Kurt Jacobs: German Jewish refugee and American WWII Soldier

• In Event: Transnational Refugee Experiences and Networks

Abstract

Over the last decade, research and interest in a special cadre of mainly German-speaking Jewish intelligence officers and former refugees collectively now known as the “Ritchie Boys” has expanded in print, film and US senate recognition. Of the 20,000 soldiers who trained at the US military fort at Camp Ritchie during WWII, approximately 2000 were former German Jewish refugees including Kurt Jacobs born Kurt Jacobsohn.
Trained as a lawyer but prevented from practicing, Kurt left Germany as part of a wave of German speaking Jewish refugees fleeing state sponsored Nazi antisemitism in the 1930s. He reestablished a new life in Buffalo, NY., married a local Jewish woman, and had a child. In his mid-thirties and despite an injury to his leg, he volunteered to become an American soldier. He was recruited as an intelligence officer because of his German language skills and returned to Europe as an army interrogator.
While serving soldiers including other “Ritchie Boys” died on the battlefield, I will argue that the story of Kurt Jacobs bears more detailed study for what it reveals about ideas about identity and the limits ascribed to Jewishness, nationality and belonging. Captured in Germany while serving as an American soldier, Jacob’s German-Jewish origins were exposed, and along with Murray Zappler, another German Jewish émigré American soldier, was executed by German soldiers while other “native-born” American non-Jewish troops in the same unit were imprisoned through the end of the war. Seen as neither a soldier, nor as an American citizen serving his country, the determining factor in Jacobs’ death was his Jewishness.
Building on my earlier research as a digital historian, I utilize family letters, newspaper clippings, military records, court proceedings and other records to highlight the personal and transnational dimensions of this little-known story, placing it in the broader contexts of historical German antisemitism, Germany military complicity in atrocities and the limits of humanitarian treatment of Jewish soldiers during war, to illuminate understandings of identity and belonging across national and ideological boundaries.

Author

• Chana Kotzin, William Jewell College