Ludwig Erhard was a severely injured WW I veteran. I present data on his vita. Erhard’s education ended with a doctorate at the University of Frankfurt/Main with Franz Oppenheimer, the “liberal socialist,” in 1925. After some unsuccessful years in his father’s textile business at his hometown Fürth, he was employed by the Institute for Economic Observation of German Manufactured Goods in 1929 in Nuremberg. In 1943, Erhard founded his own Institute for Industrial Research. I provide evidence that he had twice shown political turncoat behavior: from a liberal in the European sense during the Weimar Republic to Nazi economic-policy doctrines until German military defeat in 1943 became a foregone conclusion, and thereafter to the American conception of market instead of government-controlled economic conditions. I discuss Erhard’s qualifications for public office as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Erhard’s character.

Basil Liddell Hart created the term “indirect approach to strategy.” It was first articulated in 1927, and then appeared in its fully developed form in his 1929 book The Decisive Wars of History, which would eventually be republished as Strategy: The Indirect Approach in 1967. Liddell Hart’s views on warfare made him a controversial figure in the 1920s and 1930s, and his legacy after his death in 1970 remains unclear. For a time in the 1930s he was considered one of the greatest writers on war, if not thegreatest, at least in the Anglo-American world. His reputation collapsed at the beginning of World War II, but had recovered after the war so that by the late 1950s he was once again, at least in Samuel Griffith’s eyes, the most important strategist in the world. Today he is entirely unknown outside a very narrow academic community. His contributions to strategic thinking in the 1920s and 1930s were distorted by two factors: his commitment to preventing Britain from repeating its performance in World War I, and his need to earn a living as a writer. He took intellectual shortcuts, found the answers in history that he wanted to find regardless of the evidence, and argued for negotiating with Hitler during World War II. Liddell Hart had played an important role, along with his friend J. F. C. Fuller, in promoting mobile, mechanized warfare, particularly tanks.