STEPHEN DAISLEY
IN A tranquil verge in the Belgian countryside 85 men lie in repose, British casualties of the Great War. Hyde Park Corner (Royal Berks) Cemetery, outside Ploegsteert, looks like thousands of memorials across Europe, a quiet and dignified resting place for those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
This site is different, though, and when you arrive at row B, plot 21, you begin to understand why. This marks the grave of Max Seller. Unlike the men he is buried alongside, he was not British but German. His headstone is different too, for while the others are engraved with a cross, Seller’s is etched with the Star of David. What quirk of history brought a German Jew to be interred with the very men he was sworn to kill?
This was the question German historian Robin Schäfer set out to answer after he stumbled across this curious grave site in 2012.
The author of Fritz and Tommy has researched World War I extensively but the mystery of Max Seller was one he could not shake and he knew he had to solve it.
“A number of German soldiers are buried in British cemeteries,” Schäfer explains. “That is not uncommon. The unusual and noteworthy thing, and what sparked my interest in the burial initially, is that Seller is buried side by side with his former enemy, not singled out or grouped together with other Germans. That is unique.”
If the conditions of Seller’s burial are unique, it is because the course of his life and the circumstances of his death were extraordinary. Seller was an astonishingly brave soldier who fell in an act of last-ditch heroism that was half-daring and half-mad.
His courage was such that even the British held him in esteem and accorded him a fitting funeral. The one place where his valour was not recognised was back home; his service to the Kaiser did not save his family when the Nazis eventually came to power.
Born in Gunzenhausen, Bavaria in 1890, Maximilian Seller and four siblings were raised alone by their mother Martha after the death