Did the Germans fight with Jews under the Kaiser during ww1?

by lucasr9
kieslowskifan

Yes.

German Jews were still subject to conscription and although the upper reaches of the officer corps were restricted to gentiles, many German Jews served under the Kaiser. German Jews both volunteered and were conscripted to serve in 1914 and many did. About one-fifth of German Jewry served in some capacity during the war and many were on the front lines. Many Jewish public intellectuals also rallied to the flag in 1914 and despite Jews' contemporary reputation for extreme left-wing causes, the political leanings for the mainstream of German Jewry was to the center-left and center-right liberal parties. Antisemitic discourses both during the war and after asserted that Jews were shirking their duties and not serving in any capacity. This is false.

We know the above because of an antisemitic initiative by the Prussian War Minister Adolf Wild von Hohenborn in 1916 to count the number of German Jews serving under arms. Many of Germany's Jews resented the Judenzählung (Jew census) as a betrayal of their clear loyalty to Germany. The results of the Judenzählung validated these concerns. Around 80% of German Jews in uniform served at the front and showed that German Jews were proportionately more likely to serve their country.

The concrete results of the Judenzählung were quickly forgotten in the postwar period as far-right propagandists took it as a matter of fact that Jews did not serve and in fact had betrayed the country in 1918. This was a bitter pill for the many German Jews who served both with both distinction and out of genuine patriotism. Kaiser Wilhelm II never acknowledged the support of German Jews in the war and instead indulged in antisemitic fantasies about his downfall. Jews were likewise largely written out of the Weimar memorial projects within Germany; veteran groups largely indulged in the antisemitic conspiracies and other racist thought. Thins grew worse with Hitler. The Third Reich simply ignored their service, reduced the pensions of Jewish veterans, and later deported many of them to either extermination centers or slowly starved to death in concentration camps. In the end, national service by Jews counted for very little when nationalist thought was often highly racist in nature and could ignore basic facts.