Editing Stab-in-the-back myth (section)

{{Short description|Antisemitic conspiracy theory promulgated in Germany after World War I}}
{{Redirect2|Stab in the back|November criminals|other uses|Stab in the back (disambiguation)|and|November Criminals (disambiguation)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=March 2021}}
[[File:Stab-in-the-back postcard.jpg|thumb|upright=1.35|An illustration from a 1919 Austrian postcard showing a [[Stereotypes of Jews|caricatured Jew]] stabbing a [[Imperial German Army|German Army]] soldier in the back with a dagger. The capitulation of the [[Central Powers]] was blamed on communists, [[Bolshevism|Bolsheviks]], and the [[Weimar Republic]], but in particular on Jews.]]
The '''stab-in-the-back myth''' ({{Langx|de|Dolchstoßlegende}}, {{IPA|de|ˈdɔlçʃtoːsleˌɡɛndə|pron|De-Dolchstoßlegende.ogg}}, {{literally|dagger-stab legend}}){{efn|Despite the similarity of the German word ''Legende'' and the English word "legend", "stab-in-the-back <u>myth</u>" is the [[WP:COMMONNAME|preferred term]] in English.}} was an [[Antisemitism|antisemitic]] and [[Anti-communism|anti-communist]] [[conspiracy theory]] that was widely believed and promulgated in [[Aftermath of World War I|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 [[History of Germany during World War I#Home front|home front]] &ndash; especially [[History of the Jews in Germany|Jews]], revolutionary [[Socialism|socialists]] who fomented strikes and labour unrest,{{sfn|Kershaw|2016|pp=118–119}} and [[republicanism|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'''" ({{langx|de|November&shy;verbrecher|label=none}}).

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. [[Propaganda in Nazi Germany|Nazi propaganda]] depicted Weimar Germany as "a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest 'national opposition'{{snd}}fourteen years of rule by Jews, [[Marxism|Marxists]], and '[[cultural Bolshevism|cultural Bolsheviks]]', who had at last been [[Nazi Germany|swept away by the National Socialist movement under Hitler]] and the victory of the 'national revolution' of 1933".<ref name="Kolb2005">{{cite book|last=Kolb|first=Eberhard|title=The Weimar Republic|url=https://archive.org/details/weimarrepublic00kolb|url-access=limited|location=New York|publisher=Routledge|year=2005|page=[https://archive.org/details/weimarrepublic00kolb/page/n152 140] |isbn=0415344425}}</ref>

Historians inside and outside of Germany, whilst recognising that economic and morale collapse on the home front was a factor in German defeat, unanimously reject the myth. Historians and military theorists point to lack of further Imperial German Army reserves, the danger of invasion from the south, and the overwhelming of German forces on the western front by more numerous Allied forces, particularly after the [[American entry into World War I|entrance of the United States into the war]], as evidence that Germany had already lost the war militarily by late 1918.<ref name="Watson2008">{{cite book|last=Watson|first=Alexander|title=Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918|location=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge Military Histories|year=2008|at=ch. 6|isbn=9780521881012}}</ref>{{sfn|Evans|2003|page=150}}