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These Respected Figures Were Also Some of the Weirdest People in History

Khalid Elhassan August 8, 2022 39 min

23. The General Who Thought He Was Pregnant With a Baby Elephant

Blucher was a head case, and everybody knew it. However, he was still a great combat leader for all that, so his superiors put up with the crazy and continued to steadily promote him up the ranks. He fought in the Netherlands in 1787, and a year later, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. The year after that, he was awarded the Pour le Merite, Prussia’s then-highest military award. In the early 1790s, he distinguished himself as a cavalry officer when Prussia went to war against Revolutionary France.

Blucher thought he was pregnant, and that he was about to give birth to a baby elephant. Map Cards

By 1794, Blucher had been promoted to colonel of his regiment, the Red Hussars. That same year he made another jump up the ranks to major general, and in 1801, he was promoted to lieutenant general. This, despite his extremely weird and bizarre behavior and beliefs. Among his nuttier delusions, which came and went over the years, was his belief that a Frenchman had impregnated him. As a result, for some time, Blucher was convinced that he was about to give birth to a baby elephant at any moment.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.