World Wars of the Twentieth Century 339
When the Hindenburg Plan was first proclaimed, no one clearly
recognized that manpower, food, and fuel were the ultimate regula
tors of the war effort. In 1916 and 1917, the men in charge assumed
that, as in the first years of the war, more could always be wrung out of
the civilian economy simply by issuing sterner instructions and de
manding more. They were fully determined to do so. Contrary advice
seemed defeatist or, when it came from civilians, treasonous. Erich
Ludendorff, quartermaster general and the leading spirit at Supreme
Headquarters, believed that victory would rest with the nation exhib
iting strong enough will and sufficient self-sacrifice. All other variables
depended on will power. This being so, the only danger was that
weak-kneed civilians—politicians in particular—might betray the Ger
man army by stabbing it in the back at the climax of the struggle.
Such principles had deep roots in the Prussian past. Rulers from the
Great Elector to Frederick the Great in moments of crisis had com
mandeered supplies as needed, subordinating private interest ruth
lessly to the collective, military effort. That was what had made Prussia
great. The fact that a far more complex industrial plant was needed in
the twentieth century to supply an army did not change the overriding
principle, though the generals in charge often became impatient with
the financial claims and controversies that continually embroiled and
sometimes obstructed prompt and deferential obedience to their de
mands. As shortages arose, one after another, the generals relied more
and more on big labor and big business to remodel the economy
according to military needs. Each party got more or less what it
wanted: more munitions for the army, more profits for industrialists,^56
and consolidation of their authority over the work force for union
officials.
What was left out was the rural sector where horsepower, man
power, and fertilizer all ran short. Bad weather in 1916 reduced the
- Rival groupings of industrialists responded to and profited from expansion of
munitions production in diverse ways. For an interesting analysis of the splits in German
industry see Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “Widersprüche in Modernisierungs-
prozess Deutschlands,” in Bernd Jürgen Wendt et al., eds., Industrielle Gesellschaft und
pohtisches System (Bonn, 1978), pp. 225–40. Army officers shared with union leaders
and socialists a profound distaste for the pecuniary calculations of industrialists. In the
closing phases of the war, when worker morale became critical, Ludendorff toyed with
the idea of eliminating profits by étatisation of munitions firms. Cf. Gerald Feldman,
Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966), pp. 494–96. The
Marxist view that businessmen called the tune to which the army officers danced,
expressed for example in J. Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the
German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (London, 1976),
seems naively misguided—a clinging to nineteenth-century notions about the
sovereignty of market relations in a time when these were being subordinated to the
ancient principle of command mobilization.
