Being a Jew in Hitler-controlled Europe meant persecution, but being WWI decorated veteran, even Jewish, ought to have meant something. It didn’t, but some.

 Being a Jew in Hitler-controlled Europe meant persecution, but being WWI decorated veteran, even Jewish, ought to have meant something.

It didn’t, but some

German or Austrian Jews may have thought so at first. Not that they’d avoided persecution – expropriation, termination of their citizen’s rights, and deportation to occupied territories of Eastern Europe – but annihilation they did not expect. Especially the ones in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto in May 1942. 

In late 1941, 20,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Luxembourg were brought there. Between 4 and 15 May 1942, 11,000 of them got deported via the Radegast station to the German extermination camp of Kulmhof and gassed on arrival. 11,000 people in 11 days, no survivors, except for one category.

War heroes.

Of the previous war, of course. Ghetto announcement no. 380, calling on the foreigners to report for transfer, exempted WWI veterans awarded the Iron Cross of 1st and 2nd class, as well as Wound Badge holders. In certain cases, it applied to their widows, as a number of veterans had already succumbed to ghetto life.

They represented a much larger group: in late 1914, every fifth serviceman in the German military was a Jew, the end of the war saw 30,000 of them decorated, and these ratios were not much different in the Austro-Hungarian army. Jews were actually overrepresented in headcount, merit and casualty categories. 

Not for long, however, were the middle-aged and elderly veterans in Litzmannstadt spared; most entered the Kulmhof gas vans following the September Gehsperre, and those who made it through the winter did it soon thereafter. It’s safe to say that close to none of the hundreds of these men or their families survived. 

Neither did deported war heroes elsewhere. On 13 July 1942 in Józefów, "ordinary men" from 101 Ordnungspolizei Battalion murdered 1,500 Jews, many of whom were DPs from Germany. One of the policemen remembered shooting an old man who claimed to be a decorated WWI veteran from Bremen. Iron Cross?

Polish Jew Samuel Willenberg was brought to Treblinka in October 1942, around the time when several transports from Theresienstadt, carrying Czech, German and Austrian Jews arrived. In the Lazarett, a place of execution, he saw "elderly and crippled men," one of whom had a wooden leg. Wound Badge. 

How many Wound Badges, Iron Crosses, and less prestigious WWI decorations travelled to Riga and were immediately shot into Rumbula pits? How many got off at Auschwitz Judenrampe? How many were escorted from Vienna to Sobibor in mid-June 1942 by Lt. Fischmann’s Schutzpolizei? Only the people who sent them there could tell.

War heroes.

Of the ongoing war, of course. In WWII, the likes of Lt. Fischmann, Einsatzgruppen leaders or concentration camps personnel also got German decorations – not for saving lives under fire anymore, but for throwing lives into the fire. Except for that one case in Litzmannstadt, WWI Iron Cross meant nothing if pinned on Jews because to new Germany, Jews meant nothing.

Between two world wars, the meaning of German war hero changed, and the man who redefined it, in WWI soldier of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, had won both Iron Cross of 1st and 2nd class, and a Wound Badge.

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In the photograph: Jewish soldiers of the German Army, celebrating Hanukkah on the Eastern Front.