World War One

1. World War One Allied Victory– ‘Dolchstoss’ (The Stab in the Back) Mr Scully HSC Modern History

2. Outcomes for this Lesson - • Recount the collapse of Germany’s allies in 1918. • Understand the reluctance of the Germans to continue the war. • Discuss the collapse of the German Monarch. (Create a timeline) • Define the term “Dolchtoss”

3. Collapse • In the smaller theatres of war, Germany’s allies were collapsing. On 29 September 1918, the Allied forces stationed in Salonika in Greece invaded Bulgaria. Bulgaria sued for peace and was given an armistice with severe terms. Turkey lost Damascus and Aleppo. The Allies destroyed the army of the Ottoman Empire and so Turkey capitulated on 30 October. On the same day, Austria sued for an armistice. The Austro–Hungarian Empire had fallen apart, the Czechoslovaks had declared independence on 21 October and, in the following week, the Yugoslavs declared the same. This was the first step in the complete separation of Austria and Hungary.

4. Germany Wanes • As the initial successes of Operation Michael waned, German morale crumbled. Many divisions were simply exhausted after advancing 65 kilometres in seven days. Their very success posed a problem: divisions waited kilometres ahead of their supply trains, whose wagons, pulled by skinny underfed horses, lumbered with difficulty over the pockmarked wasteland. • As the will of the Central Powers to continue the war disintegrated, Ludendorff and Hindenburg sought an audience with Kaiser Wilhelm II and advised him to arrange a German armistice ‘as early as possible’, with America’s President Wilson as the facilitator. Events moved rapidly.

5. The end of the Monarch • On 27 October, Erich Ludendorff resigned and the German government attempted to reform the constitution in the hope that a more democratic parliamentary regime may obtain more favourable peace terms. At the beginning of November, mutiny broke out in Germany, unleashing military disobedience on a massive scale. Within days, the revolt spread through most of northern Germany. Ludendorff claimed that socialist ideas were poisoning Germany’s fighting forces and that his confidence in the loyalty of the troops was lost.

6. On 9 November, revolution in Berlin brought an end to the Hohenzollern dynasty with the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As a result of pressure from the Allies, a new German republican government was declared. The government was keen to bring an end to war before Allied troops could advance onto German soil. • It did not take long for the German high command to manufacture the legend of the ‘Dolchstoss’—the ‘stab in the back’ (from a mixture of Jews, socialists and communists) to explain the ending of the war, thus preserving the reputation of the ‘undefeated’ army.

7. Roger Chickering in Imperial Germany and the Great War 1914–18 describes this myth as a ‘shameless exercise in evasion’ and suggests that it was a series of arrogant miscalculations by the German high command—which he labels the ‘Frontstoss’ or ‘stab from the front’—which helped to bring about Germany’s loss. • By a prompt and efficient campaign of propaganda, the army high command put socialist politicians into the spotlight of defeat, allowing themselves to slink behind the curtain and disappear from the stage, only to reappear with untarnished reputations at a later stage of German history.