The official birth of the term "stab-in-the-back" itself possibly can be dated to the autumn of 1919, when Ludendorff was dining with the head of the British Military Mission in Berlin, British general Sir
Neill Malcolm. Malcolm asked Ludendorff why it was that he thought Germany lost the war. Ludendorff replied with his list of excuses, including that the home front failed the army.
Malcolm asked him: "Do you mean, General, that you were stabbed in the back?" Ludendorff's eyes lit up and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone. "Stabbed in the back?" he repeated. "Yes, that's it, exactly, we were stabbed in the back". And thus was born a legend which has never entirely perished.
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The phrase was to Ludendorff's liking, and he let it be known among the general staff that this was the "official" version, and so it was disseminated throughout German society. This was picked up by right-wing political factions and used as a form of attack against the SPD-led early Weimar government, which had come to power in the
German Revolution of November 1918.
The reviews in the German press that grossly misrepresented general
Frederick Barton Maurice's book,
The Last Four Months, also contributed to the creation of this myth. "Ludendorff made use of the reviews to convince Hindenburg."
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In a hearing before the Committee on Inquiry of the National Assembly on November 18, 1919, a year after the war's end, Hindenburg declared, "As an English general has very truly said, the German Army was 'stabbed in the back'."
[7]
In 1919,
Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund leader
Alfred Roth, writing under the pseudonym Otto Arnim, published the book
The Jew in the Army which he said was based on evidence gathered during his participation on the
Judenzählung, a military census which had in fact shown that German Jews had served in the front lines proportionately to their numbers. Roth's work claimed that most Jews involved in the war were only taking part as profiteers and spies, while he also blamed Jewish officers for fostering a defeatist mentality which impacted negatively on their soldiers. As such, the book offered one of the earliest published versions of the stab-in-the-back legend.
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