Walther von Mossner

Origins and early life

Walther von Mossner was born in Berlin in 1846, the son of Jakob Wilhelm Mossner, a Jewish banker of the city, and this fiche states plainly that he did not live as a Jew: he was baptised into the Protestant church of Saint Nicholas at Spandau on 26 April 1846, as an infant, and he is recorded here on the ground of his named Jewish father.

Work and career

His commission in the King's Hussars in 1865 came as a personal favour from King Wilhelm I to that father, and it was granted over the objections of officers who did not want a Jew, as they said, in a cavalry regiment; the Prussian officer corps was in practice closed to Jews and to men of Jewish descent, and his career is the exception that shows the rule. He fought in the war against Austria in 1866 and in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and 1871, was ennobled, and rose through the general staff.

He was appointed aide-de-camp to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1892, commanded a division and then a corps, and became governor of Strasbourg in 1903, one of the most sensitive military posts in the empire. He reached the rank of general of cavalry and was the last Prussian general to receive the Grand Order of the Black Eagle. He wrote a memoir of his service. He died in Berlin in 1932, the year before the regime that would have expelled him from the army came to power.