An Oxford college wants to commemorate all those connected to it who died in World War One, irrespective of the country they died fighting for.
The Queen’s College currently has 121 names on its World War One memorial but that omits those who did not fight for British forces.
A proposal to add five new names – including three German soldiers – follows a similar move by the city’s New College in 1930, Merton and Magdalen Colleges in 1994 and University College in 2018.
The Queen’s College said the “appropriate and unobtrusive response” was “justified by the need to remember all members of the college community who died”.
The names to be added are:
- Carl Heinrich Hertz, who was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1893 and died in France in 1918
- Erich Joachim Peucer, who was born in Colmar in 1888 – which is now in France but was then part of the German Empire – and died in Italy in 1917
- Hungarian Paul Nicholas Esterházy, who matriculated in 1901 and died in 1915 in Poland
- Gustav Adolf Jacobi, who was born in Weimar in Germany in 1885 and is thought to have died fighting in 1914. He is already included on a memorial at Rhodes House in Oxford
- Emile Jacot, who fought in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, was wounded and died of his injuries in 1928. It is unclear where he was born
Names currently listed on the memorial include George Tyrrell, from Oxford, who was a chorister in the college’s choir for eight years. He died in France in December 1915, aged 20.
The move is expected to be confirmed by Oxford City Council in the coming weeks.
