Paul von Hindenburg
Paul von Hindenburg was recalled from retirement at sixty-six, became Germany's most revered soldier, and appointed Hitler chancellor at eighty-five. Born in 1847 to a Prussian junker family, he fought at Königgrätz in 1866 and in France in 1870, retired as a general in 1911, and asked to be recalled in 1914. He was sent east in August 1914 with Erich Ludendorff as chief of staff and won at Tannenberg, destroying a Russian army of some 150,000. The plan was largely Max Hoffmann's, and the credit went to the calm old man at the top, whose photograph appeared everywhere and to whom a wooden statue twelve metres high was raised in Berlin for the public to hammer nails into. He and Ludendorff took the supreme command in 1916 and ran what was effectively a military dictatorship, displacing the civil government. He demanded an armistice in the autumn of 1918 and then let the army's honour be preserved by others. His testimony to a Reichstag committee in 1919 endorsed the Dolchstoßlegende — that the undefeated army had been stabbed in the back by politicians, socialists and Jews — which is the single most destructive falsehood in Weimar politics, and it came from the man best placed to deny it. He was elected president in 1925 and re-elected in 1932 as the candidate of the republic's defenders against Hitler. He then governed by emergency decree through three chancellors, and appointed Hitler in January 1933 on the advice of men who believed they could contain him. He died in August 1934.
- Lived: 1847 CE – 1934 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: field_marshal, military_leader, president
