Hitler's Jewish Soldiers
The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent
in the German Military
Bryan Mark Rigg
May 2002
528 pages, 95 photographs, 6 x 9
Modern War
Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-7006-1178-9, $29.95
As featured on NBC-TV's Dateline
(first aired Sunday, June
9, 2002)
WINNER OF THE 2003 COLBY AWARD
William E. Colby Military
Writers' Symposium
Click
here to learn more about the author's speaking tour.
 On the murderous road to "racial purity" Hitler
encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views
and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries
of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he
discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was
more difficult than he'd anticipated. As Bryan Mark Rigg shows in
this provocative new study, nowhere was that heinous process more
fraught with contradiction and confusion than in the German
military.
Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly
large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as
Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial
laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the
actual number was much higher than previously thought--perhaps as
many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking
officers, even generals and admirals.
As Rigg fully documents for the first time, a great many of these
men did not even consider themselves Jewish and had embraced the
military as a way of life and as devoted patriots eager to serve a
revived German nation. In turn, they had been embraced by the
Wehrmacht, which prior to Hitler had given little thought to the
"race" of these men but which was now forced to look deeply into the
ancestry of its soldiers.
The process of investigation and removal, however, was marred by
a highly inconsistent application of Nazi law. Numerous "exemptions"
were made in order to allow a soldier to stay within the ranks or to
spare a soldier's parent, spouse, or other relative from
incarceration or far worse. (Hitler's own signature can be found on
many of these "exemption" orders.) But as the war dragged on, Nazi
politics came to trump military logic, even in the face of the
Wehrmacht's growing manpower needs, closing legal loopholes and
making it virtually impossible for these soldiers to escape the fate
of millions of other victims of the Third Reich.
Based on a deep and wide-ranging research in archival and
secondary sources, as well as extensive interviews with more than
four hundred Mischlinge and their relatives, Rigg's study breaks
truly new ground in a crowded field and shows from yet another angle
the extremely flawed, dishonest, demeaning, and tragic essence of
Hitler's rule.
 Side and front photographs of "half-Jew"
Anton Mayer, similar to those that often accompanied a
Mischling's application for exemption.
"Through videotaped interviews, painstaking attention to
personnel files, and banal documents not normally consulted by
historians, and spurred by a keen sense of personal mission, Rigg
has turned up an unexplored and confounding chapter in the history
of the Holocaust. The extent of his findings has surprised
scholars."--Warren Hoge, New York Times
"The revelation that Germans of Jewish blood, knowing the Nazi
regime for what it was, served Hitler as uniformed members of his
armed forces must come as a profound shock. It will surprise even
professional historians of the Nazi years." --John Keegan,
author of The Face of Battle and The Second World
War
"Startling and unexpected, Rigg's study conclusively
demonstrates the degree of flexibility in German policy toward the
Mischlinge, the extent of Hitler's involvement, and, most
importantly, that not all who served in the armed forces were
anti-Semitic, even as their service aided the killing
process."--Michael Berenbaum, author of The World Must
Know: The History of the Holocaust
"Rigg's extensive knowledge and the preliminary conclusions
drawn from his research impressed me greatly. I firmly believe
that his in-depth treatment of the subject of German soldiers of
Jewish descent in the Wehrmacht will lead to new perspectives on
this portion of 20th century German military history."--Helmut
Schmidt, Former Chancellor of Germany
"An impressively researched work with important implications
for hotly debated questions. Rigg tells some exquisitely poignant
stories of individual human experiences that complicate our
picture of state and society in the Third Reich."--Nathan A.
Stoltzfus, Florida State University, author of Resistance
of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi
Germany
"An impressive work filled with interesting stories. . . . By
helping us better understand Nazi racial policy at the
margins--i.e., its impact on certain members of the German
military--Rigg's study clarifies the central problems of Nazi
Jewish policies overall."--Norman Naimark, Stanford
University, author of Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in
Twentieth-Century Europe
"An illuminating and provocative study that merits a wide
readership and is sure to be much discussed."--Dennis E.
Showalter, Colorado College, author of Tannenberg: Clash of
Empires
"An outstanding job of research and analysis. Rigg's book will
add a great deal to our understanding of the German military, of
the place of Jews and people of Jewish descent in the Nazi state,
and of the Holocaust. It forces us to deal with the full, complex
range of possible actions and reactions by individuals caught up
in the Nazi system."--Geoffrey P. Megargee, author of
Inside Hitler's High Command
"With the skill of a master detective, Bryan Rigg reveals the
surprising and largely unknown story of Germans of Jewish origins
in the Nazi military. His work contributes to our understanding of
the complexity of faith and identity in the Third
Reich."--Paula E. Hyman, Yale University, author of
Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History and The
Jews of Modern France
"A major piece of scholarship which traces the peculiar twists
and turns of Nazi racial policy toward men in the Wehrmacht, often
in the highest ranks, who had partly Jewish backgrounds. Rigg has
uncovered personal stories and private archives which literally
nobody knew existed. His book will be an important contribution to
German history."--Jonathan Steinberg, University of
Pennsylvania, author of All or Nothing: The Axis and the
Holocaust 1941-1943
"An original, groundbreaking, and significant contribution to
the history of the Wehrmacht and Nazi Germany."--James S.
Corum, School of Advanced Air Power Studies, author of The
Roots of Blitzkrieg and The Luftwaffe
"Rigg's work has discovered new academic
territory."--Manfred Messerschmidt, Freiburg University,
author of Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat (The Wehrmacht in the Nazi
State)
"Rigg's bracing and unintimidated study lays bare the
contradiction, confusion and expedience that governed Mischlinge
policy and the maiming cost to those whose lives were burdened by
anxiety, guilt and collusion. In the end we must be grateful for
his book, a penetrating light cast on some of the murkier corners
of the human psyche."--Michael Skakun,
Aufbau
"Rigg has opened brand new territory for historians and
students of war, offering new insight into the Nazi mentality on
race."--World War II Magazine
"Rigg has done a very significant piece of historical research
and writing."--Milt Rosenberg, WGN Radio, Chicago
"A brilliant and extremely disturbing work of masterful
historical research. A must read for everyone. It raises more
moral dilemmas than one can answer."--Steve Pieczenik,
former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and co-creator of the
best selling novels and TV series OP-Center and Net
Force
BRYAN MARK RIGG received his B.A. with honors in history
from Yale University in 1996. Yale awarded him the Henry Fellowship
for graduate study at Cambridge University, where he received his
M.A. in 1997 and Ph.D. in 2002. Currently Professor of History at
American Military University, he has served as a volunteer in the
Israeli Army and as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. His
research for this book has been featured in the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, and London Daily Telegraph.
Click
here to learn more about the author and his research
experiences.
The thousands of pages of documents and oral testimonies (8mm and
VHS video) the author collected for this study have been purchased
by the National Military Archive of Germany. The Bryan Mark Rigg
Collection is housed in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in
Freiburg, Germany.
To view resource materials, including notes,
bibliography, and index, click here.
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