Jewish historian Brian Mark Rigg: “Numerous areas relating to the Holocaust and the Nazi era in general remain largely unexplained or poorly understood
Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (Part I) | VT Archives | Alternative Foreign Policy Media .wpb_animate_when_almost_visible { opacity: 1; } Blogger Facebook Mail Reddit Rumble RSS Spotify Twitter VKontakte WordPress Youtube Sign in Government Health History Investigations Life Military Wars World Podcasts VT Radio Sign in Welcome!Log into your account your username your password Forgot your password? Password recovery Recover your password your email Search Wednesday, January 10, 2024 Sign in / JoinAbout VT Staff Policies Donate Membership Newsletter Merch Advertise Contact Blogger Facebook Mail Reddit Rumble RSS Spotify Twitter VKontakte WordPress Youtube Sign in Welcome! Log into your account your username your password Forgot your password? Get help Password recovery Recover your password your email A password will be e-mailed to you. VT Archives | Alternative Foreign Policy Media Government Health History Investigations Life Military Wars World Podcasts VT Radio Home Life Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (Part I) Life Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (Part I) By Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor - March 29, 2014 0 6296 DISCLOSURE: VT condemns the horrific tragedy committed by the NAZI Party against Jewish Citizens of Europe during Word War II known as the "Holocaust". VT condemns all racism, bigotry, hate speech, and violence. However, we are an open source uncensored journal and support the right of independent writers and commentors to express their voices; even if those voices are not mainstream as long as they do NOT openly call for violence. Please report any violations of comment policy to us immediately. Strong reader discretion is advised.by Jonas E. Alexis A few days ago, Paul Kendal of the British newspaper The Telegraph wrote that in 1941 a medical officer by the name of Major Leo Skurnik received an Iron Cross from the German high command. Skurnik happened to be a Jew. Kendal wrote, “And Skurnik was not the only Jew fighting on the side of the Germans. More than 300 found themselves in league with the Nazis when Finland, who had a mutual enemy in the Soviet Union, joined the war in June 1941.”[1] Yet Kendal, without serious self-examination, propounded, “The alliance between Hitler and the race he vowed to annihilate — the only instance of Jews fighting for Germany’s allies — is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Second World War, and yet hardly anyone, including many Finns, know anything about it.”[2] The serious historical questions which Kendal failed to posit and which are largely and sometimes deliberately ignored by the Holocaust establishment are simply these: If Hitler’s goal was to annihilate an entire race, how is it possible that there were thousands upon thousands of people of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany? Is it historically and intellectually satisfying to maintain both contradictory positions at the same time and in the same respect? Is it rationally sound to say that those Jewish people were simply dupes and simply didn’t know Hitler’s real intention? Didn’t they know that their ultimate doom was concentration camps? What actually made them join the Third Reich? Those are some of the many questions that I asked one writer who happened to publish a widely read book on Nazi Germany. The book is published by the University of California. In our long private conversation, he kept positing that it was Hitler’s intent to exterminate the Jews of Europe, but throughout his analysis, he failed to seriously deal with the puzzling situation that people of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany posed a serious threat to the prevailing thesis that the Hitler wanted to exterminate all Jews of Europe. Jewish historian Walter Laqueur attempted to answer this nagging dichotomy last year. He admitted that there were indeed people of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany, but argued that “Nazi policy toward half- and quarter-Jews (Mischlinge of the first and second degree) was contradictory and changed over time. Half-Jews who were not brought up as Jews (Geltungsjuden) were not deported and killed: There were legal problems, and Hitler, who did not want to be bothered by lawyers, declared that he would take a binding decision only after the final victory. “Those of military age had to serve in the army both at the beginning of the war and its end when the armed forces were depleted. But in between they were excluded from military service, and they were not permitted to serve in positions of command.”[3] Is this historically accurate? What, then, is the background of all these complex issues and how can one confront some of the prevailing claims of the Holocaust establishment? Jewish historian Bryan Mark Rigg maintains in his study of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers that “numerous areas relating to the Holocaust and the Nazi era in general remain largely unexplained or poorly understood.”[4] These areas are poorly understood because theories that are inconsistent with the prevailing vision of the Holocaust establishment—even when based on historical documentation—are dismissed without examination. It is no accident that Laqueur called Rigg’s study “malevolent, more often ignorant, and breathtakingly obtuse in its conclusions.”[5] Much of Rigg’s sources are from archival documents and personal interviews with those who said they were of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany, but since Laqueur does not seem to be interested in serious research like this, he dismisses Rigg by name-calling. Rigg argues that “tens of thousands of men of Jewish descent served in the Wehrmacht during Hitler’s rule,” and according to his best estimate, the number of soldiers of Jewish extraction—a group he terms Mischlinge—was more than 150,000.[6] He warns readers, however, that “previous estimates varied and future scholars may devise more advanced computations to produce a more precise figure. All such efforts should lead to the same significant conclusion: the number of Mischlinge in the Wehrmacht was far greater than anyone previously imagined.”[7] Officers such as Bernhard Losener were well aware that if Hitler “treated half-Jews as Jews, the armed forces would probably lose 45,000 soldiers.”[8] Hitler “allowed some Mischlinge to apply for exemptions under section 7 of the supplementary decrees of November 1935. In some cases, if Hitler approved, the Mischlinge was allowed to call himself or herself an Aryan.”[9] Similarly, Jewish historian Sarah Gordon notes, “In Germany, some Jews even supported Hitler despite his anti-Semitism…Max Naumann, the head of the Association of German National Jews, ardently solicited support from the Nazi party after Hitler had come to power, pointing out the national loyalty of his members and their service to the German nation. “Gerhart Hauptmann, a Nobel Prize recipient for literature, even voted for Hitler. Many Jews were quite comfortable living in Germany despite latent anti-Semitism, whether intellectual or social.”[10] Hitler “played a direct role” in allowing such Jews to remain in his service.[11] Those Mischlinge families “had lived in Germany for generations, and most had lost all contact with their Jewish heritage. They had helped develop German society, fought in her wars, and furthered her culture. Some had not known of their Jewish heritage until Hitler came to power.”[12] Historian Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California states that some Jews supported the Third Reich “at its creation; they had prospered materially in it, and they remained reticent to criticize it in a fundamental way.”[13] What’s more startling is that Hitler “even allowed some to become high-ranking officers. Generals, admirals, navy ship captains, fighter pilots, and many ordinary soldiers served with Hitler’s personal approval.”[14] More importantly, “Many German Jews and Mischlinge thought that Hitler based his anti-Semitic tirades on Ostjuden [German and Eastern Jews] who had emigrated from the ‘land of Bolshevism.’ The Nazis reinforced this preconception when they issued decrees against Ostjuden in 1933 and later when they forced eighteen thousand of them to leave the Reich in 1938… “Dr. Max Naumann, a Jew and a retired World War I army major and founder of the militant right-wing organization of National German Jews, wrote Hitler on 20 March 1935 that he and his followers had fought to keep Ostjuden out of Germany. Naumann felt that these ‘hordes of half-Asian Jews’ were ‘dangerous guests’ in Germany and must be ‘ruthlessly expelled.’”[15] Academically and economically, those Ostjuden made little progress largely because they learned “Polish Talmudic barbarism, as contrasted with refined German Bildung (education).”[16] Lindemann writes that “Western Jews often described Ostjuden as parasitic and filled with hatred of non-Jews, those specifically Jewish qualities that were the source of the most insistent and hostile remarks by anti-Semites about Jews generally.”[17] The Ostjuden were humiliated by the German Jews, who viewed them as “irrational, mystical,” and believed that their “superstitious religion…no longer had a place in a world based on reason and scientific knowledge.”[18] Therefore, for the fully assimilated German Jews, “Hitler’s anti-Semitism” was “a reaction to the culture of the Ostjuden.”[19] Karl Marx himself despised the Ostjuden.[20] It was no accident, then, that a group of wealthy intellectual Jews who were already immersed in Enlightenment thought and practice would despise some German Jews because of their “primitive lifestyle.”[21] Wolf Zuelzer, “a 75 percent Jew,” declared that “for the majority of German Jews, the Orthodox Ostjuden dressed in his caftan, fur hat and ritual side-locks was a frightening apparition from the Dark Ages.”[22] As a result, at the dawn of the twentieth century, “many of the local Jewish communities in Germany refused to allow Eastern Jews to vote in community elections on the grounds that they were not German nationals.”[23] Robert Braun, a Mischlinge, noted, “Generally, Mischlinge are very anti-Semitic.”[24] Unsurprisingly, a number of Jewish groups strongly supported National Socialism, because they saw the Ostjuden “as a grave danger to their social standing who, if allowed to stay in Germany, would only intensify anti-Semitic feelings. In several public statements during the 1920s and 1930s, liberal German Jews labeled Ostjuden ‘inferior’ and asked for state assistance to combat their immigration…Robert Braun recalled that his Jewish father, Dr. R. Leopold Braun, was an anti-Semite who did not like Ostjuden.”[25] Not only that, most of the Mischlinge “felt Aryan and did everything they could to disassociate themselves from Jews and to be viewed as faithful Germans.”[26] Hitler’s racial theories did not come out of thin air. In the early 1920s, “he directed much of his hatred toward Eastern Jews and Jewish Communists…he also hated Communists and felt that Communism was a Jewish movement. He was present in Munich when Kurt Eisner, whom Hitler called ‘the international Jew,’ led his Socialist revolution from 1918 to 1919. Hitler felt that ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ like Esiner were responsible for and had profited from Germany’s defeat in World War I.”[27] As we saw in previous articles, it was not just Hitler who saw that Bolshevism would create a nightmare in Europe. Winston Churchill and many other political leaders drew similar conclusions. For Hitler, the Jews made matters worse when the Red Terror, which was dominated by Jews, “tried to gain more power, under the leadership of people of such Russian Jew Eugen Levine…As a witness to this chaos in Bavaria, Hitler described it as being a ‘rule by the Jews.’ So, since Hitler felt that Communism was a Jewish movement and inherently dangerous, he directed his hatred toward the Jews.”[28] It was a sense of Jewish supremacy over the Germans that accelerated the Nazis to move quickly to develop a response to Jewish ascendancy. In the early part of the 1900s, Lindemann says, “Gentiles could hardly miss noting how many liberal German-speaking Jews had begun to assert that a Jewish background engendered enlightenment, while a Germanic heritage was a burden, pulling in the direction of irrationality and barbarism. As historian Steven Beller has commented, ‘Jews…began to see themselves as bearers of the Enlightenment’ in Austria and Germany.”[29] Lindemman continues, “In private correspondence, Graetz expressed his destructive contempt for German values and Christianity even more forthrightly. In 1868 he had written to Moses Hess, ‘I am looking forward with pleasure to flogging the Germans and their leaders—Schleirmacher, Fichte, and the whole wretched Romantic school.’ In the same letter, he wrote ‘we must above all work to shatter Christianity.’”[30] As early as 1902, a Viennese Jew by the name of Solomon Ehrmann talked about how the world needed to be “Jewified” in order to be enlightened and in order to fulfill the goals and purposes of Judaism.[31] This idea played a major role during the Bolshevik Revolution, particularly in the lives of non-Jews who joined the movement.[32] Yet this side of history has never seen the light of day in the Holocaust establishment precisely because it would destroy the building block of this school of thought completely. Jewish historian Howard M. Sachar has a chapter on Nazi Germany in his over a thousand-page work A History of the Jews in America. Incredibly, he doesn’t even touch on these complex issues.[33] Instead, he tells us that “anti-Semitic discrimination in all echelons of the Polish economy kept a quarter million Jews endlessly dependent on soup kitchens, clinics, orphanages.”[34] What is even more astonishing is that when discussing the Frankfurt School, Sachar only mentions in passing that it was an institution funded largely by Jews and for Jewish leftists, but failed to document their pornographic and revolutionary activities. Moreover, he did not even touch on the pornographic nature of Weimar Germany, which Jewish revolutionaries made possible and which eventually incited anti-Jewish reactions among some racialists and other secular intellectuals and writers of various stripes. On the contrary, Sachar extols the school: “It was extraordinary research, in both quantity and quality.”[35] Sachar turns a blind eye because his ideology does not allow him to see the obvious. He keeps propounding the unconvincing thesis that Jewish persecution was a direct result of hatred, rather than Jewish revolutionary activity. Although Sachar mentions that a number of Jews participated in the Bolshevik Revolution, he tempers his remarks by saying, “The largest numbers of Russian Jews had never adopted a Bolshevik political agenda.”[36] According to Sachar, Jews are persecuted because of their success![37] Despite the fact that many Germans during that time opposed anti-Semitism, it was obvious to them that “many Jews themselves were not genuinely interested in mixing but were rather bent on destruction and domination.”[38] Rigg noted the same thing: “Quarter-Jew Horst von Oppenfeld, a descendant of the Jewish Oppenheim family, who was a captain and an adjutant to Stauffenberg, said that Orthodox Jews experience so many problems because they do not assimilate. ‘Their problem,’ he claims, ‘is due to the fact that they want to be different.’”[39] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen argues in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust that anti-Semitism was so ingrained in the entire German people that not even the ordinary Germans were spared that irrational hatred.[40] Other Jewish writers such as Lucy Dawidowicz and Steven T. Katz ascribe to that thesis.[41] Yehuda Bauer agrees with many of Goldhagen’s theses and tries mightily to rescue him from historical oblivion and insanity, although he criticizes Goldhagen on other issues.[42] Yet Lindemann tells us a different story: “Racism and anti-Semitism were, in the eyes of many German-speaking Jews, more accurately seen as products of reactionaries and of the mob. Hatred of Jews, they believed, was most typically to be found in eastern Europe, or in the less developed parts of the German-speaking world.”[43] Historically, the Goldhagen thesis suffers badly when one looks at Jews in Germany in the 1800s. Sarah Gordon, in a book that was written years before Goldhagen postulated his historically risible thesis, notes: “Cultural explanations that include anti-Semitism as a central reason for Hitler’s electoral success are inadequate as explanatory tools because of their nebulous formulation and because counterexamples from the works of famous scholars and writers indicate that cultural influences were diverse; for example, Treitschke wrote an anti-Semitic tract, but Mommsen wrote a countering statement. “Thus German’s cultural heritage was not uniformly anti-Semitic. Moreover, a deep commitment to a legal and constitutional state was shared by late-nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives. Both groups rejected all attempts to nullify the legal equality of Jews; not a single law was passed between 1869 and 1933 to rescind the new freedoms granted during the foundation of Germany. “Of course, in practice there were many instances of job discrimination, social snobbery, and other types of hostility toward Jews; these were common in all Western countries at the time. Nevertheless, legal emancipation was accepted as part and parcel of the new state despite pressure from rabid anti-Semites to re-impose legal restrictions on Jews. “Not only liberals and conservatives but also many Catholics and Protestants were opposed to anti-Semitic legislation on ideological or intellectual grounds…This was obviously a rational pragmatic stance, but in addition it was an expression of the humanitarianism embodied in Christian ethics.”[44] Before the 1930s, groups that adopted anti-Semitic propaganda influenced only a fraction of the population, and they “never drew a large percentage of the total votes. Only in the election of 1930 and later years did the Nazis succeed in obtaining strong support…and the causative role of anti-Semitism in this success is by no means clear.”[45] Moreover, “Between 1887 and 1912 anti-Semitic deputies represented only 2 percent of all Reichstag delegates, including all who were reelected, and by 1914 the anti-Semitic parties were practically defunct and their press was in ruins. After World War I additional small anti-Semitic parties arose with racist programs, but once again their electoral strength was less than 5 percent of all valid votes. “These small volkisch groups eventually either allied with and were absorbed by the Nazis or gradually faded into insignificance. The track record of anti-Semitic parties was very poor even from their own point of view.”[46] After laying out the historical background of anti-Jewish reaction, Gordon concludes that “the attributions of anti-Semitism to a uniquely distorted ‘German mind’ or ‘German character’ are largely irrelevant, whether based on psychology, sociology, intellectual history, or demonology.”[47] If Goldhagen is right, then Jews would never have gotten so much power in Germany. Gordon states, “German universities admitted Jews on an equal footing as early as 1790, and Jews were overrepresented among university professors and students between 1870 and 1933.” Jews in 1909-1910 were “less than 1 percent of the population,” yet “almost 12 percent of the instructors at German universities were Jewish, and an additional 7 percent were Jewish converts to Christianity, so that 19 percent of the instructors in Germany were of Jewish origin.”[48] Rigg writes that “between 1800 and 1900, around seventy thousand Jews converted to Christianity in Germany and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These numbers do not include those Jews who left Judaism and did not embrace another religion.”[49] The Jews perceived that the only way they could move forward was through assimilation, which sometime… truncated (23,375 more characters in archive)