Ridgewood June 27, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 19 Jewish soldiers Dr. David Fine addressing his audience at the Ridgewood LIbrary. (continued from page 3) Dr. Fine said eastern Jews, harrowed by Tsarist persecution, sometimes sang “Deutschland uber Alles,” and that German officers attending the Yiddish theater, where they could understand most of the language, rose to show respect when the “Hatikvah,” anthem of the Zionist movement, was sung. The horror of the Holocaust, Dr. Fine said, was caused by extreme politics in an extreme situation and not by “German DNA.” He pointed out that German President Paul von Hindenburg, who had been the last commanding officer of the Kaiser’s army, had protected the rights of Jewish veterans as long has he lived. “Two out of three Germans never voted for Hitler,” Dr. Fine said. “He got in because his was the largest party, not because they were a majority.” One man in the audience said that his father, a soldier in the Kaiser’s army, experienced anti-Semitism, later fled Hitler, and never allowed German to be spoken in his American home. But one woman said that her family fled Hitler, hated the Nazi movement, spoke German at home by preference, and held no grudge against modern Germans. A number of Jewish people brought photographs of grandfathers in German uniforms. One of the men pictured served four years in the German army’s renowned medical corps, was wounded four times, and decorated for valor. Another volunteered as a teenager and served at the front until he received a medical discharge.