LUDENDORF COMEDY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 48, Issue 78, 12 January 1928, Page 2

LUDENDORF COMEDY.

TANNENBERG ANTICS. . Very curious incidents at the recent dedication of the Tannenberg Memorial are now coming to light (states the Berlin correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph"). According to the newsagency of the Socialist" Party, Ludendorff consented to be present only on condition that he was not asked to drive in the same carriage as President Hindenburg. He further stipulated that ten generals, including Hutier, who commanded the 18th Army in the 1918 offensive, should not be present on the battlefield simultaneously with himself. When the Chancellor appeared on the stand at the side of President Hindebburg, Ludendorff ostentatiously took his departure, remarking in a voice audible to. many of those present that he could not be expected to share the position with a man like Marx. He then planted himself in conspicuous solitude in front of the stand, a's if he and he alone were taking the salute of the march-past.

Ludendorff and his second wife, who is attempting to provide his rather crude anti-Semitism with a. philosophical basis, took advantage of their visit to East Prussia to hurl thunderbolts at the Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons from a lecture platform. The general tried to make it clear that the conspiracy of these three, which rohbed him of the fruits of victory, was hatched as early as 1912. He expressed dissatisfatcion that President Hindenburg's speech merely destroyed the "war-guilt lie," whereas it should also have contained an official denunciation of the Versailles Treaty and the Dawes Plan. In order that there might he no douht as to the guilt of the next war, Ludendorff said that its watchword would not ibe defence of the homeland, but reconquest of what had been stolen. Fran Ludendorff, who as a nerve specialist in Munich was generally regarded as an exceedingly able and levelheaded woman, has made such progress in anti-Semitism under her husband's tuition that she seems already to have reached the position*—commoner in Germany than might be supposed—of repudiating Christianity because of its Jewish associations and reviving the warship of Wodin. She revealed to her perplexed audiences that the Tannenberg Memorial was an unholy thinp - because it had been dedicated on a Jewish religious holiday.