Neither the abdication nor the armistice would have gone as smoothly as they did without Hindenburg’s support.
While refusing to resign with Ludendorff, Hindenburg accepted the convictions of Ludendorff’s successor, General Wilhelm Groener, that the army no longer supported the kaiser and the country needed immediate peace.
By October, the Second Reich was exhausted. The great offensives of March 1918 so depleted Germany’s human and material resources that the army proved unable to stop the battering Allied counterattacks. Hindenburg came to life once more only as Germany stood on the brink of disaster. The shrewd common sense that had been a hallmark of his earlier career gave way to a passivity ironically replicating that of Wilhelm II. He accepted the increasingly unrealistic war aims of the militarists and nationalists. Hindenburg participated in the intrigues that led to Bethmann’s dismissal in July 1917 and saw to it that the chancellor’s successors remained no more than figureheads. The munitions program, the Auxiliary Services Law, and the unrestricted U-boat campaign overstrained Germany’s resources and, in the latter case, added the United States to Germany’s enemies. He lent his name and prestige to a series of policies ranging from inauspicious to disastrous. Hindenburg, once again working in tandem with Ludendorff, however, was in well over his head as the supreme commander of a total war effort in a state already stumbling from exhaustion. His appointment as chief of the General Staff in August 1916 surprised few politicians and fewer soldiers.
Hindenburg’s mystique increased during 19, both because of the achievements of his armies in the east and because of the continued loss of status by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, and not least the kaiser himself.
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