Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers (08.10.03)

An important addition to the Holocaust literature is Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers (University of Kansas Press). Rigg is a Yale-trained historian, received a fellowship at Cambridge University, and collected an incredible amount of documentation in Germany..His book received the 2003 Colby Award. He is now under contract to write a similar book for Yale University Press, which he is preparing at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

He examines the Nuremberg Racial Laws, which recognized four categories of Jews: full Jew, half-Jew and quarter Jew. Quite apart from being subject to persecution, in theory they could not rise in the military, even though in World War I Jews were numerous in the German and Austrian armies, had distinguished themselves amd had suffered great losses. Apparently Hitler's grandmother had been seduced by a Jew, making him a quarter Jew. This was a secret obsession for him. Possibly his grandfather is responsible for his obsession. However, he thought he could distinguish between a Jew and a non-Jew, and he personally proclaimed Aryan-looking Jews Aryan. Equally odd was the Jewish concept of Jewishness being inherited through the mother. Rigg tells the story of a German Jews who had been in a concentration camp. After the war he went to Israel, where he was asked about his mother. She was Christian. In that case, he must formally convert to Judaism. He said he could not because he was an atheist. Too bad, so he returned to Germany.

Despite the Nuremberg Laws, some half Jews rose to the very top in the Nazi military. Two of them played important roles in the Luftwaffe: Erhard Milch and General Erhard Willberg. At sea there was U-boat commander quarter Jew Admiral Bernhard Rogge, who sank a British ship and somehow found on it secret plans for the defense of southeast Asia. He presented them to the Japanese, thus greatly facilitating their conquest of the area. The Japanese rewarded him with a Samurai sword, a very great honor. Other Nazi leaders were part Jewish, includingReinhard Heydrich, "the Hangman of Europe" and the commander of the Bismarck. One thing is open to question. These commanders said later that they knew nothing about Auschwitz and the concentration camps. Yet when I lived in Bayreuth in 1933, people knew about Dachau and joked "Schweigen ist gold, reden ist Dachau" (silence is golden, to speak is Dachau). Rigg says that during the war Germans were so preoccupied with staying alive that they could not think of anything else, including the concentration camps.