Oberleutnant Theodor Heinrich Friedrich ERBE (1903)

Brigade-Ersatz-Bataillon 21
Born 18 June 1880
Killed in action 9 September 1914, aged 34
Burial site unknown.

Theodor Erbe was the son of H Erbe of Wettmar. He was married in 1907.

He studied at the Gymnasium, Hildesheim, and at the University of Göttingen where he took a PhD in English Philology in 1903. The same year, he published ‘Mirk’s Festial’, a collection of homilies by Johannes Mirkus. He read English at Merton as a Rhodes Scholar; he was one of two Rhodes Scholars admitted in the first year of the scheme. From 1907 until the outbreak of the war, he taught English in Berlin and Buenos Aires.

He was one of two German Mertonians killed in the war; he died fighting the Russians on the Eastern Front. (Many German Rhodes Scholars did not wish to fight the British.)