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PRECEDENTS
In mid-July 1914, just as Europe was teetering on the brink of a world war, General von Kleist, a withered veteran of the nineteenth-century Wars of Unification, found the time to pen an article for the conservative Kreuz-Zeitung. The subject was not military strategy or the latest weaponry – seemingly important issues at this time – but rather the question of whether Jews should be allowed to become military officers. Kleist was firmly of the view that Jews should not be commissioned, offering a string of reasons to this effect. ‘The army is racially pure’ was one; ‘Germany is a comprehensively Christian state’ was another.1 For all the polemics of his article, Kleist was actually preaching to the converted. Germany’s conservative circles had long been of the opinion that it would be inappropriate for Jews to hold command over Christian soldiers. The Prussian officer corps, whose members generally held Jews in low esteem, also saw little reason to alter the status quo. By the time of Kleist’s article, it had actually been almost thirty years since the last Jew had been awarded a reserve commission in the Prussian Army, although the situation was slightly more favourable in Bavaria where a handful of Jewish officers had been installed.2 In the intervening period, a whole string of Jews from well-to-do backgrounds, who under other circumstances would have reached officer rank, had been denied promotion. What stopped them being commissioned into the army were the racial underpinnings of military selection. The German military establishment held a fixed idea of the physical attributes that made a good fighter. Notions of bravery, fearlessness and aggression all featured prominently. In common with other societies of this time, the dominant belief was that some ‘races’ displayed these traits while
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