The German Question, Part Eighty

"Kaiser Wilhelm & World War I" Part Two/J "The Germans At War"
"Germany's Jews During World War One"

Some information about Germany's Jews during World War One is very relevant here, as we are now approaching that terrible era of Hitlerism. One of the problems about researching German Jews during World War One is that when the Nazis came to power, the Nazi government "apparently" removed many records for Jewish war veterans. It seems at least 100,000 German Jews served in the German military during World War One, and some 12,000 died. The Jewish population of Germany at the time was about a half million. Further, the German Army occupied a large area of Russian territory (including Russia's Polish area), where Jews formed a relatively significant part of the population. The Tsarist government was noted for its oppressive anti-Jewish policies, and these policies made for mixed emotions for Jews in these regions during the war; as Russia was their homeland, but their treatment by the regime was often terrible, thus giving some Jews in these regions cause to hope for a German/Austro-Hungarian victory. That is not to say that Germany and Austria-Hungary were a paradise for Jews, but anti-Jewish measures tended to be less harsh than in Tsarist Russia.

Of the approximately 100,000 Jews who served in the German military during the war, some 30,000+ were decorated with some form of military honor. By the time of the war, many German Jews were undoubtedly assimilated a great deal into German society; that is, they essentially saw themselves as Germans, and many of their German neighbors accepted them as such.** There remained, however, an element of German society which did not accept Jews as Germans, and reports circulated that Jews were war profiteers and that Jewish soldiers were shirking their military duties to Germany. This brought about a count, or census, of Jewish soldiers and where they were serving, as anti-Jewish elements believed, and publicly espoused to inflame public opinion, the notion that Jews tended to serve, not at the front, but in rear areas of the army. The count proved otherwise, showing 78% of Jewish soldiers serving in front line units, but the information was not then released to the public, so the rumors persisted, as did anti-Jewish feeling. Some say anti-Jewish feeling intensified because the results were not released, and that conspiracy mongers then promoted the belief that the government was keeping the information secret to protect Jews from a hostile reaction to the negative information.***

Special note must be made here for Hugo Gutmann. He was a German Jew born in Nuremberg (Nürnberg in German), Germany in 1880. A decorated German soldier of World War One, being awarded the Iron Cross, both first and second class, he rose to the rank of lieutenant (Leutnant in German; pronounced "loit-nahnt"). In what became a terrible irony, Gutmann recommended the Iron Cross (First Class) for one of his regiment's soldiers, a man actually born on the Austrian side of the border, who, at that time, wore a broad mustache. Later the man would become famous, ah infamous, for his "toothbrush" mustache. That man was Adolf Hitler, and Hitler continued to proudly wear his Iron Cross for the remainder of his life; an Iron Cross recommended by a German Jew. Gutmann left Germany prior to the outbreak of World War Two, eventually coming to the United States, where he died in 1971.

* Former Russian Jews who had immigrated to the U.S. or England, often, but not exclusively, because of harsh treatment, tended to denounce the Russian government, an ally of Britain. This brought about some anti-Jewish reaction in Britain, and also among pro-Allied supporters in the United States, before America entered the war, and then among more Americans after America declared war.

** I don't want to overstate nor understate this, and to be fair, I suppose it would be just as appropriate to say that "some" of Germany's Jews did not see themselves as Germans, some perhaps out of religious belief, some out of the idea that German society would never truly accept them. The problem is, except for comments by some German Jews later on, how do we really know how many held a particular belief? The same can be said for the beliefs about Jews by the non-Jewish German population.

*** You can never get ahead of conspiracy mongers and the paranoid. If information not supporting their beliefs is released, they say it was doctored. If information isn't released, they say your hiding it because it confirms their beliefs.

WORD HISTORY:
Garden (also spelled "garten" as part of the compound "Kindergarten")/Yard-You get two words today. These words, which are really the same word, trace back to the Indo European root "gher," which had the general notion of "enclose, grasp" (when you grasp something, you "enclose it" with your fingers). The Old Germanic offshoot was "gardo" or "garda," which had the meaning "enclosure, enclosed section around a living area." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "geard," with the meaning "enclosed area around a house, a garden," and this eventually came to be the English word "YARD," but with only the meaning of "enclosed area around a house." Why you ask? I did hear you ask, right? Because the specific meaning "garden" went to that spelling of the word, initially "gardin," which English borrowed at some point in the 1300s from the Old Northern French word "gardin."^ French had the word from Latin "gardinus," which meant "an enclosed garden," and Latin had gotten the word from the Germanic dialect Frankish, also referred to by some as "Old Low Franconian," which had "gardo," again with the Germanic meanings given above. When Latin borrowed the word from Frankish, it had taken on more the meaning of "garden; an enclosed place for growing plants." So, this is one of those sort of strange events in English where our original word developed as "yard," and then English borrowed a form of the same word from another language (which had also borrowed it), but with a slight variation in meaning. (By the way, "yard," the form of measurement, is from a different source.) "Yard" and "garden" are (or were) widespread in the other Germanic languages in various forms, but their meanings vary, although the concept of "enclosed land" is present, as in some languages the meaning may be "farm" or "estate" or "grove" (an area enclosed with trees) and not all translate specifically to English "garden" and/or "yard," and it seems in some languages the terms may now be dialect, rather than standard. German has "Garten" (also used in "Kindergarten," "Tiergarten" and "Biergarten"), which in Old High German was "garto" before becoming "garte," and then the modern spelling, and it means "garden," as German uses another word, "Hof," related to English "hovel," for "yard," but German once had the word "Gart," meaning "an enclosure" but it has died out ; Low German Saxon has "Goorn," which means "garden," but also "yard," although the latter is usually part of compound, which designates whether the yard is in the "front" or the "back;" Dutch has "gaard(e)," but it may now only be dialectal; West Frisian had (still has?) "gard;" Norwegian has "gårdsplass" and "yard," but both seem to mean "yard;" "Danish has "guard"="garden" and "yard" (the spelling is a coincidence, and it is not related to "guard," a security officer); Swedish has "trädgård"=garden and "gård"=yard; Icelandic has "garður"=garden and "garðinum"=yard ('ð' is called an 'eth,' and it is pretty much equivalent to 'th,' although sometimes it is rendered as 'd') .

By the way, for those interested in Slavic languages, the Indo European base "gher," with that concept of "enclose," gave Old Slavic "gord" (notice the similarity to Old Germanic "gardo," and then the more modern base of many Germanic words "gard/gart/yard," and indeed some linguists feel Old Slavic borrowed the term from Germanic). "Gord" meant "an enclosed 'fort-like' living area, as in times of old, towns usually had some form of protection around them. This then became modern "gorod/grad/grade" (notice the transposed "r" and vowel sounds from the original "gord" in "grad" and "grade"), which means city or town (but not used in all Slavic languages). Some notable examples: Russia has the city of "Novgorod," and had, during the Communist era, "Leningrad," the renamed former capital of St. Petersburg, which has now reclaimed its original name, and "Stalingrad," the renamed city of Tsaritsyn, also renamed again, but as Volgograd. Serbia has "Belgrade."

^ Italian has "giardino," Spanish has "jardin" and Portuguese has "jardim," all seemingly borrowed from French.