Jews and Military Service: Britain and Germany during the First World War

An old anti-jewish argument that many of those promoting critical perspectives on the subject of jews and Judaism are largely unaware of: is the argument that jews are under-represented among front-line soldiers as well as frequently in the military itself. This argument can be traced back to the debates around jewish involvement in First World War when it was variously argued that jews were under-represented - in terms of their population percentage - in the trenches and front-lines of that war. (1)

While this argument has largely been forgotten by critics of the jews: the jews themselves have not forgotten it completely. Indeed, we not infrequently see features in jewish periodicals about jewish soldiers and how Israel's military is allegedly one of the best in the world. This we may reasonably argue is down to the fact that the jews want to project themselves as a confident and pioneering people (like David fighting Goliath) in direct contrast to the old jewish stereotype of the fat, weak and cowardly jew who spends his days hondling (2) in the market places of the world.

Jews historically have tried to argue from the individual to the general or put more succinctly: they argue that because there have undoubtedly been jewish commanders and soldiers throughout history (usually citing individuals rather than groups) who were good at fighting and did win medals/awards for doing so. It therefore means that the idea that jews would shirk front-line military duty in the First World War and after is unfounded. (3)

The problem with this argument is that those making it tend to conflate two separate assertions as being one and the same. To wit: the claim that they are answering is that jews have never been good soldiers, have never fought for their country at the front and have never earned awards for doing so. This has to my knowledge never been argued by any intellectual proponent of the theory and indeed even anti-jewish work from the Third Reich explicitly allowed the possibility and implicitly allowed that it had occurred. (4)

The more accurate claim that has been argued by many anti-Semites and critics of jews historically is that the jews have been disproportionately under-represented among the front-line troops and have - as a rule of thumb - not been good soldiers, have not fought for their country and have earned proportionately less awards and distinctions for doing so. (5)

Where the conflation comes from is the consistent habit of the jews and their apologists of taking the necessarily greatly simplified ideas of a cartoon, political speech, pamphlet and/or newspaper article as being representative of the intellectual case behind them. This then allows the jews and their apologists to make the absurd claim that anti-Semites and critics of the jews believe that jews have never been good soldiers and so forth: thus allowing them to find a few examples of jews who have been these things and wave them in the air for all to see. (6)

The more sophisticated jewish apologist however prefers instead - if this manic waving of unrepresentative examples does not suffice to convince an opponent - to resort to an intellectual shell game with the use of statistics.

The British Armed Forces in the First World War

An apt example is provided by the Jewish Defence Campaign's Speakers' Handbook from 1937, which includes - as Appendix D - some statistics about the jews who it alleges fought for the British Empire from 1914-1918.

The jewish author of that handbook Frank Renton gives the following statistics: (7)

50,000 Jews fought for the British Empire out of a population of 400,000 across the Empire.

10,000 of these volunteered before conscription.

39,000 of these fought in 'fighting units'.

Total of 9,000 casualties (or 19% of those in fighting units)

Of those 2,245 were deaths and 6,800 were wounds.

Awards for bravery included five Victoria Crosses and some 1,590 other honours and distinctions.

This all sounds kosher and impressive: doesn't it?

Let’s begin by de-constructing these superficially impressive figures by using like-for-like comparisons.

If we calculate the percentage of jews who died in service - Renton doesn't state whether this was by enemy action, disease or other means fair or foul - then we get a figure of only 0.6% when compared to the total jewish population of the British Empire.

When we switch our attention to the percentage of jews who were wounded in service we get a measly 1.7% of the total jewish population of the British Empire.

You might here interject that Renton was only comparing jewish deaths against those who served, but then what that analysis doesn't indicate is that Renton is manipulating the statistics by taking the lowest possible numbers to give him the highest possible percentage in his comparison. In doing so he maximises the rhetorical effect of the number, but that number doesn't give us a representative or reasonably comparable statistic.

The reader will note that Renton takes the lowest possible total statistic (jews in 'fighting units') and compares it against all jewish dead and wounded in the First World War. Nothing is included in those statistics to tell you why only those in fighting units could be casualties or why war dead are only those who died as a result of enemy action.

In essence the percentage Renton gives is dishonest, because it inflates the percentage of jewish contribution well beyond that allowed by the raw data.

If we compare the statistics from the British Empire more widely however, we get a sense of just how different the dead and wounded rates between jews and non-jews were.

The total population of the British Empire (8) in 1914 was some 58.4 million individuals of this some 1,041,410 were killed during the First World War. (9) This gives us a percentage death rate of circa 1.8% of the British Empire's population.

If we exclude the colonies as well as the dominions and just take the British Isles (including Ireland) we have a total population of 45.4 million individuals of these some 886,939 were killed during the First World War. This gives us a percentage death rate of circa 2.0% [to be more precise 1.95%] of the population of the British Isles.

If we move onto those injured the picture is little different with 2,020,998 wounded from the British Empire, which gives us a wound rate of circa 3.5% of the British Empire's population.

If we again exclude all territories other than the British Isles we have 1,663,435 wounded, which gives us a wound rate of circa 3.7% of the population of the British Isles.

Just by doing a like-for-like comparison we can see that the number of jews killed or wounded in the British Armed Forces in the First World War was disproportionately low when compared to the percentage for both the troops from the British Isles [where most jews were resident] and from across the Empire.

We should further observe that the significant difference between the jewish and total rates of death and wounding cannot be reasonably explained in any positive way by the jews and their apologists.

However, before we go into the implications of this: we still have not dealt with Renton's claims about medals/awards and volunteering before conscription was introduced. These will - and indeed should have in Renton's case - inform the preliminary conclusions that we can make from this data.

Renton cites the number of Victoria Crosses (10) and the number of honours and distinctions given to jewish troops, but again the devil is in the detail. Renton once again presents an absolute number, which might seem like a lot but in reality, it is but a drop in the sea of the huge number of medals and awards that were made in the First World War by the British Army to its troops.

Renton lists the number of Victoria Crosses awarded to jews as 5 which he implies describes the bravery of the jews in question: now while I don't doubt that the context is rather lacking. In that some 628 Victoria Crosses were awarded in the First World War. That makes the number of Victoria Crosses awarded to jews as being 0.8% of all those awarded for acts of heroism during the war.

We should bear in mind that that this means that non-jews were awarded 623 Victoria Crosses or 99.2% of them.

That rather deflates Renton's claim: doesn't it?

Further when we move onto the awards and distinctions it doesn't get any better for Renton's absolute numbers as he cites a figure of 1,590 awards and distinctions having been awarded.

However again vital context is missing from that statement in that over 300,000 such awards were distributed by the British Army at that time. (11)

If we again put that into a percentage of the awards and distinctions given by the British Armed Forces to its soldiers during the First World War (I have used 300,000 as the lowest possible number it could be) it comes in at a paltry 0.5%.

To give this further perspective if we work out the percentage of the British Empire's population who were jews then we come to 0.7% (or to be precise 0.68%). This means that the jews have significantly underperformed in the winning of medals as an element of the population by a significant margin of between 20-40%. In addition, the very slight over-achievement in the winning of Victoria Crosses can be reasonably accounted for by the relatively low number of these medals that were awarded during the First World War.

One can thus see that a pattern is beginning to become apparent in that the jews are heavily under-represented in both the number of casualties taken and the number of medals won in the British Armed Forces at this time. This means that we are facing the conclusion that jews cannot - as Renton claims - have been taking a representative part in the fighting at the front for the simple reason that they didn't win as many medals or take nearly enough casualties to suggest this.

Another nail in Renton's coffin is his figure of 10,000 jews volunteering for military service before conscription was introduced in the British Isles in January 1916. The irony with that figure is that it means that while 50,000 jews ultimately joined the British Army (already only circa 12.5% of all the jews in the Empire) only 20% of these (Renton's 10,000) joined before January 1916.

This means that Renton is already in trouble given that only 2.5% of the jewish population of the British Empire volunteered for the British Armed Forces until they were legally compelled to. Or put another way: in one and half years of total war only 10,000 jews would volunteer fight for Britain in spite of allegedly being a 'loyal minority'.

That another 40,000 jews were conscripted after January 1916 also removes the argument that the jews concerned were not eligible for military service as it tells us that there can only have been a large number of jews who were of military age and fit for front-line service, but who chose not to volunteer to serve.

Compare that to the non-jewish population of the British Isles of whom 750,000 (or 1.7% of the population) had enlisted by September 1914 and who reached the same percentage of enlistment as the jews as part of the population by January 1915. A full year before the jewish figure of 10,000 individuals (or 2.5% of the jewish population) had been achieved.

This clearly indicates then that the jews were holding back and actively not enlisting in the British Armed Forces in the First World War before it became legally mandatory to do so in January 1916. Shukman has pointed out - however tacitly - that there was a large population of jews in Britain who were Russian citizens and who were effectively using Britain as a hiding place from military conscription in their own country. (12)

This became a cause of ongoing concern to the British home front authorities in 1916 and 1917 with the introduction of conscription and the presence of Russian jews who didn't want to go home as they would be conscripted themselves but who refused to joined the British Armed Forces as well. This - in addition to the disproportionate frequency of far-left wing political views among this Russian jewish diaspora - led to the British government to keep trying new ways of getting the Russian jews to fight including offering to set up special units for jews to serve under British command and using the incentive of a homeland to try and tempt them to side with the Allies.

The reality that underlay this was that the British Armed Forces had been bled white by incompetent generals on the Western front - (13) with the singular exception of General Edmund Allenby's Middle Eastern Command (although even they suffered one or two major military disasters) - (14) and the British forces were desperate for manpower to plug the many gaps in the ranks of their understrength units on the Western front. (15)

This was represented in other arenas by the British habit of promising anything to anybody if it would get them more manpower, (16) which they fervently (and ultimately quite stupidly) believed would win them the war regardless of the massive superiority in tactics and weaponry [as well as increasingly in manpower and experienced units] enjoyed by the Central powers (in particular Germany and the unfairly traduced Austro-Hungarian Empire).

For those somewhat perplexed by what I have said above I should point out that First World War history has been heavily revised in recent years by a succession of younger historians who have looked less at what the generals and propaganda claimed, but at the raw data that was produced during and after the war.

This has led these scholars to roll back the years of misrepresentation and jingoistic sabre-rattling about Allied superiority (or at least equality) in the First World War to show that the French - for example - mutinied because they were being thrown at pointless objectives (that they had attacked for days and had been declared 'taken' by the Allied press) and mown down literally in their thousands for the sake of the pride of a general and his staff. The British - as even conservative scholars like Niall Ferguson - have noted had a less extreme, but yet very similar time of it.

This context gives us a situation where we have a British government that is desperate for replacements for its soldiers and what we may conjecture happened is very simple.

By January 1916 only 10,000 jews had volunteered for service in the British Armed Forces and with a population of some 400,000 to recruit from the British military began to pursue all angles to try and force the jews of Britain into fighting for the country they professed themselves loyal citizens of.

This then accounts for why between January 1916 and November 1918 (although conscription lasted until 1919) some 40,000 jews were brought into the British Armed Forces by legal coercion.

That in spite of this the jews still underperformed as substantially as they did suggests to us that the jews were far less-likely to be on the front-line with the infantry, but rather in the rear and performing support roles. This would account - with the fact that very few jews volunteered to serve - for the fact that the jews both took disproportionately less casualties and won disproportionately less medals than their non-jewish counterparts.

The jews were hardly 'patriotic' then - in spite of their loud exclamations to have been so - (17) were they?

The German Armed Forces in the First World War

It is important when doing a comparison between armed forces and the percentages of those who served in each to analyse them against other armed forces that fought in the same war: preferably on the other side. This then helps us to establish whether what one situation suggests - as with the lack of participation and casualties in the British Armed Forces in World War I - is an outlier which may be ascribed to a unique situation or is a wider phenomenon which must be explained by a factor or series of factors that translate across political boundaries.

The number of jews who fought in the German Armed Forces between 1914-1918 is usually estimated to be approximately 100,000 individuals (18) of a jewish population in Germany of some 550,000. (19) These statistics are drawn primarily from the 1921 study of Jacob Segall (20) whose explicit object was to prove the rumours of jews being disproportionately under-represented on the front-line were false. This contradicted the number of some 62,000 that was found by the official report compiled by the Prussian Ministry of War. (21)

The difference in all likelihood derives from disparate methodologies being used in so far as Segall adopted a much wider definition of 'in military service' than did the official report, which focused on direct war involvement while Segall uses any jews who could be associated with the military as Oppenheimer makes clear. (22) Hermann counters Segall by pointing out that his statistics include jews serving as canteen staff, communications officers, war correspondents and logistics officers as if they were 'front-line soldiers'.

It is difficult to judge as to whether Segall or Hermann is correct here due to the destruction of most of the military records of the German Armed Forces in the Second World War. However, from what we do know we can draw some tentative general conclusions.

Though there are some with reservations: we are fortunate to have fairly good figures about how many jews were killed but the records about the numbers of wounded are far less certain. Further the true number of recipients of German awards and distinctions is difficult to gauge, but as most estimates generally agree on the number of Second-Class Iron Crosses that were awarded, we can proceed on that basis.

Now the figures that we can supposed to be correct (for the sake of argument) are that there were 100,000 jews serving in the German Armed Forces in some form out of a total population of 550,000 jews in Germany (although Oppenheimer estimates the figure variably between 550,000 and 600,000). (23) This gives us a figure of some 18.1% of the jewish population of Germany having served in the German Armed Forces if one uses the most favourable figures.

However, if we use the official statistics - as cited by Hermann - that there were 62,000 jews serving in the German Armed Forces that gives us a figure of some 11.3% of the jewish population of Germany.

To be generous let’s take the higher figure of 18.1% as being the more accurate.

Now if we cross reference this figure with the amount of jews who were killed during the war - usually estimated at 12,000 although only circa 10,500 jews were later identified by name as having been killed - (24) then we can see that the percentage of jewish dead as part of the population is 2.2%.

Both these figures however need to be viewed in their correct situational context given that although absolute figures are rhetorically very powerful: they can be very misleading.

To do this we need to - as with the British Empire - understand the percentage death rate that the German Empire suffered. Now the German Empire had a population of some 64.9 million individuals in 1914 of these 2,050,897 were killed during the First World War. This gives us a percentage death rate of 3.2% for the German Empire.

Now already we can see that there is a very large gap between the amounts of deaths as part of the population between the total percentage of Germans killed and the percentage of jews killed. This cannot be ignored precisely because the jewish death rate is a third less than the total. This suggests of course that Hermann, Armin and Boepple were correct in their assertion about jews being disproportionately under-represented among front-line soldiers in the German Armed Forces.

This significant differential is even more notable when we look at the mobilization figures for the German Armed Forces. The German Empire with a population of 64.9 million mobilized circa 11 million men to serve in the German Armed Forces: this gives us - if we compare it against the total population - a percentage of some 17% of the 1914 population having been mobilized.

When we compare that to the jewish population who - if we are to believe the higher figure - contributed some 100,000 individuals to the German Armed Forces out a 1914 population of some 550,000: we can see that is some 18.2% of the 1914 jewish population.

This presents us with something of a conundrum given that the jews proportionately contributed significantly more of their population to the German Armed Forces, but yet suffered disproportionately less casualties. (25)

To understand this, we should also look at the number of decorations that were awarded to jewish soldiers, which Rigg lists as approximately 30,000. (26) Renton however claims a figure of some 35,000. (27)

This makes for impressive reading given that taken as a percentage of the number of jew is in the German Armed Forces we get some 30% of jews being decorated if we follow Rigg's number of 30,000 and 35% of jews being decorated if we follow Renton's number of 35,000.

These are very large percentages, aren't they?

Well again we need to apply context here: if we understand that by contrast the Iron Cross Second Class alone was awarded between 4 and 5 million times during the First World War: the contribution of jews deflates rather significantly. This fact for example means that in terms of the Iron Cross Second Class alone some 36.4% of German soldiers were awarded it.

We should note that we are told by both Rigg and Renton that 30,000/35,000 jews were 'decorated', but they neglect to mention if that meant that the jew in question received the Pour le Mérite (28) or whether he merely received the Wound Badge in Bronze.

What this infers is that the jews were receiving a lower level - as compared to their numbers in the German Armed Forces - of decoration than the rest of the German forces. If we combine this with the slightly increased level of jewish mobilization in the German Armed Forces and the fact that the percentage death rate among jews is significantly lower: it strongly suggests that Hermann, Armin and Boepple's arguments on this score are correct.

This is for the simple reason that there is no reasonable way that we can suggest that a large number of jews were simply lucky or otherwise led a charmed existence as to be killed in disproportionately lower numbers while winning less decorations and yet being slightly over-represented in the German Armed Forces.

The slight over-representation of jews - as a percentage of their population - in the German Armed Forces can be explained by two separate facts:

Firstly, that the German Empire used a system of compulsory military service before war broke out and jews were not exception to the rule.

Secondly due to the Judenzählung ('Jewish Census') of October 1916: we know that the German authorities were actively trying to make sure that all jews who could serve were doing so. This means - in effect - that the jews in Germany had to serve, because unlike the British government there was no legal impediment to the German government forcing the jews to do: ergo the higher representation as a percentage of the population due to this governmental focus and lack of legal obstacle.

I also need to stress again that I have above used the best possible figures for the jewish case in so far as I have utilized Segall's 100,000 rather than the official 62,000. This means - as they say - it can only ever get worse for the jews: after all if official records are correct then the only 11.3% of German jews served compared to 17% of the total population, which means they were not only killed in disproportionately low amounts but that the number of jews who served in the German Armed Forces - as a percentage of their population - was disproportionately low.

We can thus see that as in the case of the British Armed Forces in the First War War: the jews are significantly under-represented among the casualties and medal-winners as a percentage of their total population. Further this indicates that a general pattern is beginning to form in so far as we can see that the jews were not the loyal religious minority they made themselves out to be precisely because they were under-represented and also under-performed in the British and German Armed Forces in the First World War.

References

(1) Most modern discussions of this assertion are brief and focus solely on the German Armed Forces to the exclusion of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French and British armies all of whom had similar accusations levelled at them during (and after) the war. This is obviously unbalanced and needs to be corrected as even a little bit of research quickly indicates that such ideas were rife among on both the front-line and the home front of the warring parties.

(2) Yiddish for bartering/aggressively negotiating.

(3) For example, Geoffrey Green, 2007, 'England expects...: British Jews under the white ensign from HMS Victory to the loss of HMS Hood in 1941', Jewish Historical Studies, Vol. 41, p. 63; alternatively see Joseph Bendersky, 2000, 'The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army', 1st Edition, Basic: New York

(4) Curt Hermann, 1936, 'Der Jude und der Deutsche Mensch', 1st Edition, Heinrich Handels Verlag: Breslau, pp. 15-16; for a contrasting view of the statistics (but one that I disagree with) see Franz Oppenheimer, 1922, 'Die Judenstatistik des preußischen Kriegsministeriums', 1st Edition, Verlag fur Kulturpolitik: Munich.

(5) Hermann, Op. Cit., pp. 15-16

(6) Two examples; one older and one recent, are: E. Rubin, 1952, '140 Jewish Marshals, Generals and Admirals', 1st Edition, de Vere: London; Ronald Winch, 2009, 'They Were There: From Ploughshares into Swords: Jews in the American Military from 1634-1978', 1st Edition, Self-Published: Palm Springs [this later author claims to have been an Israeli diplomat but I am doubtful].

(7) Frank Renton, 1937, 'Jewish Defence Campaign: Speakers' Handbook', 1st Edition, Woburn Press: London, p. 78; Rubin, Op. Cit., p. 17 supports Renton's figures

(8) I have excluded the Indian Empire in all my figures here because of the lack of conscription and huge population it would massively skew the data.

(9) For the sake of convenience for the reader to check what I have said: I have taken the statistics offered by Wikipedia, which are available at the following address: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties#Casualties_by_1914_borders

(10) The highest medal that can be awarded for gallantry in the British Armed Forces.

(11) http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/service_records/med_awarded.htm

(12) Harold Shukman, 2006, 'War or Revolution: Russian Jews and Conscription in Britain 1917', 1st Edition, Vallentine Mitchell: Portland, pp. 7-12; supported by Kenneth Collins, 1990, 'Second City Jewry: The Jews of Glasgow in the Age of Expansion, 1790-1919', 1st Edition, Scottish Jewish Archives: Glasgow, p. 191

(13) For example John Mosier, 2001, 'The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I', 1st Edition, Harper Collins: New York, pp. 240-241

(14) Sean McMeekin, 2011, 'The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power 1898-1918', 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 275

(15) Mosier, Op. Cit., pp. 312-313

(16) T. G. Fraser, Andrew Mango, Robert McNamara, 2011, 'Makers of the Modern Middle East', 1st Edition, Haus: London, pp. 64-65; 71-72; to be fair to the British the Germans also acted similarly as per McMeekin, Op. Cit., pp. 89-90; 93

(17) Collins, 'Second City Jewry', Op. Cit., pp. 181-184

(18) Bryan Mark Rigg, 2004, 'Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military', 2nd Edition, University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, p. 72

(19) Oppenheimer, Op. Cit., p. 12

(20) Cf. Jacob Segall, 1921, 'Die deutschen Juden als Soldaten im Krieg 1914-1918: Ein statistische Studie', 1st Edition, Philo Verlag: Berlin

(21) Hermann, Op. Cit., p. 16; cf. Otto Armin [Alfred Roth], Ernst Boepple, 1919, 'Die Juden im Heere: Ein statistische Untersuchung nach amtlichen Quellen von Otto Armin', 1st Edition, Deutscher Volksverlag: Munich

(22) Oppenheimer, Op. Cit., pp. 7-9

(23) Ibid., pp. 8; 12

(24) Cf. Leo Lowenstein (Ed.), 1932, 'Die Jüdischen Gefallenen des Deutschen Heeres, der Deutschen Marine und der Deutschen Schutztruppen 1914-1918: Ein Gedenkbuch', 1st Edition, Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten: Berlin

(25) I am assuming here of course that the percentage of jews wounded broadly reflects the same percentage discrepancy as in the case of those killed.

(26) Rigg, Op. Cit., p. 72

(27) Renton, Op. Cit., p. 79

(28) This was Imperial Germany's highest military decoration and in some respects the direct equivalent of the British Victoria Cross.