HINDENBURG, PAUL VON and the rearming of Germany. But by January 1954, it was apparent that the heyday of radical influence had passed. Herriot resigned from public office that year, although he remained president of the party. He spent his last years as a celebrated elder statesman, a living embodiment of French parliamentary republicanism. Declining health forced Herriot to resign as party leader in 1956 and he died in Lyon on March 26, 1957. He was thus spared from witnessing creation of the highly organized Fifth Republic with his antithesis, de Gaulle, as president. Further Reading Dutton, Paul V. Origins of the French Welfare State, 1914–1947. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Gildea, Robert. Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945. London: Macmillan, 2002. Herriot, Édouard. Eastward from Paris. London: V. Gollancz, 1934. Jackson, Peter. The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Jessner, Sabine. Édouard Herriot: Patriarch of the Republic. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974. Moure, Kenneth. The Gold Standard Illusion: France, the Bank of France, and the International Gold Standards, 1914–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Zahniser, Marvin P. Then Came Disaster: France and the United States, 1914–1940. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002.
Hindenburg, Paul von (1847–1934) president of Germany Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was born in Posen, Prussia (modern Poznan´, Poland), on October 2, 1847, the son of an aristocratic father and a commoner mother. His Junker family had provided soldiers to the Prussian state for centuries so Hindenburg, like his illustrious forebears, pursued a military career. He fought well in the Six Weeks’ War against Austria in 1866 and the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71, eventually rising to lieutenant general. Hindenburg retired from active service in 1911, concluding a career that was by far more competent than brilliant. However, in August 1914 he
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returned to the colors following the outbreak of World War I and was dispatched to the Eastern Front. There, in concert with General Erich von Ludendorff, he orchestrated decisive victories over larger Russian forces. These feats catapulted him to the status of national hero and, by 1916, he was able to remove Kaiser WILHELM II as director of the war effort. Furthermore Hindenburg and Ludendorff were convinced that the only way to win was by unrestricted submarine warfare to starve Great Britain into surrender. When Chancellor THEOBALD VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG objected on the grounds that it would bring the United States into the war, Hindenburg arranged his dismissal. In the spring and summer of 1918 the Germans launched an ambitious assault that rapped at the gates of Paris, but the arrival of American forces slowly drove them back. Hindenburg, now convinced that the war was lost, prevailed upon the kaiser to abdicate, then arranged for an armistice and Germany’s unconditional surrender. He withdrew from public life a second time in June 1919, still the most popular figure in the nation. After the war Hindenburg remained sequestered on his country estate in Neudeck and avoided politics. A committed monarchist, he despised the newly instituted Weimar Republic and distanced himself from it. But after the death of Friedrich Ebert, the republic’s first president, a conservative clique of military and business figures convinced Hindenburg to run for the office. Hindenburg—displaying neither interest in nor aptitude for politics— complied only out of a sense of duty. In April 1925 he was narrowly elected and viewed his administration, regardless of what others thought, as simply a transitional government until Wilhelm II was restored to the throne. He was fortunate to be assisted in office by Chancellor GUSTAV STRESEMANN, who arranged Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations in 1925. But neither leader was prepared for the Great Depression of 1929 and the tremendous social dislocation and chaos it occasioned. Out of this troubling period emerged ADOLF HITLER and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party, which wanted to restore order with an iron hand. Hindenburg initially dismissed Hitler as “that Bohemian corporal,” appointed HEINRICH BRÜNING as chancellor, and granted him near dictatorial powers to confront the national emergency. The Reichstag (legislature) was dissolved in July 1930 (one of many times up to early 1933), and Germany was ruled by decree,