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Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden Under German Occupation: 1915-1918

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Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden Under German Occupation: 1915-1918 University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2010 Shattered Communities: Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden under German Occupation: 1915-1918 Tracey Hayes Norrell [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Diplomatic History Commons, European History Commons, History of Religion Commons, Military History Commons, and the Political History Commons Recommended Citation Norrell, Tracey Hayes, "Shattered Communities: Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden under German Occupation: 1915-1918. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2010. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/834 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Tracey Hayes Norrell entitled "Shattered Communities: Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden under German Occupation: 1915-1918." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Vejas G. Liulevicius, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Denise Phillips, Margeret Andersen, David Lee Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Tracey Hayes Norrell entitled “Shattered Communities: Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden under German Occupation: 1915-1918.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Vejas Liulevicius , Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Denise Phillips Margaret Anderson David Lee Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) Shattered Communities: Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden under German Occupation: 1915 - 1918 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Tracey Hayes Norrell August 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Tracey Hayes Norrell All rights reserved. iii ABSTRACT “Shattered Communities: Soldiers, Rabbis, and the Ostjuden during Occupation: 1915-1918" addresses the interethnic experience in Poland during the German occupation of 1915-1918. This dissertation demonstrates that the German design for 'modernization' of the East began with the First World War, which envisioned the Jews as a critically vital component, rather than an obstacle to their success. The German military made its connection to the peoples in the East via its own army rabbis and Jewish administrators. This work examines the role of the German Army rabbis, in 1915, in establishing a Jewish press and Jewish schools, along with Jewish relief agencies funded by German Jewish businessmen, in assisting the local Ostjuden communities. By the time the guns stopped firing in 1918, however, the German government had reneged on their promises of recognition and help, and the circumstances of many Ostjuden were as precarious as they had been before the war. Even worse, the experience of war in the East encouraged the rise of racist nationalism in Germany and Eastern Europe. The roots of Nazi policies toward Jews were planted firmly in Poland and Lithuania between 1915 and 1918. But for defeat in the war, it is highly unlikely that the Nazis would ever have risen to power, and in the absence of the German experience of war in the East, the later commitment to a Jewish genocide might never have been imagined. By examining the transnational relationship between the Germans and the Polish Jewish communities during the Great War, I contribute to a better understanding of the complexities leading to the crucial fracture that took place under the pressure of total war in 1917. iv Table of Contents Chapter Page Chapter 1: Prelude to Tragedy ............................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Germans, Poles, and Jews before the Great War, 1096 to 1914 ..................... 16 Chapter 3: The Reliable Pioneers of Germanhood in the East, July to December 1914 .. 52 Chapter 4: Beside the Blood of Thy Neighbor: Poland, January to October 1915........... 86 Chapter 5: All Flesh of My Flesh and Bone of My Bone, November 1915 to October 1916 ................................................................................................................................ 120 Chapter 6: The Blood at Ohel Yaakov, November 1916 to October 1917..................... 160 Chapter 7: The Ignominious Collapse of All Moral Foundations, November 1917 to November 1918............................................................................................................... 202 Epilogue: The Fatherland in the Abyss, November 1918 to November 1919................ 239 v Chapter 1: Prelude to Tragedy The image of trench warfare on the Western Front prevails in the historical memory of the First World War, its authority often overwhelming any popular understanding of the great significance of the war on the Eastern Front. This reality of our historical memory does not, however, hold for Poles and especially not for Jews. In August 1914, one half of the world’s Jewish population, about seven million people, was literally confined in a huge ghetto in Eastern Europe that had been created in the late eighteenth century when Poland was divided into partitions governed by three European powers. Perhaps a half million Jews lived in East Prussia, governed by the German state. The Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled over a million Jews in Galicia, to the south. In Russian Poland to the East, often called Congress Poland for its creation at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, two million Jews were crowded into towns and cities. Further to the east in the Pale of Settlement, fifteen Russian provinces that included Ukraine and Belarus, another four million Jews resided mostly in poverty, under severe civil discrimination. Eastern European Jews approached the war in 1914 with hopes that it would release them from Russian oppression that had accompanied pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the conflict soon unleashed violence that brought suffering, especially to Polish Jews, as bad as any the Jews had known. More than half of all Jews in the world found themselves overtaken by destruction and cruelty in Poland and Russia’s western provinces. During the war, the outside world would learn something of their continuous suffering; but even so their fate at the end of the war is among the lesser-known tragedies of world history. By the Armistice in 1918, more than half a million Jews had fought in the war on both sides, the large majority of them serving on the Eastern Front. No single event since the Diaspora 1 that began almost two millennia earlier was as significant in Jewish history as the Great War. It led directly to another war and to the most tragic event in the Jewish experience, the Holocaust. It also provided the largest impetus to date for the creation of a Jewish state. In 1914 the German Army marched into Russia’s Polish partition with an agenda that included establishing a positive working relationship with local Jews. The German military saw the Jews as vital to their plans for settlement and influence in the East. Twenty-five years later in 1939, Germany invaded Poland with completely different plans—to remove the Jews in order to exploit the region, and in 1942, it began the systematic slaughter of the Ostjuden community. This outcome amounted to a horrific irony in light of German plans for Polish Jews at the outset of the Great War. This study will attempt to explain how this turn of events came about. Between 1914 and 1917, the German Foreign Office and its Military High Command relied on the Army rabbis, Jewish administrators, and soldiers to establish friendships with the large Jewish population. They engaged in relief efforts, started schools, and established media communication in the regional Jewish periodicals. German Army rabbis provided crucial leadership and direction in cultivating a relationship with the local Polish-Jewish communities. The rabbis based this transnational relationship on commonalities between the German and Yiddish languages and on the reality that Jews already functioned as intermediaries in Polish society. Erich Ludendorff, German Army Chief of Staff, along with several key leaders in the German government, believed that the Jews were indispensable mediators for German occupation of Poland.1 By examining this transnational relationship among the German, Polish, and Jewish communities with the Feldrabbiner at the center of this relationship, this study will 1 General Erich Ludendorff, The General Staff and its Problems, edited and translated by F. A. Holt, O.B.E. (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company,
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