Otto Armin (=Alfred Roth), The Jews in the Army. A statistical analysis based on official sources, Munich 1919

Source Description

This text titled “The Jews in the Army” was written by Alfred Roth, who concealed his identity by using the pseudonym Otto Armin, a combination of the first names of his two sons. It was published in early 1920 by Munich-based Deutscher Volks-Verlag and had a print run of 10,000 copies. The publishing house had only been founded on April 1st, 1919 as a spin-off of J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, and it was run by Dr. Ernst Boepple, a close associate of Julius Friedrich Lehmanns. Its list mainly included expressly antisemitic publications. Roth had previously published a six-page essay titled “The Jews in the Army” under the pseudonym Dr. Hans Friedrich which appeared in the December 1919 issue of the “All-German-völkisch monthly for the German people,” Deutschlands Erneuerung, published by J.F. Lehmanns. His original plan to subsequently publish individual chapters of his book as broadsheets could apparently not be realized. Roth’s single intention in his writing is to portray the German Jews’ participation during the entirety of the First World War as shirking and deliberate breaking of German morale. This explanation of the German army’s collapse, which defamed Jews and picked up on latent anti-Jewish resentment, was frequently employed in anti-republic agitation, and it was readily believed by large parts of the lower middle class and middle class in particular.
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Recommended Citation

Otto Armin (=Alfred Roth), The Jews in the Army. A statistical analysis based on official sources, Munich 1919 (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-133.en.v1> [March 28, 2024].