Ridgewood June 27, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 3 Author discusses Jewish soldiers in Kaiser’s army a collection of letters from Jewish soldiers to their families, and a list of the 12,000 Jewish soldiers who fell in the Kaiser’s army during World War I. Jews constituted just under one percent of the population of Wilhelmine Germany, and Jews who were enlisted, promoted, decorated, wounded, or killed were in each case about one percent of the Imperial Army. These numbers were confirmed by the Ludendorf Report, which summarized Jewish contributions to the war effort. Jews who lived in what was then the Russian Empire, Dr. Fine said, hailed the Germans in general and the German Jews in particular as liberators from Tsarist antiSemitism. A few instances of Wilhelmine German anti-Semitism, he said, were balanced by instances in which German officers went out of their way to make sure their Jewish soldiers received credit for their brave and responsible service to the Kaiser -- whose German Jewish officers, enlisted men, and a nurse celebrate Chanukah in German military uniform just behind the front in Russian Poland in 1916. best friend, Alber Ballin, was an observant Jew and a shipping magnate who committed suicide in despair when Germany lost the war. The Kaiser’s top war-time economic advisor, Walther Rathenau, was also Jewish and a former Guards Cavalry officer in the pre-war Imperial Army. In one case Dr. Fine reported, a German officer wrote a letter to the family of a Jewish soldier who had died after combat, contradicting the statement that the boy’s death was a suicide and asserting that the Jewish soldier had died of wounds suffered in battle. “I was just impressed with the efforts that the army went through to preserve the dignity and honor of the young men,” Dr. Fine said. “If the army was anti-Semitic, they would not have done so.” He adds that the German Army sanctioned Jewish chaplains and approved Jewish religious services even within the vicinity of the front. (continued on page 19) by John Koster Dr David Fine’s new book, the subject of a recent lecture at the Ridgewood Library, introduced his audience to a topic some people found startling: Jewish soldiers served, sometimes heroically, in the army of Kaiser Wilhelm II during World War I. “Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War,” Dr. Fine’s doctorate thesis for his doctorate in modern European history from City College of New York, took 10 years to complete and required research in fraktur, the Gothic script used in most German books prior to the 1930s, and in the Gothic handwriting which he admits is akin to decoding. “Most of what we hear is overshadowed by the Holocaust, which is a negative story, and I believe this is a positive,” said Dr. Fine, the spiritual leader of Ridgewood’s Temple Israel. His book was published in English by De Gruyter, a German academy publisher based in Munich. The book was triggered by two antiquated books Dr. Fine found in Germany: