During the winter semester of 1901/1902, she began to study medicine at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, where she attended the lectures of August Weismann on common descent (Vorlesungen über Deszendenztheorie) amongst others.

[citation needed] She also advocated women's rights and equality of the sexes, although these issues did not form a central part of the wider political platform with which she would become associated.

She attacked the work of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and argued that occult practices had been responsible for the development of mental illness in a number of her patients.

She and her husband argued that General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger had lost the First Battle of the Marne because he had come under the control of Lisbeth Seidler, a devotee of Rudolf Steiner.

She criticized the lack of depth and tendency towards jargon in his seminal 1932 work Der Yoga als Heilweg and argued that the teachings of Krishna and Buddha had in fact been adopted by the writers of the Old and New Testaments, making Indian religion off-limits given her aversion to Christianity.

[2] Hauer feared Ludendorff´s power in völkisch circles, given her work and her influential husband, and would de-emphasise the Indian aspects of his ideas in subsequent writings.

[7] On a personal level, Ludendorff's hatred of the occult also stemmed from her support for the völkisch movement and her desire to construct a new, specifically-German religion.

[8] She believed that the Dalai Lama was controlling Jews in their supposed attempts to destroy Germany through Marxism, Roman Catholicism, capitalism and Freemasonry.

[10] As part of her dual assault on Christianity and the occult, Ludendorff drew on her interpretation of science to develop her own faith, Gotterkenntnis or 'God Knowledge', which emphasised notions of racial inheritance, culture, economy and justice.

[2] The faith became the religion of the Tannenbergbund, founded by her and her husband in 1925, a conspiratorial organisation which briefly claimed as many as 100,000 followers before losing out to and being prohibited by the NSDAP in 1933.

[11] She considered the Bible a fraud and called for a pantheism rooted in blood and soil rhetoric, in which the soul of God permeated the land as a whole.

Whilst Mathilde Ludendorff despised Christianity, Erich, despite his conversion to Gotterkenntnis, retained a strong sense of German Protestantism, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church was a much stronger threat to the couple's völkisch ideals; even though avowedly non-Christian, he was seen as a Protestant crusader by both the arch-conservatives of the Protestant League and their opponents in organised Catholicism.