Jüdische Flieger im Weltkrieg
Berlin: Verlag der Schild, 1924. Quarto, original papered boards with green cloth backstrip, 124 pp., with four pages of publisher's advertisements. Covers a little rubbed and bumped at extremities, but a very good copy overall. Second edition of Felix Theilhaber's important account of German-Jewish aviators in the First World War. First published as a slim booklet in 1919, this second edition of 1924 is considerably enlarged, in a larger format with many more photographic illustrations throughout.
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 NCO's 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 the booklet Jüdische flieger im Kriege (1919) and this second edition of 1924 with the variant title Jüdische flieger im Weltkriege.
Jüdische flieger im Weltkriege is a carefully researched book that 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 the first edition booklet are: Joseph Zürndörfer, Arthur Chasanowicz, Paul Spiegel, Wilhelm Frankl, Max Holzinger, Ernst Muller, Heinz Bettsak and Max Pappenheimer.
The second edition adds the following pilots, amongst others: Alfred Neufeld, Karl Fromm, Jakob Ledermann, Hans Friedlander, Gustav Samuel, Wilhelm Wolff, Siegfried Heiman and Alfred Odenheimer. Of special interest is the profile portrait of Simon Pinczower, a previously obscure airman from Beuthen in Upper Silesia, who rose to some prominence following award of the Iron Cross.
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 supress 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 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 records the first edition of 1919 but not the second edition (see entry for G572); neither edition is noted by Myron Smith. Item #2729
Price (AUD): $550.00