Munich stab in the back trial

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The Munich stab in the back trial (October 19 – November 20, 1925) had the stab in the back legend , according to which democrats, left-wing parties and Jews were to blame for Germany's defeat in World War I (as well as partly the " war guilt lie ", which Germany is solely to blame for the outbreak of war gave), on the subject. The defamation process between two newspaper editors created the opportunity to bring the then burning political question to a decision in the form of a judicial process.

The question was whether the defeat in the First World War was caused by the political actions of the Social Democrats in the hinterland, the so-called “stab in the back of the undefeated army”. Against the background of the Reichstag election in December 1924 , the conservative editor of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte , Paul Nikolaus Cossmann , in his stab in the back books (April to September 1924), with financial support from right-wing parties, accused the SPD of being involved in revolutionary activities during the war in the sense of stabbing in the back . In October / November 1925 he sued the editor-in-chief of the social democratic Munich Post , Martin Gruber , who had declared that Cossmann would falsify history by spreading the stab in the back .

During the month of the trial, hundreds of witnesses and experts such as Bernhard Schwertfeger , famous army and naval leaders such as Vice Admiral Adolf von Trotha, and high and low political figures passed the bar. Representatives of the party executive of the SPD affirmed their advocacy of national defense. The statement of its expert Hans Delbrück forms the basis of argument of the party on this question to this day:

“I cannot help him [the plaintiff Paul Cossmann], it [the allegation of the socialists' guilt] is a falsification of history, all the worse as it also represents poisoning of the people. Everyone wanted the victory of the defensive war, including the majority and independent socialists, but not that of the insane, insane war of conquest. "

General Wilhelm Groener certified that the SPD leadership had a "state-preserving cooperation" with the Supreme Army Command . Cossmann himself stated that the allegations were not directed against the SPD representatives and the trade unions and that there was mutual agreement in the assessment of the revolutionary forces (including the Spartakusbund , KPD ) as “traitors”.

Ultimately, the court ruled, not least because of the eloquence of Cossmann's trial attorney Joseph Graf von Pestalozza , that Cossmann had merely "made an error" in spreading the stab in the back , and that the accusation of lying or hate speech could not be upheld. According to the court ruling, Cossmann's “errors” did not allow the conclusion that he had deliberately falsified the story. As a result, Gruber, defended by Max Hirschberg , who accused Cossmann of lying or hate speech because of the spread of the stab in the back legend , was prosecuted and convicted of insult and defamation, although the stab in the back legend had actually been refuted.

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