Jay Winter's Take on Hitler and the "Stab in the Back"

Hitler Speaking at an Early Rally

Adolph Hitler did not invent the phrase "Stab in the Back." The failed German military leaders of the Great War did. He did, however, ride "Stab in the Back" to power.  Following the failed Beer Hall Putsch (1923), Hitler railed against the "November criminals" of 1918, accusing them of stabbing the German Army in the back. Hitler and the party used the phrase in countless public speeches and platforms to attack the Weimar Republic, and blame Jewish people and socialists for the defeat in World War I.

Prolific World War I historian, Jay Winter takes exception to the Führer's usage, while showing that Hitler understood the underlying dynamic between a nation and its army.

War efforts on this scale and duration [of World War One] required the recognition that armies were the cutting edge of the nation at war: well-being at home vitally affected the capacity of armies to go on, and thereby well-being at home directly affected the outcome of the war. This was true not only because armies of workers had to supply armies of soldiers, but also because war of this kind entailed hardship and sacrifice for the families of soldiers, an issue fundamental to their will to fight.

This is hardly a revolutionary finding, though it has led to massive misunderstanding about why the Allies won and the Central powers lost the war. The war came to an end when the morale of both the German army and the German home front crumbled in 1918; both front and home front came to see that the war could not be won. The fact that they crumbled together is hardly surprising, though the linkage has been obscured by Hitler's claim that the reason the front soldiers had to surrender was because they were betrayed by cowards at home –the stab-in-the-back legend.

 

1924 German political cartoon showing Philipp Scheidemann, the German Social Democratic politician who proclaimed the Weimar Republic and was its second chancellor, and Matthias Erzberger, an anti-war politician from the Centre Party, who ended World War I by signing the armistice with the Allied Powers, as stabbing the German Army in the back.

What Hitler said was almost exactly the reverse of the truth: there was a stab in the back: the knife was wielded by the military leadership of Germany that led their country into a war they could not win and then brilliantly shifted responsibility for the disaster onto all shoulders other than those who really bore the blame. But Hitler's statement about linkage between front and home front did disclose a feature of total war of great importance, not only to the 1914-18 struggle but to later conflicts. 

Among the lessons the Nazis took from the Great War was that to undermine the material well-being of the civilian population was to endanger the war effort as a whole. That is one reason why the Nazis kept living standards relatively high for “Aryans” during the 1939–45 war and why they displaced the deprivation suffered by their elders in 1914–18 at home onto the backs of untermenschen: slaves, political prisoners, gypsies and Jews.

Source: "The Second Great War, 1917-1923," Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar, Vol. 7, No. 14