A few days before Christmas in 1937, Adolf Hitler attended the funeral of General Erich Ludendorff, the famed World War I military leader and one-time Nazi supporter. At the memorial service Hitler chose not to speak, not wanting to utter any words of praise for a man who had come to despise him.
Ludendorff had participated in the failed Beer Hall Putsch fourteen years earlier and never forgave Hitler for scooting away amid the gunfire that erupted. When President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ludendorff sent Hindenburg a telegram saying he had just "handed over our sacred German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I prophesy to you this evil man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and will inflict immeasurable woe on our nation..."
Ludendorff, along with Germany's other senior generals were men of the old school, born into aristocratic Prussian families with long military traditions, knowing even in childhood they would one day command battalions of soldiers just as their fathers and grandfathers had.
Among this closed society, Adolf Hitler would always be an outsider, the man referred to by Hindenburg as the "Austrian corporal." Although the Führer might be admired by millions, he would never be fully accepted by the upper echelons of his own General Staff. Hitler, of course, knew where he stood with them and he tolerated their quiet disdain as long as they remained useful to him.
