In 2002, University of Kansas Press published an intriguing book called Hitler’s Jewish soldiers. I have been meaning to get hold of it but haven’t yet, and being in Australia, am not aware of what general reception and coverage of this book in the US has been like. I’d certainly be interested to hear from any readers who have followed this. The book, from what I’ve read about it in articles like this certainly documents one of the most interesting quirks in history:
Germans of mixed Jewish descent, the so-called Mischlinge, suddenly found themselves in limbo. As many as 3 million Germans, at least 25 to 50 percent Jewish by descent, fell into this category. Many had no idea they had a Jewish ancestor until the Nazis told them.
Suddenly second-class citizens, thousands sought to “redeem” themselves as Germans through service to the party in the Wehrmacht. They were eager to demonstrate they were Germans first in a Germany where it was a crime to be Jewish at all.
Rigg points out that “These Mischlinge internalized Nazi standards…. Many behaved the same way as Aryans…out of loyalty to Germany, belief in the Nazi government, because they were scared to act otherwise, for opportunistic reasons or, most commonly, out of a mixture of all four.”
Sympathy with Hitler’s goals for Germany was apparently very common among Mischlinge. Rigg was told by more than one of his interviewees, “If not for my [Jewish] grandmother, I could have been a Nazi.”
Wehrmacht policy on Mischlinge varied depending upon which service one was in (it was best to be in the Luftwaffe or the Kriegsmarine) and whom one knew (a high party official or military officer with access to Hitler or the Reich Chancellery was best), as well as upon whose desk a particular soldier’s file landed. Despite pressure from the Nazi Party to eject all partial Jews from the service, Wehrmacht officers were largely willing through the end of the war to retain the services of those Mischlinge in whom the Reich had invested money and time in training and who proved good and tested comrades in battle. A very select few of high-ranking and talented individuals never had to worry.
The book alleges that one of these ‘Mischlinge’ was the Nazi war criminal Erhard Milch.
There’s an excerpt from the book here.
And here’s another great irony – this picture of ‘Mischlinge’ soldier Werner Goldberg was used by a Nazi propaganda newspaper, and captioned ‘The ideal German soldier’.
Here is the ‘Mischlinge’ Luftwaffe General Helmut Wilberg who was ‘Aryanised’ by Hitler in 1935.
Apologies in advance to all German readers but this stuff doesn’t exactly disabuse me of the prejudice that Germany was one screwed-up nation. (“Oh, he’s Jewish but he’s a decent chap, a good killing machine. We’ll spare him”) And just what the hell were these ‘Mischlinge’ soldiers thinking??? Was this German nationalist madness so infectious that it could overcome family feeling?
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