Letters, poems and photograph by Alfred Koch (1893-1918) collected and commented by his mother Auguste and his brother Richard Koch of Frankfurt.

“The outbreak of the War”, his mother writes in the preface to the collected correspondence, ”produced in him a joyful excitement, it appealed to his youthful sense of adventure.  England’s declaration of war, on the other hand, sent him into fits of rage. He saw very clearly what it all meant for us [Germany]. All the same, he left the next morning in good spirits and full of hope, as if he were going to a maneuver.”  Alfred Koch left home on August 6, 1914, and joined the 116th Reserve Infantry Regiment as a Vice-Officer.  Koch, who suffered from asthma since his early childhood years, left school before graduation and worked in a slipper factory in Frankfurt. In 1912, he was called up for the military duty, which he served in Erlingen (Bavaria) and was discharged with the rank of a Corporal in Reserve.

Koch was rejected for fighting in the field because of medical reasons, served in different supply division throughout the war, mostly in France but also in Ukraine and  Russia.In his letters home he expresses his  “responsibility towards Judaism and his loyalty towards Germany one the one hand as well as his disappointment about Jews being rejected for higher ranks and anti- Semitism in the German Army on the other hand. He fell on April 28, 1918 on the Western front at Les Trois Fermes near Bayeul in Northern France.