The influence of propagation on the nonperturbative high-harmonic features in long-wavelength strong pulse excited semiconductors is studied using a fully microscopic approach. For sample lengths exceeding the wavelength of the exciting light, it is shown that the propagation effectively acts as a very strong additional dephasing that reduces the relative height of the emission plateau up to six orders of magnitude. This propagation induced dephasing clarifies the need to use extremely short polarization decay times for the quantitative analysis of experimental observations.