Well, the first and most obvious question is whether or not you can read German, because most of what's been translated into English comes from foreign language newspapers that would rather avoid the issue of victory altogether.

Generally speaking though, one of the major problems for Germany was the question of what "victory" even meant: while the idea of defeat was "unthinkable," especially with the police looking over everyone's shoulder, Germany was a rather bizarre mixture of believing itself the victim in the war, and expecting to make material gains.

As such, depending on who you asked, ending the war without war reparations or territory losses could be a "victory," as could annexing most of Eastern Europe. Few would disagree with the former (at least openly,) but how many genuinely expected the latter before Russia's collapse is a much more open question.

After Russia's collapse, most people would have likely expected to keep the territory gained, but that made Germany's subsequent reversal all the more shocking, and presumably despairing, since the German government was clearly more afraid of ending up like the Tsar than admitting defeat by the end.

>about how plenty of Germans believed that they'd been stabbed in the back

It depends on how you define 'plenty'. Some thought that, but it was mainly a post-war myth.

>november criminals

Pardon, the who?

>Everything i read says that lots of germans thought that they were winning the war because of propaganda

'Everything' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What says that, for instance? And, did most Germans believe their own propaganda? In the face of enormous amounts of casualties that were so extensive they couldn't be hidden, food shortages, massive inflation, and so on.

German troops were tired but optimistic after Russian defeat, but this only lasted until around the middle of 1918, when German offensives were exhausted, and they were pushed back almost to their own border. Between March and July alone the Germans took about a million casualties. Their offensives had been bogged down because of German troops stopping to raid French and British supply depots to steal wine, bacon, and white bread, which they had seen little of for four years. Reinforcements sent to replace casualties deserted in large numbers. There were mutinies of entire units who refused to obey orders. Some officers believed the home front, where strikes were common, was responsible for 'corrupting' the troops, and blamed the 'radical left' or 'the Bolsheviks', but it was quite apparent after German offensives ground to a halt that the troops themselves no longer believed the war could be won. The British, interrogating prisoners, found there was a massive drop in the morale of German troops, and that most of them now believed that Germany could not win the war. Straggler collection posts, which Germans set up because of increasing problems with deserters, were busier than ever, and in the last month of the war, were overwhelmed with tens of thousands of soldiers. Surrenders increased in number too, with 385,000 prisonsers taken in four months, which is more prisoners taken than in any single year of the war.

German troops on leave and in letters home told their families quite a lot, and would often be brutally honest. The food supply in Germany in 1917 had been severely cut short, with an official ration of 1,100 calories. Home district commanders warned that the longing for peace was widespread throughout all classes. There were strikes in April 1917 with more than 300,000 workers participating because the bread ration was reduced. The German high command constantly told themselves it was purely political, but strikes were usually around some combination of hours, wages, and food, and typically cutting the hours, increasing wages, or relaxing rationing, did the trick. The populace knew the war was not going well.