Chapter 2: The STAB IN THE BACK German Lie Blaming the Communists and the Jews for Losing WWI
To begin, we’re going to rewind to WWI because, as author Daniel Mendelsohn has pointed out, the years from the start of World War I (1914) to the end of World War II (1945) comprise the second Thirty Years’ War in Europe. (The first was a series of conflicts fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648.)
And to keep things somewhat less confusing — “World War I” will be used instead of the “Great War” for the war between 1914 and 1918. This will be used even when the book discusses events before World War II although that name for the Great War didn’t exist until World War II .
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The Brothers Grimm and Nazi Antisemitism
Some of the 19th-Century German folklore and legends collected or created by the Brothers Grimm were “antisemitic, reflected and further incited German hatred of Jews, and were later used as propaganda by the Nazis.
“The Nazis viewed the Jews and other ‘subhuman’ peoples as outsiders, strangers, and backstabbing vampires draining the blood of the Fatherland by way of its wealth and resources. […]The Nazis saw themselves as honorable werewolves, members of a pack protecting the blood and soil of the homeland against invading vampires sucking the lifeblood out of the homeland.”
- Ira Wesley Kitmacher, author, Monsters and Miracles: Horror, Heroes and the Holocaust
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To learn more about this, watch:
Now we will set the stage on the eve of WWI:
And this requires another disclaimer – I am not an historian. And on this note I’ll share what my husband always recites – probably quoting someone whom he cannot recall – when asked to explain in simple terms the start of WWI (I will be using WWI rather than the Great War as it was known until WWII):
“The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist. Whereupon Germany fell on Belgium and Luxembourg, Australia invaded Turkey, Britain seized the Holy Land, and Russia went Communist.”
In the beginning of the 20th Century the Hapsburg empire (Austria-Hungary) that began in the 13th Century still existed. Although the areas under the empire’s control changed over time, the core lands were in central and eastern Europe, including present-day Hungary, Czechia (also known as the Czech Republic), and Slovakia.
Germany was not part of this empire. In fact, the unification of Germany formed from various Germanic kingdoms had only occurred in 1871 after the victory of Prussia (the northeast of Germany) in the Franco-Prussian War. This unified Germany was ruled by a monarch and did not become a democracy.
We’re going to skip the more nuanced reasons for WWI because, for our purposes, what is important is the end of WWI. (I highly recommend non-Jewish German Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of WWI – All Quiet on the Western Front – banned by the Nazis in their run-up to WWII – and Remarque’s lesser-known sequel novel The Road Back.)
For the following discussion I am partly relying on the 1933 nonfiction book Germany Puts the Clock Back by American newspaper correspondent Edgar Mowrer.
A short history of the end of WWI in Germany (any errors are mine):
As opposed to WWII where the Allies leveled large areas of Germany, Germany proper was left relatively unscathed in WWI. Thus many German people believed the German news reports that Germany was winning the war even though, as pointed out in Remarque’s novel (he served in the German army during WWI), the German army was running out of supplies – both ammunition and food. Thus the surrender of Germany on November 11, 1918, came as a shock to much of the German population.
To be clear, as opposed to WWII, in WWI Germany (as part of the Central Powers) did not surrender unconditionally to the Allies. Instead, Germany signed an armistice, which is considered a conditional surrender. Thus Germany agreed to stop fighting based on specific terms set by the Allies.
This surrender was then followed by the Versailles Peace Treaty signed June 28, 1919, which officially ended the war. The treaty’s terms were considered excessively harsh by many.
Leaving this treaty aside for now, perhaps the most important point for our discussion is that Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as emperor of Germany two days before the signing of the armistice. The winning side of WWI determined that a democracy was to take root in what was now established as the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) named after the German city of Weimar.
The first obstacle to a lasting peace was that Germany’s politicians and military personnel did not want to take responsibility for the defeat. Almost immediately this took the form of the STAB IN THE BACK lie – that the Communists and the Jews in Germany stabbed the Germans in the back, causing Germany to lose the war.
Never mind the high percentage of German Jews who served in Germany’s WWI army and that many German Jews were awarded Germany’s Iron Cross. Germany needed a scapegoat – and the Communists and Jews were readily at hand.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia reports:
“October 1916: The German Military’s Jewish Census
“During World War I […] antisemitic newspapers and politicians claimed that Jews were cowards who were shirking their duty by staying away from combat. To prove this claim, the Minister of War began an investigation into the number of Jews serving in the front lines. For reasons that are not clear, the results were never published, which allowed antisemites to continue to question Jewish patriotism after the war.”
(I cannot find the reference where I read that the results were not published because these would have contradicted the German lies.)
The second obstacle was the German psyche. In general Germans did not take well to the concept of democracy – they preferred being told what to do. Here’s Mowrer on this subject in Germany Puts the Clock Back:
“Hitler knows his Germans. Other peoples dislike soldiers and drill. Germans hanker for both. So everything about national socialism is militarised. Other peoples resent open autocracy and desire at least the appearance of personal freedom. Germans seem obsessed by a desire to obey. And Hitler so thoroughly fostered this feeling that you could hear National-Socialist students at Berlin University shouting in chorus: ‘We spit on freedom!’ (Wir scheissen auf die Freiheit!)”
And thus, at the beginning of 1919 with the wide dissemination of the STAB IN THE BACK lie, began the road that would lead to the murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others.
For more information about the beginnings of the German anti-Jewish plan during WWI, listen to this podcast now:
NEXT CHAPTER: Chapter 3: Boring Stuff of Modern European History That We Usually Ignore