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 labour unrest, [ 1 ] and republican politicians who had overthrown the House of Hohenzollern in the German Revolution of — When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in , they made the conspiracy theory an integral part of their official history of the s, 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 ".
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 entrance of the United States into the war , as evidence that Germany had already lost the war militarily by late In the later part of World War I, the Supreme High Command Oberste Heeresleitung , OHL controlled not only the military but also a large part of the economy through the Auxiliary Services Act of December , which under the Hindenburg Programme aimed at a total mobilisation of the economy for war production.
In order to implement the Act, however, Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg and his Chief-of-Staff, First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff had to make significant concessions to labour unions and the Reichstag. He had lost his usefulness to them when he lost the confidence of the Reichstag after it passed the Reichstag Peace Resolution calling for a negotiated peace without annexations.
After only days in office, however, he became the first chancellor to be ousted by the Reichstag. After years of fighting and having incurred millions of casualties, Britain and France were wary about an invasion of Germany with its unknown consequences. However the Allies had been amply resupplied by the United States , which had fresh armies ready for combat. In the West, Germany had successes with the Spring Offensive of but the attack had run out of momentum, the Allies had regrouped and in the Hundred Days Offensive retaken lost ground with no sign of stopping.
