YALE KRAMER: WHO OWNS HISTORY? THE STAB IN THE BACK MYTH
Who owns history?
Some would say those who win the struggle, others would say whoever claims it. The trouble with history is human nature. Even the best history cannot escape its powerful gravitational pull–the human nature of its principal actors, its writers, and its readers. If one doubts this, there is no better example than the history of the last several months of the Great War–from March 1918, to November.
We are approaching the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the armistice between the Allied Powers and Germany at five a.m. on the morning of November 11, 1918 in the iconic railway car as it stood in the chilly darkness of the forest of Compiègne. It may be illuminating to review from today’s perspective the rapidly fading but dramatic and highly important events leading to that morning.
The United States Congress declared war on the Central Powers on April 6, 1917, after the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in February and went on to sink seven American ships. At the time our army was pathetically undermanned, consisting of around a hundred thousand men and ranked 16th or 17th in the world. But by the summer of 1918 four million American soldiers were in training and on their way to the Western Front. However, they were not yet ready to meet the onslaught of what the German High Command believed would be their tie-breaking offensive, finally forcing the Allies to beg for a negotiated peace.
On the whole, the military situation of the Central Powers at the beginning of 1918 was not at all bad. With the help of Lenin and the Bolsheviks they had forced the Imperial Russian Army out of the war, had easily conquered and occupied thousands of square miles of Russian territory, and forced the Bolsheviks to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, ending the war on the Eastern front for the Germans and thus releasing thousands of men to fight the Allies on the still stalemated Western Front. From their point of view the Germans had at least won half of the war.
By the Spring of 1918 the military dictators of the Central Powers, Generals Paul von Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorff, were planning their final throw of the strategic dice–a monumental offensive using all of their manpower, even to their last reserves–to bring the Allies to the bargaining table. With their new infusion of first-rate troops from the Eastern Front they believed that they would have numerical superiority in the struggle.
Ludendorff conceived of the crucial new offensive based on his successful victory over the various Russian armies during the previous year–powerful and violent forward thrusts akin to the German Blitzkrieg of the early months of World War II. Beginning on March 21, 1918, the field commanders were ordered to push forward and keep moving no matter what; if they encountered resistance, to make an end-run around it and push forward.
The Germans understood the key to winning the battle was tempo. It meant beating the Allies quickly before the Americans could arrive in force. And for the first days of the powerful offensive things went well for the Germans. They stormed forward relentlessly and drove the British back with such force that by April 5 the Germans had advanced twenty miles along a fifty-mile front and stood within a few miles of Amiens, defended only by a group of makeshift units.
But in war things can change in the blink of an eye and several things took place within the German high command as well as on the field. First of all, as John Keegan, the British historian notes, “The accidents of military geography also began to work to the Germans’ disadvantage. The nearer they approached Amiens, the more deeply did they become entangled in the obstacles of the old Somme battlefield, a wilderness of abandoned trenches, broken roads, and shell-crater fields left behind by the movement of the front a year earlier.”
In addition, the men of the German army began to discover the niceties of the British rear areas, “…stuffed with the luxuries enjoyed by the army of a nation which had escaped the years of naval blockade that in Germany had made the simplest necessities of life rare and expensive commodities, time and again tempted the advancing German troops to stop, plunder and satiate themselves.”
Basking in the glory of their early success, the German generals split their forces into three different spearheads without realizing that none of the prongs would be strong enough to achieve a breakthrough. And shortly afterword the Allies counter-attacked and stopped the crucial offensive dead in its tracks, leaving the most elite units of the German army in tatters–a quarter of a million men killed or wounded. The German high command had to acknowledge that their greatest hope, the war-winning Kaiser Battle, was lost. More than ninety divisions were exhausted and demoralized. “The enemy resistance was beyond our powers,” Ludendorff finally recorded in his diary.
By early summer, the war, for all practical purposes, was over. There were four reasons.
The first is that the Germans had made one of the war’s worst military miscalculations: they had ignored the development of the modern tank and allowed the Allies to amass a large corps of armor that was capable of moving rapidly (five miles per hour) and concentrating intense cannon and machine-gun fire at the enemy.
Then, in June of 1918, the wave of so-called “Spanish Inluenza” that was swirling around the world finally hit what was left of the German army. Half a million men whose resistance, depressed by poor diet, was far lower than that of better-fed Allied troops, fell ill and weakened or died.
The third decisive factor was that Ludendorff had lost nearly one million men since the beginning of 1918 and had finally run out of reserves to fill the losses of the spring and summer suicidal offensives.
Along with the above the most powerful and demoralizing fact the German high command had to face was the appearance of the American Army. Throughout late spring and early summer the young and vital American troops had fought side by side with the Brits and the French, reviving the weary Allies with their esprit.
John Keegan summarized the impact of the American Army this way. “…A German army unable to make good its losses was now confronted by a new enemy, the U.S. Army, with four million fresh troops in action or training….[Ludendorff] attributed the growing malaise in his army and the sense of “looming defeat” that afflicted it to ‘the sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front.’ It was indeed immaterial whether the doughboys fought well or not….the critical issue was the effect of their arrival on the enemy. It was deeply depressing. After four years of war in which they had destroyed the Tsar’s army, trounced the Italians and Romanians, demoralized the French and, at the very least, denied the British a clear-cut victory, they were now confronted with an army whose soldiers sprang, in uncountable numbers as if from the soil….Nowhere among Germany’s remaining resources could sufficient force be found to counter the millions America could bring across the Atlantic, and the consequent sense of pointlessness of further effort rotted the resolution of the ordinary German soldier to do his duty.”
On September 28, Ludendorff sought out Hindenberg, the old Field Marshal, and told him that there was no alternative but to seek an armistice. “The position in the west was penetrated, the army would not fight, the civilian population had lost heart, the politicians wanted peace.”
The next day the German high command met with the Kaiser and the Chancellor to advise them that Germany must now ask for an armistice with the Allies and that the war could not go on. For them the term “armistice” did not as yet imply “peace” or “peace treaty.” It meant only a temporary abstinence from battle agreed upon by both sides–a truce.
It must also be understood that in the confusing and chaotic events that followed in October and early November, the German troops on the western front were unflagging in their efforts to destroy their enemy and the Allies lost thousands of men in the forty days before the armistice was signed.
Within a few days of Hindenberg’s and Ludendorff’s conference with the Kaiser, the latter grudgingly agreed to a step in the direction of democratization. He signed a proclamation establishing a parliamentary regime and appointing as the new Chancellor of Germany Prince Maximilian of Baden, a cousin, a political moderate, an advocate of negotiated peace, and an acknowledged opponent of Ludendorff.
Both Hindenberg and Ludendorff put strong pressure on Maximilian to sue for an immediate armistice. They reminded him that it was impossible to make good the very heavy losses of the most recent battles. It was imperative “to spare the German people…further useless sacrifices.”
On October 4, after informing the Reichstag of the need for peace, Prince Maximilian telegraphed to Washington requesting an armistice. Unfortunately, the Germans wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They indicated that they did not want to surrender, but wanted to end the war without any preconditions that might be harmful to the Central Powers.
Wilson rejected the German peace note. The first condition for peace, Wilson reminded them, was the evacuation of Belgium and France, since the German armies were still in possession of much of Belgium and hundreds of square miles of northeastern France–hundreds of villages and towns and thousands of Frenchmen. The war would not end, Wilson insisted, until there were no German troops on Belgian or French soil.
Powerful ambivalence dominated the attitudes of all of the major players on both sides of the war about ending it. Throughout the last weeks of October and early November the German generals and the Kaiser could not make up their minds whether they wanted to terminate the fighting and risk loss of empire and pride or fight on in some fantasied suicidal frenzy to the last man.
In late October, despite the fact that the German Government accepted President Wilson’s condition for negotiations–the complete withdrawal of their troops from France and Belgium–Grand-Admiral Tirpitz urged Maximilian to reinforce the Western Front with every available man and pursue the submarine campaign more forcefully. He wrote the Prince, “Every German must understand that if we do not fight on, we fall to the level of wage-slaves to our enemies.”
Ludendorff too, despite his previous cries for an armistice, now reversed himself and declared that the German army could and should fight on.
But Maximilian also heard from more realistic sources. Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria reported the parlous condition of his troops, short of artillary support, ammunition, fuel, horses and officers. In conclusion he wrote, “We must obtain peace before the enemy breaks into Germany.” But the German government, in a profound state of denial, resisted the inevitable.
The Allies were as divided as their enemies about ending the war. David Lloyd George told his military advisers during these terminal weeks of the war that he was afraid that if the Germans gained a respite as a result of the armistice, “…they might obtain time to re-organise and recover.”
General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, was also worried about the German ability to start the war up again in the spring of 1919. His opinion was that the Allied advance should continue until the German army surrendered. “An armistice would revivify the low spirits of the German army and enable it to reorganize and resist later on.” The French, eager to press forward with plans for the armistice, turned down Pershing’s idea of an unconditional surrender.
The last days of October and early November–the last days of Willhelm II as Kaiser and of his autocratic monarchy–saw a cascade of institutional collapse and desperate attempts to save Germany from political chaos and a Bolshevik-style revolution.
Though most of the German troops continued to fight under the tight command of their Prussian commanders, the German navy was a different story. It suddenly became the center of a revolution which swept away the old Empire and became the roots of the Weimar Republic. On November 3 the Naval Command at Kiel, in the face of defeat, insisted on ordering a battle to the last man against the British Royal Navy. The following day thousands of sailors, large numbers of factory workers, and twenty thousand garrison troops openly rebelled.
Several thousand sailors traveled from Kiel to Berlin to register their mutinous feelings there. On November 5 the sailors in Lubeck and Travemunde joined the revolution. A day later they were joined by the sailors in Hamburg, Bremen, and Wilhelmshaven.
Ludendorff’s replacement, General Groener, told the Kaiser on November 6, after a review of the Western Front, that an armistice must be signed at the latest by November 9, “Even Monday [November 11] will be too late…”. His review of the situation revealed that things were rapidly falling apart. Revolution was imminent, and the Government’s authority had fallen so low that troops would refuse to fire on revolutionaries.
It wasn’t until the morning of November 9 that the Kaiser finally acknowledged that he had lost the support of his navy, and Groener warned him that no military operation inside Germany could succeed. Eleven German cities were flying the Red flag, revolutionaries were in command of the main railway centers, and many soldiers had joined the revolution. If called upon to fight, the army would not do so. There were no reserves.
The following day, November 11, the armistice was signed and peace came about at 11 AM. But it would be a mistake to think that either side saw this event as a friendly or unembittered peace. In the 24 hours before it came about there were 10,944 casualties of which 2,738 men died. The last Frenchman was killed at 10:45 a.m. The last Englishman died at 9:30 a.m. The last American at 10:59, and the last German sometime after 11 a.m.
But even before the armistice was signed the so-called ‘German Revolution’ had begun and did not end until August 19, 1919, at the time of the adoption of the constitution of the Weimar Republic. Compared to the grand and earthquaking revolutions of France and Russia it was a bit on the tepid side. The hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries made up of workers, sailors and returning soldiers were sensible enough to allow the government bureaucrats to go on with their routine work even though they, the revolutionaries, were reshaping the political world of Germany in dozens of revolutionary city councils.
The only reign of terror occurred against the Communists and Bolsheviks. The largest political faction at the time–the anti-Communist Socialist party, the SPD, mobilized the Freikorps, a rogue militia made up of returning army members who were young, did not have families to return to and, like Corporal Adolf Hitler, were unemployed and looking for some kind of pseudo-military institutions to attach themselves to. These debased but armed organizations brutally suppressed the Communists and eventually became organized as rightist parties during the Weimar Republic.
When the Allied troops crossed into Germany on December 1, 1918, they were amazed by the contrast between the ruined villages and farms of northeastern France and Belgium and the “carefully cultivated fields and prosperous villages of Germany.” The Germans, who had seen virtually nothing of the war, could not understand what had happened so suddenly to their nation, since they believed that the enemy had not defeated them in battle, but had secured an armistice as a result of their own leaders‘ failures to avert revolution and political reform.
All that the German public knew at that time was that their army had defeated one of their major enemies–the Czar’s army–that their army was occupying a significant amount of enemy territory in France and Belgium, and, as far as the home front knew, they still had a functioning army.
The deep-seated bitterness after November 11, the discontent and frustration of Germany in the light of the catastrophic losses of men over four years and during the political upheaval that followed, eventually became expressed in what came to be called the dolchstosslegende–the stab-in-the-back myth–of how the Great War was lost. This was the notion that the German Army did not lose the war but instead was betrayed by the reformers on the home front, especially those anti-monarchists who established the Weimar Republic.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they made the myth an integral part of their official history of the end of the war and the 1920s. The Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as a “morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation…fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks….”
Although this myth was largely invented by Ludendorff and Hindenberg, and propagated by members of right-wing parties during the revolutionary period of 1919 and throughout the later unstable times of the Weimar Republic, some part of the stab-in-the-back myth doubtless took root in the minds of many ordinary apolitical Germans, and contributed to the gradual acceptance by the electorate of the Nazi Party and its promises of redress and revenge.
The stab-in-the-back myth became German history for twelve years of Nazi rule–and perhaps for long after.
Comments are closed.
