Aside from his membership in the Pan-German League, Hugenberg had a more personal reason for being an annexationist. Together with his friends Emil Kirdorf, Hugo Stinnes and Wilhelm Beukenberg, Hugenberg in 1916–1917 founded a number of corporations to exploit the occupied parts of Belgium and northern France. These companies were favored by the Army, which ruled occupied Belgium and France as both Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff—both firm annexationists—appreciated Hugenberg's willingness to spend millions of marks to mobilize public support for their cause. In 1918, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Hugenberg founded two corporations, the Landgesellschaft Kurland m.b.H and Neuland AG, which had a combined budget of 37 million marks, to establish co-operative funds that would make loans to the hundreds of thousands of German farmers that he expected to soon be settled in Eastern Europe.