Mathilde Ludendorff

Mathilde Ludendorff, born Mathilde Spieß (1877 to 1966), was a German psychiatrist who also wrote on philosophy, politics and religion. She became a leading figure of the Völkisch movement, known for unorthodox, esoteric and conspiratorial ideas, and her third husband was General Erich Ludendorff. Together with him she founded the Bund für Gotteserkenntnis, a small and rather obscure society of theists, which was banned from 1961 to 1977. Her entry in a medical atlas records a trained psychiatrist whose later public writing carried her far from clinical practice into doctrine and politics, a reminder that medical credentials have sometimes been attached to ideas that medicine itself does not support. She died in 1966.