[deleted]
the reasons behind the revolution in Germany in 1918?
The most immediate causes were A) the High Seas Fleet mutinied after being ordered to attack the British Grand Fleet, a virtual suicide mission; and B) the spread of the Volksmarine (People's Navy, the new soldiers revolutionary movement) to Kiel and the other North Sea ports coincided with strikes and bread riots in other German cities, which snowballed to the point where the Kaiser was finally forced to abdicate (a decision in debate since October 1918), and Prince Max von Baden ushered in the new German Republic via a/the 'Revolution from Above', and two days later of course, the Armistice on the Western Front was signed. The German Army in the West had been routed as of November 5th, and as Alexander Watson describes in Enduring the Great War, German junior officers and NCOs began to surrender their units rather than see their men die for a lost cause.
As to your main question, my simple answer would be to try to find Michael Geyer's excellent essay/article Insurrectionary Warfare, which discusses the pivotal events of October 1918 and the debate about how to end the war that gave rise to the Dolchstosslegende, the Stab-in-the-Back Myth. However, I'll attempt to distill what he and others such as Isabel V. Hull have written.
The German Army sought to preserve it's honour in various ways. For one, it squirreled away officers everywhere, be it in the clandestine Black Reichsheer that coordinated the Freikorps paramilitaries, the Reichsarchiv military history section (where they connived with the Foreign Office to write their narrative of the War's outbreak), or under the cover of 'NCO' rank within the actual 100 000 man Reichswehr (or Reichsheer, call it what you will). Generals like Wilhelm Goener, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff found their way into government and wrote self-serving memoirs, that depicted the German Army as the defender of the German Nation against the encirclement of the vile 'Triple Entente.' Above all, they formulated the Stab-in-the-Back Myth; why and how is very important in subsequent German history, and European, even World history, for that matter.
Contrary to received wisdom, Generals like Ludendorff, Hermann von Kuhl, and Hindenburg never seriously debated that the German Army had been defeated in the West. After all, it had been Ludendorff who had advocated request for an Armistice at the end of September, when the Westheer appeared on the brink of collapse. What they did debate was what defined 'defeat.'
For one thing, the German Army's idea of peace was unacceptable to the Allies, meaning as it did that Germany would receive what the Army considered an 'honourable peace', ie annex Austria, and or keep control of the Brest-Litovsk satellite states. As the Army's situation deteriorated however, there was a change in the position of civilians like Max von Baden. Whereas previously civilians like him and Friedrich Ebert had been prepared to dismiss the Kaiser and call for a mass mobilization, forcing the Allies to offer acceptable terms, it was now the Army that took up the call of many, including Walter Rathenau, for a Levee en Masse. The OHL (supreme command) staff began working on plans for an Endkampf, whereby 600-800 000 men would be stripped from industry via emergency measures (aided by a greatly empowered police force), and utilized to support an Elastic Defence-in-Depth, like what the German Army had used since 1917, only based around the heavily urbanized areas of eastern Belgium and Briey-Longwy, combined with liberal employment of scorched earth, potentially all the way to the Rhine. In short, the game plan of the Army was now a 'war after war', which would end in utter destruction either for Germany's enemies, or for the German Nation itself.
Recoiling from this, Prince Max pressed the Foreign Office to agree to Allied armistice proposals, setting in motion the end of the war in the West. The Army, however, was thoroughly wedded to the idea of an Endkampf, even if the soldiery was prepared to 'vote with it's feet' to end the fighting in the West. Plans after the war, drawn up by OHL staff officer Joachim von Stulpnagel, envisioned a Volkskrieg or 'People's War', whereby the entire nation would be committed to total victory, or downfall. German 'military culture', which was so thoroughly wedded to the idea of the Battle of Annihilation, and remained so to it's detriment in WWII, could conceive of no end save victory or self-destruction.
The end result was defeat, and worse than that, impotence at the hands of the Versailles Treaty, an end that only further radicalized the Army's way of thinking. The foundation of the Stab-in-the-Back was not that the German Army was not defeated in the field, but that in accepting peace over self-annihilation, German 'honour' (read the Germany Army's honour) had been besmirched. Now, Germany was a 'slave', or as Carl Schitt was to argue, a League of Nations 'colony', through the 'imperialism' of International Law. The only conceivable way for Germany to redeem itself was to seek out a renewed confrontation, and undo the Reich's defeat. Pouring scorn on the 'November Criminals', Socialists and 'Jews' that had (in Ludendorff et al's eyes) provided weak, insufficient leadership, officers like Hans Schleicher, Max von Hindenburg, and Ludwig Beck sought out a Feldherr that could give Germany ('s army) back it's 'rightful place' as a Great Power (or the place denied it, a World Power), and if all else failed, provide a captain who would go down with the ship, not seek peace at the eleventh hour like Max von Baden or Friedrich Ebert. Hitler was the fulfillment of these wishes, both in 1933-35, and in 1943-44, as the Endkampf drew near and the German Officer corps, with the exception of Stauffenberg and his crew, circled the wagons around their Fuhrer.
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