Abraham (Apel) Waitz – First Jewish Soldier in the Imperial-Royal Engineer Corps?

The manpower records of the Habsburg Army are so detailed that even a cursory survey would give a good overview of the fate that awaited most Jewish recruits. Although there were cases to the contrary, nearly all of the initial intake of Jews enlisted directly after Joseph II’s conscription edict, were sent to the serve in the Military Transport Corps (k.k. Militar-Fuhrwesens-Corps).[1] From 1796, Jewish recruits were allocated mostly to the infantry. It has been argued that Jews were excluded from serving in smaller, professional, and more prestigious branches of the army, such as cavalry, artillery and the technical corps.[2] This view makes sense in light of modern perceptions of discrimination which Jews endured in that time. But this logic covers in part a particular research dynamic. Historians arriving at the Austrian State Archives – and indeed any archive – are usually on a research leave. Time limits and a cap on the number of boxes which can be ordered – let alone read – invertedly results in scholars prioritizing sources which most likely to contain relevant information. For Jewish soldiers of the Habsburg army, the source material of choice were the minutes of the Aulic War Council, where Juden makes a separate entry in the annual index volumes. However, this tends to have the effect that researchers only look at official army policy as dictated from its centre in Vienna. To see how things functioned in reality, one has to look at the actual manpower reports. In the few cases when muster rolls were consulted, those were only infantry units.[3] But to see whether Jews also admitted into the corps d’elite, one has to look consistently at their records, and this requires more than a summer research stay in Vienna.  

Earlier this year, I came across the first two Jewish recruits allocated to the Cavalry. This happened 236 years ago in March 1790, suggesting that the Imperial resolution that Jews were to be treated equally under military jurisdiction was not a moot point.[4] Earlier on I wrote on Jews who were members of the founding cadre of the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger – another prestigious unit in which Jews were assumed not to serve.[5] Now I came across another such instance. Abraham (or Apel) Waitz, admitted in 1815 into the Imperial-Royal Corps of Engineers (k.k. Ingenieur Corps) – the uppermost echelon the technical services of the Habsburg army.

Apel was inducted into the army reserve in August 1808 and following a month-long training period was conscripted directly into 24^th Line Infantry Regiment ‘Strauch’.[6] This regiment was transferred from Lower Austria to Galicia only a few months before and was allocated a new recruitment district in Brzezan (Today Berezhany, Ukraine). At that time Apel was living in Kamianka-Buzka, but apparently he actually born in the provincial capital in Lviv (Image 1). We know this because, when the 24^th infantry marched to war in February 1809, Apel was transferred to the 30^th Line Infantry ‘De Ligne’ and placed in its Depot Company at its headquarters in Lviv. Following the disastrous Austrian campaign in Poland, the troops of the Duchy of Warsaw occupied Galicia and took Lviv on 28^th May, where Apel was taken prisoner. For all purposes it appeared that Apel’s military career was over, but this was not the case.[7]

In Autumn 1810, Apel re-appeared in Bukowina where he was arrested as a former soldier of the 24^th Regiment by the locally based 1^st Garrison Battalion (Image 2). After spending a month under guard Apel was released, but whichever story he gave did not entirely satisfy his new unit, which transferred him in summer 1811 to the 2^nd Garrison Battalion on the Slavonian Military Frontier. Tasked with holding two fortresses – Brood and Alt Gradisca – directly on the Ottoman border, this battalion appears to have been a depository of deserters and other untrustworthy elements. Sending them to the ‘wild south’ of the Monarchy was a punishment in its own right. Besides desertion prospects there was severally limited: fortresses were not only hard to get into, but also out of.[8] Besides, the only place to escape to would have been Ottoman Bosnia.

Apel left Câmpulung in July 1811, arriving at his new unit at Slavonski Brod two months and 800 kilometres later. His subsequent service on the Slavonian Military Border went really well. In summer 1812, Apel was trusted enough to be sent as a courier to regional headquarters at Esseg (modern Osijek, Croatia). There he fell ill and was hospitalised for a month before returning to his battalion at Brood. One year later, Apel was sent on detached service to the great border fortress of Peterwardein the main Habsburg stronghold opposite Belgrade (Image 3). There Apel was assigned to the field apothecary – a position of great trust because medicine was expensive, and the apothecary had a large supply of alcohol. Furthermore, his placement there suggests Apel had above average education for a common soldier. In 1814, he was attached to the Peterwardein garrison hospital where he stayed for more than a year. In July 1815, Apel was transferred to the k.k. Ingenieur Corps Corps.

The Habsburg Army Corps of Engineers consisted of professional officers commissioned by the Engineering Academy in Vienna. Standing directly under the commandant, the military engineer was the chief technical officer in the fortress.[9] As a particularly important border stronghold, Peterwardein may have had several military engineers in the garrison. But Apel was only a private soldier, so his likely role in the Corps was either batman (officer’s servant) or magazine watchman. Whichever, the fortress administration went into the extra effort to ensure he could stay in Peterwardein for good. As long as Apel remained a soldier of the garrison battalion, his old unit could summon him back. Formal transfer into the Engineers ensured he stayed in Peterwardein.

Moving between units required the issue of a formal transfer sheet, which survives (Image 4). According to this document, Apel carried a First-Class Veteran Badge. This distinction was usually given after 10 years of unblemished service. However, Apel was awarded the badge after less than eight years, of which more than a year remained unaccounted after Lviv fell to the Poles. One possible explanation is that, for particularly meritorious wartime service, one year could count as two. In any case, the fact that Apel was awarded the Veteran’s Badge earlier than prescribed by the regulations, indicates that, whatever happened in 1809, Apel’s honour was fully restored.

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* I am grateful to Debbie Bryce for her help with this text.

[1] Ilya Berkovich, ‘“und dieses gute Verhaltenszeugniß geben kann”: Two Jewish Soldiers in the Croatian Campaign of 1790’, Die Habsburgermonarchie: Fragen, Quellen und Ergebnisse zur Geschichte der Neuzeit (Blog), (29 January 2025), https://doi.org/10.58079/136fq.

[2] For instance: Erwin A. Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten, 1788–1918, (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014), p. 51; Peter C. Appelbaum, Habsburg Sons: Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Army, 1788–1918, (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022), p. 27.

[3] So far the only one to do this was Rabbi Max Grünwald, who looked at the 1811 and 1817/8 peacetime musters of the 4th, 10th, 15th and 44th Line Infantry Regiments, see: Österreichs Juden in den Befreiungskriegen, (Leipzig: W. Kaufmann, 1908), pp. 21–4. His findings on that point were quoted without further ado by Schmidl, Habsburgs jüdische Soldaten, p. 55 and Appelbaum, Habsburg Sons, pp. 27-8; On how to identify Jewish soldiers in the manpower records of the Habsburg army, see: Ilya Berkovich, ‘Jewish Mercenaries in Habsburg Service: Soldiers of the Freikorps Grün Loudon (1796–1798)’, PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien 29 (2023), pp. 68–79, [esp. 73–4], https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-65023.

[4] Ilya Berkovich, ‘The Adaptation of the Habsburg Army Oath for Jewish Soldiers: The Case of Prague Infantry Volunteer David Koschler (1789)’, Judaica Bohemiae 60 (2025), pp. 25–44, [here pp. 30–1, 42–3]

[5] Ilya Berkovich, ‘Wolf Bikard (1790-1878) and other Jewish Kaiserjäger at the End of the Napoleonic Period’, Die Habsburgermonarchie: Fragen, Quellen und Ergebnisse zur Geschichte der Neuzeit (Blog), (16 January 2023), https://doi.org/10.58079/pewf; see also: Ilya Berkovich, ‘Die ersten jüdischen Kaiserjäger’, in: Manfred Schullern-Schrattenhofen and all, Die Tiroler Kaiserjäger: Geschichte, Uniformierung, Ausrüstung und Traditionspflege von 1816 bis heute, (Vienna: Militaria, 2023), p. 201.

[6] On the Reserve Anstalt introduced in 1808, see: Gunther E. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 118;  Ilya Berkovich and Michael Wenzel, ‘The Austrian Army’, in: Alan Forrest (gen. ed.), The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars, 3 Vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022-23), Vol. 2, pp. 106–28 [here pp. 122– 3] https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108278096.007; For a summary of the history of the 24^th Line infantry regiment, see: Alfons von Wrede, Geschichte der k. und k. Wehrmacht, 5 Vols, (Vienna: Seidel, 1898-1905), Vol. 1 pp. 281-90.

[7] John h. Gill, 1809 Thunder on the Danube: Napoleon’s Defeat of the Habsburgs, 3 Vols. (London: Frontline Books: 2008-10), Vol. 3 pp. 27 –35. I initially entered Apel into my database ‘Casualty List of Jewish Soldiers of the Habsburg Army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1788-1820)’, [Dataset], Version 3, Zenodo (18 March 2026), row 249,  https://doi.org/10.5281/Zenodo.19101198. An updated version of his service record covering his subsequent service in the military border will be made available in the next version of this, as well as all future versions of my main research database: Ilya Berkovich, ‘Jewish Soldiers of the Habsburg Army (1788-1820)’ [Dataset], Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13787515.

[8] Compare with a first-hand account of serving in a fortress garrison in Württemberg in the 1780s’: Johann Steininger, Leben und Abenteuer des Joh. Steininger, Gustav Diezel, (ed.), (Württemberg: Wachendorf, 1841), pp. 39, 42–4.

[9] Oscar Tauber and Rudolf von Ottenfeld, Die österreichische Armee: von 1700 bis 1867, (Vienna: Berté and Czeiger, 1895), pp. 438–9; Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries, pp. 21, 32.

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