A young American is documenting the stories of hundreds
of German veterans of Jewish descent.
Many lost family to the Holocaust
while serving the Nazi
regime.
LONDON —
Sustained by scholarship, peanut butter and a sense of mission, American Bryan
Rigg is exploring an eerie and uncharted
no man's land of Holocaust history. Rigg interviews former German soldiers of
Jewish heritage, some of them high-ranking officers, who fought for Adolf
Hitler's Third Reich in World War II--
during the Holocaust, when the Nazis slaughtered
6 million Jews.
"Thousands
of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis
called 'full Jews' served in the military with Hitler's knowledge. The Nazis
allowed these men
to serve but at the same time exterminated their families,"
Rigg said.
(according to different sources 150 thousands – add. Zk)
On a heady
journey of personal and professional discovery, the
25-year-old Texan has talked with more than 300 of these veterans, including a
handful in California. Passed along from one old soldier to another, he has
crisscrossed Germany over four years, often by bicycle, sometimes sleeping in railroad
stations to stretch his budget.
Rigg said he
has documented the Jewish ancestry of more than 1,200 of Hitler's soldiers,
including two field marshals
and 10 generals, "men commanding up to 100,000 troops." In about 20
cases, soldiers of Jewish
heritage were awarded the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest military honor, he
said.
Along the way,
Rigg, who is of German extraction and was raised as a Protestant, has
discovered that he too has Jewish ancestry. Like many of the families he has
visited, Rigg had distant relatives who were killed for being Jewish--and
others who died fighting in battle for Nazi Germany.
The old
soldiers give Rigg both documents and their stories of war, peace and
suffering. He says many stillstruggle with a question that is a challenge to
history:
If I fought in the German army while my mother died in a Nazi
concentration camp, am I a villain or a victim? Many of the men Rigg meets
cling to Nazi terminology, describing themselves as half-Jewish, half-German.
Sometimes they weep as they reminisce, these Germans now in their 70s and 80s,
many of whom killed on
the battlefield for a monstrous regime while their
families were being killed by it.
"In many
cases, these men have not talked about it for 50 years. When I come, it is as
if they have opened up a coffin they thought they buried so long ago.
It all
comes out," Rigg said.
One of his
discoveries was a 1944 German army personnel document listing 77 high-ranking
officers "of mixed Jewish race or married to a Jew." Two generals,
eight lieutenant generals, five major generals and 23 colonels are on the list.
Hitler personally signed declarations for all 77 on the 1944 list asserting that
they were of German blood, thereby exercising his right of exception under 1935
Nazi legislation that barred anyone with a Jewish grandparent from becoming an
officer.
Deciding
exactly who was to be classified a Jew stirred great internal debate among Nazi
leaders. Hitler loathed Jews, but he also needed experienced commanders and
fighters."What's fascinating is how involved Hitler was in the screening
process," Rigg said. "At the height of the war, he was personally
deciding whether this private or that should be of German blood. A
private!" He said there were at least a dozen exception lists approved by
Hitler--naming ranking officials not only in the armed forces but in the
civilian administration that worked with the military. In interviews and research in Germany this
month, Rigg found still more Wehrmacht officers of Jewish descent and more than
1,500 pages of documents, both from veterans and their families and from the wartime
German archives
that Rigg explores with these people's consent.
"Thousands
of men of Jewish ancestry fought in the Nazi military because they were
drafted. But many were career soldiers, and that forced them to apply for the
German blood declaration," Rigg said. "What's sick here is that, even
though Hitler gave the approvals, the officers' relatives were being exterminated
behind their backs. . . .
Were most of
these people so egotistical they didn't care who died just so they could
live?" Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles, says that the soldiers' individual stories are well known but that
there does not seem to have been a serious scholarly attempt to piece them
together
into a larger picture.
The new
research also poses vexing questions. "If there were Jews who served in
the armed forces to save their own lives, that is one thing. If there were
others who served knowing what was going on and made no attempt to save
[lives], well then that is unacceptable and dishonorable," Hier said. In
the homes he visits, Rigg often sees menorahs and books about Judaism. Many of
the veterans "have learned Hebrew," he said, "and a few have
converted to Judaism and gotten circumcised in their 40s and 50s."
The Nazi
regime reeked of hypocrisy, Rigg's new research makes plain. He documents the
case of Field Marshal Erhard Milch, deputy to Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering.
Long rumored to have been Jewish, Milch in fact had a Jewish father, which,
according to Nazi code, made him unacceptable to serve in the armed forces. But
in 1935, Rigg's research shows, Goering, Hitler's chosen successor, falsified documents
to declare Milch of Aryan descent by asserting that his mother's brother
was
really his father.
"Many of
them lost relatives in the Holocaust and knew they had been sent to Auschwitz
or other camps. Yet in 1944, when these men themselves got postcards ordering
them to report to a certain train station for deportation, most of them
went," Rigg said. "If they really knew what happened to their parents
and
grandparents, why did they go?"
At Cambridge,
Steinberg--a New Yorker who has taught in England for three decades—said Rigg's
findings will deepen history's view of the Holocaust. While Rigg's quest has at
times proved unsettling for him, for
many of the old soldiers that he interviews, a visit from the young, earnest
American scholar is cathartic--
even liberating.
"I've
gotten letters and phone calls from kids and grandkids of these people, saying:
'Thank God you've come. Now our daddy or grandfather will talk to us
about all
of this,' " he said.
December 24, 1996 | WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO | TIMES STAFF WRITER
The Jews in Hitler's Military - 2015 Los Angeles Times – article
collections
synopsis by Zbyszek Koralewski
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