Stab-in-the-back myth

The stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende, ˈdɔlçʃtoːsleˌɡɛndə, dagger-stab legend) was an antisemitic conspiracy theory that was widely believed and promulgated in Germany after 1918. It maintained that the Imperial German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front—especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes and labor unrest, and other republican politicians who had overthrown the House of Hohenzollern in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Advocates of the myth denounced the German government leaders who had signed the Armistice of 11 November 1918 as the "November criminals" (November­verbrecher). When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, they made the conspiracy theory an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the "November criminals" who had "stabbed the nation in the back" in order to seize power. Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar Germany as "a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest 'national opposition'—fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and 'cultural Bolsheviks', who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Hitler and the victory of the 'national revolution' of 1933". Historians inside and outside of Germany unanimously reject the myth, pointing out that the Imperial German Army was out of reserves, was being overwhelmed by the entrance of the United States into the war, and had already lost the war militarily by late 1918. In the later part of World War I, Germany was essentially transformed into a military dictatorship, with the Supreme High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) and General Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as commander-in-chief advising Emperor Wilhelm II – although Hindenburg was largely a figurehead, with his Chief-of-Staff, First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, effectively in control of the state and the army.