Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

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Hitler's Jewish Soldiers
By Bryan Mark Rigg.

This is an extremely well-done book.

We can clearly see how this book might be dynamite. The risk of this book is that this very important unearthing of a part of the Holocaust that normally doesn't get discussed will be seized by the fever-swamp to imply that the Jews were, somehow, responsible for their own predicament. Riggs avoids this by extensive scholarship, academic objectivity and show casing the inhuman quandary that “Mischling” – Germans with a Jewish parent or one or two Jewish grandparents – found themselves in because of the inhuman system of National Socialist racism.

The “problem” that the National Socialists found themselves in upon seizing power was determining “who were the Jews?” Clearly, Germans who were religiously Jewish were Jews, but were Germans who had converted from Judaism? How about people who had a parent, or a grandparent, who had converted from Judaism? Was someone who was Christian and whose parents were Christians but had a Christian grandparent who had married a convert to Christianity from Judaism a “Jew”? What about those people in that situation who had no idea of their grandparent's conversion? Were they Jewish?

The Nazi answer about Germans who had converted from Judaism was that they remained “racially” Jewish. This represented a substantial departure from historic Christianity, which treated converts as equally Christian as non-converts. But the question of such a person's descendants was more difficult and the policy treatment of such persons changed over the course of the Third Reich.

Rigg opens his book with an in-depth bit of analysis into the question of the size of the Mischling population. The answer is not precise, but the general conclusion is “a whole bunch.” Here is Riggs' conclusion:

“One does not know how many full Jews served. If the ratio of 97 full Jews for every 967 half-Jews can be applied from the data collected for this study, and given the estimate that 60,000 half-Jewish soldiers served, then one could assume that at least 6,019 full Jews also served in the Wehrmacht. The numbers presented here are insignificant relative to the Wehrmacht's size, but are startling in light of the Holocaust. The idea that at least 150,000men of Jewish ancestry served in the Wehrmacht is hard to accept. Nevertheless, the evidence strongly suggests that was the case.” (p. 65.)

This may be the least interesting conclusion of the book.....but...gosh!

Rigg reaches his conclusion from intermarriage trends, which resulted in the estimate that “quarter Jews were twice as plentiful as half Jews, putting their numbers at 140,000.” (p. 64.) This is a sizable number, but it must be kept in mind that 17 million served in the Wehrmacht, making the Mischling component less than 1% of the total manpower of the Wehrmacht. (p. 64.)

The Nazis tended to distinguish between full Jews and Mischling, but, nonetheless, discriminated against Mischling. The Nazi concern, in part, was that treating Mischling like full Jews would be demoralizing to Non-Jewish Germans, aka “Aryan Germans,” who would see their relatives being persecuted by the State. (Concern about demoralizing Mischling soldiers was not something that mattered to the National Socialists.) As a result, while there was persecution of Mischling, the persecution was less than that directed at full Jews. Thus, Mischling could serve in the military, but they could not hope to advance beyond a low-level non-commissioned officer position. Also, periodically during the war, after the victory in Poland, the Party issued orders requiring the discharge of Mischling from the military, which order was countermanded when manpower was needed. It seems that a quite a number of Mischling were able to survive the Holocaust by virtue of being in the Wehrmacht and riding out the changes in policy with the help of officers who needed trained soldiers or were uninterested in Nazi racial fanaticism.

The depth of racial fanaticism is demonstrated by the long discussion in this book about how Hitler personally undertook to review every exemption provided to any Mischling from the Nazi racial classification system. The system provided some flexibility for Mischling who had proven their bravery on the battlefield. Exception or connected or lucky soldiers – as well as civilians – were able to obtain a Deutschblutigkeitserkarung which declared them de jure Aryans. Others were able to acquire a Genehmigung – an exemption – that permitted them to remain in the Wehrmacht with the promise that their Aryan status would be determined after the war. The system was complex and convoluted and involved investigations of families and photos, ruling out candidates that looked “too Jewish.” (A similar system was put in place for mixed Aryan-Jewish marriages.) At the end of the line, Hitler's approval was required, such that no matter how the war was going, he would spend a few hours a day pondering photos to determine exemptions. (He would also eventually decree that exemptions would only be given to those who had demonstrated dedication to the Nazi Party.)

The idea of “Jewish” Nazi Party members can cause an even more severe moment of cognitive dissonance, but this underscores a major subtext of the book; being a “Jew” didn't mean to the Third Reich what it means to us. I suspect that most people thought of “Jews” as “those guys” – religiously and culturally Jewish, not “one of us” an assimilated Christian. Many of the “Jews” had had no contact with Judaism for generations; they were Protestant or Christian for generations, and they might never have known that Grandma Sophie had converted when she got married in 1872. The Nazi true-believer – Heydrich, Jules Streicher and others – though had a fully worked out theory of Jewish contamination that extended to the Aryan wives of German men. Quarter Jews and Half-Jews soon found themselves in a legal limbo.

On the other hand, there were Mischling Germans who knew that their parents, grandparents or relatives were Jewish in the classic sense. This book is filled with the unimaginably tragic stories of Mischling soldiers who would return home on leave to find out that a father or mother had been deported. There are stories about how Mischling Wehrmacht soldiers would go to Dachau to visit a father or mother; in one story, such a soldier obtained the promise of a camp commandant that so long as his father remained well-behaved and kept his boots shined, he would look out for him.

These Mischling found themselves risking their lives for a country that they knew was murdering their family members and discriminating against them, but they lacked any feasible option, and many honestly loved their country.

They also knew that they might well be the next victims. As the war continued, the contest between the Nazi radicals and the Interior Department, including Bernhard Losener – who Riggs depicts as something of a hero of the Mischling cause (p. 271 – 272) – moved in the direction of the radicals, with the direction of persecution heading toward treating half-Jews and then quarter-Jews as full Jews, with all attendant consequences. Riggs opines that if Hitler had won the war, the Mischling populations would have been murdered.

Riggs has a fascinating final chapter about what the Mischling might have known about the Holocaust. The answer is that to a man they claimed that they didn't know about the Holocaust. They knew that their relatives were being murdered; some had actually witnessed the mass murder of Jews; some had been to Auschwitz; but they didn't put together the pieces they knew into a a conclusion about the Holocaust. Rigg writes:

“From the evidence, one would think that most Germans should have been aware of what today is called the Holocaust. This assertion applies even more to the Mischlinge who had opportunities to find out about the Holocaust. But most refused to believe or failed to assess the incriminating evidence they heard about or witnessed. Although many doubted the accuracy of the death certificates of relatives that stated they had died of “natural causes in the camps,” they did not believe their relatives had been systematically murdered. Many could not understand why the people they had grown up with would want to kill them or their families. Deported Jews often led their Mischling relatives to believe that their deportation was not serious. When Harald Ettheimer's aunt left for her deportation, she told him not to worry because she would soon return.

Since the victims themselves, according to Holocaust historian Lucy Davidowicz, alleged that it was beyond their imagination that they would be gassed and killed, one should not expect ordinary Germans to much more. Steinberg wrote, “Holocaust records show that Jews themselves often refused to believe what was happening in spite of the evidence of their own eyes.” Another Holocaust historian, Leni Yahil, claimed that systematic murder was beyond anyone's imagination. Marian Kaplan wrote, “But a far more effective barrier to their comprehension was the sheer inconceivability of the genocide. Even those who received information frequently reacted with disbelief or repressed it. “ If Jews did not believe what was happening to them, it follows that most Mischlinge also could not believe the Holocaust was happening, because they had less direct exposure to persecution. Almost all the interviews conducted for this book supports this conclusion. The average German who had even less contact with those who were persecuted, was highly unlikely to suspect the extent of the Holocaust.” (p. 265.)

Rigg offers many examples of this failure to comprehend:

“Hans Schmechel , who lost both grandparents, Emma and Wilhelm Gotha, at Theresienstadt, manned a flak gun in 1944 while the Nazis deported his brothers, Horst and Heinz, to an OT forced labor camp. They found it quite ironic that two of them had to perform forced labor in an OT camp while the other served in the Luftwaffe. Schmechel's family had only heard about the atrocities when his Aryan uncle, Walter Schmechel, a guard at Auschwitz, came home in 1943 and reported what he had seen. The family believed the uncle but still did not know that systematic extermination of millions was under way.

An even more bizarre case was that of Horst Reinhard's family. While Reinhard served with false papers to make the authorities think he was a quarter-Jew, his father was forced to serve as an army staff sergeant in the SS guard unit at the concentration camp Flossenburg. Reinhard's Jewish mother, Marie, even lived with her husband in the camp's staff housing and thus survived. Reinhard said that although he wrote letters to his parents at the camp, he did not know about the Holocaust until the 1950s. He knew about deportations but, like most other Germans, never thought the Jews were being systematically murdered. The Schmechel and Reinhard families had more information than most families, but they still failed to either understand or believe the signs they received.” (p. 253 – 254.)

There is a fascinating insight in this about how knowledge may be a communal activity; we know things when we discuss our different perspectives and reach conclusions. The ability to take counsel – as St. Thomas Aquinas would put it – was denied in the totalitarian Nazi society.

A final interesting feature of Nazi racism is the appeal to the relatively modern science of genetics. I have recently watch the Kenneth Branagh movie “Conspiracy” about the Wannsee Conference. There is a scene where Stuckart, played by Colin Firth, is advocating to sterilize Mischlinge and does a brief speech about “Mendeling out.” Nazis used Mendel's name as a verb to descript genetic expression between mixed breeds.” (p. 320, fn. 180.)
My appreciation for that movie, and my understanding of the issues these Nazi characters were discussing. Rigg writes:

“The racial theorist Dr. Achim Gercke in the RMI introduced another argument when he wrote in September 1935 that Mischling could really be disguised Jews. Anyone who mathematically defined “50 percent, 25 percent, 12 percent, 6.25 percent, etc., Mischlinge” had not understood Mendel's laws of genetics, Gercke maintained. Gercke warned that Mischlinge could also “mendel out pure Jews.” (p. 96.)

Hitler followed this genetic approach:

“As the war worsened, Hitler became less generous with his exemptions. He told General Jodl during an afternoon tea session on 10 May 1942 that he regretted giving exemptions to so many half-Jewish soldiers. “For experience showed, “ Hitler said,” “that from these Jewish offsprings, four, five or six generations of pure Jews keep Mendeling out.” (p. 219 citing Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgesprache im Fuhrerhauptquartier, 1941 – 1942.) (Sidenote: Rigg's sources is encyclopedic and deep.)

“On 2 July, Bormann wrote Bouhler complaining that Bouhler had continued to send applications to Hitler that did not meet the criteria. Bormann explained that Hitler had expressed his indignation at the handling of Mischling cases. He explained that only men who had performed special service to the Party during the Kampfzeit should be considered. Party membership alone was not enough. Hitler warned that if they were not careful, the Mishlinge would create a new Jewish race. One needed to exercise caution, Hitler had told Bormann, because it had been proven that Mischlinge always “Mendeled” out Jews. Hitler pointed to Cripps and Roosevelt to support his claim.” (p. 223.)

My take-away on this is that the facile assumption that Nazi anti-Semitism was simply Christian anti-Semitism ignores the injection of the new science.

This book is full of surprises, perhaps, because we have a model of what Nazi anti-Semitism must have been like. Adding the details of the treatment of the Mischlinge corrects what has become a more or less politically correct morality tale. The actual facts are more nuanced, and less about “either/or” – either Germans knew about the Holocaust or they are lying and either the victims were Jews or they were not. And that leads to some fascinating observations about humanity and human behavior.