While millions of German Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis, many of their relatives, willingly or not, were fighting for the Third Reich.
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This article appears in: Winter 2014 By Bryan Mark Rigg On September 15, 1944, as Allied armies squeezed Germany from east and west, and the Third Reich needed all the experienced, able-bodied soldiers it could find, a strange but far from unusual letter was being written. On that day an officer in the headquarters of SS head Heinrich Himmler had requested that Generalmajor Wilhelm Burgdorf, deputy chief of the Wehrmacht personnel office, dismiss from the Army on Himmler’s personal orders a colonel by the name of Ernst Bloch. Bloch, it seems, had been targeted for discharge from the service not because he was deficient as a soldier but simply because he was a Mischling—a half-Jew; his father was Jewish. He also might have been discharged because Himmler may have discovered that Bloch had helped rescue some Jews, one of them the famous Rabbi Joseph Schneersohn, in 1939 from the SS, although this was done under the orders of his boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German Secret Services (Abwehr). Eleven days later, Burgdorf informed Himmler’s office that Bloch had been dismissed but added that in 1943 the colonel, who had earned an Iron Cross for bravery, had asked to be “sent to the front despite his several World War I wounds.” Burgdorf’s halfhearted protest did not succeed in easing Bloch’s plight. It also did not seem to matter that Bloch was described as a “positive National Socialist.” Bloch left his post on October 27, 1944. On February 15, 1945, Hitler signed the official order discharging him because of his Jewish heritage and Burgdorf officially informed Bloch of his discharge: “The Führer has decided as of 31 January 1945 to discharge you from active duty. It is an honor to thank you on behalf of the Führer for your service rendered during war and peace for our people and fatherland. I wish you all the best for the future. Heil Hitler.” Bloch was flabbergasted because he knew Hitler had once personally declared him deutschblütig (of German blood). However, Bloch probably did not know the particulars behind his discharge. He was simply ordered to leave, and he obeyed without questioning. Walter Brockhoff, a close friend of Bloch’s, wrote to Bloch’s wife, Sabine, after the war to ask why his friend had been discharged. Brockhoff wrote, “One doesn’t dismiss a brave and battle-tested officer away from the front during the hour of greatest danger. There have been and will be few officers of his caliber.” Yet the brave Bloch did not simply fold his tent and return home. As the Soviets closed in around Berlin, Bloch joined a Volkssturm (people’s militia) unit and prepared to defend the capital. He was killed during the Battle of Berlin shortly before war’s end. However odd the story of Ernst Bloch may seem, it is far from being an isolated case. Thousands of Mischlinge—field marshals, generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, and enlisted men—were summarily dismissed from the German military; many ended up in forced-labor camps. And many of their Jewish relatives also reached a tragic end in Nazi Germany’s slave-labor, concentration, and extermination camps. Finding and documenting men of Jewish descent who fought in the Wehrmacht was a research project I undertook throughout most of the 1990s. The stories of the nearly 500 veterans I interviewed helped me document a largely unknown and undocumented chapter of World War II history. Many of the stories, like Ernst Bloch’s, illustrate the tragedy and complexity of German society under Hitler. And for many today, it presents several troubling issues about identity and history. This is even the case for the very subjects themselves. By way of illustration, back in 1994 I interviewed a couple in Berlin. He, Heinz Z., was a half-Jew who had false documents during the Third Reich claiming he was an Aryan. As he discussed his time in the military, his second wife Sabine sat next to him silently listening to him describe his experiences under Hitler. Heinz told me that he felt his false documents helped him protect his first Jewish wife and their infant son. His status came under the Nazi legal designation of “privilege mixed marriage.” In other words, he helped protect his wife from persecution by staying married to her. While Heinz was on the Russian Front in 1943, he got a notice in the mail that his wife and infant son had been deported to Poland. His commander, on learning this, immediately granted him emergency leave to put “things in order.” As Heinz explained, he thought at that moment, “What moron deports a nursing mother off to a camp?” When Heinz arrived in Berlin and started to visit the various Nazi government offices, including the Gestapo, he learned that she had indeed been deported to the East. He tried desperately to get permission to go to the camp to bring his family back home, but the Nazis denied his request. As the war came to an end, his unit was transferred to the Western Front where he eventually ended up in an American POW camp. After several months of internment, the Allies released him and he returned home. He quickly learned from the Nuremburg Trials and other events that documented the crimes of the Nazis that his wife and baby boy had been deported to Auschwitz. They, being the most vulnerable, were immediately gassed on arrival and then burned in the crematorium. By the time Heinz had learned of their deportation, they had already gone up the chimneys of the factories of death at this extermination camp. As he explained this story, he fell into deep sobs. This grown man of 80 years of age crumbled and cried like a small child. I turned off my camera, walked over to Heinz and gave him a hug. I told him that if he wanted, I would return the next day to finish the interview and he could have the evening to rest. I even suggested we go for a walk to allow him to calm down. Had the Nazis not persecuted and sent millions of Jews to the death camps, like these men and boys exiting boxcars at an unnamed camp, they might have helped ease the Germany military’s manpower shortage. As I backed away from him and returned to my seat, I could see that his wife, Sabine, was furious. At first, I thought she was angry at me because I had brought her husband to this emotional state, or that maybe she was upset because I hugged him and had violated German social etiquette. (Germans in general are not given to public displays of affection.) But I soon learned that she was not upset at me at all. As she suddenly verbally laid into her husband, I quickly learned that she was shocked and angry with him because this was the first time out of 50 years of marriage that she had learned she was the second wife. As I sat there listening to her berate him, I told them, “I think I will just leave you two alone for a while. I am sure you have plenty to talk about without me here.” I would finish the interview the next morning. To my surprise, the wife was quite thankful that I had come because many questions she had accumulated in 50 years of marriage were answered in one evening. She and I learned many things about Heinz that helped explain some of his problems in adjusting to surviving the pain and trauma of the Nazis. She now knew why he had been so adamant about the name of their first son—it had been the name of his first son who had died in Auschwitz. She also now knew of the strange woman’s name he often yelled during his nightmares. Bloch’s and Heinz’s stories illustrate the difficulty of understanding the Third Reich’s different shades of gray. Their stories also highlight the struggle the Nazis underwent in implementing racial policy onto a society developed by hundreds of years of assimilation between Christians and Jews, Gentiles, and Semites. With these facts in mind, most accept as common knowledge today that persons of Jewish descent were the most endangered people under Hitler, and when considering the Nazi definition of who was a “full Jew,” they would be right. Yet, what many do not know is that probably several thousand Jews—and more than 150,000 “partial” Jews—served in the Wehrmacht, Germany’s military. These partial Jews, so-called Mischlinge, had a much more complicated history under the Nazis than one would think especially when one knows these men were actually required to serve. This fact surprises even those who consider themselves knowledgeable about World War II and the Holocaust. Even more surprising is how these men dealt with their situations. One partially Jewish soldier, Heinz Bleicher, observed that few people today can understand the heavy emotional burden of partial Jews during the Third Reich. Every year they felt sucked deeper into an abyss with no escape. Hans Frank, Governor-General of Nazi-occupied Poland, greets the commander of a Ukrainian militia unit as Gestapo officers look on. Frank pledged to annihilate the Jewish population of Poland—and nearly succeeded. Nevertheless, until at least 1941, the Nazis drafted many into the Wehrmacht during this time of trauma and confusion. This startles most people since Hitler called Mischlinge “blood sins” and “monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” Among those were career soldiers who, because Hitler “Aryanized” them with the deutschblütig declaration, reached some of the highest ranks, though many of their relatives had to wear the yellow star and died in the Holocaust. While lecturing from 2002 to 2013 about my books Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, Rescued From the Reich, and Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, I was often asked about the lives of those identified as “Hitler’s Jewish soldiers.” How could they serve? Did they consider themselves Nazis or Jews? What did Hitler know about them? What did they know about the Holocaust? Did they feel guilty about serving? Many listeners found it difficult to learn that men of Jewish descent served in Hitler’s armed forces, sometimes with great distinction. Until recently, historians have not explored Mischling history. For some these “victims of the Holocaust” represent “embarrassing leftovers from the trauma of Hitler’s Germany.” These men often feel alone in their experience and harbor a fear that their testimony will be given “without an echo in the vast wasteland of war,” the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Moreover, in general, German soldiers have really “nothing to celebrate and much, including dishonor, to forget.” So it is remarkable that Jewish and Mischling soldiers have shared their experiences, which complicates an already thorny subject matter. This “thorny subject matter” exists because Mischlinge simply do not fit into neat categories of victim or perpetrator, Jew or non-Jew. Although a few documented in this study were Jews, most were Mischlinge—a category of people that historically has no intellectual justification. Thus, it has proved challenging to explain a racial category that never existed before the Third Reich’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws. However, what unites Mischlinge is not only the discrimination they experienced, but also their anger, frustration, fear, and sense of inferiority. Ultimately, the Nazis severely persecuted them and murdered many of their Jewish relatives, bringing them into the horrible world of the Holocaust. The question of identity haunted many Mischlinge in general, not only those serving in the Wehrmacht. Most grew up as patriotic, Christian Germans who suddenly learned after 1933 that their nation now viewed them as inferior subhumans. The Nazis believed that being Jewish or partially Jewish made them unacceptable as full citizens. Soon after the Nazis took over power, many of these “Christian” Mischlinge soon discovered that their Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic, had gone along with the Nazis and not only turned their backs on them but gave theological justification to persecute the Jews in the name of God and Jesus. So their identities as Germans and Christians were quickly stripped from them and they started struggling with the question: “Who am I?” A page from Dieter Bergmann’s Wehrmacht pay book. A half-Jew, he loved his country but agonized about fighting for a regime that persecuted his fellow religionists. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote that “government defines reality.” The Nazis violently upset the lives of millions by implementing this racial doctrine. The 19th-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill foretold what would happen to Jews and Mischlinge under the Nazis when he wrote, “Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right … it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.… It leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.” The men described in this article were persecuted by a system that issued “wrong mandates” about human value. They struggled to conform their personalities to the Nazi view of worthy Germans, yet failed to realize that their society had abandoned them. For example, Dieter Bergman wrote during the war that he represented what people wanted in a “good German.” He was tall, blond, trim, kind, good natured, and also a “warrior type.” Yet he realized his destiny as a half-Jew hung from a pathetically slender string in an environment without refuge and legal rights. This perilous condition affected their perception of themselves and their behavior. They had to honor laws that eliminated their rights. The situation had the elements of a play in a Theater of the Absurd. This article uses several Nazi terms to explain this history, without implying agreement with the Nazi racial theories that inspired their introduction. Nazi terms such as “half-Jew,” “quarter-Jew,” “Mischling,” “Aryan,” and “non-Aryan” come from an evil system designed to eliminate people of “inferior” ethnicity from society. The Nazis used such vocabulary to abuse and dehumanize those they deemed Untermenschen (sub-humans). The ways the Nazis applied their racial laws did not reflect the understanding of Jewishness prevalent in German society in the 1920s. The designation “Mischling” after 1933 sounded just as foreign to Mischlinge’s ears as it does to ours. Bergman further explained, “Half-Jewishness is a strange concept. It’s like being half-circumcised—it doesn’t exist.… However, with Hitler, we had to try to understand what being a Mischling meant. Unfortunately, we were slow learners.” Events beyond their understanding and coping mechanisms simply beleaguered most Mischlinge. For example, Heinz Gerlach wrote Minister of Education Bernhard Rust in 1941, “I cannot help it that I’m a Mischling. Also, no one should blame my parents for my situation. They married during a time without racial laws.” Gerlach further clarified that his mother looked and acted like an “Aryan” and that his father’s family never thought twice about accepting her. He wrote that she had proven her disapproval of Judaism by marrying a Christian, baptizing her son a Christian, and raising him to “love his Fatherland and the Führer.” Gerlach struggled with the Nazis defining him partially Jewish—a part of his background he had never accepted. The lives of Jews and Mischlinge show how the racial laws affected them on a personal level, the extent of their persecution, and the divided loyalties many toiled with during the Nazi years and afterward. Their lives seemed ludicrous when they served in the military while the Nazis persecuted their family members. Colonel Ernst Bloch was a German Mischling (half-Jew) who gave much for the Fatherland. His facial scars were the result of being bayonetted during World War I. He died defending Berlin in 1945. As a full-Jew, Captain Erich Rose told his friend, General Albert Schnez, “I’m a Schwein. The Nazis murdered my family (which I have to assume), and at the same time, I fight for them.” Yet, most did serve, and when one learns more about German society, this service does not seem so strange. Most German Jews and Mischlinge grew up in an environment where their elders conditioned them to have a strong obedience to authority. They learned to obey their parents, teachers, clergymen and, most importantly, their government. German society conditioned people to believe that the authority of superiors was based on “greater insight and more humane wisdom.” In the military, this submission was explicit. After the war, Gustav Knickrehm said, “‘The advantage of our armed forces lay in this monstrous training.… You carried out all orders automatically.… You acted automatically as a soldier.…’” Mischlinge learned Kadavergehorsam, or slavish obedience, even if it infringed on their personal freedom and the human rights of their family. In other words, the Nazis imposed “political and ideological conformity” on all subjects under their rule. Whatever Hitler ordered, they had to obey, and they did so almost willingly because of their culture. Those who did not obey Nazi laws wound up in concentration camps or in front of a firing squad. Also fundamental to comprehending the bizarre situation where men wore the swastika on their uniforms while their relatives had to wear the Star of David is an understanding of their Jewishness. Most parents of Mischlinge did not raise them as religious Jews, and most Mischlinge did not consider themselves Jewish until Hitler persecuted them. But Nazi racial laws considered them all Jewish to one degree or another. On November 14, 1935, the Nazis issued a supplement to the Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, that created the “racial” categories of German, Jew, “half-Jew (Jewish Mischlinge 1st Degree),” and “quarter-Jew (Jewish Mischlinge 2nd Degree),” each with its own regulations. These laws distinguished Germans from persons of Jewish heritage both biologically and socially. Full Jews had three or four Jewish grandparents, half-Jews had two Jewish grandparents, and quarter-Jews had one Jewish grandparent. If a person not of Jewish descent practiced the Jewish religion, the Nazis also counted him or her as a Jew. The Nazis resorted to religious records to define these “racial” categories, using birth, baptismal, and marriage and death certificates stored in churches, temples, Jewish community centers, and courthouses. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws provided the basis for further anti-Jewish legislation to preserve the purity of the “Aryan” race. The Nazis based their racial laws on the völkisch (ethnical in a racial sense) notion of the inherent superiority of the “Aryans.” These laws provided civil rights to those belonging to the Volk and having German “blood.” This created a “new morality which, in terms of the old system of values, seemed both unscrupulous and brutal.” An anti-semitic poster with a caricature of a Jew; the headline reads, “He is to blame for the war!” Through such crude propaganda the Nazis hoped to inflame hatred toward Jews. The Nazis automatically denied Jews and Mischlinge citizenship privileges. However, under Article 7 of a supplementary decree of the Nurem… truncated (21,081 more characters in archive)