issues facing the German capital's city-state government in 2020. Nothing like virtue-signaling when people are getting stabbed and robbed.


Don’t forget at this time UK ruled 22 % of the whole world. By the way Hindenburg’s biggest fan was STALIN. Hindenburg was not vain and had humour.
A German artist (sculptor) called Hindenburg's face the face of the century. Hindenburg. "Nobody noticed this before Tannenberg."




Berlin Drops Hindenburg Honorary Title - for Role in Nazi Rise
30 IX 2023.



Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
- Author: Edmund Burke.

Just what will be the outcome of 'the mass 3 rd world invasion of Europe'?
 
Old October 10th, 2023 #49
jagd messer
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Default Battle of Jutland

Battle of Jutland



A full account of the Battle of Jutland narrated by Admiral Jellicoe’s grandson as part of the Jutland Centenary Commemorations (a second animation, Scapa Flow animation, can be found here on Youtube). The 24 minute animation gives the viewer an overview of the major “chapters” of the battle – the opening battle cruiser action, the Grand Fleet deployment, the Turn Away and the Night Destroyer actions. Additionally the 1917 submarine campaign is explained as a consequence of Scheer’s decision not to risk another Fleet-to-Fleet encounter. Graphics, animation, animated maps and contemporary photography illustrate key points.


The Battle of Jutland Animation - YouTube


10 X 2023.
 
Old October 10th, 2023 #50
jagd messer
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Default The Sinking of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919



At Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919, there occurred an event unique in naval history. The German High Seas Fleet, one of the most formidable ever built was deliberately sent to the bottom of the sea at the British Grand Fleet's principal anchorage at Orkney by its own officers and men.

The Grand Scuttle became a folk legend in both Germany and Britain. However, few people are aware that Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter became the only man in history to sink his own navy because of a misleading report in a British newspaper; that the Royal Navy guessed his intention but could do nothing to thwart it; that the sinking produced the last casualties and the last prisoners of the war.

This is the remarkable story of the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. It contains previously unused German archive material, eye-witness accounts and the recollections of survivors, as well as many contemporary photos which capture the awesome spectacle of the finest ships of the time being deliberately sunk by their own crew.

The Imperial German Navy Fleet Scapa Flow Suicide and Salvage. SMS Hindenburg U Boats etc.


10 X 2023.
 
Old November 14th, 2023 #51
jagd messer
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Default Jutland by Captain Donald MacIntyre



2.28 p.m. May 31st 1916 - the culminating moment of more than a decade of deadly rivalry between Britain and Germany for control of the seas.

With drums beating the quarters, bugles blaring, the High Seas Fleet, Germany's entire naval might, steamed into battle against 148 warships of the British Grand Fleet.

For 12 hours the inferno raged. And when the last thunderous shots died away, there emerged a new crop of legends, stories of peerless courage, scenes of magnificent drama.

Captain MacIntyre's enthralling account re-creates the shock of battle, the tension of the commanders and the awesome splendour of this giant clash of force.


Battle of Jutland (May 31–June 1, 1916), naval engagement off the west coast of Denmark that was the only major encounter between the main British and German fleets in World War I. Both sides claimed victory: Germany because it had destroyed or damaged more ships, Britain because it retained control of the North Sea.
 
Old November 14th, 2023 #52
Farwell Kirk
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Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by jagd messer View Post
Battle of Jutland



A full account of the Battle of Jutland narrated by Admiral Jellicoe’s grandson as part of the Jutland Centenary Commemorations (a second animation, Scapa Flow animation, can be found here on Youtube). The 24 minute animation gives the viewer an overview of the major “chapters” of the battle – the opening battle cruiser action, the Grand Fleet deployment, the Turn Away and the Night Destroyer actions. Additionally the 1917 submarine campaign is explained as a consequence of Scheer’s decision not to risk another Fleet-to-Fleet encounter. Graphics, animation, animated maps and contemporary photography illustrate key points.


The Battle of Jutland Animation - YouTube

https://youtu.be/U_UryFjKUsM

10 X 2023.
The usual British propaganda version I assume.
 
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