In 1924, a book was published in Germany praising the heroism of more than 200 elite Jewish airmen who had fought for the country in the First World War.
A defamation campaign was afoot labelling Jews as shirkers responsible for the Fatherland’s defeat in the Great War, and the book was an attempt to counter the antisemitism.
Judische Flieger im Weltkrieg — translating as Jewish Flyers in the World War — was written by military physician Felix Theilhaber, who had been awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.
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Beckhardt's grandson Lorenz Beckhardt
And on the cover of his book, the doctor put a photograph of a German-Jewish pilot in the cockpit of a fighter plane he had adorned with a swastika.
“It looks deeply shocking today, but when Fritz Beckhardt daubed that swastika on his plane, the Nazi Party didn’t yet exist. It was founded in 1920,” says Israeli Elimor Makevet , who has co-edited a new English version of the book. “Four years later, the swastika had been appropriated by antisemites and Dr Theilhaber used this photograph to mock them.
But during the war, soldiers decorated their aircraft with circles, triangles and some non-Jewish Germans even painted the Star of David. At the time, it was the emblem of a popular brewery.”
It should also be noted, he says, that the Nazis used the symbol counter-clockwise, adding:
“Swastikas are quite prevalent throughout the world and have even been found in archaeological excavations in Israel.”
As Britain, Australia and New Zealand hold ceremonies at British military cemeteries in Israel this Sunday to mark the signing of the armistice that ended fighting in the Great War, we should remember not only that Jewish soldiers fought and died for the countries in which they lived, but that they needed to demonstrate their service, says Makevet.
“Europe’s Jews were insecure,” he says. “Fighting for Germany, for France and for Britain, was not only about patriotism. It was a way of showing gratitude to those countries.” Franz Beckhardt, the German-Jewish pilot on the front of Dr Heilhaber’s book, would learn that the gratitude he felt was not a two-way street.
In 1938, the infantry combatant, who had been awarded the Iron Cross in the First World War, was sent to Buchenwald for having an affair with a non-Jewish woman.
Two years later, he was set free by Hermann Goering, who oversaw the creation of the Gestapo.
“They had flown in the same squadron,” says Beckhardt’s grandson, journalist Lorenz Beckhardt. “There were two kinds of Nazis: men like Hitler and Himmler, who thought Jews were subhuman, and those like Goering, who used antisemitism to further their political careers, but who didn’t privately subscribe to Third Reich ideology. Goering also released other Jews.”
After his release, Berkhardt escaped Germany with his Jewish wife to join their children, who had come to Britain on the Kindertransport. Then, in the 1950s, the family returned to Germany. “It was an odd decision, an indication of how German my fighter pilot grandfather still felt, of his romantic patriotism,” says Beckhardt.
Romantic and highly misplaced. When the family went back to Wiesbaden-Sonnenberg to run the only grocery shop in the village, a business Beckhardt’s grandparents had set up before the war, it wasn’t long before they realised many of the villagers who had boycotted it in the 1930s were still giving the shop the cold shoulder. “The antisemtism had not gone away.
The boycott ended in 1977 when the shop was sold to a non-Jew,” says Beckhardt.
He was born in 1961, four months before his soldier grandfather died, and because of the post-war antisemitism they experienced, his parents didn’t tell him he was Jewish. “I found out in my late teens. At that time there was still conscription in Germany and one day I told a cousin that I was a conscientious objector. ‘You won’t have to serve anyway,’ he replied.
‘The descendants of people who were persecuted by the Nazis are exempt from military service.’ That’s when it all came out.”
It would, however, be another 20 years before Beckhardt visited a rabbi in Cologne, showed him his birth certificate and became what he describes as a member of Germany’s Jewish community.
Then, when he was in his 40s, he underwent circumcision. “That’s the moment when I felt complete as a Jew.”
The journalist also went on to write a book about his family’s story, entitled Der Jude mit dem Hakenkreuz: Meine Deutsche Familie — The Jew with the Swastika: My German Family — which he presents at schools in Germany and for which he is seeking a British publisher.
“Like my grandfather Fritz, I feel very German, but I am not as blind as him. I know the fight against antisemitism is one that will never end.”
The latest English edition of ‘Jewish Flyers in the World War’, edited by Elimor Makevet and Dr Dieter H. M. Groschel, is an adaptation of Adam Wait’s 1988 English translation of the original. It is published by The Great War Aviation Society.
