Casualty List of Jewish Soldiers of the Habsburg Army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1788-1820)

This is the first attempt to record the Jewish soldiers who became casualties in the numerous Wars between the Habsburg Monarchy and Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Jewish military service in the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian army from the mid-19th century onwards, especially during the First World War, is well known and documented. By contrast, nothing comparable has been done for the very first Jewish soldiers in modern history. The time has come to set the record straight!

The current database was compiled from the personal records of the War Archive (Kriegsarchiv) of the Austrian State Archives. At that time, the Habsburg army did not publish casualty lists other than mentioning the names of the most senior officers. To find individual Jewish soldiers who became casualties, one must identify serving Jewish soldiers in the regular musters and revision papers. Those found so far can be seen in the database Jewish Soldiers of the Habsburg Army (1788-1820), which should be used in parallel with this one. The current database offers an outtake with a separate list of Jewish soldiers who were killed, wounded, missing in action, or taken prisoner. The first version has 253 entries. These are arranged chronologically based on the date the soldier first became a casualty. The name of the battle or the action shows at the top of the table. Under each such action, up to four sub-categories are given:

1. K/KIA (Killed in Action) – Soldier killed outright in combat. Readers might be surprised how few such cases appear in the database. There are several possible reasons. Firstly, since 1781 the Habsburg manpower reports began to omit the rubric Vor Feind geblieben (left in front of the enemy) denoting soldiers killed in battle. This was part of a broader rationalisation of military records in the early days of Joseph II’s rule. Whichever was the cause of their death, all fatalities were now perceived as irrecoverable manpower wastage. Soldiers who died in service were now simply marked as gestorben. Identifying combat deaths is only possible by looking at monthly reports called Standes- und Diensttabellen. Even then, the number of combat deaths remains extraordinarily low. It appears that the Habsburg army formally recorded a soldier as ‘killed in action’ only if the body was identified. For this to happen, the army had to remain in control of the battlefield – in other words, the battle had to be won. For much of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, this was rarely the case on the Austrian side.  It appears that most combat deaths in the period landed in the rubric as ‘missing-in-action’.

2. W/WIA (Wounded in Action) – Muster rolls did not record wounds at all. Monthly tables did so very rarely. The latter were intended primarily as financial documents to record the source of the men’s pay. When a soldier entered hospital, his pay was issued from the hospital fund whose accounts were later reimbursed by the man’s regiment. While dates of hospitalisation were meticulously recorded, the cause of hospitalisation was not mentioned. In most cases, identifying wounded soldiers can only be done indirectly. When dozens or hundreds of men from the same unit were hospitalised on the same day directly after a major battle, it can be reasonably assumed that these were combat casualties. A sure way of identifying a wounded soldier was through the medical evaluation papers (Superarbitrierungs-Liste), which were filed for men no longer fit for wartime service.  These papers always mentioned combat wounds, as this was a major argument in favour of making the soldier eligible for admission into the invalids. Unfortunately, the survival rate of these documents is variable and the majority simply do not exist. This database employs two categories for wounded soldiers. When medical papers or hospitalisation date allows clear identification, a soldier is entered into the database as a certain case. When broader context allows (such as wartime service and numerous other hospitalisations from the same company on the same day, suggesting a skirmish), such men are entered as probable cases.

3. P/POW (Prisoner of War) – Unlike the previous two rubrics, the Habsburg military records usually mentioned soldiers taken prisoner (Kriegsgefangen/ In Kriegsgefangenschaft gefallen). The reason was again financial. Firstly, returning men had to be issued with backpay. Secondly, from the Third Coalition War onwards, reciprocal wartime prisoner swaps (Cartel) were discontinued, but the system remained in place to ensure that mutual settlement of accounts between two belligerent armies could happen after the war. This is not the only reason why prisoners make the largest single category in our database. For much of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, entire Austrian army corps were forced to surrender (for instance in Ulm in 1805). This happened so often that musters from 1806 and 1811 sometimes blankly omitted case of POWs, based on the assumption that nearly every soldier fell prisoner in the previous war. Therefore, for regiments who fought in Germany and Austerlitz in 1805, and in Bavaria and Deutsch-Wagram in 1809, one must also consult the monthly tables.

4. M/MIA (Missing in Action) – Recorded as Vor Feind vermisst or vermisst for short, this category denotes men who were missing when the battle ended. Anything could have happened to them. Some were dead (see rubric one), but others were taken prisoner, were lost, or deserted. The army recorded such missing men for the same reason as prisoners of war – to settle their backpay in future if necessary.

The total for each category of casualties is given at the bottom of the table for every war fought by the Habsburg army from 1792 to 1815. At the right hand side of the table are the grand totals for each category marked in red. At the end of every personal record are fields showing what happened to the soldier after he became a casualty. Wounded could recover or perish in hospital, while the prisoners and the missing could return. The same soldier could appear in the database more than once as he could be taken prisoner, be wounded or go missing several times. Only for those killed in action could the record be closed. For those who survived, the final fate was noted where known: discharge (including sub category), invaliding, desertion, or non-combat death. Men still in service when last mentioned in the documents are noted as ‘serves’. Whether complete or not, a detailed service record for each soldier as as I could reconstruct it from the sources is available in the database  Jewish Soldiers of the Habsburg Army (1788-1820).