Mathilde Ludendorff - Politico-religious Activity

Politico-religious Activity

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. Her 1931 book, Erlösung von Jesu Christo (Redemption from Jesus Christ), underlined this by portraying Jesus as a Jewish preacher who had not died on the cross. She represented the Bible as a fraud and instead called for a pantheism rooted in blood and soil rhetoric in which the soul of God permeated the land as a whole.

As part of her dual assault on Christianity and the occult, Ludendorff drew on her interpretation of science to develop her own religion, Gotterkenntnis or 'God Knowledge', which emphasised notions of racial inheritance, culture, economy and justice. The faith became the religion of the Tannenbergbund, a conspiratorial organisation founded by her and her husband in 1925, which briefly claimed as many as 100,000 followers before losing out to the NSDAP.

She also 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 völkisch 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.