The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory

Abstract

Over the course of the First World War, around 100,000 Jews served in the German uniform, and 12,000 of them died in it. Tim Grady explores the ways in which Germans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have commemorated these veterans and their fallen comrades from the end of hostilities in 1918 to the late 1970s. He argues that Jews played a central role in constituting Germany’s public memory of the First World War, and the strength of Grady’s book—his research ranges impressively from the archives of Berlin and Hamburg to those of Würzburg and Heilbronn—lies in its scenes of lingering attachment on the part of German Jews to their and their loved ones’ records of service, even after 1933. Grady uncovers, for instance, a 1950 letter to the mayor of Heilbronn from a former resident who requested that the name of her brother, who had fallen in 1914, be added to her father’s gravestone in the city’s Jewish cemetery. Ten years later, he notes, a group of German Jews—many of whom had fled the Nazi regime—gathered in Würzburg to dedicate a plaque to the memory of the Jews in that community who had died in the First World War. Even those who had emigrated in the 1930s continued to honour the memory of the 12,000 fallen, as in the case of one especially dedicated New York association of veterans that organized annual commemorations until 1972.