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Mathilde Friederike Karoline Ludendorff (born Mathilde Spiess, 4 October 1877 in Wiesbaden – 12 May 1966 in Tutzing) was a German physician specializing in psychiatry. She is best known as one the "feminist icons of the Völkisch movement" (along with Lenore Ripke-Kühn, Sophie Rogge-Börner and Ina Seidel
) and was married with Prussian general Erich Ludendorff (one of Hitler's early supporters).[1][2] In Germany, she has been nicknamed the "the great-grandmother of German anti-Semitism."
[3]
History[edit]
Early life[edit]
She was daughter of the Lutheran minister Bernhard Spiess and came from a modest household. After attending a public and a private girls' school, she received a professional education, also reserved for sisters and uncommon at that time.
After a two-year preparatory course, in 1886 she began teaching at a girls' school in Biebrich, Wiesbaden, and, with the savings she had collected, she was able to enroll in the evening school at the Gymnasium Lyceum in Karlsruhe Weststadt, starting to study medicine at the University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1901, where she had the opportunity to listen to the lectures of August Weismann.
Having married her anatomy professor Gustav Adolf von Kemnitz in 1904, she moved to Munich the following year, where she gave birth to a daughter, Ingeborg von Kemnitz (1906–1970), and twins, Asko (1909–1992) and Hanno (1909–1990). In 1911, she resumed her interrupted medical studies for a year, followed by a part-time internship in the gynecology department of the University Clinic in Bonn, followed by her habilitation in 1913. That same year, she received a doctorate in neurology with a thesis examining the hereditary nature of mental differences between the sexes. Her husband died in 1917 (in a mountain accident) and, in parallel with a growing passion for the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, she founded a one-person joint-stock company twelve months later.
Rise in politics[edit]
Subsequently, she became interested in the (first wave) women's movement, but then started combining feminism with völkisch and neo-pagan thinking.[4] In 1917 she first published Das Weib und seine Bestimmung (The Woman and Her Destiny), later published in a more ideologically sharpened version, built on the ideal image of "the primordial Germanic esteem for women", where women had a greater religious significance, before the Jews, in her opinion, deprived women of their authority through a creation mythological gender order that placed women at the bottom.
Mrs. Ludendorff wanted "women's original position" restored, as described in Tacitus' Germania. Snorri Sturluson's description of the Norns in the Prose Edda also reinforced her view of this. In 1934, she and Walter Löhde (1890–1965) published the pamphlet Christliche Grausamkeit an deutschen Frauen (Christian Cruelty to German Women), a highly anti-Semitic propaganda piece with a completely unreasonable claim that Christianity, under Jewish influence, was responsible for the lives of nine million "witches", a figure she had taken out of thin air.
She published the book Triumph des Unsterblichkeitswillens (Triumph of the Will to Immortality), in which she claimed that all people of the Germanic race have the possibility of "self-salvation". She denied the existence of a personal god, but believed that there is a divine power that only reaches self-awareness in Nordic people. She therefore divided humanity into light and shadow races, where the Jews in particular represent evil and relentlessly try to keep the Germanic light race in ignorance. Christianity is seen as a deliberate Jewish attempt to prevent the Germans from understanding themselves.
Together with her husband, she wanted to found a new, anti-Christian and German-based faith, based on the supposed cult of Germanic witches. This did not receive any support from Hitler, but Himmler was extremely interested in everything occult. For her and Himmler, the witch trials were a crime against the German people by the Catholic Church, which wanted to destroy the old Germanic cultural heritage as part of a Jewish conspiracy. Himmler would subsequently launch the Hexenkartothek (witch special mission) as early as 1935, and up until 1944, 14 employees searched at least 260 archives and libraries for documents from the witch trials. The result, 33,846 A4 pages, concluded that the "biological impact" of the witch burnings was minimal, as most of the executed were allegedly older women. The collection of documents is known today as the "witch file" and is kept in the archives in Poznań, Poland.
Nazi Germany[edit]
After her husband Erich Ludendorff was dejected by Hitler and then dying in December 20th, 1937, Mathilde got politically sidelined. Nevertheless, she was allowed to continue operating the Deutsche Gotterkenntnis (German God-Knowledge) association in 1937, which was recognized by Hitler. The group would be banned post-war by Allied powers occupying Germany, with Mrs. Ludendorff having been designated as a National Socialist activist.
Post-war[edit]
In 1951, the Deutsche Gotterkenntnis was re-established under the name Bund für Gotterkenntnis (League for God-Knowledge), but in 1961 it was banned in several German federal states as unconstitutional. Reportedly, the group had up to 12,000 members before being banned by the Bavarian Administrative Court. She died five years after this ruling. In 1977, due to procedural errors, this ban was lifted and the association still exists today, although controlled by constitutional bodies.[5]
References[edit]
- ↑ Hutton, C. (2005). Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk. Polity Press. Page 177. ISBN: 9780745631776
- ↑ Davies, P. (2010). Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture. 1860–1945. De Gruyter. ISBN: 9783110227093
- ↑ GOTTERKENNTNIS (L) 16.02.1960, 13.00 Uhr • aus DER SPIEGEL 8/1960 (in German)
- ↑ Felix Wiedemann: Germanische Weise ist Frau, Priesterin, Schamanin. Das Bild der Hexe im Neuheidentum. In: Uwe Puschner, G. Ulrich Großmann (Hrsg.): Völkisch und national. Zur Aktualität alter Denkmuster im 21. Jahrhundert. Darmstadt 2009, Page 269. ISBN 978-3-534-20040-5, (In German)
- ↑ "The God-cognition by Mathilde Ludendorff (1877–1966)". Bund für Gotterkenntnis Ludendorff e.V.. Archived from the original on October 7, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.