The Big Lie and Beyond: Making and Marketing the Stab in the Back

Erich Ludendorff was the principal architect of “the big lie” that poisoned German political culture in the 1920s and 1930s—that Germany had not been defeated in 1918 but had been “stabbed in the back” by revolutionary Jewish and Socialist groups on the home front. Paul von Hindenburg, wartime supreme commander and later president of the Weimar Republic, lent his considerable authority to the idea. Hitler and the Nazi party made the stab-in-the-back a staple of their campaigns.

Relying on his reputation for military “genius,” Ludendorff developed and marketed the idea of the stab-in-the-back with considerable success. From his 1919 memoir, which sold in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, to his 1935 booklet, Total War, Ludendorff and his publishing company sold millions of newspapers, pamphlets, and books that offered lessons to be learned from the Great War and warnings of future conflicts. Ludendorff consistently pursued certain themes that became influential in both public and military discourse: the importance of civilian morale, the related need to secure adequate food supplies, the failure of domestic politics, and the operation of shadowy global conspiracies.

In those works, readers would then be referred to other materials by the press and be introduced to the more esoteric nuances of his and his wife’s philosophy, Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. What developed was an elaborate system of propaganda, which promised national renewal and spiritual strength and which, despite Ludendorff’s protestations to the contrary, made the family quite wealthy. Ludendorff’s development of the stab-in-the-back story reveals the German people’s desperate search for scapegoats to explain their calamity and the evolution of a convenient (and untrue) idea into a powerful (and profitable) political motif.