Stab-in-the-back legend
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![An illustration from a 1919 Austrian postcard showing a caricatured Jew stabbing the German Army in the back with a dagger. The capitulation was blamed upon the unpatriotic populace, the Socialists, Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, and especially the Jews.](/Images/godic/202501/30/Stab-in-the-back_postcard2956.jpg")
![A 1924 right-wing German political cartoon showing Philipp Scheidemann, the German Social Democratic politician who proclaimed the Weimar Republic and was its second Chancellor, and Matthias Erzberger, an anti-war politician from the Centre Party, who ended WWI by signing the armistice with the Allies, as stabbing the German Army in the back](/Images/godic/202501/30/Stab-in-the-back_cartoon_19242956.jpg")
![Reichspräsident Friedrich Ebert: (1923), as Provisional President of the Weimar Republic in 1919, he contributed to the myth, in telling home-coming veterans that](/Images/godic/202501/30/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1973-076-58,_Reichskanzler_Cuno_und_Reichspräsident_Ebert_crop_Ebert_only2956.jpg")
The stab-in-the-back myth (German:Dolchstoßlegende, pronounced[ˈdɔlçʃtoːsleˌɡɛndə]) was the notion, widely believed in right-wing circles in Germany after 1918, that the German Army did not lose World War I but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially the republicans who overthrew the monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–19. Advocates denounced the German government leaders who signed the Armistice on November 11, 1918, as the "November Criminals" (German:Novemberverbrecher).