Defiant Germanness

This chapter discusses the Wannsee Conference and the deportations to and the experiences of Jewish veterans in Theresienstadt. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 established Theresienstadt as the destination for highly decorated and war-wounded Jewish veterans. The German public's negative reaction to the deportations of Jews that began the previous year, together with interventions by senior officers, pressured the Schutzstaffel (SS) to create a special camp for “privileged” types of German Jews. Theresienstadt was merely a ruse, a way station on the road to Auschwitz. But as the chapter shows, despite the brutal conditions they faced there and at other Nazi camps, Jewish veterans' connection to their former status and their identity did not abruptly end.

Epilogue

The book closes with a short glimpse into the history of Jewish veterans after 1945, as the survivors of the camps returned to Germany, outlining ruptures and continuities in comparison with the pre-Nazi period. Jewish veterans imposed different narratives on their experiences under National Socialism. As the past receded into the distance, it became a concern for the survivors to engage with the past, which they variously looked back on with nostalgia, disillusionment, or bitter anger. Although National Socialism threatened to erase everything that Jewish veterans of World War I had achieved and sacrificed, sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the nation, as well as bonds with gentile Germans that had been forged under fire during the war, threatened to sever their connections to the status they had earned as soldiers of the Great War and defenders of the fatherland, their minds, their values and their character remained intact. Jewish veterans preserved their sense of German identity.

Introduction

This chapter gives a vivid picture of what the Jews had to go through at the hand of the Nazis. It discusses what some Jewish veterans had to do to prove their “Germaness.” The chapter tries to understand the motives of the Jewish victims and what they did in order to cope with the circumstance they were in. It argues that Jewish veterans needed to orient themselves towards normative masculine identity, and and cultivated a distinctive manner of thinking and behaving, where courage, self-assertion, and endurance became the measure against which ideal manhood was evaluated. The chapter raises the question of the complexity of the Jewish identity during the time of the holocaust.

Reappraising Jewish War Experiences, 1914–18

This chapter talks about the Jewish war experience in the German military and the slow rise of anti-Semitism starting from the end of the World War 1. Although Jewish experiences during World War I cannot be reduced to a single Kriegserlebnis, as the chapter shows, Jews were united in the hope, as they joined thousands of other German men rushing to the colors in 1914, that the spirit of national unity would obliterate antisemitic stereotypes. Their participation in the immense violence of an industrialized war led to the formation of powerful bonds with gentile Germans, fueling Jewish hopes that the war would be the culmination of the long struggle for social acceptance.

“These Scoundrels Are Not the German People”

This chapter discusses the Nazi seizure of power from 1933 to 1935. The chapter extends the argument that Jewish veterans used their record of fighting to counter antisemetic attacks into the early years of the Third Reich, demonstrating that Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 did not bring “social death” for the Jewish Frontkampfer. The reign of terror the Nazis unleashed on Jews, Communists, and other groups stood in marked contrast to their failed attempts to marginalize Jewish ex-servicemen, whose record of service in the front lines in World War I enabled them to claim and negotiate a special status in the new Germany. Jewish veterans did not break with their identity as Germans, and continued to demand recognition of their sacrifices from the German public as well as the Nazi Party.

Jewish Frontkämpfer and the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft

This chapter examines the changes to Jewish war veterans' legal status after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and the ways in which many of these men tried to retain their sense of Germanness in the face of intensifying state-sponsored terror and persecution. Although the Nazis succeeded in banning Jews from the civil service and most veterans' organizations, this did not mean that Jewish veterans were abruptly cast to the margins of German public life. Not all Germans shared Himmler's radical vision of a racially purified Volksgemeinschaft. This inconsistency in experience — persecution on the one hand, and limited solidarity with the German public on the other — obscured the gravity of the Nazi threat, leading many Jewish veterans to contemplate accommodation with the Third Reich.

Under the “Absolute” Power of National Socialism, 1938–41

This chapter analyzes the massive deterioration of the situation of Jewish veterans after 1938 and the intense debates between the higher echelons of the Wehrmacht, Schutzstaffel (SS), and Nazi Party officials over the remnants of the special status that they, at this stage, still enjoyed. It also examines Jewish veterans' ongoing attempts to preserve their honor as prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps following the mass incarcerations after Kristallnacht. As they were rounded up, physically and verbally assaulted, and deported to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, Jewish veterans not only relied on their military training and memories of the war to overcome the ordeal; they also remained committed to preserving their honor and their dignity. This also held true for those Jewish veterans deported to the ghettos of Lodz, Minsk, and Riga in late 1941.

The Politics of Comradeship

This chapter discusses the Jewish experience under the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933. Germany's devastating defeat in November 1918 left the German nation tattered and fragmented. When the war ended, Jewish veterans, like so many other Germans, looked forward to a return to normalcy. Instead, the returning soldiers found themselves embroiled in civil war, insurrections from the Right and Left, economic upheaval, and an unprecedented outpouring of anti-Semitism starting with the Judenzahlung. Historians have traditionally portrayed the fourteen turbulent years of the Weimar Republic as a period of Jewish disillusionment, but as the chapter argues, Jewish veterans used their record of fighting in the trenches to discredit the claims of antisemitic activists and generate ambivalence among a German public that saw former soldiers as persons to be respected, regardless of background.