Creating difference: the racialization of Germany's Jewish soldiers after the First World War

Abstract

ABSTRACT In books, exhibitions and memorials, the Jewish soldiers who fought for Germany in the First World War have become a measure of the magnitude of the National Socialists' genocidal crimes. The message is a simple one: such was the brutality of the regime that it even murdered those who had loyally fought for Germany. In many ways, though, this focus on the Holocaust has led Jewish participation in the First World War to be viewed as a point of separation between Jews and other Germans. In contrast, Grady argues that the Jewish soldiers were only gradually removed from narratives of the German war effort. Indeed, he suggests that the alienation of the Jewish soldier occurred not so much during the Great War but rather during the final years of the Weimar Republic as Nazi antisemitism grew. After 1945, this image of war-time isolation was reinforced as Holocaust awareness in West Germany and elsewhere started to increase.