Joseph Behm (1900-1918) was an Imperial German Army private who was killed in action while serving on the Western Front of World War I.
Biography[]
Joseph Behm was born in Germany in 1896, and he studied theology during his youth. He and his high school classmates Albert Kropp, Paul Baumer, Friedrich Muller, Franz Kemmerich, and Peter Leer were convinced to join the Imperial German Army in 1914 by their nationalistic teacher Kantorek, and they were assigned to Lieutenant Stanislaus Katzinsky's 2nd Company on the Western Front in France. Behm was overweight and youthful, and he enlisted in the army due to peer pressure. He was blinded in no man's land during the Hundred Days Offensive of 1918 and was shot before his friends could rescue him; he was the first of his friends to die.