The latter pointed directly to the "betrayal" of "unpatriotic" Jews who supposedly avoided going to the front lines and got positions in the rear (in reality, 80% of the Jewish soldiers were in the front line). Besides, they secretly pulled the strings of the country (being 1% of the German population) and provided the main revolutionary leaders (when only a few leaders were of Jewish origin). After the war they were accused of engaging in black markets and speculation, and were even held responsible for the subsequent hyperinflation.
Although Hitler later used this latest version to promote the expulsion of Jews from the national community, the truth is that the stabbing theory lost momentum during Nazism. Hitler preferred to south africa phone number list interpret the real catastrophe as the republican period that followed the military defeat, and he accepted humiliating peace terms. The Kaiser had fallen in November 1918 not because of a Jewish or revolutionary conspiracy, but because of his own lack of will to power.
The abandonment of the stabbing theory was due to the care with which the Nazis addressed an electorate that had suffered the war at the front or rear and might be offended by accusations of treason. But the initial acceptance that this theory enjoyed derived from a series of special reception conditions. In particular, the military defeat was greeted with surprise by a population anesthetized by censorship and war propaganda so successful that it did not prepare it for the outcome and prompted subsequent paranoid ramblings. It is true that the Germans were still occupying vast foreign territories towards the end of the war; on the other hand, the Russian Revolution and the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaties in March 1918 allowed them to transfer troops engaged on that front to the west and regain the initiative. But the German military offensive was a failure.