Why did the Germans claim that the Jews started World War 1?

Answer 1

Actually, you think it was the German people who blamed the Jews for the loss of World War I, but it was Hitler who convinced them to blame them. You may call it hypnotizing them, but he grabbed their attention with his powerful speeches. He's obviously wrong because Jews did not even make up 1 percent of their population, so there would not be much they can do to make Germany lose World War I against millions of German soldiers. They lived peacefully until Hitler changed everything and turned it all against them.

Answer 2

Many Germans had the most excruciating difficulty believing that they had really been defeated on the battlefield. Reasons for this reluctance included:

1. The fact that at the time of the armistice the German Army was still 'in good order': they was no disorderly rout.
2. When the armistice was signed the front was still about 500 miles from Berlin and there was no fighting on German soil.
3. In 1917 Germany had actually succeeded in defeating Russia.

In particular, the senior military cultivated the myth that Germany had been 'stabbed in the back' on the home front. The generals wanted to preserve their own prestige as far as possible. In fact on 1 October 1918, Ludendorff had resolved that it would be a new (left wing) civilian government that would sign the armistice. It was a great mistake of the Allies not to make Hindenburg and Ludendorff sign the armistice in person, but civilians. (The Allies didn't repeat this mistake in 1945).

There was a revolution of sorts in Germany in November 1918. Far, far too much had been demanded of the German population, and it was starving by then. They had been periodic labour unrest in Germany since January 1918. The revolution was triggered by an order given to the German Navy to take on the British Navy in a 'die and die' mission: the men simply refused, and mutinied.

There were two versions of the stab-in-the-back legend, as it is usually called in English. The first was simply that the home front had been wrecked by subversives. The other version was antisemitic, claiming the it was specifically Jewish subversives who had fomented unrest for their own purposes. Since the Russian Revolution of October 1917 Communism had been widely associated with Jews. It so happened that in Bavaria (but not in other parts of Germany) Jews had played a prominent part in the revolution. It was, above all, in Bavaria that the hardline nationalists became intensely, hysterically, frenetically antisemitic. In January 1919, the forerunner of the Nazi Party was founded in Bavaria as a specifically anti-'Judeo-Communist' party.

Having said all this, it should be stressed that by no means all Germans believed the stab-in-the-back legend, and of those who did, many did not (initially anyway) subscribe to the antisemitic version of it. However, it became a key theme in Nazi Propaganda.

Answer 3

"The Germans" did not claim that. It was above all the Nazis that believed crazy conspiracy theories.

Answer 4

The Germans could not face the facts that they lost the war and the blame was their own.