Jüdische Flieger im Kriege ein Blatt der Erinnerung
Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1919. Octavo, printed wrappers, 52 pp., four plates. Well preserved in the original publisher's printed wrappers. Scarce early booklet defending the valour of German-Jewish aviators in the First World War. Printed in 1919, this is the scarce first edition and was followed by an enlarged second edition of 1924.
The author, Felix Aaron Theilhaber (1884-1956), was a physician and gynaecologist based in Berlin and Jena. As a young man he visited Palestine and remained committed to the establishment of a Jewish homeland for the remainder of his life. The squalid and overcrowded conditions of Berlin in the first decade of the century convinced him of the value of social and moral reform. Furthermore, within his role as a physician, Theilhaber was active in the sex reform movement championed by Wilhelm Reich and Max Henkel. He was an early advocate of birth control, legal abortion and resisted the criminalisation of homosexuality under German law.
Theilhaber's first experience of military life came during the Italo-Turkish war of 1912, whilst volunteering for the Red Crescent in Tripoli. This experience was recorded in his 1912 account titled Beim roten Halbmond vor Tripolis (Cologne, 1912). Theilhaber later enlisted as a frontline field doctor during the First World War, and was conscious of the important part that Jewish soldiers and officers played in the conflict. Much of his non-medical publication record actively resists anti-Semitic attempts to denigrate the Jewish contribution to the German war effort, beginning with Die Juden im Weltkrieg (1916), which was followed by this booklet Jüdische flieger im Kriege (1919). Both were published by Louis Lamm in Berlin, and the latter was republished in 1924.
Jüdische flieger im Kriege is a carefully researched booklet of some 52 pages. It frequently draws upon the authors personal contact with the aviators themselves, or with members of the families of deceased airmen who provided letters and anecdotes. The aviators profiled in this book are: Joseph Zürndörfer, Arthur Chasanowicz, Paul Spiegel, Wilhelm Frankl, Max Holzinger, Ernst Muller, Heinz Bettsak and Max Pappenheimer. All the listed airmen are illustrated with photo portrait plates. Furthermore, the booklet reproduces the Iron Cross award certificates for Ernst Adler and Simon Pinczower, a previously obscure airman from Beuthen in Upper Silesia.
Printed material commemorating the Jewish soldiers, pilots and sailors of the First World War is of enduring historical importance. The contribution of patriotic and valorous Jews to the war effort was an uncomfortable truth for the Third Reich, who attempted to suppress this book in both its editions (and similar publications) throughout the thirties. Ultimately, decorated soldiers and airmen of the First War generation either emigrated or perished in the camps, as nothing less than personal intervention by a General appealing to the Nazi executive could save them. As for Theilhaber himself, following a few months of imprisonment by the Gestapo in 1933, he ultimately emigrated to Palestine and continued to practice medicine into the fifties. His brother, a Berlin based lawyer named Robert Theilhaber, was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. Noffsinger G572; not in Myron Smith. Item #2440
Price (AUD): $725.00