Paul von Hindenburg

I was a Prussian officer before I was anything else. I learned my trade in the wars of 1866 and 1870–71, and I spent decades at staff tables and in regiments, valuing order, duty, and economy of means. In 1911 I retired as a general, believing my service complete.

War found me again in August 1914. Given the Eighth Army in East Prussia, with Ludendorff at my side and Hoffmann’s mapwork and intercepted orders in hand, we struck between the separated Russian armies. At Tannenberg, Samsonov’s Second Army was encircled and destroyed; soon after, at the Masurian Lakes, we drove the First Army back. A nation made a symbol of me; I remained a soldier managing facts and railways.

In 1916 I took charge of the Supreme Command with Ludendorff. We demanded total mobilization—the Hindenburg Programme—and the Auxiliary Service Law to bind labor to industry. On the Western Front we built the Siegfriedstellung, and in 1917 we withdrew to it, devastating the ground as we went. In 1918 we gambled on a final offensive, then faced exhaustion and the weight of American arrivals. In September I urged the Kaiser to seek an armistice.

After the collapse, I defended the army before committees and accepted the talk of a “stab in the back.” In 1925 I was elected Reichspräsident. Faced with crisis, I relied on Article 48 and appointed Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher by decree. On 30 January 1933 I named Hitler chancellor within a cabinet of conservatives, believing control possible. I signed the Reichstag Fire Decree; the Enabling Act followed. I died in 1934, and the offices I had held were fused.