The Tragic Pursuit of Total Victory: Germany’s Unrelenting Offensive That Lost WWI

By William J. Astore | MHQ  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The malicious Dolchstoßlegende or “stab-in-the-back” myth promoted by Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1919 completed the tragedy. Because of this myth, many Germans redirected their animus from military leaders to war profiteers; to socialists who had presciently called for peace negotiations; and to Jews, even though the latter had made war sacrifices proportional to their representation in German society.

Remarkably, despite his central role in overseeing Germany’s military collapse, Hindenburg emerged with his reputation intact, even enhanced. For some he came to embody their sense of the war as tragedy, a fact captured by his niece when she wrote after the war that to Germans “he seemed to rise out of an old legend of our forefathers. He incorporated the soul of our nation, without being in the least self-conscious of it. And one felt awed at its tragic presence.”

But it was Erich von Falkenhayn who captured a more telling tragedy when he wrote in 1919: “Rhetoric, self-adulation and lies plunged Germany into the deepest abyss, when they stifled the sense of reality in our once strong and good people. The continuance of their rule threatens to make us slaves for ever.”

An even deeper tragedy was that in the 1920s the Nazis seized upon the stab-in-the-back myth and took it to heretofore unimaginable extremes. Once the Nazis gained power in 1933, with President Hindenburg overseeing Adolf Hitler’s legal installation as chancellor, the so-called “November criminals” of 1918 were initially judged not worthy to live normal lives. They were among the first to be arrested and displayed in the new Nazi concentration camps.

Soon the Nazis judged them unworthy to live at all. As the historian Holger Herwig once provocatively asked, “Is it too far off the mark to suggest that the ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ began with the Dolchstoßlegende?”

The flip side to this myth was Ludendorff’s postwar claim that “the majority of the German people were ready and willing to sacrifice the last of their strength for the army.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s refusal to face facts—that, in their blind pursuit of total victory, they had driven their men beyond endurance—paradoxically enabled a horrific new zeal: that of the Freikorps and later of Hitler and the Nazis, bent on murdering those persons and peoples who were allegedly responsible for sapping Aryan warrior spirit.

Crafted in the context of their own insecurities, ambitions, and sense of alienation, Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s seductive false promise of total victory was papered over by self-serving lies and delusion. These lies contributed in no small measure to the murderous reality of a second, even more tragically devastating world war.

This article was written by William J. Astore and originally published in the Autumn 2007 issue of MHQ Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: World War I

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.