Deutsche Version

It was a winter morning, sometime at the end of February 1915, and heavy rain clouds were hanging over the dark green hills surrounding the town of St. Wendel. A young woman, with a three-week old baby on her arms, appeared at the door of Hospitalstrasse number 13. Uneasiness showed on her face as she watched the two grim faced policemen approaching the entrance where she stood. They stopped just under the door step and one of them, the older one, saluted and said; “Frau Levy, I am sorry, very sorry, to inform you that a short while ago we received terrible news from the front about your husband…”. The woman, Emilie Levy, my grandmother, did not hear the rest. She fainted and her sisters took her and the baby home, where she will spend the rest of her life as a war widow.

Until a short while ago I could not write down the somewhat dramatic prologue of this story because I hardly knew anything about my grandfather. Yes, I knew that his first name was Markus and that he was killed in World War One, probably in October or November 1915. My mother told me that as a young child she accompanied my grandmother several times on visits to his grave. She also said that he was buried in a huge German military cemetery, somewhere south of Strasbourg; “…in Schlettstadt, where thousands of graves were scattered throughout many kilometers...”. And yes, the tombstone was in the shape of a black cross, similar to all other tombstones there, with no special marks to identify it as being a Jewish last resting place. Where and when was my grandfather born? This was uncertain. Probably he was born in Berlin or somewhere “near Berlin” and he was supposed to be four years older than my grandmother, meaning he was born in 1884. She also knew that her father was a school teacher in Ottweiler, a town near St. Wendel, at the time he met her mother, the future Frau Levy. That’s it, more or less. Please, remember that my mother never saw her father and had no documents or pictures of him on hand.

One winter evening, about a year ago, I found myself reading “The Price of Glory – Verdun 1916”, a remarkable book by an English writer, Alister Horne. Sinking deeper and deeper into the dreadful descriptions of that battle, I all at once realized that my own grandfather was sacrificed in such a battle too, crushed to dust in the big “bone grinder”. At that moment I decided to find out what exactly happened to him. Not only for my own peace of mind, but also for the sake of my children and grandchildren, so they will be able to go there, pray on his grave and honor his memory at the very place where he fought and died.

Where and how should I start? We have the privilege to live in the twenty-first century, so naturally the Web will be the immediate option. One click for the search-engine, another click for “Erster Weltkrieg” and here I am. After moving around many relevant sites I made my choice and sent the very little information I had to the e-mail addresses mentioned in some of them. In just two days it turned out to be the right choice. The first answer came in on June 29, from Hinrich Dirksen (you can see the war story of his great grandfather, Harm Dirksen, in this web site). He questioned the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgraeberfuersorge (VDK) about Markus Levy, but unfortunately they could not find any records on him. This channel, the VDK, turned out - at the beginning of the search - to be a dead end, for the simple reason that the information I had at that time was not enough and even partially wrong. I can’t blame them, considering the amount of inquiries they probably must answer. And then, a few days after I received the e-mail from Hinni Dirksen, another e-mail came in, this time from Alexander Kallis, who offered to assist me in the search of my grandfather’s grave in what he called a “private investigation”. This one single e-mail became the corner stone of a wonderful friendship and an Arthur Conan Doyle like detective story, where Alexander took the part of the man with the meerschaum pipe and I became the doctor of good advise. But there was one difference. We looked for the victim, not the murderer, Ha, Ha.

In order to start a full scale investigation, we had to identify the most promising clues hidden in the information I gathered. The first sure thing was the town of St. Wendel, where my mother grew up. I sent a letter to the municipality with all the information I had, but never got a reply. They, like the VDK, could not come up with any further suggestions about the fate of Markus Levy, apparently because our information was not complete, or even partially wrong. Next “sure thing” was Schlettstadt, today’s Selestat, the city my mother remembers as the place where the military graveyard was located in. Sounds easy? Wait and see. First problem was to get a relevant e-mail address, like the registration department, etc. In the case of Selestat I could not find a page with such an address. The nearest thing I found was the web site of the tourist office, which had both a phone and a fax number. So I picked up the phone and spoke (in English) with a nice lady who gave me the fax number of the person in the municipality who is in charge of such matters. A letter (in my so-so German) with all known details went out on July 17 and a reply, in French of course, arrived two weeks later. Alexander went over to his neighbor, who does not master the French tongue but is a great Chanson singer. He translated the letter into readable German and now all we had to do is sit back, relax and read it carefully. Unfortunately bad news again. Madam Jeannette Moerel of Ville de Selestat told us that though they checked several graveyards, both in Selestat and Bergheim, they could not find a grave belonging to Markus Levy. Dear reader, you will forgive me for presenting you with all these little boring details. I do it only for one purpose, to let you understand how frustrating it all was at that time, when we were shooting in the dark at all possible directions.

On August 8 Alexander inaugurated his web site Vogesenkämpfe 1914-1918. Big celebration, many congratulations and a lot of fire work. Sure, I exaggerate a bit, but this development enabled me to put an ad like message in the forum. It reads as follows:

Have anyone of you seen, heard or touched the tomb stone of my grandfather, Markus Levi, who was killed in action in Oct. or Nov. 1915 while serving in the German army in the area of Selestat. It is possible that he was burried in Saint-Marie-aux-Mines.

Unknown friends emerged out of the darkness. French and Germans associates, who are occupied with this old forgotten war, arrived to assist me. Surprisingly most of them are young and their personal contact to that old era is through a great-grandfather who fought in WW1 at one or another front. Within 24 hours of my above mentioned message an answer came from a French, Eric Mansuy, who lives in the Vogesen. He offered to go personally to the military graveyards in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, Sainte-Croix-aux-Mine and Bertrimoutier. He added in his reply; “You may wish me good luck, this isn’t an easy task.” Eric, I believe you and thank you for all you have done! Eric Mansuy, is an English teacher who published many research articles in different web sites, one of them is the war story of his great-grandfather, Srg. Georges Curien (can also be seen in this web site). Alexander and Eric are peers of a small group of people who share a common interest in WW1. They keep in touch with each other and by sharing information and knowledge they made my wish come true.

For a while nothing happened. Alexander and myself did not want to break our newly found friendship and the mutual interest we have in our ancestors, so we occupied ourselves by exchanging information about this and that, via e-mail of course. Until this very moment we never spoke to each other, not in person and even not on phone. Then Alexander raised a question that became crucial in solving the mystery of the lost Markus Levy. Perhaps he had another name, or maybe the spelling I used was wrong. For instance, Levy could be written as Levi or Markus as Marcus? I asked my mother and all she could say was that in her family they always talked about “poor Markus, who fell in the war.” My father in law, who came to Israel from Badlangensalza in 1937, thought otherwise. He confirmed the fact that many German Jews were given a Jewish name upon birth to be used inside their communities, but for general purpose and convenience they used a Christian name, either by officially changing their name or just by adopting a nickname. His own father was known as Mendel-Max. If this was the case with my grandfather Markus, it could explain the fact that the VDK could not find his name in their records. Following this line of thought, we could assume that Markus, when enlisted for his service in the German Army, adopted a Christian name. Another friend of Alexander was mislead in the same way. This time it happened to Rainer Schlicht, an antique book dealer from Frankfurt. Upon Alexander’s request he scrutinized very carefully his old Judaica records and books, especially a memorial book published in 1932, with the rather long title “Die Jüdischen Gefallenen des Deutschen Heeres, der Deutschen Marine und der Deutschen Schutztruppen 1914-1918.” Unfortunately he could not find, among the hundreds of Levys listed there, any Markus Levy or Levi, born in 1884 and killed in October or November 1915. This book, that Rainer keeps in his bookstore, is a main source for our subject and I will return to it later on, because a very important clue, to be unveiled in due course, was hidden inside its old yellowish pages. This clue, for the reasons mentioned above, was unnoticed by Rainer when he first examined the book. So even the assumption that Markus might have had a different name did not change a thing, No trace of him was found. I nearly gave up and terribly frustrated I wrote to Alexander on December 31; “…I believe that if there is still a marked grave somewhere, it will only show up by pure luck…” Alexander, please forgive me for my doubtfulness.

And then, as the case goes in all good detective stories, when the search was doomed to fail, a breakthrough happened. On January 24 a letter arrived in Alexander’s mail. It came from the Civil Registry Office (Standesamt) of Ottweiler, to whom Alexander wrote several weeks earlier. As you probably remember my mother always said that her father Markus was a schoolteacher in Ottweiler (near St. Wendel) at the time he met her mother. Thanks God, Brigitte Kreutz of the Standesamt was smart enough to overlook the first name of Markus and she referred only to the last name; Levy. She found in her archive a registration (Anmeldung) card of a certain Max (not Markus) Levy who was a schoolteacher by profession, born in Magdeburg on May 20, 1886, of the Israelitisch (Jewish) faith and a military reservist. According to the registration card he lived in Ottweiler between September 1913 and May 1914.  Could this be my grandfather? Probably yes. Ottweiler was a very small town in 1914, apparently with a Jewish community of several families only, so it is hard to believe that two Jewish teachers with the name Levy lived there at the same time. We already had the explanation on how the name Markus could change to Max. Though the finding of the registration card was a huge achievement, it was not a definite proof yet, but still, we could start to smile, and so we did.

Registration card (Meldekarte) from Ottweiler -click to enlarge-

A short while before this letter arrived at Alexander’s apartment in Frankfurt, two other breakthroughs happened, one in Germany and one in France. On December 29 another friend of Alexander, Leo Ott of Appenweiler, a member of a French-German group who is devoted to the preservation of military memorials in Elsas, wrote him a letter with very interesting findings. In his research he found out that In the German military graveyards of Elsas and the Vogesen there are two Jewish tombs with the name Levy on them. The first one, in Cernay (Sennheim), belongs to Eduard Levy who was killed on May 1916. The other one is in Bertrimoutier, near St. Die. It is the grave of a German soldier named Max Levi, Wehrmann, buried in grave number 2/574, killed on February 18, 1915. Is this Max Levy of Ottweiler? Leo could not find any Levys in Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and Thanville. He also added in his letter that Bertrimoutier is a secondary cemetery erected after the war ended. While Leo Ott was doing his research in Germany, two Frenchmen did their own work on locating my grandfather’s last resting place. One of them, Eric Mansuy, we already met earlier in this story. The other one is Thierry Ehret from Muhlhouse. I have no words to thank them for their endless search, which included going personally from graveyard to graveyard and from tombstone to tombstone until they came up with their findings. On January 14 Thierry put a message in Alexander’s forum saying (original in German);

With a high level of certainty we can assume that Max Levy (not Markus) was killed while serving in the 12 company/LIR 81 on 18.02.1915 and he is buried today in the military graveyard in Bertrimoutier.

Oh, how much would I like to believe that Max Levy killed on 18.2.1915, and resting now in peace in France is the very man we are looking for, but I had to be careful. It was too good to be true. I did not dare telling my mother about this assuring news until we could confirm all findings and be absolutely sure that the man who is buried in Bertrimoutier is the same man who was a teacher in Ottweiler one or two years before the war. And that he is the very man whom my grandmother chose to be her husband. As many times throughout the search Alexander and myself consulted with each other via e-mail. Many question marks arose, like; how a person who lived in the Saar served in a Frankfurter regiment, the 81 Landwehr Infanterie Regiment? Next, my mother said that her father was killed in October or November 1915, not in February of that year. Could it be a bad memory or just wrong information she perceived from her family long ago? And the name, could Markus really be Max, could Levi be Levy? On the other hand there were also assuring things, The Max Levy in Bertrimoutier was buried under a cross and not under a Jewish “Star of David” tombstone, exactly the way my mother remembers it; “his grave was like the thousands scattered around”. And then, Bertrimoutier is less than 8 kilometers away from Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (Markirch), so it could easily be the Schlettstadt-Markirch my mother visited as a child. Even today Bertrimoutier has a population of less than 300, so one could easily assume that the cemetery was called after the nearby city - Markirch.

The missing link, the “Rosetta stone” of this puzzle, turned out to be the birthplace of my grandfather. It was the only time during our long search that I really pressed my mother for a definite answer. Without telling her about our findings so far, I asked her, on one of my weekly visits to her – she lives more than 150 kilometers away – where exactly was her father born. Finally she came up with “Marburg” or maybe “Magdeburg”. Since previously she always said he was born “somewehere near Berlin”, so most likely Magdeburg was the answer. By combining her response with the information in the registration card of Ottweiler (which indicated Magdeburg as Max’s birthplace) we arrived at the conclusion that all we have to do now is to prove that the man resting in Bertrimoutier was born in Magdeburg in 1886. And that there was no other Max or Markus levy born there on the same year.

So next we had to find out where the man who lies eighty-six years in Bertrimoutier was born. Seems easy? Not so my friends. Naturally Alexander approached the VDK who is supposed to have some records in their files, such as the birthplace and birth date, on the soldiers buried in cemeteries under their management. Here, in this part of the search, a most bizarre thing happened. Alexander had some intensive e-mail exchanges with the VDK and finally they admitted having the birthplace of the man in Bertrimoutier on their records, but they are not allowed to reveal this information due to a regulation saying; “even the internet is under the Datenschutz”. Listen to this, we are talking about data on military personnel nearly 100 years old, people who died long ago, in already forgotten wars. Even in my country, Israel, which is still at conflict with some of our neighbors, we reveal such information after 30 years. Now Alexander became really mad - the one and only time I saw him like that - and wrote a new "persuasive" letter to the VDK. In reply they agreed, as an exception I guess, to reveal only one very important piece of information - for us the most important one - namely that the man in Bertrimoutier was born in Magdeburg on May 26, 1886. Sounds familiar, you bet !!! We still had a difference of 6 days between the birth date on the registration card from Ottweiler and the records of the VDK, but this could easily be explained by a mistake made in the hand writing of a clerk who scribbled 20 as 26 or vise versa. So far, so good.

To solve the riddle of Max-Markus birth date and birthplace I sent, on January 21, an e-mail to both the Standesamt and the Archive of the city of Magdeburg, asking for data about my grandfather, in particular information concerning his birth date. The Standesamt replied on the same day, saying they will do their best, and they did, as you will immediately see. The Archive sent me, next day, a full list of all Levy families that lived in Magdeburg in 1886, six in total, but they could not tell which of them was visited by the stork in that very year. On February 7 an official envelope, with German stamps on it, arrived in my mailbox. I tore it open and there it was – a copy of the birth certificate of Markus Levy, a boy, born on May 20, 1886, to Simon and Sarah Levy (one of the six families mentioned earlier by the archive department). A letter from Frau Klaus of the Standesamt accompanied the birth certificate saying; “1886 wurde in Magdeburg kein weiterer Markus oder Max Levi oder Levy geboren.”  That’s it. Final proof, case closed. I wish to use this occasion and thank again Frau Klaus, Herr Buchholz and Herr Ehlenberger of Magdeburg for their assistance. How and when Markus Levy changed his name to Max we don’t know. It happened some time between his childhood in Magdeburg and his arrival in Ottweiler in 1913. But even though he made the official change, in his family he still was known as Markus, just as my mother says.
 

Birth certificate from Magdeburg with the first name Markus on it  (in old script)

I promised earlier to refer again to that old forgotten book “Die Jüdischen Gefallenen des Deutschen Heeres, der Deutschen Marine und der Deutschen Schutztruppen 1914-1918.” Published in 1932. When, at the beginning of our search, Alexander’s friend Rainer Schlicht, the antique book dealer from Frankfurt, scrutinized the names of the fallen soldiers in the book, he examined only the alphabetic list. The reason was that we were not certain as for the last address my grandfather lived at, before he went to the war. And above all, the name he was looking for was wrong, Markus instead of Max, so no wonder he couldn’t find him among the hundreds of Levys mentioned there. I went back to this forgotten book only in January, when we already knew who the dead soldier in Bertrimoutier was. To my surprise this rare book was all that time within my immediate reach. Less then fifty kilometers from where I live, in the Leo Baeck Institute’s library in Jerusalem, a copy of this green book was placed on a shelf there, waiting to be opened by me. There, in the list sorted by the place of residence of the fallen soldiers, on page 328 under St. Wendel, five names appeared. One of them, you are not surprised of course, was Levy, Max, born 26.5.1886, in Magdeburg, killed on 18.2.1915, served in 12/L.I.R. 81.

Now, listen to this, when I showed the name list of the fallen Jewish soldiers of St. Wendel to my mother, she immediately recognized another name, just next to her father, Max. He is Isaak Reinheimer, her uncle, the brother of her mother Emilie, who was killed on September 1915 serving in the 12/L.I.R. 17. This can explain why my mother always talked about October or November as being the month of her father’s death. Old memories emerged. She said, with tears in her eyes; “what a tragedy it was, the two of them died and my mother was left with no one, but me.” Perhaps, in later days, when members of the family talked about their two dear ones, it all mixed up in the mind of the young orphan and became one tragedy that must have happened on the same day.

Where and how was Wehrmann Max (Markus) Levy killed? Here again, an old and rare book disclosed the answer. The book is now in the possession of Hubertus Ochsler, another friend of Alexander, who managed to get it somewhere. It was written by the medical officer of Landwehr Infanterie Regiment 81, Dr. Med. Fritz Samer, an officer and gentleman and a man with both medical and writing talents. Hopefully his surgical skills were not inferior to his prose, Ten years after the war ended, in 1928, he published the history of his regiment in WW1 under the title; “Das Landwehr Infanterie Regiment 81 im Grossen Krieg. Sein Leben und Kaempfe.” In this work we can find the answer to what happened on 18.2.1915, the day my grandfather died.

When the violent fighting of August and September 1914 ended and the front in Elsas and the Vogesen stabilized, more or less, L.I.R. 81 found itself positioned near the main road St. Die – Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines – Selestat, in the vicinity of the small town Lusse. French troops held tight their positions on the wooded hilly ground south of the road, opposite to Lusse. This narrow ridge  was known as Schusterberg and hill 600 (a summit measured by the French as being 607 meters high, hence called by them Cote 607). The hill allowed superior observation over the whole area, a fact that was used very efficiently by the French artillery. Both sides, in the words of Dr. Samer, had their positions on the Schusterberg (the eastern part of the ridge); “at very close distance, like two fighters in the boxing ring. One of them had to take the initiative and drive the other out.” Already in January the soldiers of the regiment heard their commander, Colonel (Oberst) Vogel, say; “Die Hoehe muss unser werden.” (the hill must be ours).

Hill 600, a view from Lusse to south-east,  with French and German trenches shortly after the fighting ended -click to enlarge-

The assault was set for 18.2.1915. The attack plan was simple and straightforward, as customary in those days. Captain (Hauptmann) Bernhard, the commander of the third battalion, volunteered himself - “naturally”, as Dr. Samer tells us - to take the main role of the attack. His bravery turned out to be unfortunate for my grandfather, the teacher from Ottweiler, because he served in company 12, one of the four companies of the third battalion. Max (Markus) Levy became a “volunteer” by the word of his commanding officer. The third battalion was supposed to crash the French positions on the western side of the Schusterberg, and then fight it’s way onto hill 600. The hill was a strong fortified piece of high terrain, surrounded by barbed wire and machinegun positions. Battalions One and Two of the regiment were supposed to follow upon success, the first battalion on the left flank and the second battalion on the right flank. The intention was that the two battalions will proceed with the attack toward the direction of La-Combe, a small village about 400 meters west of hill 600.

Captain Bernhard, the commander of the third battalion, dictated, with the blessings of his superiors, the following order of battle. Companies 9 and 10 will take the center of the assault. Company 12 will be positioned on the right side of the attack and company 11 on the left one. Then he issued his commands (as quoted in Dr. Samer’s book);

1.The intention is to attack only with hand grenades and unloaded bayoneted rifles because the enemy is very close and the shooting angle is limited.
2. The battalion will attack in three waves. The first one will be armed with hand grenades, axes, signal pistols, ropes, wooden walking boards, ladders and barbed-wire cutters. The second wave will be dedicated for the support of the first wave, filling in the rows, and the third wave will be armed with the necessary equipment for assaulting the enemy’s positions. Each wave will consist of about 200 men.
3. Direction of the attack; Hill 600.
4. Two machineguns for support, one on the right flank and another one near the “Rock” (Felsen), will create a curtain of crossfire toward the positions of the enemy.
5. Medical aid and gathering place for the wounded; at the commanding post of company 11.

L.I.R. 81, list of casualties, Max Levy #215

An Unknown number of French soldiers from Infantry Regiment 253 and the Alpine Ranger  Battalion number 23 lost their life too. The Germans buried 50 of them in marked graves but many others, who died in their trenches, were just covered by dirt with a shovel.

As an Israeli I can’t complete this rather personal story without a last word about the role of Germany's Jews in WW1. In 1914 a total of 600,000 Jews lived in Germany (less than 1% of the population). 80,000 members of this small community were recruited to the armed forces. They served in the army, in the navy and even in the newly formed airforce, and over 12,000 lost their lives in the battlefields of Europe, sacrificing them selves for what they considered to be their beloved Fatherland. My grandfather Max (Markus) Levy was one of them. Now, that I know were he fought his last battle and were he is buried for more then 86 years, I can visit these places and honor his memory by saying the old Jewish "Kadish" prayer on his grave. I hope my children and grandchildren will also do so, while spending their annual vacation in this part of Europe - stop for a moment at Bertrimoutier and Hill 600, and salute in honor of this brave ancestor of theirs. That’s it, my friends. This is my story and the story of all men and women who assisted me in this long and arduous search. I want to thank them all, from the depth of my heart, for what they have done for me and my family.
 

Max Levi's tomb stone in "DS Friedhof Bertrimoutier" Photo: Eric Mansuy