I requested this one for my husband to read - he is obsessed with World War 2 (because it affected his parents so much) - so this is really his review, not mine. (I hope that doesn't break any NetGalley rules but we share a kindle!) He's read a lot of books on this topic and, as other reviewers have said, he didn't find anything particularly new here, but he did enjoy it, found the writing very clear and said it was well researched.

Thank you Netgalley and Pen & Sword publishing for this advance reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

I don't have a whole lot to say about this book other than it was very dry and read like a text book. I actually shelved it for a time and wasn't going to give feedback, but I finally finished it and decided to go ahead and give feedback now that I've read it.

The book was very well researched and offered a lot of insight, but I didn't feel like it offered anything new. It was just another book about the political discourse leading up to the Nazi invasion. I'm very fascinated by WWII and all of the events of the Holocaust, but this book was just a chore to read because of the fact that I felt like I was back in high school doing research for a paper. It didn't read like a story. However, like I said, Alexander Clifford really put a lot of research into this so I cannot rate it based on how I feel about the story. I will rate it based on the effort put into writing it, which is 4 stars.

Author and historian Alexander Clifford published the book Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hitler: Germany’s Generals and the Rise of the Nazis in December 2021. So far over his career, he has published three books.

I categorize this book as ‘G’. Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Hitler were all veterans of WWI, though at very different levels within the army. The first several chapters of the book focus on Hindenburg and Ludendorff. It addresses their WWI accomplishments and the years following the war. Both of them promoted or at least did not contradict the stab-in-the-back myth as the cause of the German loss in WWI. Ludendorff was involved in schemes against the government though he always stayed well back from the forefront of any movement.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff were both very conservative. They wanted the government to move in that direction. Ludendorff was associated with Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch but kept in the background. He became friends with Hitler and supported him, though he felt that Hitler attempted the putsch too soon.

Hindenburg ran and was elected President of Germany in 1925. He was a well-known hero from WWI and was seen as a unifier of the various political factions. He was reelected in the 1932 election. He considered the position of President to be above party politics, but he wanted to have a conservative cabinet. His administration was filled with much political strife. That enabled Hitler to forge an alliance with Hindenburg in 1933 and be appointed Chancellor.

I enjoyed the 15.5+ hours I spent reading this 342-page WWII era history. Until I read this book, I had no idea how precarious the political situation was in Germany. After reading about the conditions in the 20s and 30s, it is more understandable how Hitler rose to power. This book definitely filled a gap in my knowledge of WWII era history. While this book is readable, the material is a bit dry. I like the cover art selected for this book. I rate this book as a 3.8 (rounded up to a 4) out of 5.

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I mean... I thought I'd learn something new. But I felt like everything here was just stuff you'd find on a Google search or something.

A very concise and well researched book on the three leading figures during world war 1 at Germany's after effects of their parts in the war looking at how their personality and skills were put to use for better or worse. A very compelling read.

Weimar-era Germany was a confusing place: foreign occupation, hyperinflation, putsches, and armed paramilitaries clashing in the streets.

It remains so.

Which is why Clifford's book, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Hitler is such a welcome, timely account of how German's first Republic was murdered in the crib. And while Hitler's name may be the most familiar of the titular trinity, Clifford lays the burden on the backs of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. For many non-German readers, Hitler bursts into history as a son of god (or a demon). Clifford ties in Hindenburg as the father of the Third Reich, and Ludendorff as its racist, delusional Zeitgeist.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff's legends were made in the Great War. They were the leader and the tactician behind German success against the armies of the Russian Empire in the Eastern Front, most notably at the Battle of Tannenberg, a five-day entrapment in the first month of the war (August 1914) that crushed two Russian armies and proved the mobility of the Germany military.

But the subsequent rise of Hindenburg and Ludendorff to the top ranks of the German military left them responsible for the collapse of Germany armies four years later in the Western Front. Propaganda-saturated Germans never saw the sudden end coming, especially mere months after Operation Michael came close to encircling Paris before American troops poured in and reversed all advances. Ludendorff suffered a mental breakdown and resigned. Hindenburg hung on through Armistice, all the while trying to avoid responsibility for such an ignominious defeat.

Clifford shows how, in the years following the war, as Germany's socialist SPD-led Republic emerged and the country faced a bleak future enschackled by the Versailles Treaty, both generals nourished the Dolchstoss, "stabbed-in-the-back conspiracy theory" for quite personal reasons. Ludendorff, once he had his wits about him, turned into a General-Michael-Flynn-style conspiracy monger, roving from coup attempt to coup attempt until he was arrested in the Nazis' Beer Hall Putsch (1923). But 1927, Hitler would dispatch him, and he would spend the rest of his life peddling paganism along with anti-Christian as well as anti-Semitic screeds.

Hindenburg is Clifford's primary target here, as his capitulation to the Nazis in the waning days of his life has often been explained away by his old age and subsequent death from lung cancer.

"President Hindenburg," Clifford writes, "was the ultimate arbiter of German politics in this period and it was his decisions more than anyone else's that ultimately led the country down a dark path that would end with war and genocide."

Hindenburg, already 70 at the end of the war, bided his time after the Versailles Treaty, burnishing his reputation. In 1925, after candidates failed to win a first round in the presidential elections, he threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for the right-wing, German People's Party (DVP). Seen as a non-partisan, unity figure, he won election to a post from which--due to constitutional provisions--he could exert great pressure on the parliamentary process.

A key element of the Dolchstoss excuse was that socialists and Jews had lost the war, not Gemany's vaunted army--certainly not a patriotic field marshal like Hindenburg. As president, Hindenburg ignored the SPD, preferring to work with the moderate-Catholic Center Party, despite the fact that the SPD was the nation's largest party. Nevertheless, the SPD gave him full support for re-election, spooked as they were by mounting sectarian violence by Nazis and Communists. Despite this support and the opposition of his principal opponent, Adolf Hitler, Hindenburg, aged 85, devoted his final term to the cause of "unite the right" selecting a series of chancellors over mounting Reichstag opposition, until he came to the despot he had once described as "that lance corporal."

Hitler's rise, first to chancellor, then to Fuehrer, was not so much manipulated from the dying Hindenburg as handed him on a silver platter. The vision of one-party, right-wing rule which Hitler embodied was, Clifford shows, the very one envisioned by Hindenburg.

There is one surprise worth reading to the end to learn--it regards Hindenburg's political "will," which was passed directly to Hitler after his death. It surprised me so much, I wanted to throw my e-reader at the wall!

The timeliness of reading this book, even as the American Republic reels in the wake of attacks by Donald Trump, "Unite the Right" nationalists, and organized separatists, cannot be understated. It is a chilling, fascinating look at history.