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.