Talk:Gerhard Neumann

Lack of references, sources and citations

I assume that this (interesting and well-written, IMHO) article is based on the book mentioned in the "References" section. However, as required by Wikipedia policies about "verifiability", this biography should have much more inline citations in its text. Can anyone please provide them?
Thanks & regards, DPdH (talk) 23:35, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Done! — ¾-10 05:14, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

?

... non-practicing "Jewish Germans". ... would receive deferment from conscription into the German army. Am I the only one who thinks there is something wrong? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.221.41.181 (talk) 19:19, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

The article is correct, although, as your question points out, it seems very strange to us today from the post-Holocaust perspective. In the 1930s, Jewish German young men were still being drafted into the army at the same time that their parents and families were being gradually, increasingly dispossessed and disenfranchised. It was an odd period of about 5-7 years when German society was still in an intermediate, transitional phase from one in which many Jews were part of the society toward one where they were being disappeared (in the transitive sense of that verb). You have to understand that as recently as World War I and the 1920s, there were Prussian Jews who were every bit as culturally Prussian as any non-Jewish counterparts. There were Jewish veterans of the Kaiser's army who were ardently patriotic to Prussia. There were even some Jews among the Freikorps of the 1920s, as baffling as that can sound on the surface today (when people simplistically tend to equate all Freikorps with Nazism). There was a brief period in the 30s before the war started, like a twilight zone, when the old paradigm hadn't finished being killed yet, even though the new paradigm was clearly blowing in on the wind. Someone like Gerhard, as odd as it seems today, was looking at a near certainty of being drafted into the army in the mid-30s. And although his memoir doesn't spell out why he wanted to avoid that, it seems obvious that he was doing it not to avoid being a soldier per se (which he did not avoid as part of the U.S. Army) but to avoid being a soldier fighting in support of the Nazi government. But being a 21-year-old kid at the time, he also just wanted some exciting foreign adventure (p. 26). I wonder if he latched on to that as his motivation at the time, and didn't want to think much about the fact that he was also probably turning away from Germany as a homeland (which turned out to become a fact). What's it like to come to the decision that you can't conscionably support the government of your native country after it's taken a nasty turn like fascism? Always traumatic I suspect. — ¾-10 19:47, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

PS: Speaking of things that seem weird now, consider: The German government was going to grant draft deferment to German engineers who went to help the Nationalist Chinese fight off the Japanese invasion and occupation. As late as 1938! Think how very strange that is, when by 1936 Germany had already signed a treaty with Japan as one of the Axis powers. I see that Wikipedia has an article about it (Sino-German cooperation until 1941). A strange time in history. — ¾-10 23:46, 15 April 2012 (UTC)