With the German Guns

Herbert Sulzbach

4 ideas

1. Decorated Jewish Gunner Erased Then Exiled

   Herbert Sulzbach, from a Frankfurt Jewish family, served four years as a German field artillery officer, won the Iron Cross, and kept a patriotic day-by-day diary that was published in 1935 to praise. There he was interned as an enemy alien, then enlisted in the British Army and later worked to re-educate German prisoners of war. His case is concrete evidence that proven wartime sacrifice and loyalty cannot secure belonging once a state redefines who counts as a member of the nation.

2. Contemporaneous Diaries Resist Retrospective Disillusionment Narratives

   A diary written daily records beliefs as they were held, before hindsight imposes a tidy arc. Here patriotism and duty persist almost to the end, and morale erodes through small, dated increments rather than one moment of awakening. Reading war through such records exposes how later memoirs compress and moralize experience into a single shift from enthusiasm to disillusion.

3. Artillery War as Technical, Distanced Violence

   For a field artilleryman, combat is mostly logistics and procedure: moving batteries, caring for horses, registering targets, and firing on coordinates at an enemy he rarely sees. Because the killing is mediated by maps, ranges, and routine, the soldier's daily experience centers on craft and comradeship rather than on the people his guns destroy. This distance helps explain how sustained patriotic commitment can coexist with industrialized slaughter.

4. Undefeated-in-the-Field Shock of 1918

   Front-line soldiers who saw the 1918 spring offensives advance and who were still holding a line at the armistice experienced the sudden collapse, capitulation, and revolution at home as bewildering rather than inevitable. The gap between what they had witnessed and the political outcome made defeat feel imposed from behind. That perception became fertile ground for postwar betrayal myths.

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