The stab-in-the-back myth, in German the Dolchstosslegende, was the claim that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield in 1918 but had been betrayed from within by traitors: Marxists, socialists, pacifists, and above all Jews. It was historically false. It was politically catastrophic. And it was central to the rise of the Nazi movement, providing Hitler with a narrative of national humiliation and internal enemies that he deployed throughout his political career.
The origins of the myth
Germany’s defeat in November 1918 came as a genuine shock to the German public. The armistice was signed while German armies still occupied significant portions of Belgium and France, and the German press had not prepared civilian opinion for the scale of the military collapse. Senior officers who had requested the armistice then refused responsibility for it. General Erich Ludendorff, who had effectively run the German war effort, told a British general in August 1919 that the German army had been “stabbed in the back” by the home front. He did not mean it literally; he was constructing a political defence. But the phrase entered circulation.
The myth was then developed and weaponised. Jewish figures were identified as the primary stab-in-the-back traitors: the prominence of Jewish socialists in the 1918-19 revolutionary movements in Munich and elsewhere provided the pretext. This ignored the approximately 100,000 German Jews who had served in the German armed forces during the war, and the 12,000 who had died in that service. It also ignored the straightforward military reality: Germany lost the war because the Allied powers, reinforced by American entry in 1917, had more men and materiel than Germany could match, and because the Hindenburg Line had been broken by Allied offensives in the autumn of 1918.
Hitler and the myth
Hitler made the stab-in-the-back myth central to his political appeal from the beginning. In Mein Kampf he attributed Germany’s defeat to Jewish subversion of the home front. In his speeches throughout the 1920s and early 1930s he returned to it constantly, linking the alleged betrayal of 1918 to the Weimar governments that had signed the Versailles treaty and to the Jews he claimed were behind both. The myth served him in two ways: it explained the defeat without requiring any acknowledgement of German military failure, and it identified the Jews as the enemy responsible for everything that had gone wrong since 1918.
The Reichstag fire decree of February 1933 and the Enabling Act of March 1933, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers, were both justified in part by the rhetoric of national emergency and internal betrayal that the stab-in-the-back myth had normalised. Once in power, Hitler used the myth to frame the coming war as a rectification of the 1918 betrayal: this time, the internal enemy would be destroyed before it could stab Germany in the back again.
The Dolchstoss in the courtroom
The myth was examined and decisively refuted in a Munich court in 1925, in a libel action brought by a Social Democrat against a newspaper that had printed the stab-in-the-back claim. The court found that Germany had been defeated on the battlefield and that the claim of betrayal was unfounded. The finding had no political effect. The myth was not a historical argument susceptible to refutation by evidence; it was a political weapon, and its users had no interest in the evidence.
See also
Sources
- Boris Barth, Dolchstosslegenden und politische Desintegration, Droste Verlag, 2003
- Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, Allen Lane, 2003
- John Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan, Macmillan, 1936
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, Allen Lane, 1998
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, HarperCollins, 1997