Tim Grady’s book runner-up for RHS Gladstone Prize 2011
Tim Grady’s book runner-up for RHS Gladstone Prize 2011
Tim Grady’s book, The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory has been awarded proxime accesit status for the Royal Historical Society Gladstone History Book Prize 2011.
The judges said: 'This book examines the thorny question of the commemoration of Jewish soldiers who fought in the German army during the First World War. It covers the period from 1914, when mobilisation began, to 1980. Of the one hundred thousand Jewish men who were called up, twelve thousand were killed - a higher war toll than for their non-Jewish comrades. A 1916 census by the Committee for War Statistics which identified Jewish participation was suppressed and by 1920 the slur that Jews had deliberately avoided war service was widely believed, a solid part of the 'stab-in-the-back' myth. In this book Tim Grady traces the attempts by the Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten, (the Association of Jewish Front-line Soldiers) to commemorate the Jewish fallen and Jewish veterans against rising anti-Semitism. War memorials were built, but Jewish names were increasingly excluded. Nevertheless, Jewish war veterans and their sons were exempted from the 1933 ban on employment in the civil service. After 1945, the memory of the Jewish veterans of the First World War was blurred by the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Tim Grady concludes that the First World War was pivotal in breaking relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans.'
