Michael Geheran's "Comrades Betrayed"

Michael Geheran is Assistant Professor of History and Deputy Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Comrades Betrayed: Jewish World War I Veterans under Hitler, and reported the following:

Comrades Betrayed examines the generation of Jewish men who fought for Germany in World War I. It looks at their experiences in the trenches of the Great War, how they responded to the rise of Hitler, how they coped under Nazi persecution, and why many believed that Germany would never betray them, even as the Holocaust unfolded around them.

In many ways, Page 99 gives readers a good sense of the book. It discusses the impact of the so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935 on Jewish veterans. This legislation not only stripped Jews of their basic rights as German citizens but was part of a larger Nazi effort to erase everything Jewish soldiers had achieved and sacrificed. It sought to destroy their identity as Germans, as soldiers, as well as the high status they had earned as veterans of the Great War, upon which their sense of German identity rested. Yet as the rest of Chapter 4 makes clear, Jewish war veterans were able to discredit the claims of Nazi propaganda in a highly public manner, using evidence of wartime military service to obliterate antisemitic stereotypes of the un-German, un-manly “Jew.” This strategy generated ambivalence among a German public that saw former soldiers as persons to be respected, regardless of race or background, a path not available to Jewish men who had been too young or too old to have served in World War I.

Page 99 is unlike the rest of the book, however, because it is part of a shorter section that delves into the minutiae of antisemitic legal ordinances the Nazis passed in the mid-1930s. Missing here are the numerous first-hand accounts by victims, perpetrators, eyewitnesses, and other people who experienced the events recounted. Drawing on never-published letters and diaries from private family collections and interviews with survivors and their family members, Comrades Betrayed throws light on little-known individuals such as Otto Lewin, perhaps the last Jewish soldier to openly serve in the Wehrmacht, and Hugo Gutmann, who had been Hitler’s commanding officer in World War I. It frames the persecution and murder of Jewish veterans as a human drama, allowing the voices of these victims to be heard once again.

Learn more about Comrades Betrayed at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue