Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 by Brian E. Crim (review)

Eleven million Germans served in World War I, and that service redefined the nature and attitude of the veterans’ community, from the eighteenth century onward one of the pillars of the Prussian state and of the German Empire. As many as forty percent of World War I soldiers joined veterans’ organizations, which were also open to males who had been too young for the war but were engaged by its ideals. After earlier wars, veterans readjusted to civil society. They processed the Great War, however, as a transformative experience: a Bildungserlebnis, a world-historical event understandable only to those who had “been there” (or aspired to acolyte status). In sharp contrast to their French and British counterparts, a significant portion of Germany’s veterans committed themselves not merely to commemorating their sacrifice and the comradeship forged in battle, but to revitalizing a defeated society and building a dynamic new order reflecting the values of the trenches—as defined by the men who had survived them.

The “Jewish Question” played a crucial role in this process, as it had in German military experience since the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation. Uses of the “Question” were ideologically-based, depicting “the Jew” as not merely a permanent alien, but also as a cipher symbolizing industrialism, urbanism, capitalism, sexual license, or anything else that detracted from Germany as it ought to be and might become. In the aftermath of the Great War this “cultural code” was processed to present “the Jew” as a coward at the front, a shirker in the rear, a transmitter of defeatism and Bolshevism—comprehensively responsible for sabotaging Germany’s efforts and structuring Germany’s defeat.

With these matrices, antisemitism became a touchstone for admission and survival in the rabid factional conflicts of the Weimar Right. Crim persuasively argues that the abstract, constructed, nature of this antisemitism made it a common denominator—indeed the only common denominator—of a cultural and political community that devoted more energy to internal feuds than to either making a revolution on its own or mobilizing general support for one. Ideological antisemitism depended neither on verifiable behaviors nor on actual Jews. That, Crim argues, made it easy for right-wing veterans’ organizations to practice what he calls “situational anti-Semitism”: the absorption and expression of current attitudes and prejudices rather than a well thought-out ideology. Antisemitism could be intimated, or even openly expressed, without excluding the possibility of cooperation with Jewish veterans. This cooperation in turn reflected a generalized veterans’ myth internalized as fact: the best of the German people had served at the front, and the best of those had died there. Jewish veterans insisted on participating in the organized rites of memory and mourning, and the Right could not exclude them from the war experience. This was particularly true of the two largest veterans’ organizations.

The Stahlhelm was one of the most successful (if latently oppositional) mass institutions of the entropic Weimar Republic. It had a thousand chapters and a half million members. President Paul von Hindenburg was an honorary member. The Stahlhelm was mainstream, or at the least near mainstream. But a component of its success was the fundamentally situational nature of its hostility to Jews. The Stahlhelm insisted that “the Jewish spirit,” alien and intractable, had triumphed over the heroic, front-soldier ethos. That triumph had now been institutionalized in the chaotic Weimar Republic. But this relative minimalism, combined with the organization’s size and scope, made it prone to internal divisions on the issue. The Stahlhelm was too respectable to feature the kind of vicious antisemitic attacks characteristic of the emerging Nazi Party. Its actual antisemitism was largely reactive: to fend off more radical competitors for a membership increasingly young—and increasingly intolerant of such behaviors as standing with Jewish veterans to commemorate the war experience.

The Young German Order, Weimar’s second-largest veteran-dominated paramilitary...