Kristallnacht in Context: Jewish War Veterans in America And Britain and the Crisis of German Jewry

Abstract

Perhaps due to stereotypes or self-imposed limits of scholarly imagination, veterans’ organizations are not thought to be terribly fascinating historical subjects.¹ As voluntary, fraternal bodies, they tend to embrace ideals that informed their members’ military service, namely, nationalism and deference to authority. They allow former soldiers a space to socialize, institutionalize nostalgia for wartime duty, and afford men (and sometimes women) opportunities to publicly demonstrate their honor and willingness to sacrifice for a greater good. Organized veterans also engage in admirable, but not necessarily remarkable, types of service. They dress up; attend ceremonies, services, parades, and meetings; provide care to their surviving colleagues; memorialize those who died in battle; and recall the service of members deceased after wartime. As innately conservative groups, self-organized veterans rarely challenge the establishment.² Among the few instances when this has occurred, and with far-reaching ramifications, is the rise of Freikorps and Stahlhelm in Weimar Germany, what Peter Fritzsche has termed “rehearsals for fascism.”³ In the history of German Jewry, the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten, the Jewish veterans’ organization founded in 1919, was one of the most ardently German-nationalist (and anti-Zionist) among its cohort.⁴ The men whom Bryan Rigg misleadingly calls “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers”—mainly those who had no sense of themselves as Jews—have ironically received more attention than perhaps any other Jewish soldiers.⁵