Meno Burg - Officer in The Pre-March Era

Officer in The Pre-March Era

In the Pre-March Era it needed a new chief of the artillery, Prince Adalbert of Prussia, and a new king Frederick William IV to remove the injustice of the discriminatory Waffenfarbe (German for: “corps color”). Through a cabinet order of 16 April 1844, Burg was allowed to replace the black epaulettes of the armory with the red epaulettes of the artillery.

That was not the end of the discrimination. As the rank and quarter lists of the Prussian Army show, Burg was passed over by others who had entered the service after him. On 27 March 1847, Burg was granted the “character of a Major in the artillery” (German: Charakter als Major der Artillerie). That was actually not a real promotion. His uniform showed to the outside that he was a major, but in reality he did not serve on an established post of a major. He did not receive the salary of a major and he was not “in line” for another promotion. That was the end of his military career. The grounds given, that Burg’s post would have exceeded the budget for a field officer is not convincing. There were always two to three younger majors on fully paid positions at the school, younger officers without Burg’s merits. The political circumstances did not allow Jews to enter into the Prussian government positions or to get promoted if they had already a government position. A typical example is what Otto von Bismarck said on 15 June 1847 in the Vereinigten Landtag (Prussian Parliament). He said that he would “give the Jews all rights, but not to hold positions of authority in a Christian State”; if he had to obey a Jew, he would feel “deeply depressed and knuckled down”.

Burg had to endure similar experiences when it came to the award of military medals. Although he had been recommended since 1838 by the commander of the United Artillery and Engineer School for the Order of the Red Eagle (German: Roter Adlerorden) Class IV, it took more than three years until the medal was finally awarded to him by king Frederick William IV. The value of the medal can be explained with the fact that in the Artillery Brigade, which Burg belonged to until his promotion to captain, had been – at the moment of the award of the medal to Burg – under eighteen captains only one who had the medal and among the eight captains at his school, where he worked as an instructor, Burg was the only one. It appears that the Prussian kings did not hesitate as much when it came to awarding civilian medals to Jews. Burg repeatedly received high civilian awards.