1 Jews and Mischlinge Hiding Their Identities

Many Jews and Mischlinge hid their identities from the authorities while serving in the Wehrmacht. They accomplished this by falsifying their ancestry documents, changing their names and/or lying to authorities, finding someone to protect them, and behaving inconspicuously. Their actions display how intense and creative the will to survive can be. Their stories range from simple situations in which the Wehrmacht drafted half-Jew Arno Spitz after he falsified his documents to the experience of Rabbi Simon Gossel, who survived two years in Auschwitz only to find himself serving in the Wehrmacht in 1945.¹ Stories like these abound, making the history of the Third Reich more complicated.

Half-Jews Helmuth Kopp and Arno Spitz remained in the armed forces by not truthfully answering their ancestry declarations. Both served the entire war without much trouble. They considered the dire consequences if the authorities discovered their lies, but refused to dwell on this possible outcome. Few such men remain alive today, because serving on the Russian front was usually deadly. By war’s end, Germany had suffered over 6 million casualties, and Russia lost over 20 million people. Most German casualties of war, including 75 percent of combat deaths (2.3 million), happened in Russia, and many Jews and Mischlinge who served there died in battle. One Landser (soldier) said Russia was “like a cold iron coffin” with death lurking everywhere.² Kopp and Spitz feel lucky they survived. Kopp said, “When I look back, my chances for survival were probably no different than had I ended up in Dachau. Sometimes the units I served with suffered 80 percent casualties.”

The stories of full Jews Edgar Jacoby, Karl-Heinz Löwy, and Paul-Ludwig (Pinchas) Hirschfeld show how a few Jews survived in the army. Jacoby’s experiences demonstrate how horrible one’s situation could become if the Nazis discovered a hidden Jew in the ranks. In 1941, the authorities learned that Jacoby served with falsified documents. He ultimately survived because of his “Aryan” wife’s protection. Many Jews survived the war because they had married non-Jews since the Nazis hesitated to deport spouses of “Aryans” to extermination camps.³ Others used subterfuge, as did Löwy, whose story is amazing in its unpredictability. Raised as a religious Jew, he escaped to France before World War II, changed his name when the Nazis took over, and then entered the Waffen-SS, in which he served until the end of the war. Hirschfeld’s story also demonstrates how another religious Jew could survive in the Wehrmacht by forging both his religious and ancestry documents. He served on the murderous battlefields of Russia while remaining a religious Jew.

Others found friends in high places with the courage to protect them. Quarter-Jew Horst von Oppenfeld and half-Jew Günther Scheffler, whose stories appear in this chapter, as well as others, found such people of honor. Oppenfeld’s family reputation and military record protected him; the bureaucrats simply left him alone. Scheffler stayed in the army because his commanders valued his skills and person more than the Nazi racial laws. These stories were not uncommon. Often Jews and Mischlinge remained in the Wehrmacht because someone valued them more than Nazi ideology.

While survival skills or plain luck enabled certain Mischlinge and Jews to serve unnoticed, they continued to struggle with how the regime treated Jews, especially their own Jewish family members. Most understood that their future was bleak under Hitler, but nonetheless fought on day by day like any other soldier. They felt that serving in the Wehrmacht would ensure that German society as a whole would treat them as equals to their “Aryan” fellow citizens. They were mistaken. Know ing how they felt about their service and why they served demonstrates once again their tragic situation.

Half-Jewish Gefreiter Helmuth Kopp

Today, Helmuth Kopp gets around using crutches, but he has remarkable energy for an eighty-year-old. Large muscles bulge through his shirtsleeves from years of supporting his weight. He has lived alone since his wife died, and when he discusses their relationship, one sees he loved her deeply. He has an infectious laugh and frequently nods his head with a quick cackle when he sees you understanding his point. His clear blue eyes sparkle as he talks about his life. He enjoys telling jokes and often makes fun of himself. Although pessimistic, he feels he must discuss his experiences in order to prevent what he suffered during the Third Reich from happening again.

images — Half-Jew Helmuth Kopp on 27 September 1994 at his home in Berlin after our interview.

Kopp was born on 10 May 1922 in Insterburg, East Prussia. He was born to a Jewish mother, Helene (née Kaulbars), and a gentile father, Wilhelm, and had four siblings. His mother remained religiously Jewish, and his father was Christian. “However,” Kopp said, “my father was like most Christians today. They really don’t believe in their religion and went to church only on Easter and Christmas. It was more culture than faith for him.” His father served as a private in World War I and, after the war, became a businessman. Growing up, Kopp found himself confused about his religious beliefs since he went to both church and synagogue. “As a boy, my Jewish relatives told me I was a Jew and when I was with my Christian relatives, they always told me I was a Christian. I guess I was living closer to Jesus than most! However, as a child, I was perplexed about the whole ordeal.”

Helene Kopp died of tuberculosis in 1925. Wilhelm was not a good provider and did not want to take care of the kids. Consequently, Kopp’s maternal and paternal relatives fought over which family would raise the children. The Jewish family was furious: their ancestors had lived in Germany for over 300 years, and most family members had remained Orthodox. They felt that by rabbinical law the children were Jewish because of their Jewish mother and therefore should come to them. The Christian family could not believe that these children were going to be raised Jewish and fought to bring them up as Christians. They berated Wilhelm for his decision to marry a Jew. Strangely enough, the court’s ruling evenly split the girls up between the Christian and Jewish families. The Christian family took the two girls who looked most “Aryan” (that is, blond and blue-eyed). It remains unknown whether the court made its decision based on their physical characteristics. Kopp and two other sisters were sent to live with his Jewish grandparents.

Although Kopp lived with his Jewish grandparents after his mother’s death, he often spent time with his father. When his father remarried in 1927, Kopp, at the age of five, was sent to his Jewish aunt and uncle, Sarah (“Susi”) and Heinz Moses, and they enrolled him in the Orthodox Jewish school of Siegmundshof. There, he often got into trouble for bringing sausage and butter sandwiches for his lunch after spending time with his father on weekends, but in general, his teachers treated him well.

One year into his second marriage, Kopp’s father broke off all contact with his children. “My father was a weak man. I don’t think he wanted to worry about us and when he remarried, the woman wasn’t interested in us. At first I was excited because I thought I was getting another mother. But I soon learned that most stepmothers are the worst form of humanity, right up there with the Nazis.” Kopp also had little contact with his sisters. “The whole situation was tragic. We’re only family by blood ties,” Kopp said. During the early 1930s, he corresponded with his sister Judith who then lived in Palestine, but that contact stopped as the Nazis gained power and he went into hiding.

The Jewish family with which Kopp lived did not like him and made him feel, he said, “as a Goy, and in their world, Goys were horrible people. Since Goys weren’t part of the chosen, they were thought lower than dirt.” Although Kopp’s mother was a Jew, his grandfather Louis Kaulbars did not consider him to be a Jew. On several occasions when he saw his grandfather during the 1920s and early 1930s, his grandfather hit him with a horsewhip and called him Goy. Once, Kopp said, he could not go to school because of his large, red welts. He believes this vile behavior reflected his grandfather’s grief at having lost his daughter to a gentile husband and then to death. Also, Kopp was a hyperactive child, and the grandfather found it difficult to deal with him. One day his grandmother chided her husband: “That’s our daughter Helene’s child!”

The grandfather replied, “No, that’s Wilhelm’s Goy!”

“My soul was hurt,” Kopp said. He later added, “The situation was purely meshuge [mad].” Kopp did mention that his Jewish grandmother sympathized with him and would say, “It’s not your fault that your mother sinned. You now have an extra burden from Heaven to be an even better Jew than others.” Kopp did not want to shoulder this burden and thought that any God who placed him into such a situation was “closer to Satan than a Loving Being.”

In the early 1930s Kopp’s Jewish grandparents and his guardian and aunt, Sarah Moses, intended to emigrate to Palestine, where her two sons Horst and Werner Moses already lived. Kopp thought he would go, too. “I wanted to go to Israel, but they wouldn’t take me,” Kopp said. Instead, Sarah planned to leave the boy behind and asked Berlin’s Jewish Community Center whether the Ahava orphanage there would accept him. The director of the orphanage, Herr Rothschild, asked Sarah, “Is he Jewish?” His aunt answered yes. “Then the director asked if I was circumcised. When she answered no, he told her that they would only take me if I was circumcised.” That was why she had him circumcised at the age of twelve in a traditional but belated Bris (Jewish ritual circumcision). “Circumcised penises don’t heal as well on twelve year olds as they do on babies,” Kopp said gruffly. “With a few days of life, who the Hell remembers the pain,” he continued. But “twelve year olds remember, believe me.” After the rabbi had cut off his foreskin, stitches were required to close the wound, and Kopp walked with a cane for six weeks thereafter.

He lived at the orphanage from 1934 until 1937 while most of his Jewish relatives emigrated to Palestine. Though his aunt and uncle Moses gave up their plan to emigrate to Palestine and stayed in Germany, they did not want to support him anymore. So Kopp could not leave the orphanage.

In the summer of 1937, he ran away from his school because his Orthodox classmates and teachers treated him badly. He also did so to avoid persecution by the Nazis.

In 1939, when his father died, Kopp lost hope of protection from a Christian (“Aryan”) relative. His father’s family did not want to have much to do with him, and most of his Jewish family had emigrated to Palestine. For those few Jewish relatives who remained in Germany, Kopp was not really considered part of the family.

In the fall of 1940, he volunteered for the army, but, as required, had first to serve almost a year in the Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labor Service), where he built bridges over lakes and swampy areas from December 1940 to October 1941. Right after this service, he entered the Wehrmacht.

As a half-Jew wanting to serve after the war with France ended in 1940, Kopp had to lie about his origins. When asked how he felt about that, Kopp explained that he “didn’t want to own up to my Jewish past, especially after how my grandfather had treated me. And besides, I didn’t want to end up in a concentration camp. The Wehrmacht was the safest place.”

Asked whether his circumcision caused him any problems, he said the army doctors usually lined up the men in a row and simply asked them to pull back their foreskins to check for diseases. Many times, during such procedures, Kopp pretended he had pulled his foreskin back and often no one noticed his deception. When he was questioned about it, though, since his circumcision had left visible scars on his penis, he told examining physicians that it resulted from an infection. Armed with this tale, he never experienced any trouble other than occasional jokes about his “Jewish penis.” “If they only knew that it really was,” Kopp said, laughing. “I was always worried about what would happen during inspections. I never hesitated to tell doctors that I had lost my foreskin because of an infection caused by the foreskin being too tight around my penis [Phimose or Phimosis] . . . One day, a doctor said to a colleague, ‘Come and see his Jewish tip,’ but he was kidding. Later, when I had future inspections, the same doctor did the examination, and said with a laugh, ‘Here comes Helmuth with his Jewish prick.’”

He did not encounter much suspicion with his lovers, either. Women, Kopp said, paid little attention to what type of penis a man had, since, as he explained, “Once you’re up, there isn’t a lot of difference between a Jewish and a gentile penis. And that’s what women are most interested in—can you fly the flag or not?” If it was discussed, Kopp simply told the woman the story he gave the doctors.

But one encounter with a woman made Kopp nervous. While he was sleeping with a French prostitute, she commented, “That’s strange. With my husband, I can always play with his foreskin. Don’t you have any?” “I took a deep breath,” Kopp said, “and told her my infection story which I don’t think she believed, but it didn’t matter. She got her money, and I got to sleep with her. She never reported me . . . We even developed an affection for one another. Our situations were somewhat similar, I mean, we were both social outcasts, and thus, we understood one another.”

Even though he enjoyed himself during his off hours, Kopp did not have a lot of time for girls because he was preparing for combat. He entered the tank corps of the army as part of the 257th Tank-Destroyer Brigade and drove a self-propelled gun (turretless tank having a fixed cannon on a moving platform). He was sent to the Russian front near Charchov, and from April to July 1942 his unit was engaged in battle. He drove the self-propelled gun and remembers that he stopped counting after his group of six men had destroyed 24 Russian tanks.

Although his own self-propelled gun was hit by enemy fire several times, none ever penetrated its armor. “We wore radio headsets and often heard the death cries of comrades. Self-propelled guns next to us would get hit and I’d hear the men screaming inside as the flames engulfed them. They were friends and I knew their voices. Many gave their last words to heaven and their mothers,” Kopp said. After a battle, Kopp and his buddies found it difficult to go to the burned-out chassis and see their buddies, often mere black skeletons slumped over twisted metal. “When I saw the bones of my comrades, I always thought that this would not happen to me. In my mind, I always thought that this could only happen to the next guy, not me.”

Confronting death made many examine the regime and what was going on around them. Kopp said that it made him hate the Nazis. Combat forced Mischlinge to think about Hitler, and many grew to resent the fact that they were persecuted and sent to battle at the same time.

After four months on the Russian front, Kopp’s brigade had lost over 50 percent of its original 120 tank-destroyers. The Wehrmacht then sent his unit to Brest, France, at the end of July 1942 to recuperate, resupply, and train for a new unit.

In France he spent a lot of time “chasing girls and drinking wine. French women were so easy.” When not partying, he and his comrades trained for close combat against tanks. They no longer would assault tanks with self-propelled guns, but would do so by using demolition charges as units attached to the infantry. They learned how to lie in wait for tanks to fasten mines and satchel charges to them. They were told that they were becoming an elite force that would protect the infantry against attacking Soviet tanks.

They practiced digging deep holes and waiting for a tank to roll over them so they could attach their explosives to its bottom. “However, in training, we got a false sense of what a tank could do to us while using this tactic. When the tank rolled over us in training, it would only stop and twist itself a few times and then move on. As a result, we remained safe in our holes. However, in Russia, when the Soviets knew a hole was there, they would roll over the hole, stop, and then rotate the tank back and forth until our comrades in the hole were mashed like pancakes. I still can hear the screams of my friends as they were drilled into the earth,” Kopp said.

In November 1942, his new unit, attached to the Sixty-first Infantry Division, was sent to Russia at Tsarskoye Selo outside of Leningrad in the siege of that city, a siege that would claim 1 million lives before the city was liberated in the spring of 1944.⁴ Kopp took part in reconnaissance missions. “Whenever the men would see a Russian tank, they would yell ‘Where’s Kopp, the tank killer,’” Kopp said with a laugh. In March 1943, his company relocated to Schlüsselburg on the southeastern side of Leningrad to prevent the Soviet counteroffensive from breaking up the siege. Kopp distinguished himself there.

In March one of his friends was injured in no-man’s-land as he tried to return to the German lines. Obviously in a lot of pain, he screamed for help. Kopp went to his superior and asked if he could rescue his friend. Though the commander told him not to, Kopp jumped out of the trench, ran to his bleeding comrade, and saved him. His superior then immediately promoted him to Gefreiter (private first class). “Not bad for a Jew, huh?” Kopp said, laughing, “And besides, if that’d been me, I hope someone would have saved my ass . . . In war, your love for your fellow comrade was all you had.”

The vast majority of Mischlinge comment upon how strong the camaraderie was within their units despite their supposed racial differences. It was not only combat that united these men in friendship; they were also brought together by the horrible events they witnessed. While fighting in northern Russia, Kopp witnessed two executions of partisans. One involved the hanging of ten Russians who had helped the Soviet army. “It was a sad day to see those young people dangle from the ropes and kick for life,” Kopp said, shaking his head. “I thought as I watched those partisans die that if they knew about me, then I could also be strung up on a lamp post and find myself kicking my way to death.”

For Germans, “partisans were not eligible for the consideration due to a man in uniform. The laws of war condemned them to death automatically, without trial.”⁵ The partisans knew such treatment awaited them if they got caught and thus they fought tenaciously. They also conducted psychological warfare by taking German prisoners, killing them through mutilation, and leaving them in an area where the Germans would find them. A German officer wrote that he discovered some of his comrades “with eyes gouged out and ears and noses cut off.”⁶ Scenes out of Dante’s Inferno were common in the area where partisans operated, and the Germans often encountered comrades with their “faces smashed open with axes . . . wounded men tied with their head inside the gaping bellies of dead comrades; amputated genitals . . . [men found] tied up and naked, on a day when the temperature had dropped to thirty degrees below zero, with their feet thrust into a drinking trough which had frozen solid.”⁷

Seeing dead comrades, whether from combat or partisan guerilla warfare, affected one greatly. Kopp talked often about how he and his comrades fought on battlefields covered with the dead. The smell was horrible, something between decomposing fish and rotten fruit, and watching the bodies decay before their eyes and noses was traumatic and horrifying. After they walked over the land soaked with death, the men’s clothes and boots would smell of rot for weeks thereafter. Often they watched their close friends die and then slowly decompose before their eyes.

So, the combat experience for men like Kopp and many others in this book was one of utter horror. They were confronted with the horrible reality of facing and causing death on a daily basis, which most in “civilized” nations never encounter. One can only imagine the psychological and emotional toll warfare exacted from these men.

After several months in combat, Kopp contracted trench foot, a debilitating condition resulting from overexposure to cold, wet weather. So in June 1943, the army sent him back to the rear to heal, and then to the Tank Killer Reserve Brigade at Saarbrücken.

After a few weeks in Saarbrücken, Kopp was transferred to northern Germany and became a dispatch driver for the army’s supreme headquarters driving high-ranking officers around Berlin. “It was a great job and I was able to spend a lot of time committing Rassenschande⁸ after work,” Kopp said. Following five months in Berlin he was transferred to a military prison, where he served as a guard for four months.

Then the army sent him back to Russia, but shortly thereafter he fell ill with an infection and entered a military hospital at Paderborn. After six weeks there, he was transferred back to Saarbrücken to his reserve unit.

In February 1944, the military assigned him as a technical instructor to the Grenadier Regiment Neuhammer 1 and he returned with this regiment to the eastern front, this time to Moldavia, Romania. While stopping at a train station in Hungary, he saw a Jewish forced worker hitting another Jew. He walked up to the man and asked, “Why are you beating him?” After a moment of silence, the man answered, “I’m responsible for having these people here work. If we’re caught not working hard, they’ll murder us. This one wasn’t working.” Kopp threatened to kill him if he saw him whip another person. When Kopp returned to his comrades, they wondered why he wanted to help Jews. He explained that no one should mistreat another.

Eventually Kopp’s unit moved from Moldavia to fight at Jassy, Romania, in late summer 1944. A few weeks later, the Soviets encircled his regiment, originally about 3,000 men but now seriously reduced by casualties, and after several days of vicious fighting took the survivors prisoner near the Prut River. At this battle, the Soviets trapped fifteen or sixteen German and several Romanian divisions, which eventually resulted in Romania’s capitulation.⁹ “It was a bloodbath before we finally gave up,” Kopp said.

Asked why he continued to fight, he said that though he knew Germany would not win the war, one fought at this stage for one’s comrades and to avoid becoming a prisoner. Kopp also fought because he felt scared. As one German wrote, “The idea of death, even when we accepted it, made us howl with powerless rage.”¹⁰ Eventually the members of Kopp’s unit were taken prisoner, and he accepted his fate, feeling at least happy that the war was over for him. Luckily, he survived. After two years in a Russian POW camp, he returned to Germany in 1946.

When asked if he was aware of the Holocaust at the time, Kopp stated that, yes, he had heard about systematic exterminations during the war. In 1942 he knew the Nazis had sent Jews to Riga, where they shot them, including his aunt Susi and his uncle Heinz Moses. In Latvia, near the city of Dünaburg, Kopp also learned about Himmler’s SS shooting Jews. He even heard the firing of machine guns. This probably occurred on 1 May 1942. After the Nazis murdered several Jews that day, the surviving people in the Dünaburg ghettos numbered only 500, ultimately bringing down the population even more from its original 16,000 one year earlier.¹¹ Others told Kopp that special German units continued to kill partisans and Jews elsewhere.

When asked if he felt a sense of guilt because of his military service, Kopp stated that he did not. “What were my choices? Stay in the army and try to survive or go to a concentration camp? . . . Had I gone to the camp, I probably wouldn’t be here today. I’m happy I’m alive.”

When asked if he felt connected to his Jewish roots, Kopp said that he has always felt Jewish, although he does not share Orthodox Judaism’s view on what is kosher and what is not. “I’m proud of my Jewish heritage,” he said. Even though he does not believe in God, at the beginning of his time in combat, he did say the Shema (an affirmation of faith, considered the holiest of Jewish prayers) a few times and asked the Lord for protection. But after a few days in battle, he stopped believing. He described how several Catholics in his unit prayed and crossed themselves before battle and then died, while he would not cross himself and survived. “When you fight in a war, you really see that God doesn’t give a damn about humans or about justice. After my face had been sprayed with the brains of comrades, I realized that God doesn’t care about us. When you hear the screams of dying men plead for God’s help and then God does nothing, you spit on God.”

Kopp wanted to believe in the God of his religious teachers but after his war experiences, he feels that God simply does not exist. As another German wrote after he prayed to God to help his dying friend who had had his face blown off: “God did not answer my appeals. The man [his comrade] struggled with death, and the adolescent [the writer] struggled with despair, which is close to death. And God, who watches everything, did nothing.”¹² Many soldiers, like Kopp, believe that events in war prove the nonexistence of God.

After the war Kopp tried to emigrate to South America. To distance himself from the Nazis, he told everybody he met that he was Jewish and recited the Shema to prove it. In Berlin he asked a rabbi who had contacts in Colombia for help. When Kopp entered the rabbi’s office, he saw other Mischlinge and Jews there. When the rabbi found out about Kopp’s army service, the rabbi said that Kopp must have shot Jews if he had served so long. According to Kopp, “This rabbi was a fanatic. I was more Goy than Jew for him. All he cared about were full or religious Jews. He couldn’t believe that I didn’t shoot them. I told him, ‘You think because I served in the army, I hated Jews. That’s crazy!’ Then I left.”

For Kopp, turning to Jews for help was often humiliating. He quickly learned that most would never understand his situation and that, regardless of Halakah, many Jews would reject him.

Many of his relatives had emigrated to Palestine during the 1930s. When asked whether he contacted any of them after the war, Kopp shook his head and said, “I tried to establish contact with my Jewish relatives after 1945, but they rejected me because I had fought ‘for Hitler’ in the Wehrmacht . . . my relatives call me the Jewish Nazi. They don’t like to have contact with me at all . . . my aunt actually told me that it would’ve been better had I died in a concentration camp than serve in the Wehrmacht. So they believed death was better than serving in the army. At least I’m alive today.”

Another relative in Israel does not consider Kopp Jewish. His cousin Horst Schulz told him that even as a goy he should never have served in the Wehrmacht. So Kopp quickly learned that establishing contact with his Jewish family was painful and unproductive because they felt only disgust for how he survived the Third Reich. As a result, he tried to forget the war and his Jewish past.

When he returned to Berlin in 1946, Kopp married, had a family, and became a businessman. For years he struggled with traumatic memories of combat and the Gestapo and would often wake up at night in a cold sweat. He now feels it important to talk about his dreadful life during the Nazi years. “If I do so,” Kopp said, “I might have some small influence on preventing an asshole like Hitler from coming into power again.”

Surprisingly, Kopp discusses his past in a very matter-of-fact manner. His experiences show how critical family support and love are in developing healthy self-esteem, especially when one is young, and that in times of extreme crisis, supportive relatives mean more than anything. Since his family was dysfunctional, Kopp did not have this support and had to rely on himself for survival. He often laughs when recalling the horrible situations he faced and does so not only to alleviate his trauma but also because he does not want to complain. Looking at what Kopp has gone through, it is amazing that he can still smile. He exemplifies the triumph of the human spirit. “The difference between me and most people today,” Kopp observed, “is that I am a lucky bastard and I know it. Enjoy the day because tomorrow we die. Luckily, I will die naturally and not on a field of battle or in Hitler’s destruction.”

Half-Jewish Lieutenant Arno Spitz

Arno Spitz is of medium height and has white hair, clear blue eyes, and a mustache. His stocky frame gives the impression he could have been a powerful wrestler when young. When asked a question, he takes his time to answer. He has a bright mind and continues to believe that what he experienced during the war was unremarkable. Yet, when one listens to his story, it comes across as anything but unremarkable. Perhaps for men of his generation, some of the events he describes seem common, but for the majority of people in the West today his world of combat, death, and Nazi terror present a reality many have a difficult time comprehending.

Spitz, born 24 April 1920 in Berlin, had a Jewish father, Walter, who converted to Christianity to marry his wife, Christine. At that time, Jews in Germany often assimilated and converted. Many Jews who converted did so for social acceptance.¹³ Spitz’s father did not believe in Christianity and thought religion and God were nonsense. He believed, as does his son Arno, that man created God. He only converted for love. Arno’s mother, a Lutheran minister’s daughter, remained somewhat religious, but she did not raise her children with a strong belief. She was a decided philo-Semite, and the Spitz family maintained friendly relations with Jews. Nevertheless, once in Arno’s presence in mid-1933, she called Jews “cowards” for leaving Germany without “good” reason. This remark motivated the young Spitz to be courageous in everything he did, especially while in the military.

During World War I, Spitz’s father served in the army’s chemical department. He later became the director of a pharmaceutical factory. He felt the Versailles Treaty would not provide a lasting peace and looked forward to the day when Germany would regain its respectability internationally. Under the terms of the treaty, the Allies at the end of World War I forced Germany to yield a considerable part of its territory and pay heavy reparations. As a result, Germany fell on hard times economically. But Spitz’s family prospered due to his father’s creative intelligence and good contacts.

Spitz lived on a beautiful estate in a village near Eberswalde outside of Berlin and enjoyed a privileged life. Although anti-Semitism did exist in Germany, the family did not experience problems before 1933. Having a Jewish father concerned Spitz only after the Nazis gained control in Germany and imposed a discriminatory framework of social values. Yet, Spitz’s father did not think Hitler’s tenure would last very long. He was, of course, unfortunately proven wrong.

The Nuremberg Racial Laws promulgated in 1935 classified Spitz as a half-Jew. He now worried about dating “Aryan” girls. He shied away from several invitations from girls to start a relationship, which gave him a sense of “lost youth.”

By 1937, his father, due to the persecution, lost his ability to support the family and had to sell his estate. He tried to make a living producing pharmaceuticals in Austria and the Baltic and Balkan countries, but did not succeed.

In March 1938 Spitz passed his Abitur (high school examination) and finished at the top of his class. Since the Nazis had started to bar half-Jews from studying at universities except after military service, Spitz decided to volunteer for the Luftwaffe (German air force). Before entering the Luftwaffe, he had to fulfill the required half-year in the National Labor Service.

On 9–10 November, which came to be called Reichskristallnacht (Reich Crystal Night, which came to be called in English Night of Broken Glass), the Nazis arrested some 30,000 Jews, murdered around 100 Jews, burned hundreds of synagogues, and destroyed countless Jewish-owned businesses.¹⁴

Following this pogrom, Spitz’s father left via Riga for the United States in July 1939. Two of Walter Spitz’s brothers had already emigrated to that country in 1933 and felt fortunate since the United States denied entry to most Jews. Yet another brother had gone to Chile.

After his national service and while waiting to enter the military, Spitz worked as a road construction laborer and stayed with his mother in emergency quarters in Falkenberg. His three siblings—brother Peter, a merchant marine officer, and two sisters, Gerda and Miriam—had found acceptable job opportunities in Berlin. In March 1939, the Luftwaffe placed Spitz in a communications unit at Bernau north of Berlin. After finishing basic training there, he was selected to join a marine air force communications unit in Prussia.

In July 1939, with war on the horizon, his group boarded a ship for Pillau in East Prussia. His superiors told him and his comrades to stay below decks so that the Allies would not become concerned about troop movements to Prussia. Spitz and his fellow soldiers worried about the coming conflict. When the war started, his superiors attached him to a small motorized naval air force communications unit to set up airport control facilities on newly acquired airfields. They assigned him to take charge of telephone services of an operational airfield at staff headquarters, keeping him out of combat when Germany launched its invasion of Poland.

At this time a friend of his father’s, Axel Nehls, who commanded a reporters’ unit, advised Spitz not to draw the attention of the authorities. As a result, while in the service, he did not discuss his ancestry. Also, as far as he knows, no reference to his Jewish past existed in his papers. Spitz believes his commander, Lieutenant Erich Berker, who knew about Spitz’s background, falsely testified that Spitz was an Aryan, thus protecting him.

While in charge of a telephone switchboard at a provisional navy airport in East Prussia, Spitz made friends with HE 59 sea-biplane pilots. After they complained about difficulties in orientation on high seas far from communications relay stations, Spitz developed an automatic coupler using his high school training in physics, which the Pillau airport engineer sent on to General Ernst Udet, the supply chief of the Luftwaffe. Soon thereafter, Udet sent Spitz a letter commending his efforts. That incident encouraged Spitz to apply later for navigational training.

After Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940, Spitz’s unit moved to Aalborg, where it remained during the French campaign in May. One year later, in April 1941, after Germany invaded Greece, the military stationed his unit at the Aegean coast town of Kavalla and later near a shipyard south of Athens. Soon Spitz was promoted to Unteroffizier (corporal) and eventually managed to join the paratroopers, an elite Luftwaffe unit. In spring 1942, he entered jump school near Guetersloh, west of Hanover.

For the first four weeks Spitz and his peers trained in infantry tactics and field survival. One evening, after they retired to bed, their superiors ordered them to gather their gear and get ready to ship out immediately. Without ever having made a jump, his unit traveled directly into the Demyansk battle in northern Russia. They joined a large contingent to relieve 100,000 Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers who had been encircled there in an area of about 20 by 40 miles during the winter of 1941–1942.¹⁵ On reaching the battlefield, Spitz’s unit immediately attacked a Soviet position heavily defended by bunkers. At daybreak, Spitz’s group focused on a specified bunker about 500 meters away.

As Spitz crawled forward on his belly, he lost contact with his men. Small blueberry bushes covered the marshy ground. “Strangely enough,” Spitz recalled, “although we were attacking, just like a sheep, I’d randomly pick berries with my lips and eat them as I continued on my elbows and knees.” Spitz had to keep his head close to the ground as a continuous flow of German heavy machine-gun fire flowed overhead into the enemy’s bunker.

As Spitz’s group moved forward, Russian artillery shells rained down on them. Body parts flew in every direction as the shells tore into the Germans. The sounds of war made ears ring and confusion reigned on the battlefield. In the words of another soldier, “The world was seething with death.”¹⁶

Chewing his blueberries, Spitz continued to crawl forward into this chaos. Due to his steady approach, he reached the bunker alone. He then attacked and sprayed two Russian soldiers lying dead next to it with sub-machine gun fire and waited for reinforcements.

Hardly any others in his unit survived. His unit had originally numbered around 300, but only a handful remained alive. The artillery barrage had cut down most of his fellow paratroopers. For his bravery and accomplishments on that day, Spitz’s superiors awarded him the Close Combat Bar in Bronze—a medal awarded to those who had “seen the whites of the eyes of the enemy,” Spitz explained.

One reason for Spitz’s brave acts arose from his inferiority complex as a half-Jew. He simply felt he had to do more than others. This was common among half-Jews. Many sought glory on the battlefield as a means of improving their self-esteem as well as protecting themselves and their families. Serving also proved to others just how German they felt and were.

The few surviving remnants of Spitz’s battalion returned to Germany at Bergen-Belsen near Lüneburg for further training and to get reequipped. Spitz had no idea a concentration camp lay nearby and commented, “I never knew about what horrible crimes were going on there at the time.” When he was in Bergen-Belsen, the concentration center was primarily a POW camp where thousands of Soviet war prisoners had already died. While training at Bergen-Belsen, Spitz found he did not like the new paratroopers. Many were troublemakers and rejects. He therefore began to look for a new outfit.

One day in late summer 1942, he heard that an antitank unit was being formed at his base. “In an uncustomary move on my part, or any Unteroffizier for that matter, I approached the battalion commander and asked to be taken,” Spitz said. The officer gave Spitz a searching glance and then accepted him.

After training, he returned to Russia to an area north of Demyansk at Staraja Russa near the great Ilmen Lake. In 1943 the front remained largely quiet, but during the winter, the Red Army started its rollback operations in the northern front and things heated up. Spitz’s unit engaged not only in several local skirmishes but also in repulsing Russian infantry attacks using antipersonnel shells. Spitz’s unit, the Twelfth Luftwaffe Field Division, Antitank Battalion 43, was outfitted with the Pak 97/38 French 75 mm and the German 8.8 cm Flak cannons.

In late 1943, they came under heavy fire. Spitz’s unit fought back tenaciously. Running out of antipersonnel shells, they were in danger of being overrun; they called back for more supplies but did not receive the help they so desperately needed. Spitz volunteered to drive a truck to the supply depot to get ammunition, and his company commander approved the mission. As Spitz and some of his comrades drove away, the whole horizon lit up with the fires and flashes of warfare.

They drove all day through swampy areas and burning villages to reach the Army Corps’ headquarters. When they arrived late at night, Spitz told the orderly that he wanted to see the supply officer, a general. “That’s impossible now,” the man said, “the general is asleep.” Spitz felt exasperated. He knew their comrades would not survive much longer at their position without cannon support. Spitz insisted that he see the general immediately. Seeing Spitz’s desperation, the orderly returned to the tent and woke his commander. “The general was actually kind to me. He promised that he would make sure our truck was filled up with the antipersonnel ammunition by morning,” Spitz said. Personnel there loaded the truck overnight while the driver and Spitz slept a few hours.

After the truck was loaded, Spitz and his comrade returned to a disastrous situation. On the road outside the village where they had fought the day before, Spitz met his commander, Captain Kupke, and the battalion commander, who informed him that the Russians had killed most of Spitz’s comrades and had captured their cannon. The trip to acquire ammunition seemed to have been in vain. Not giving up hope, though, Spitz suggested a counterattack. There were only four of them: the two officers with their pistols and Spitz and an orderly with a submachine gun. They decided to try the daring plan and entered the darkening village street with its empty wooden houses. The sun sank below the tree line as they moved forward.

Nearing their old positions, Spitz and the other soldier next to him received enemy fire. They answered with their submachine guns. Suddenly, the man next to Spitz was hit and dropped to the ground, dead. Now enraged, the two officers and Spitz yelled “Hurrah!” and charged the Russians, firing as they ran. “I know this sounds romantic. Yelling and charging is stuff of the movies. I lost my mind in that moment, but it worked. Since it was dark, the enemy must have thought there were more of us and their group retreated,” Spitz explained.

When they retook their old positions and cannon, they found their comrades dead. Rigor mortis had already set in, making the dead rigid in their death positions. Their eyes were wide open and their mouths were contorted. Not wasting time to bury their fallen comrades, Spitz and the two officers quickly removed their cannon with a truck and placed it behind the shrinking front, leaving their dead comrades behind.

Spitz’s commander awarded him the Iron Cross Second Class and promoted him to Fahnenjunker-Feldwebel (officer candidate sergeant) for his actions. “A soldier like you,” said his commander, “should become an officer.” Spitz did not feel like a great soldier. He just felt lucky; he feels that he survived war because he could sense danger and avoid it. He does not know how to teach someone how to develop this sort of intuition, but he had it, and it saved his life.

Spitz’s outfit later joined other units that continued their retreat into Estonia. On 4 April 1944, a shell splinter wounded Spitz during a frontline inspection. “I always believed I was untouchable,” Spitz said, “I mean, being in so many near-death experiences, I thought I would never get wounded.” Blood ran down his foot and out of the ripped hole in his boot. Because he could no longer walk, his commander carried Spitz on his back to the next medical attendant.

Medics transported him to the rear echelons where other wounded soldiers awaited transportation to a first-aid station. The injured cried out in pain and screamed for their mothers. “The ones who had been shot in the gut were the worst,” Spitz said, “they screamed until they’d slump over, dead in a pool of blood.” Until observing these wounded soldiers, Spitz had not considered war to be particularly dangerous. Until then, he “had just played in war like a theater production.” He knows this sounds strange today, but it was how he felt then.

Spitz was sent to a hospital in Lithuania and later to Schwerin in Mecklenburg. Soon the Soviets entrapped the army he had served with on the Kurland peninsula in the Baltic region, and many comrades disappeared under Russia’s rolling advance.

Upon Spitz’s recovery, the military attached him to the 139th Mountain Regiment (Gebirgsjäger) in Klagenfurt, Austria. He attended Officer Candidate School and became a lieutenant. When asked how he got by the ancestry forms for officers, Spitz explained that he did not sign the “Aryan” declaration and left the blanks empty about his family. No one seemed to notice this omission.

“Only the first year did I worry someone would find out I was a half-Jew, but when it never became an issue, I felt protected,” Spitz said. While serving, he felt he had a relatively free life. In his opinion, the majority of his comrades were somewhat critical of Nazi ideology. He and others fought for Germany and not for Hitler. “I did my duty, that’s all,” Spitz said.

When asked about his decorations, Spitz downplayed them. “Yes, I received some medals for bravery, but I was really not a good soldier,” he claimed. “I was just lucky that my true ancestry was never known.”

His brother, a decorated ship merchant marine captain, also never encountered problems because of his ancestry. Even one of his sisters, Gerda, served in the Wehrmacht and survived in Hamburg serving in an antiaircraft flak unit, and the Nazis seemed to ignore her. All his siblings survived the war.

In the spring of 1945 Spitz became aide-de-camp to Colonel Buckner, commander of a mountain brigade in Bavaria. As the war entered its final weeks, the Americans captured Spitz, but he escaped. He now was on his own. With luck and his English language skills, he soon became a liaison officer between surrendered German units and the American army.

Regarding his awareness of the Holocaust, Spitz claims he knew nothing about it before the war’s end. He lost his aunt, Claire Spitz, who had suffered persecution as a Jew while staying in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin. In 1944, the Nazis deported her to the east. Thereafter, Spitz never heard from her again. His mother wrote him about Dr. Tannenbaum, a Jewish friend of the family who was deported. He thought that only Ostjuden were repatriated into Poland, but that the Nazis gassed them along with all other Jews was beyond his comprehension. Only after the war did Spitz learn what Germany had done to the Jews. “I couldn’t believe what had happened,” he said.

He mentioned that during the war he hardly even heard anti-Semitic comments from his comrades. This was simply not something they talked about. “What’s written about this after the war,” Spitz said, “doesn’t correspond with my experiences.”

He did recall that while driving through a Russian village, he saw a civilian man hanging from a tree. Was he a partisan? Spitz is horrified that not just a few partisans, but millions, were brutally murdered. He believes that war is nonsense and wishes that countries would resort less to the use of arms. “War’s simply hell,” Spitz said.

Spitz said he does not feel Jewish but added, “However, when I meet remarkable and congenial Jews, I’m glad that I’m somehow related to them. However, I wouldn’t call myself a Jew. I’m a Mensch just like everyone else.”

After the war, Spitz founded and managed a publishing house (now Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, but earlier called Berlin Verlag Arno Spitz GmbH) in Berlin and did his best to forget those days when he was forced to live as a hidden half-Jew.

Spitz delivers his testimony with utter detachment. Although he discusses remarkable events, the tone in his voice leads one to believe he feels he is just talking about ordinary events. Maybe this is how he copes with his experiences, or maybe he feels that compared with what could have happened, he is lucky to be alive because he did not fall victim to battles like Stalingrad or extermination centers like Auschwitz.

And unlike Kopp, who still struggles with what his Jewishness really means for his life, Spitz chooses not to identify with his Jewish ancestry. He seems to be bored with many definitions people use to describe themselves, including Jew and Christian. Spitz describes himself as a humanist and thinks people need to see their common humanity instead of their differences. He feels people often mix up these differences with religious prejudice that dictates who has the right way to live versus who does not—a prejudice the human race needs to eradicate if it wants to have a war-free world. This is what is important to Spitz—the pursuit of tolerance and no more war.

Jewish Captain Edgar Jacoby

Edgar Jacoby had a flare for the dramatic. Having been a movie director in both Germany and Hollywood in the golden age of film, he knew his way around the high society of power and influence. When photographed, he often struck a pose to make himself look dapper and handsome. His chiseled features made him appear athletic, and his demeanor gave the impression he was extremely confident, almost cocky. Yet, looks were deceiving. He had a weak heart and felt insecure about his place in society due to his racial background.

Edgar Nikolaus Joel Jacoby was born the youngest child of four on 4 May 1892 in Moscow, Russia, to a German family. His father, Albert, was Jewish but had converted to Christianity. His mother, Alma (née Hirschmann), was also Jewish but had been raised a Christian. Edgar and his siblings (Käthe, Gertrude, and Albert) were brought up in the Lutheran Church.

The Jacoby family lived in Moscow because of the family’s business. Albert Jacoby ran factories in Moscow, Tbilisi (now in the Republic of Georgia), and Lugansk (in Ukraine) that processed cotton, camel hair, and other textiles. In 1894, the family returned to Hamburg, where they led a comfortable, middle-class life. After Edgar Jacoby finished high school in 1911, he traveled overseas on an apprenticeship. To learn more about cotton farming, Jacoby traveled to Texas and worked on a plantation. His father felt this opportunity would prepare him to enter the family’s business.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Jacoby, caught up in patriotic enthusiasm, returned to Germany to serve. He made it back home in November 1914 and enlisted in the army. He fought as a soldier in the Ninth Army Corps.

During the war, Jacoby’s two sisters worked for the Red Cross in Germany as assistants. Yet, his brother, Albert, remained in Astrakhan, Russia, the site of one of the family offices. After the war started, the Russians confiscated the business and he had to report daily to the police. Later, the Russians allowed him to return to Germany in exchange for Russian prisoners of war.

Edgar Jacoby had his major combat experience near Rheims, France. Toward war’s end, Jacoby took command of a company. One superior wrote that Jacoby represented a perfect leader. Another superior wrote of Jacoby that while he fought in the Twelfth Company of Infantry Regiment 84 outside of Rheims, he showed incredible bravery as “a coldblooded warrior.” Although suffering a combat wound to the hand and another to the head, he continued to fight. His superiors decorated him with the Iron Cross Second and First Class. His second wife, Marianne, said that during an attack by the French, Jacoby killed over twenty men. He told her how disturbed he felt “slaughtering” a few of them with a bayonet when his machine gun ran out of ammunition. Their faces still pursued him in his dreams.

After hostilities ceased, Jacoby returned to Hamburg and was reunited with his siblings. Around this time, he married Betty, a gentile. The young couple soon had a daughter, Vera. Jacoby had difficulties finding work in Germany after World War I. But eventually, he became an assistant director in the film industry in Hollywood and moved to the United States in 1924. Although successful, in 1928 he returned to Cologne, Germany, to make films in his homeland.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Jacoby moved to Berlin hoping to disappear in the large city. Even so, his wife divorced him because of his Jewish background. According to Marianne Jacoby, Edgar said that Betty “became anti-Semitic and called me a dirty Jew.” Betty hoped the separation would help her better support their daughter. Although a Misch ling, his daughter, Vera, had to join the Hitler youth group for girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel—BDM). Tragically, she died in 1937 at the age of sixteen when she fell off a human pyramid and broke her neck during a BDM exercise. Vera’s death devastated Jacoby and he fell into a deep depression. Thereafter, he immersed himself in his work.

To escape Nazi persecution, Jacoby’s brother, Albert, emigrated to the United States in 1939. Albert’s wife followed him in 1940 on one of the last ships leaving from Italy for America. But their two daughters had to remain in Germany for lack of funds.

The family of his sister Gertrude also encountered serious problems at that time. Her husband, Baumbach zu Kaimberg, lost his government job due to his wife’s Jewish ancestry and because he refused to divorce her. As a result, the family became penniless. Unable to support his family, he hanged himself.

Now Gertrude, no longer protected by her Aryan husband, emigrated to Argentina. Settling down in Buenos Aires, she barely earned enough to live on. Even so, Jacoby’s other sister, Käthe Himmelheber, eventually sent one of her daughters, Erika, age twelve, to Argentina to join Gertrude and help her in building a life there for both of them. Käthe, who in the meantime had divorced her Aryan husband, could not join her daughter because she had been committed to a mental hospital. Käthe’s other daughter, Lisa, remained in Germany and served the Wehrmacht as a secretary. She felt embarrassed to have a Jewish mother and, like most Mischlinge, hid her origins. Luckily for her, she found people in the Wehrmacht willing to help her conceal her racial background. Käthe’s ex-husband did not care for his daughters, whom he called “half-Jewish mongrels,” so they could not rely on him for help.

During this time, Jacoby had found work with UFA (Universum Film AG) film company in Berlin, undoubtedly the best of the German studios. While filming on the Baltic Sea, he fell in love with a woman named Marianne Guenther. Tall, energetic, blond, and blue-eyed, she was beautiful and full of life. She eventually joined Jacoby in Berlin and found work at UFA. He worried about their future since the Nazis had prohibited marriages between Jews and Aryans.

Though Marianne knew about Jacoby’s background, she continued their relationship and became pregnant in 1937. They feared the repercussions of having violated Rassenschande now that proof existed they had had relations. Both worried the Nazis would execute them if they found out, especially since Jacoby did not have the Aryan papers to marry her. Marianne simply told him, “But that doesn’t change anything. I still love you.” To escape persecution and enable them to get married, Jacoby falsified his papers and married Marianne in 1937. Edgar registered himself as an “Aryan” in his documents and no one noticed his forgery. That year, their son, Klaus-Edgar, was born. Having false documents, though, did not alleviate Jacoby’s fear that someone would discover his secret.

In March 1940, not long after World War II broke out, the Wehrmacht drafted Jacoby as a reserve officer. Marianne said that no one guessed he was a Jew. “When in uniform, he looked like ten Aryans, to use the stupid Nazi terminology,” she said. Because of his experience in film, he became commander of a propaganda company documenting the German victories during the French campaign of 1940. He also worked on the weekly military Wochenschau news reports run by the Propaganda Ministry. Both he and his wife hoped this job would protect them.

The constant fear Jacoby lived in caused him stomach problems. In one of his military reports, his superior mentioned that Jacoby often reported sick. His stressful job required him to travel throughout Germany and work with demanding people. Between 1937 and 1939, he and Marianne had two more children, a daughter, Barbara, and a son, Manfred, who, sadly, died four months after his birth. This added yet more pain to his life, but having already lost comrades in World War I and his daughter Vera, Edgar had learned how to deal with such pain. Moreover, according to his wife, he did not have time to grieve. Edgar worried about his family and their future and, unbeknownst to him, time was running out for him because the authorities would soon discover his lie.

In the summer of 1941, right before Jacoby received the rank of major, his origins were brought to light when his sister Käthe Himmelheber attended a Nazi NSF (National Socialist Women’s League—a Nazi Party organization) meeting at Pinneberg. A high-ranking party officer, Alfred Krömer, identified Käthe as Jewish and later contacted her landlady, Johanna Krohn. He then met with Johanna and told her that she needed to evict Käthe because Jews were unwanted in Pinneberg.

To Krohn’s credit, she had supported Käthe and known about her ancestry. However, now she had to report the situation and force Käthe to leave her apartment. Thirty minutes after Krohn had met with Krömer, Käthe showed up at Krömer’s office, upset. She did not understand how he could just send her out on the street, especially since her brother served in the Wehrmacht. Krömer, shocked by this information, informed the military authorities, describing Käthe’s “insolence (Frechheit).” That same day, Krömer also made sure that Käthe’s boss fired her from her position at Fa. Wuppermann AG. Back at Jacoby’s duty station in Fontainebleau, France, his commander informed him about what had happened with his sister. Jacoby stuttered that he found this accusation “absurd.” He then instantly fell into a depression and suffered a heart attack. Later, he told his wife he felt “as though my heart was going to fly out of my chest. I couldn’t breathe and I was scared.” His sister’s actions had revealed his true ancestry and his false documents no longer could hide his identity.

Edgar’s unit immediately sent him to a hospital due to his heart attack. Soon thereafter, Käthe wrote to Jacoby in the hospital that she now had to live in Jewish housing, though she did not feel or “think” Jewish. Nonetheless, the documents on her ancestry “proved” her Jewish background. She pleaded for help.

While recuperating from his sickness, he wrote his sister. In a July letter to her, he explained that if he was not so sick, he would have come to Hamburg and dealt with the “shitty situation” she had created. Furious, he wrote: “My God! We soldiers have enough problems without having to take care of the mess you’ve created.” He explained that she had made his situation unbearable.

From his military experience, Jacoby should have known that the authorities would censor his mail. Consequently, he probably committed to paper ideas and “facts” he thought would perhaps mitigate his own situation. He asked her, “Since when and how come have you described yourself as a full-Jew?” The fact she now had a Jewish identification certificate surprised him. He then requested she explain what she had told the authorities about their relatives and to send the family papers in her possession to him. He scolded her, saying that before she tried to become a member of a Nazi organization, she must first have her papers in order—something, he explained, only he could do. He warned her to stop making claims about their ancestors that she obviously could not know and said he would soon travel to Hamburg to put the family’s documents in order. In case she failed to understand the situation, he told her that if the officials should push her for more information, “tell them they should wait until I’m there to answer them.” He pleaded with her to think about his wife and children and what they might face if she continued to talk about their family the way she had. “It all can come to a quick end,” he warned her.

But the Abwehr (military intelligence service) told Jacoby’s commander that his sister was indeed a full Jew. Even so, the commander allowed him to go to Hamburg to attempt to sort out the situation. Not surprisingly, he failed. One of his old commanders, Colonel von Arnim, heard about Jacoby’s problems and exclaimed, “When Edgar earned his Iron Cross in World War I, we didn’t ask him to prove his Aryan ancestry. We only asked him to prove himself in battle.” Yet this support, although noteworthy, did not help.

In August 1941, the OKW (Armed Forces High Command) wrote the OKH (Army High Command) personnel department that because of his Jewish ancestry, Jacoby could not stay. The army arrested him under the suspicion that he was a spy. Despite the fact that he was a World War I officer decorated with the Iron Cross and in poor health, the army brought Jacoby before a military court and discharged him and then deported him to a forced labor camp. Although he was found not guilty of the charges of espionage, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of staff of the Army High Command, refused to sign the verdict that Jacoby had lied about his ancestry, the Nazis still sent Jacoby away for punishment. He now had to wear the Star of David instead of the Iron Cross and to add “Israel” to his name. His sister Käthe was deported to Theresienstadt.

Jacoby’s wife, Marianne, feared the future. She did not know how to feed two little mouths with her husband locked up in a forced labor camp and she immediately appealed to the authorities to release him.

Meanwhile, Jacoby’s situation was not as deadly as one would think. He considered himself lucky that while he was in the forced labor camp, he always found people to protect him. Most camp authorities could not believe that the government could mistreat a World War I veteran decorated with the Iron Cross. Many felt sympathy for him and tried to help him in small ways. The family believes that was why, after several months of incarceration, the camp authorities returned him to Berlin. Marianne thinks that the camp commander, also a World War I officer, found a way to get Jacoby sent back home because he did not feel right locking up a war veteran. According to Jacoby, since the court had found him innocent of the charges filed against him, it was only right that he could go home. But because the bureaucrats labeled him a Jew, it took more time than usual for the court to honor its findings about him.

Luckily for Jacoby, his brave “Aryan” wife refused to divorce him and this must have had a profound effect on the way bureaucrats handled his case. Those Jews whose “Aryan” spouses divorced them usually found themselves deported to a concentration camp. Nazi authorities often pressured Marianne to leave him, but she refused to do so. One day, a civil servant asked her, “How could you marry a Jew in 1937?” Marianne answered sarcastically, “Well, why do people usually marry?” He then encouraged her to divorce him. She replied that she would not. The bureaucrat coldly answered that she should do this to have a better husband. Everyone in the office looked at her and she suddenly became upset and said, “I’ll stay married to my husband as long as I live.” She then left.

Remarkably, while being protected by his wife living in a so-called privileged mixed marriage (privilegierte Mischehe),¹⁷ Jacoby started to secretly work on films with UFA and Tobis and even helped produce some films for the Wehrmacht. His employers knew about his situation but supported him. This enabled him to feed his family.

Nonetheless, he and his wife continued to live in fear. They would board streetcars through separate doors and not walk together on the streets. However, they continued to live in the same house. Then, in the summer of 1942, things took a turn for the worse. UFA had to fire Edgar for racial reasons. The army’s case of treason against him was revisited in June 1942, and the authorities sentenced him to seven months in prison. From September 1942 until March 1943, the Nazis incarcerated him at Plötzensee in Tegel near Berlin. And then a few months after his release, the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned him at their compound in Berlin at Burgstrasse. Soon thereafter, Marianne received a phone call informing her that the Gestapo had put her husband in jail. When she asked for the caller’s identity, the caller hung up. Later, they found out someone had denounced him to the SS.

For days, the brave Marianne went from one office to another with two little children in tow to find her husband. The bureaucrats again tried to convince her to file for divorce. They explained how much easier life would be if she did so. Marianne refused. She told them that they should feel ashamed for pressuring her to do this “cowardly act.” According to the historical record, Jews who had Aryan spouses were indeed protected for a longer time than those Jews who were single or married to other Jews. As a result, Marianne’s resolve to remain married to Jacoby probably saved his life.

From the jail at Burgstrasse, the SS moved him to a basement jail at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. After ten days, he was transferred to the concentration camp Grossbeeren right outside Potsdam. Then after three weeks, he was moved to a camp at Wartenberg in the Sudetenland. Jacoby later reported that once the camp’s SS men found out about his combat service, they treated him better than others. After several months at Wartenberg, the SS returned him to a prison in Berlin. Confused by the moving around, Jacoby feared his life would soon end.

At the same time, although Marianne had small children, she was called up to take part in forced labor. When she reported, the bureaucrats there saw the absurdity of forcing her to do such work while taking care of two children and they sent her home.

Marianne’s days were fraught with tension. For instance, one day as Marianne made her way through the streets with her children, a woman stopped her to look at her daughter, Barbara, and commented, “That’s not a German child.” Marianne responded, “What do you mean? I’m a German, my family are German, and her father served in World War I as an officer.” “That isn’t a German child,” the stranger said again and walked away. Shocked, Marianne could not believe her ears. As she walked away, she worried about her daughter. “I guess she felt Barbara was Jewish because of her dark hair and dark eyes, and I was as blond as a poodle,” Marianne said. She and her children lived under a shadow of fear chained to a life of discrimination.

On 22–23 November 1943, during one of the heavy Allied attacks on Berlin with almost 800 planes, several bombs hit Jacoby’s prison and destroyed it. In the chaos, his jailer opened his door and freed him. He explained that the bombs had destroyed the files and no one would look for him. Edgar could not believe his luck. He walked through the burning city streets until he reached his home early in the morning. His heart overflowed with joy as he hugged his wife and children. Later, strangely enough, he even received his civilian clothes from the Grossbeeren camp (the personnel probably thought he had died and, thus, returned his personal effects to the family). Amazingly, he survived in hiding until the end of the war.

After the Nazis finally capitulated, Jacoby moved to the town of Nikolassee outside of Berlin and became its mayor. His ability to speak English and communicate in Russian were ideal skills to have in postwar Europe and he wanted to take an active part in rebuilding Germany. He also busied himself with increasing his family, and in 1945, his fifth child, Christian, was born.

After 1945, Jacoby and his family started to hear about the Holocaust and to learn first-hand of the toll it took on Jacoby’s relatives. One day, his cousin Alice visited him. She had survived the war, but the SS had murdered her four-year-old Jewish twin daughters at Auschwitz. Jacoby’s sister Käthe returned from Theresienstadt in poor health and lived with him and his family. In 1954, his other sister, Gertrude, came back from Argentina, demoralized and decidedly aged beyond her years from her hardships.

In order to prevent Nazism from happening again, Jacoby helped to found and worked for a Christian-Jewish solidarity organization, Die Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit. The members of this group focused on creating more understanding between Jews and Christians and fostering tolerance. The group’s founders felt that by creating a dialogue between the two faiths, they could help prevent anti-Semitism. He joind with others like half-Jew and Wehrmacht veteran Heinz Bleicher, who actually founded the Bleicher Verlag to work on these very issues of reconciliation.

Although mayor, Jacoby still needed a job to support his family. It proved difficult to receive compensation from the government. Eventually the city employed him in Berlin in film festivals, during the course of which he met the actor Gary Cooper.

To his wife’s amazement, Jacoby also attended his veteran reunions because he felt patriotic and connected to his comrades. He believed that when a person’s nation calls him to arms, he must fulfill his duty to the state. He felt that one should not feel shame at having served his land. Most soldiers throughout history are proud of their service and feel an attachment to their brothers-in-arms. Surprisingly, this feeling is often expressed by the men in this study, although they served a government controlled by Hitler.

While his immediate family had survived, Jacoby never recovered his health. In 1956 he died of heart failure at sixty-four.

So how did Jacoby view himself? Although he was brought up as a Christian, he really did not believe in any religion. But when the Nazis came into power, they labeled him a Jew. “Why couldn’t people simply view each others as human beings?” he often asked rhetorically.

He claimed he did not know about the Holocaust while it was happening. Had Marianne not remained married to him, the Nazis would have probably sent him to a death camp. The authorities did not know how to handle Jews married to Aryans, and Jacoby was lucky his wife remained loyal to him. Had she divorced him, “then he would’ve known about the Holocaust,” his daughter Barbara said, “right before they shoved him into a gas chamber.”

Edgar represents many in this book in that he failed to comprehend what the Nazis meant to do to those they labeled Jewish. Probably due to his honorable service, as well as his patriotic feelings, he sometimes failed to take the actions one would have thought necessary to protect himself and his family. As family members started to leave Germany and the race laws became stricter, one wonders why Jacoby did not use his U.S. contacts to escape. Yet his loyalty to his country, in addition to his belief that he could hide his origins, caused him to remain, which in hindsight was a mistake. Jacoby’s attitudes were similar to those of thousands of Germans of Jewish descent, who also never thought their ancestry would lead to their deaths.

Ironically, Jacoby represents a person whom many religious Jews and Nazis would have called a Jew although he would have never called himself as such. Jacoby illustrates so clearly what Martin Gilbert said: “Tens of thousands of German-Jews were not Jews at all in their own eyes.”¹⁸ Yet, here again, the Nazis did not care what one thought about oneself. What mattered was what the Nazis thought of a person, and for them, Jacoby was simply a Jew.

Jewish Waffen-SS Rottenführer Karl-Heinz Löwy

Karl-Heinz Löwy was a well-read and worldly man. During our conversation, he often quoted Heinrich Heine and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and made several references to the wonderful relationships he had with numerous women. When he smiled, he lit up the whole room. He spoke with his hands, and his eyes opened wide when he expressed an important point. Rather tall and of slender build, he was a person who enjoyed being active. He often leaned forward eagerly to discuss his life—he was excited to talk.

Löwy believed his story about his experiences as a full Jew in the Waffen-SS was more dramatic than Shlomo Perel’s tale in the movie Europa, Europa. “I don’t think Perel tells the whole truth,” Löwy said, adding, “I’ll do my best to be honest.”

Löwy was born on 25 December 1920 in Munich into a family that had fled from the Spanish Inquisition to Germany four hundred years earlier. His parents raised him as a religious Jew. Besides being Jewish, they were zealous patriots with a strong military background. This combination may sound strange today, but this was common among Jews in Germany at that time. His maternal grandfather, Schoelein, had been a reserve captain and an honorary member of his regiment and was a distinguished businessman in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. He said that he was a German first and a Jew second. In addition to his military and business activities, he was a passionate family man who deeply loved his wife and four daughters.

When World War I broke out, Löwy’s grandfather encouraged his daughters to work as Red Cross nurses. One of his daughters, Löwy’s mother, received several decorations for her service. Löwy’s grandfather, although advancing in years, served in the army during World War I. He was a “100 percent German patriot and proud of his service to Kaiser, Volk und Vaterland,” Löwy said, adding, “This sounds tragic today to those who have heard about the Holocaust, but that was the case.” Several of Löwy’s other relatives also fought in the German and Austro-Hungarian armies.

His grandfather placed much emphasis on education when he visited. He always had Löwy read Proverbs to teach him wisdom. When he tucked him into bed at night, his grandfather read works to him by the Swiss author Gottfried Keller and the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Later, when Löwy served in the Waffen-SS, he carried some of Heine’s works in his backpack.

His father, Arnold, was born in Vienna and raised in a traditional Orthodox home. He owned a brush factory in Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria. Löwy remembers his observant paternal grandfather putting on his Telfilin (phylacteries) and saying his Hebrew prayers every morning. He opposed his son’s marriage to Löwy’s mother because she came from Germany (“the land of barbarians”) and was not religious.

As a child, Löwy worked hard in school and during his Torah classes learned his prayers and Bible stories. His family celebrated the religious holidays but did not practice strict Orthodox Judaism. The traditions the family observed resembled something like moderate Conservative Judaism in the United States today. Though his family felt proud of being Jewish, they were wary of the Ostjuden (Eastern Jews), whom they found primitive.

As the Nazis gained power in the early 1930s, some members of Löwy’s family became concerned and his mother’s sister Dolch left for Switzerland. However, most of Löwy’s relatives did not believe the systematic persecution of Jews would get as bad as it did. They felt the Nazi Party would soon go away like many parties of the Weimar Republic period.

In 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Löwy’s family immediately experienced problems. Several acquaintances who had previously treated them politely now avoided contact. Anti-Semitism was growing in Germany, but Löwy’s family still sent him to Hebrew School and celebrated the Shabbat (the Sabbath). On 6 December 1934, he had his Bar Mitzvah in the large Munich Temple. Yet, things continued to worsen for the family and they moved away from Munich, seeking a life of anonymity like Arno Spitz and Edgar Jacoby. By now his father’s adultery had led to his parents’ divorce. “My mother actually caught my father in the closet screwing a maid. That didn’t go over well with my mother,” Löwy said. As a result, Löwy moved with his mother to Berlin. They believed they could disappear in the large capital.

Löwy excelled at the Jewish Adass High School but could not escape persecution. The children of pro-Nazi parents often attacked him and beat him up. When asked if he had wished back then that he was not Jewish, he said no, that he was proud of his Jewish past. As a young man he was aware that some of the greatest thinkers in history—including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Heinrich Heine—were Jewish, and knowing this gave him strength.

During the mid- to late 1930s, Löwy often visited his Aunt Dolch and her family in Basel, Switzerland, where he met the Grenacher family, which had two children, a son and daughter. Löwy would take the daughter out on dates, and he became friendly with the son. He had no way of knowing then that the son, Werner Grenacher, would later save his life.

In 1939, Löwy left Germany with his mother for Lyon, France, to escape persecution. He took odd jobs to support his mother and himself. When the war broke out in 1939, the French police rounded up Löwy and several other Germans and detained them in a soccer stadium. Among the detainees were many Jews from Austria and Germany, and several of them protested that they despised Hitler. Representatives from the French Foreign Legion arrived later and told those who wanted to prove they hated Nazis to join the legion. Löwy did so to support his mother.

After his training, he was sent to Fort Elatters in the Sahara Desert. During the period known as the Phony War or Sitzkrieg—from October 1939 to April 1940, the date when fighting broke out between the Allies and Germany in the west—Löwy did not see any action. After France lost the war, he returned to that country, which was now under the Vichy regime, to be with his mother.

Soon after his return to France, he started to work odd jobs as a milk-man and manual laborer to support himself. By this time, his mother had married a Belgian diplomat, and Löwy, adopting his stepfather’s surname, falsified his identity from Karl-Heinz Löwy to Henri Boland.

After he lived for years under this assumed name, the authorities discovered he had falsified his documents and imprisoned him at St. Paul for six months. But when he was released, he continued to live under his false identity. After the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, all of France came under German control, and now Löwy had to worry about hoodwinking the German authorities, who were more thorough than the French.

One day in 1943, while Löwy was at work, German military police started sweeping the town. He quickly disposed of his false papers and told the police that he was Werner Grenacher, an ethnic German from Switzerland. He said that his papers and wallet had been stolen on the train, but that he had traveled to the German-occupied sector to enlist in the Wehrmacht for ideological reasons. He gave them Grenacher’s birth date, mother’s name, and where he was born and was sent to a draft office, which then sent him on to Paris. At one of the military bases in Paris, he joined several hundred men who had also volunteered. An officer asked all Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) to step forward, which Löwy did. They were then told that they were going to serve in the Waffen-SS. Löwy was shocked. He had not expected to serve in Hitler’s elite force and did not know that most often non-German citizens could not serve in the Wehrmacht, but had to serve in the SS military arm. By war’s end, of the 940,000 men serving in the Waffen-SS, only 250,000 were actually German. Although the SS preached racial purity, it did not let it get in the way of its recruiting quotas except for those with “Jewish blood.” Unlike the Wehrmacht, which then drafted half- and quarter-Jews, the Waffen-SS did not allow anyone in its ranks with any Jewish ancestry.¹⁹ So no Mischlinge, much less Löwy, a full Jew, could reveal their true ancestry if they wanted to remain in this organization.

After the authorities registered Löwy, they sent him to the Sixth SS–Mountain Division, based at Hallein near Salzburg. During the medical examination, the doctors told him and his comrades to pull back their foreskins. Löwy acted as if he had foreskin and pretended to pull it back. Nobody noticed his circumcision. “For a few moments,” he said, “I felt I was a dead man. However, after I saw how easy it was to hide it and that nobody really stared at my penis, then I stopped worrying. I thought that if someone ever asked me about it, I would just tell them it was removed as a child because of an infection. However, I was worried once I was in battle. I often thought, ‘What will happen if I get wounded and they see my circumcision?’ That often made me think because it might be hard to explain the situation when you’re in pain. I guess my circum cision played more of a role in my fears than I’m willing to admit, but I survived the war and it never became an issue.”

Besides Löwy’s circumcision, his other physical characteristics would not lead most Nazis to believe he was a Jew. With his blond hair and gray eyes, many Germans thought he looked “Aryan,” which helped him conceal his origins. He believes he was the only Jew in the Waffen-SS. It was a horrible situation. Every morning when he awoke, he thought, “Will I survive this day?” Often, after asking this question, he consoled himself with the Shema, the holiest Jewish prayer.

Löwy said there were “thousands of possibilities that could’ve put someone on my trail.” While serving, he did his best not to do too much or too little to draw the attention of his superiors. He wanted to blend in as best he could.

One day, he thought his secret had been discovered when his sergeant ordered him to step forward and yelled, “You’re standing there like a Jew. Junge [boy], do you know you look just like a Jew the way you’re standing?” Löwy shivered, but when he straightened up, the sergeant let him return to his place in line. He was only “screwing around” with him.

For several months, Löwy trained hard with the mountain troops. Although he and his comrades studied Nazi ideology, he does not remember it playing much of a role in their lives compared with learning how to fight. However, he does recollect intensively studying Hitler’s life. Their superiors taught them to fight for Hitler and accept his ideals as their own. The Germans had to condition Löwy’s comrades to their new leader and his views of a transformed Europe, since they came from Finland, Holland, Switzerland, France, and Denmark. After months of training, his division entered battle in the Karelia forests on the Finland/Russian border. Before they left for war, they pledged allegiance to Hitler, but during that ceremony, Löwy remained silent. No one noticed. “I wasn’t about to give my oath to that maniac,” Löwy said. This small protest had a profound effect on Löwy. One can understand why he felt revolted by this oath when looking at the words. It read: “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Fuehrer and Reichs Chancellor of the German Reich, loyalty, and courage. I vow to you, and to the superiors appointed by you, obedience unto death, so help me God.”²⁰

Knowing the realities of Nazi Germany, one may feel puzzled by the fact that the men in this study who knew about Nazi persecution did not actively oppose the regime. People often shake their heads when they hear about “protests” of the sort Löwy made and ask why these men did not do more. Most who knew about or suspected atrocities declare the authorities would have killed them if they had acted against the Nazis. A realization of helplessness is almost universal among Mischlinge and Jews who served in the armed forces under Nazism. One must not forget that Jews and Mischlinge caught in the Nazi juggernaut had no freedom to act on their own convictions. They did what they were told to do and in the army that meant following orders.

While fighting the Russians on the border with Finland, Löwy and his comrades often engaged in hand-to-hand combat. “It was like fighting a thousand years ago,” Löwy explained, “except we had rifles instead of swords.” In fighting this war of position, once they took over an area, they had to hold it at all cost. During one battle, they overran an island in a large lake, using rubber boats to get there. In the ensuing fight, one of Löwy’s comrades died and Löwy found himself alone when Russians approached his position. A fire fight broke out and Löwy felt a bullet graze his face. He knew if he continued to fight, he would die. So he played dead. Amazingly, the Soviets thought they had killed him and left him alone. A few minutes later, his comrades rescued him when they counterattacked. Playing possum in this case saved his life. “My survival instinct is strong,” Löwy commented.

After the Waffen-SS suffered horrendous defeat at the battle of Salla in 1941, Wehrmacht units incorporated Finnish soldiers into their ranks to help teach the Germans how to fight. So Löwy had constant contact with Finnish personnel and learned their tactics. Ironically, many Jews in the Finnish army found themselves serving with Waffen-SS soldiers, so Löwy might have fought near other Jews also faced with dealing with Germans ideologically opposed to their racial background. The Germans respected the Finns’ combat abilities and valued their alliance and, thus, left Finland alone to deal with its Jews as it saw fit.²¹

Löwy described the Finnish soldiers as brutal. “Both the Russians and ourselves were scared of them,” he said, “and that should tell you something.” He describes the Finns as guerilla warfare masters. They would sneak into Russian encampments and slice the throats of sleeping enemy soldiers without making a sound. One day he and his fellow soldiers came across Soviet troops the Finns had just massacred by cutting through the soldiers’ necks so viciously that the vertebrae at the back of their throats were revealed. They did it in such a way that the victim would not scream because the air exited the sliced windpipe while the Finn shut the mouth and nose of the victim with his free hand.

Löwy disliked the fact that he served on the Russian front because he could not desert to the Soviets. They did not take prisoners often and those they took did not survive long in Soviet POW camps, especially as Waffen-SS veterans. One German soldier wrote that “the war in the east had degenerated to the point that we equated surrender to suicide.”²² Also, as historian Omer Bartov wrote, Wehrmacht personnel “had been taught that both on the personal and on the national level surrender to the Red Army was equivalent to giving oneself up to the devil.”²³ So for self-preservation, Löwy decided to stay with his comrades, whom, surprisingly, he liked. He asked for forgiveness from the Jewish people for feeling friendly toward his anti-Semitic brothers in arms. They were the best comrades anyone would want in war, he added.

Because Löwy distinguished himself in battle, his commanding officer awarded him the Close Combat Badge and the Iron Cross Second and First Class. In the fall of 1944, the Finns made a separate peace with Russia. When German forces did not exit the country as quickly as Finland wanted, the Finns attacked the Germans, and Löwy’s division protected their retreat. During the fight, one of his superiors “had Halsschmerzen [neck pains, in this case referring to where the Knight’s Cross, roughly the U.S. equivalent of the Medal of Honor, was hung]” and decided to take a hill that the Finns had secured. He took the thirty-five men who were left in Löwy’s company and stormed the position. After the fight only six returned alive. Löwy was one of them.

Löwy emphasized the difference between the Waffen-SS and the Death’s Head SS, which ran the extermination camps. “The Waffen-SS soldiers served on the front just like Wehrmacht soldiers. The Death’s Head SS were the real criminals who ran the camps. Saying this though . . . had my comrades known about my Jewish past they would have hung me up on the first tree.” While historians like Charles Sydnor would disagree with the distinction Löwy makes between the Death’s Head and the Waffen-SS, it is interesting that a Jew would hold this opinion about his organization.²⁴

When the Allies invaded Normandy, France, in June 1944, Löwy was still fighting in Finland. In December, the military transferred his unit to the western front to confront the Americans. He met green American troops hurriedly thrown into the line to counter the German thrust code-named Nordwind (North Wind). “The Americans were nothing like the Russians—in some respects, they were so naïve. We simply slaughtered them,” he said. When they attacked, many would scream and yell. Some U.S. troops did not properly camouflage themselves and often their tactics were pathetic, according to Löwy. When asked whether he felt guilty killing U.S. troops, he said in war, you lived according to one principle, “either them or me.” He said he sided with himself. Later, the United States would prove successful against Waffen-SS units as they learned how to fight the Germans in defeating the Sixth SS Mountain Division at Reiperstweiler and Wingen in the Vosges Mountains in 1945.²⁵

During battle in 1944, Löwy, who was by now a Waffen-SS Rottenführer, was shot through the leg. After spending a few weeks in a hospital, he rejoined his unit at Trier. The men’s morale plummeted and many foresaw Germany’s end. A few said they would shoot themselves if Germany lost because they did not want to live under Jews. Löwy said they claimed they fought against a Jewish Bolshevik world conspiracy and added, “That’s how brainwashed they were.” This belief dominated the thoughts of many soldiers. When Löwy heard defeatist talk by his comrades, he always made it a point to say that Hitler would defeat the Allies with his new weapons. He knew he could not say that the war was over although he knew it to be true.

One night at Trier, he sneaked away from his unit and deserted to the French. He discarded his SS uniform jacket with his medals (abandoning his medals made him sad), intending to tell anyone he met that he had escaped from a camp. He also felt nervous about the tattoo under his left arm with his blood group (all SS soldiers had this “mark of Cain”). But he could speak fluent French and this helped Löwy convince his captors to treat him well.

Löwy said that during the war he knew more about the Holocaust than most but not in the detail given today. When he served in the SS, his comrades often said that it was good to get rid of the Jews, but most, in his opinion, did not know how the Nazis murdered them.

After the war, he found out the Nazis had deported his father with his family from Vienna to Minsk, where they died. Luckily, his mother and her family survived in Switzerland. “I felt horrible about my situation but my family was glad I had stayed alive,” he said. “I wasn’t ashamed of how I endured and haven’t kept it a secret from my family. Yet there are some who didn’t understand it and were upset, but not my mother,” he continued. “She was a typical Jewish mother and thought I was the best person in the world.” One day Löwy met a Jewish man who said it would have been better had Löwy died in the camps rather than having served in the Waffen-SS. Löwy told him he was “talking like Hitler, who said the only good Jew is a dead Jew. I didn’t go to the camps and thus I survived.” He did not feel guilty for his service in the Waffen-SS because it saved him from dying in Auschwitz. “I wanted to survive,” he said, “and nothing else.” And Löwy’s opinion seems to be grounded in the Talmud: “He who sees a way to live and takes it not is like a man who sows but does not reap, like a woman who gives birth to children and then buries them.”²⁶ Philosopher Immanuel Kant further states that “it is a duty to preserve one’s life and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so.”²⁷

Obviously, troubling problems arise with this type of reasoning. In coming to terms with his survival, Löwy rationalized that it was acceptable to kill several people in combat in order to preserve his own life, and during the process he had a small role in defending the Reich and prolonging the Holocaust. However, his response to anyone critical of his Waffen-SS service was “What else could I have done?”

At the time he was interviewed, Löwy participated in the Jewish Community Center in Munich. He celebrated some Jewish rituals and hoped Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) would be said for him after he died. Yet he said he did not believe in God. “If there’s a God,” Löwy asked, “then why does he let so many horrible things happen?” He loves Israel and said that whatever Israel does is correct. “I’m in body and soul an Israeli, but I wouldn’t want to live in Israel.” He quickly added, “Too much terror and destruction.”

After talking about the pandemonium in the Middle East, Löwy said he did not have much hope for humanity. To correct the problems in the Middle East, he believed, fanatical Islam needs to be eradicated from the earth. “Hitler would’ve done humanity a service had he exterminated all the Islamic fanatics. History books would praise him today for such acts had he only done so,” said Löwy.

After 1945, Löwy experienced some anti-Semitism. When he left a girlfriend in Salzburg for another woman in the 1960s, she yelled at him out the window, “You dirty Jew, get away from here.” Later, when they talked on the phone and he tried to calm her down, she replied, “I hate you. The world hates all of you.” He complained that anti-Semitism in Austria was much stronger than in Germany. “That’s why most of the SS–Death’s Head officers who ran the extermination camps were Austrian. Hitler was, of course, Austrian. The Holocaust was done by the Austrians. The Holocaust couldn’t have happened without Austria. This tiny land of eight million people has given history so much material to work with,” Löwy said.

In 2001, Löwy died. Kaddish was not spoken at his graveside.

Löwy’s testimony is rich in paradoxes. Löwy’s family, like that of Arno Spitz, moved around searching for anonymity but ultimately failed in this. Like Spitz, Löwy adopted the philosophy that he should not do too much or too little in the military although, ironically, both men were highly decorated. Löwy illustrates the lives of many documented here in how they struggle with others in trying to get them to accept their service, which, especially in Löwy’s case, seems to have been why they survived Hitler. Furthermore, he never resolved to his satisfaction his battle with his own identity. The German poet Goethe seems to sum up Löwy’s life when he has Faust say:

Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast;
And each is fain to leave its brother.

The one, fast clinging, to the world adheres
With clutching organs, in love’s sturdy lust;
The other strongly lifts itself from dust

To yonder high, ancestral spheres.²⁸

It indeed seemed that Karl-Heinz Löwy’s breast did have “two souls.” His ex-wife supports this claim when she says his entire life was a mystery to her and he always lived with two faces and two lives.²⁹

Jewish Lieutenant Paul-Ludwig (Pinchas) Hirschfeld

Paul-Ludwig (Pinchas) Hirschfeld would have liked to live a different life. While serving tea at his home, he apologized that he did not have more to offer, but this was all he could afford with his pension. If not for the Nazis, he explained, he would have built up a large fortune and been more successful at whatever job he would have done. During our conversation, he often referred to God and his relationship with Him and how much Judaism means to him today. His deep, soft voice penetrated the room and when he laughed, his large, rather plump frame would shake. Yet, in general, his mood was often sad.

Hirschfeld, one of five children, was born to Jewish parents on 29 December 1914 in Kleinkonitz in the region of Konitz in West Prussia. His family raised him as a religious Jew. In the climate of anti-Semitism at that time, some of his Jewish relatives converted to Christianity. They did so mainly to escape persecution and believed better opportunities awaited them as Christians. But his parents disapproved of “opportunistic” conversion and believed it cowardly. Hirschfeld’s father told him never to feel ashamed of being Jewish. “Anti-Semitism,” he said, “will always be around.”

Hirschfeld had a fairly normal upbringing until his father died in the late 1920s. Thereafter the family struggled financially. Before the last year of high school, one of his teachers advised him to leave Germany. Hitler had taken power and Hirschfeld’s future looked bleak. Hirschfeld felt that to have a free life he had to live anonymously.

In 1935, he moved to Allenstein in East Prussia, registered himself as gottgläubig (a believer in God without religious affiliation), and severed contact with his family. Then he forged his Ahnenpass (“ancestors’ passport,” a Nazi document proving Aryan ancestry) and entered the infantry. Many Jews used this tactic to protect themselves.

At his medical examination, although he had to stand nude in front of army doctors, his circumcision did not become an issue. Armed with the story of having had an infection as a child, he never had to use it. They passed him and he entered boot camp. He worried that someone from his hometown might recognize him there, but that did not happen.

Questioned as to why he chose to serve, Hirschfeld answered that if he had remained a Jew in Germany, the Nazis would have deported him to a camp. He felt the army provided the best protection. “Inside, though, I remained a Jew. My service was strictly my way to survive,” he said.

After completion of boot camp, he entered the reserves and returned to school. In 1936, he received his Abitur at the Lessing Gymnasium in Stolp, Pomerania. Thereafter, he looked for work.

When asked what he thought about Hitler, Hirschfeld said, “As a Jew, I hated Hitler, but I have to respect some of the things he did . . . He had a smart mind and accomplished many things for the economy and especially for the new armed forces. People often forget that Hitler had some good characteristics. Do you think the Germans would have followed a completely evil, deranged madman? No, he wasn’t all bad.” Hirschfeld’s opinion of Hitler reflects that of most Jews and Mischlinge documented in this study.

From 1937 until 1939, Hirschfeld worked as a graphic designer in Stolp. When war looked like a distinct possibility in 1939, the army recalled him to active duty. He served as a cartographer and draftsman on the staff of Infantry Regiment 374. In 1943, he became an Oberfeldwebel (technical sergeant) and in May 1944, he became an officer, a position he was proud to attain. He then served as the regimental aide with the Ninety-fourth Kalmücken Grenadier Regiment, a unit on the eastern front.

Hirschfeld said he was a good officer. According to him, on several occasions, he maneuvered his company into positions that protected it from Russian attacks. For his performance, he received the War Merit Cross with Swords Second Class. “They called me the ‘Wise Jew’ because of my ability to second-guess the Soviets. If they’d only known!” Hirschfeld said. He also received the Wound Badge. He is proud of his military accomplishments and believes God placed him in the army to help other Jews.

“Where my unit marched east into Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia, I often secretly gave Jews rounded up by the SS and Military Police Passierscheine (special passes) so they could get food and travel home. I did more for those persecuted Jews than Jews who ran away to foreign countries!” Hirschfeld strongly asserted. He said that he also gave food to starving Jewish children in a Russian village. The opportunities to help Jews gave his service added significance. “It was easy for other Jews to leave Germany and not do anything for those not rich enough to buy their way out,” Hirschfeld said, echoing an argument that others also used to explain the value of their military service. “I stayed and did what I could from within the Wehrmacht. Jews today don’t understand this. One day, when I was at a Jewish conference in Bonn in the 1980s, I met another Orthodox Jew who had been an officer. He agreed with me that we did more for fellow Jews by staying in the Wehrmacht than we could have done had we fled to an Allied country.”

When asked if he knew other Jews who served in the military besides the officer at the conference, he said, “Of course.” His cousin Heinz Dommack died in the army during the battle of Berlin in 1945. He claims that he knew a few other educated Jews who avoided concentration camps by changing their religion, falsifying their documents, and serving as officers. One was a lieutenant and the other was a major, Georg-Wilhelm Ohm, who worked in the Luftwaffe’s research department in Berlin. Hirschfeld believes that Hermann Göring helped protect several Mischlinge and Jews serving in the air force. “Back then a person in uniform in Germany was safe. Who could present himself as a Jew at that time? No one! So they carried their Jewish secret around with them and didn’t share it with anybody,” Hirschfeld said.

On the topic of guilt, Hirschfeld explained, “Wehrmacht service was my salvation. My brother and sister and her children and husband all died in the Holocaust.” At this point, Hirschfeld stopped, choked with emotion, tears streaming down his face. He did witness Jews doing forced labor, and that pained his heart, but he was powerless to do anything. He never felt guilty for what he did, but only for what he was not able to do, like help those Jews he witnessed in need.

“What could I have done?” he continued. “Go to the Gestapo and say that I was an officer and they should protect those Jews, and by the way, also my family? I wasn’t stupid. That would’ve been my death. I did what I thought I needed to do to survive. In 1943, I was able to save my Jewish fiancée, Ruth Loeper. We falsified her documents and married. In 1944, we had our first child, Paul Nathan.” Hirschfeld then showed pictures of his wedding, at which he wore his dress uniform, and said sarcastically, “It was probably the only Jewish wedding of a Wehrmacht member.”

Hirschfeld claimed that while serving, he retained his Jewish faith as best he could by reciting the Shema every day and saying other prayers when he could. On several occasions, he believes, God spoke to him directly and saved his life.

One time, outside of Leningrad, he and twelve comrades looked for shelter from the dreadful cold of –30 degrees Fahrenheit. They found an old shack and entered it to get warm. In the distance, the sound of machine-gun fire echoed among the trees. After some minutes, he heard his name twice. At first, he thought he had imagined it. Then, thinking an officer had called, he ran outside and announced his name and rank in military fashion. But no one was there. He shouted, “Hallo, hallo, is someone there?”

Suddenly he felt God wanted him to go to a nearby hill, and he obeyed. “As I walked away, I heard a loud, piercing scream shoot through the air as an artillery round slammed into the shack. You know you are safe if you can hear the shriek of an incoming shell, because projectiles seem to travel about the speed of sound—that means the one I heard had passed me by. However, my comrades weren’t as lucky. The shell killed them in an eruption of flames. I thanked God for saving my life and prayed the Shema,” Hirschfeld said.

“Another time,” he continued,

Three officers and I were driving away from some attacking Soviets. Suddenly, God told me to get off the road. I told the driver to stop. He did so. I spotted a road to our right not marked on our map. I directed him to take it. The colleagues argued that this was foolish because they had no idea where that road led. “Our lines lie in the direction we’re driving,” they said. I told them that I felt strongly about this. If they didn’t turn, I would request to leave the car and march back to our lines. Finally, they agreed and we took the alternate route and a few hours later, we arrived safely at our lines. My comrades were angry because they felt I had wasted valuable time by taking this longer route. Later, we heard the Russians killed several Germans on the road we had originally planned to take. The Soviets had outflanked us with tanks and machine guns. We would’ve died had we not taken the detour. God saved me again.

Reflecting upon how closely death followed him, Hirschfeld said he thought it would have been a tragedy for him as a Jew to have died while wearing a German uniform and then buried according to Christian ritual. He was happy to have survived for many reasons.

He felt glad to have saved his comrades, many of whom were close friends. Even after 1945, he felt warmly toward them. When he met Furst Ausberg on the street after the war, having not seen him for years, they “hugged each other like brothers.” This type of relationship with former non-Jewish comrades has proven difficult for many today to understand, but Hirschfeld’s experience mirrors others documented in this study.

Hirschfeld finished this story with a sigh. While “serving Hitler,” he did his best not to forget “who he was.” After the war, he again became an Orthodox Jew. Since he had lost his identification documents during the war, he had to “prove” he was Jewish. He had to take classes and go through a ceremonial “second circumcision,” where a doctor drew a small amount of blood from his penis to confirm his identity according to Jewish law. Eventually Rabbi Lehrmann, Jewish authority for the Hanover region, took Hirschfeld and his family through all the ceremonies necessary to be Jewish and then the community accepted him. In his documents, his name is now Pinchas Ben Elasar.

Questioned about his knowledge of the Holocaust, he said, “I knew nothing at the time. I did know that some Jews were being killed or sent to concentration camps, but I never knew the Nazis had decided to systematically murder millions.”

Hirschfeld’s wife, Ruth, agreed. “No. It was impossible to know. We at home lived a sheltered life. We couldn’t have known.”

Hirschfeld had many things on his mind during the Third Reich. Besides being uprooted from their homes and traumatized by the Nazis, he and his wife suffered personal tragedies. They lost two babies during the war, one to birth problems and the other to starvation at the end of the hostilities in 1945.

After 1945, Hirschfeld became a businessman. The last time he was interviewed for this study, he described a vision from God that he hoped would come true. While he was standing in a synagogue praying, “A cloud engulfs me. I cannot see anyone. Then in front of me, I see the form of a man. It’s God and he says, ‘I have blessed you and made you part of the priestly caste.’ Then a large angel comes down and says, ‘You’ve heard what God has said. You still have much to do and I’ll always be with you.’ Then the angel and God disappeared and I once again see the synagogue.” Hirsch feld smiled. “God allowed me to survive in the Wehrmacht for a purpose; namely to live for Him.”

There are a few Jews who, like Hirschfeld, survived and still believe in God. Orthodox yeshiva student Simon Gossel made his way into the Wehrmacht quite differently from Hirschfeld. After surviving two years in Auschwitz, Gossel was loaded into a boxcar in January 1945 and sent back in the direction of Germany. He was in poor health and it was brutally cold. One day, the train stopped and to his amazement, the guards asked for German prisoners to get out of the boxcars. Since he spoke German, he knew he could pretend to be an ethnic German, and God told him to get out. So he did. Soon thereafter, since Germany “was using every man they could for the war effort,” he found himself surviving as a soldier. Although he was circumcised and had the Auschwitz tattoo, he lived. Describing his situation, he quoted from Habakkuk chapter 3: “I heard and my heart pounded, my lips quivered at the sound; decay crept into my bones, and my legs trembled . . . yet I will rejoice in the Lord . . . my Savior.” He went on to paraphrase Psalm 23: “I walked through the shadow of death. I knew God was with me. He was right there with me.” So Hirschfeld was not alone thinking God was with him during his survival, especially in the military, but Hirschfeld and Gossel both feel they are rare for having made it through the Holocaust with their faith intact.³⁰

Hirschfeld wanted to live his last years in Jerusalem but died in Hanover in 1997 before he could realize this dream. He grappled with his survival techniques his whole life. He, like Karl-Heinz Löwy and Arno Spitz, tried to disappear into society by moving from his hometown to other cities. Yet, once again, this tactic, although giving him a certain degree of anonymity, did not shield him indefinitely from the Nazi military machine. Both Löwy and Hirschfeld felt that by going into the armed forces, they could truly disappear from the Nazis.

Hirschfeld, unlike most in this study, who have rejected God, strongly felt the presence of God during his time under Hitler. He believed the Almighty guided his actions and ensured his survival. His belief in God helped him deal with his past. When asked why God saved him and did not help save 6 million other Jews in Europe, Hirschfeld drew a blank face and said that sometimes God’s actions cannot be explained.

Quarter-Jewish Captain Horst von Oppenfeld

At the time he was interviewed, Horst von Oppenfeld was a sophisticated, retired businessman. Although over ninety, he moved with great energy. His expressive, clear blue eyes were keenly aware of his surroundings and he took his time answering questions. He enjoyed socializing and had been quite popular with the ladies when he was a young man. Though he wanted to contribute to this research, he often seemed uncomfortable talking about his life during the Nazi years and how he dealt with his Jewish background.

Oppenfeld was born in Berlin on 16 July 1913. A descendant of the distinguished Jewish Oppenheim family, he was raised on an estate in eastern Germany. His Jewish grandfather, a banker, had changed his name to Oppenfeld when he married an aristocratic, gentile woman. At that time, he decided to give up banking and become a farmer. Oppenfeld’s ancestry is complicated. He was at least a quarter-Jew and possibly a half-Jew. He had Jewish ancestry through both parents, but stated that, among his relatives, it was taboo to talk about it. He never discovered how Jewish he was and even late in life did not care to know.

During World War I, Oppenfeld’s father, Rittmeister (cavalry captain) Moritz von Oppenfeld, served as the agricultural and food security advisor to Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff. After the war, Oppenfeld’s father took part in agricultural politics during the Weimar Republic.

As a boy, Oppenfeld wanted to become a farmer, and his father promised him one of his family’s estates north of Stettin, the capital of Pomerania. In preparation for this, when Oppenfeld turned eleven, his parents sent him to a Prussian boarding school from which, after seven years, he received his Abitur in 1932. Most of his classmates went on to the university, but Oppenfeld decided to start farming and began a two-year apprenticeship on a homestead near his father’s relatives.

Immediately before and soon after the Nazis took power, Oppenfeld felt shocked when local Nazis beat up citizens voting for the opposition. They also threatened people visiting Jewish shops. His family’s dentists, a Jewish father-and-son team who were both war veterans, were forced to close their practice. They emigrated. Experienced, highly respected officials in local government were replaced by Nazis. The Nazis jailed church leaders and political opponents. “The Nazis ruined our society,” Oppenfeld said. He also felt nervous after 1933 because he did not know how the Nazis would treat him and his family when their Jewish background became known.

To protect himself and family and to serve his country, Oppenfeld started at this time to serve in the Black Reichswehr (military units providing training in violation of the Versailles Treaty). Since the treaty had restricted the official Reichswehr to 100,000 men, having these secret units helped strengthen its ranks. In 1934, a visiting army sergeant asked for volunteers for military training. Oppenfeld joined. Army life had always fascinated him. He also wanted to continue his family’s military tradition and felt the army was devoid of Nazi ideology. Following a two-week exercise, Oppenfeld enrolled for eighteen months of training.

In April 1934, he was assigned to a reconnaissance unit outfitted on motorcycles. They learned how to locate the enemy and quickly gather information for trailing troops. Soon, Oppenfeld had to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler. He did not like this but complied. The powers of conformity were strong.

Although army life was demanding, the discipline and esprit de corps were excellent. The army equipped Oppenfeld’s unit with BMW motorcycles. “Handling them was a great sport. What young man . . . wouldn’t have enjoyed it?” he said.

After boot camp in October 1935, Oppenfeld entered the reserves. He then returned to his farm and every few months the army called him up for a few weeks of training.

Being “young and politically naive,” Oppenfeld admitted, he identified with some of Hitler’s policies. He respected how Hitler put thousands back to work with his Autobahn project. He admired Hitler when, in 1935, he flouted the Versailles Treaty and expanded the Wehrmacht. But Oppenfeld disapproved of the Nazis crushing political opposition, abolishing democratic institutions, and pressuring civilians to join the Nazi Party.

The only time Oppenfeld had to concern himself with his ancestry was in 1938 when someone denounced him. He had to go to a Wehrkreis (military district) officer in Stettin to explain his ancestry. When the official, a World War I veteran, saw that his father and three brothers had served in the war and that two of them had died in action, the official said “Unsinn” (nonsense), closed his file, and dismissed him. The subject of Oppenfeld’s ancestry never arose again. He probably remained in the army either because he continued to fall under the Hindenburg exemptions to the military racial regulations of the Arierparagraph (Aryan Paragraph), which permitted service by non-Aryans who had served in World War I or had close relatives who had served, or because someone was protecting him.³¹

In 1938 his parents, pleased with Oppenfeld’s talent, entrusted him with managing the estate he was to inherit. However, he had to give up this life when war started in 1939. In August of that year, he returned to active duty and never worked his farm again.

Oppenfeld returned to his unit and traveled to the Polish border. His parents, having already lost two sons in war, “made dire predictions about . . . Hitler’s pending venture.” After the outbreak of World War I, Germans had marched to war to the sound of music, decorated with flowers by an elated population. Now Oppenfeld and his fellow soldiers knew the reality of war, and they and the population looked upon the coming conflict with foreboding. One of Oppenfeld’s father’s friends, a noted pre-Hitler politician, told Oppenfeld at the outbreak of war, “This is the end of Germany.” Joseph Harsch, a Christian Science Monitor correspondent, wrote at the same time that the Germans “were nearer to real panic on 1 September 1939 than the people of any other European country . . . the German people exhibited more real fear of [the war] than the others. They faced it in something approaching abject horror.”³² Nonetheless, the Germans went to war and prosecuted it well.

Under the advance of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg strategy, the poorly organized and ill-equipped Polish troops disintegrated. Oppenfeld’s battalion drove deep into enemy territory and advanced beyond the Polish city of Brest-Litovsk, where Russia had signed a peace treaty with Germany in 1918. The war soon would come to an end.

The success of how quickly Hitler took over Poland emboldened him to invade and conquer France, an enemy that had successfully resisted Germany for four years during World War I. For over eight months after the defeat of Poland in September 1939, during the so-called Phony War, or Sitzkrieg (sitting war), Oppenfeld’s battalion waited behind Germany’s western border along with 2 million other Germans.³³

After several false alarms and a record cold winter in Europe, Hitler ordered his legions to roll west through the Ardennes into neutral Luxembourg on 10 May 1940. Oppenfeld’s Panzer division came under the command of General Heinz Guderian, who, according to Oppenfeld, “had perceived the strategy of deep penetration with armored force.” With Luftwaffe support, Guderian broke through north of the French fixed defenses known as the Maginot Line and crossed the Meuse River near Sedan. Oppenfeld was right in the middle of it.

Guderian continued to push his Panzer divisions on to Calais, taking hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Miraculously, as the advance slowed down because Hitler had issued a “halt” order to his armor, the British mobilized a fleet of naval and civilian ships to evacuate most of their forces and many French at the port of Dunkirk. This kept more than 300,000 Allied soldiers from falling into German hands. Meanwhile, although the French had regrouped their forces, they were unable to prevent the fall of Paris. Totally defeated, the French general Alphonse Joseph Georges threw himself in a chair and cried.³⁴ Only weeks after the invasion had started, France surrendered.

Oppenfeld and his men moved to the new Polish/Russian border, where on 22 June 1941, they, along with 3.5 million other German soldiers, invaded the Soviet Union.³⁵ His battalion headed straight toward the Russian capital, Moscow. Barbarossa, as Hitler had named the invasion, took Soviet leader Joseph Stalin by surprise. Hundred of thousands of Russians fell into German hands. In the battle around Kiev, for example, over 600,000 Soviet troops surrendered.³⁶ By the beginning of July, Oppenfeld’s unit had advanced 600 miles, just 150 miles short of the capital. “With the experience of hindsight, it’s easy to conclude that this was the apex of Hitler’s glory,” Oppenfeld said.

Oppenfeld described how eager many captured Russians were to fight with Germany against Stalin, as they hated him for his brutality. “Little did they know that Hitler was no better,” Oppenfeld commented. Most were not allowed to fight for Germany because, as Oppenfeld believes, Hitler did not want Slavs serving in the Wehrmacht.

Many Russian civilians initially welcomed Oppenfeld and his men. Several hated Stalin and despised his “murderous political institution.” In the Ukraine, civilians presented the Germans “with platters of salt and bread as an offering of welcome as we passed through villages.”³⁷ However, once the Nazis treated the population brutally, the partisan movement sprang up. “The more the German army advanced, the more they defeated and captured enemy forces, and the more brutal Germany’s efforts were to subdue an enemy that did not recognize defeat, the tougher and more desperate Soviet resistance became . . . The strategy of racist war permeated every aspect of the struggle . . . strengthening the resolve of the Soviet people and . . . [uniting] them under an all-Russian banner.”³⁸

In September 1941, Oppenfeld and his unit broke through some defenses deep in Russia until the rainy season turned roads into a quagmire. The highway to Moscow had no hard surface and disintegrated into muddy slush under the heavy downpours. Whole divisions ground to a stop. Thousands of horses died of overexertion and guns and vehicles sank deep into the mud. Soldiers went for days without rations and their leather boots either fell to pieces after being soaked so long or were simply “lost in the mire.”³⁹ The never-ending mud inspired “the sardonic joke about the man who is startled to discover a human face in the mud; the face tells him, ‘You’ll be even more surprised when you learn that I’m sitting on a horse and riding.’”⁴⁰

Oppenfeld and his men had to wait until a hard freeze to start advancing again and this didn’t happen until October. After the freeze, they advanced again, penetrated several miles deeper, and eventually reached Moscow’s suburbs by December. Now instead of battling the mud, they had to fight the cold.

The exceptionally low temperatures caused problems for the Germans, who still wore their summer uniforms with raincoats rather than winter jackets. The weather also adversely affected their equipment. They kept their tanks running all night because the cooling fluid became useless when the temperatures dropped to –30 degrees Fahren heit. One soldier described the time he spent in Russia as a “perpetual shivering fit.”⁴¹ The Germans often obtained winter clothing by taking it off dead Russians.⁴² Oppenfeld joked that “in September it was ‘General Mud,’ now ‘General Winter’ was stopping our advance.” He felt he would soon die, if not from a Russian bullet, then from the elements.

The Germans also had to contend with Russia’s surprise, their new tank, the T-34, which resisted the antitank guns Oppenfeld’s men had. The cannons could not penetrate the sloped, thick armor. Moreover, the Russians had 14,000 tanks. This was 4,000 more than what the Germans had expected.⁴³ Hitler had expressed to General Guderian his regret at not heeding the general’s warnings of Soviet production, saying, “Had I known they had as many tanks as that, I would have thought twice before invading.”⁴⁴

During the first week of December, the Russians, who were better prepared for the winter, launched a counteroffensive. The attack took Oppenfeld and his men by surprise and they retreated, leaving much of their equipment behind. Like most retreating armies, they suffered heavy casualties as they moved to the rear echelons.

Questioned about atrocities, Oppenfeld recalled how the German army mistreated thousands of half-naked and starved Russian POWs. He saw how German guards executed many who, because of sickness or injuries, could no longer walk. “This was no way to treat POWs, but I could do nothing,” Oppenfeld said.

Over 3.3 million of a total 5.7 million Russian POWs died in German camps. The Nazis treated them horribly and the prisoners often were put into concentration camps without food and water. A cynical German soldier described a horrible scene: “When we [threw them a dead dog] there followed a spectacle that could make a man puke. Yelling like mad, the Russians would fall on the animal and tear it to pieces with their bare hands . . . The intestines they’d stuff in their pockets—a sort of iron ration.” Often there was no food, so cannibalism became common. A German said that once he witnessed among a brawling group of Russians one man awkwardly waving his arm high in the air. To his horror, the German realized it was just an arm and that the group was fighting over who would eat it. Head of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring cynically said to the Italian foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano about Soviet POWs, “After having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other and, what is more serious . . . a German sentry.” The Germans allowed such atrocities because, as historian Omer Bartov wrote, they had come to “believe the murders they were ordered to carry out were an unavoidable existential and moral necessity” against the evil Soviet hordes.⁴⁵

Often in the Nazi-run POW camps for Soviets, the dead would lie in the same place for weeks. The epidemics were so horrible that no German guard would enter the camps without a flamethrower, which, “in the interest of ‘hygiene,’” he would use to set alight the dying and dead “on their beds of verminous rags.”⁴⁶

In May 1942, after eleven months in Russia, the military sent Oppenfeld’s division to France to recuperate. “Leaving Russia was like a gift from God,” Oppenfeld said. For his brave acts during the Russian campaign, the army gave Oppenfeld a company command and awarded him the Iron Cross First Class. He received this medal for protecting several wounded men and not allowing them to fall into enemy hands.

While in France, Oppenfeld and his subordinates trained replacements; received new weapons, equipment, and vehicles; and enjoyed their time away from combat. Soon, though, the Wehrmacht sent them to North Africa to support Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

The British had already defeated Rommel in Egypt and at El Alamein, Libya, at the time Oppenfeld and his men flew to Tunis in sluggish JU 52 transports. The planes had no guns, so Oppenfeld and his men opened the plane’s windows and fired their machine guns at enemy aircraft. “What a ridiculous defense concept against fast, heavily armed British Spitfires!” Oppenfeld remarked.

When Oppenfeld arrived in the desert, a hopeless situation faced him. The Afrika Korps lacked ammunition, gasoline, and food supplies, and Rommel stood on his last leg. Oppenfeld did not think the army would survive long.

In January 1943, Oppenfeld’s father died. Granted leave to attend the funeral, Oppenfeld flew from North Africa to Italy and then traveled by train from Naples to Germany. During that time, he heard Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus had surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and thought Germany would now lose the war. After this massive defeat, Oppenfeld observed a profoundly depressed population. In February, Oppenfeld returned to his company in Africa.

During the closing months of war in North Africa, Oppenfeld’s responsibilities changed drastically. He had to give up his company and became the adjutant of the Tenth Panzer Division’s leading staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Klaus Count von Stauffenberg. Oppenfeld respected Stauffenberg for his professional brilliance and gentlemanly behavior. They set up their headquarters in a captured British bus with their desks next to each other. Although Oppenfeld had no credentials for this job and made mistakes, Stauffenberg treated him respectfully. He served only six weeks under Stauffenberg, a leader of the plot to kill Hitler in 1944. Then events in Oppenfeld’s life took yet another turn. During a tense battle, Stauffenberg lost one eye, one arm, and two fingers of the remaining hand. He was given first aid and sent to a hospital by plane. Oppenfeld never saw him again.

Oppenfeld says of Stauffenberg, “I feel privileged to have been the aide to Stauffenberg, the officer, the citizen, the human being, and a role model par excellence. Had he survived the coup, he might have become not only a military but also a political leader of postwar Germany.”

Soon after Stauffenberg’s departure, Oppenfeld fell into enemy hands. At that time, the Afrika Korps had hardly any supplies and the end was in sight. The Tenth Panzer Division commander, General Friedrich (Fritz) Freiherr von Broich, had just attended the last meeting of commanding officers. He told Oppenfeld: “Our Supreme commander, General [Hans-Jürgen] von Arnim, told us, ‘Hitler threatened me not to surrender the Afrika Korps. Mind you, he didn’t say that to you. So, use your own judgment and keep in mind the welfare of your units.’ Let us tie a white shirt to the end of my carbine, Horst, then take a motorbike and drive me to the English.” Oppenfeld obeyed. The British accepted the surrender “without the slightest intent to humiliate the Germans,” and Oppenfeld became a POW.

Oppenfeld was transported to the United States, where he would remain a POW in the Midwest, a few miles from Concordia, Kansas, until the war’s end. As a POW, Oppenfeld said he became so impressed with America that he wanted to live there. He had nothing to return to in Germany because his farm had been expropriated by the Russians and Germany lay in ruins. Later on, he came to the United States, where he studied and worked as a World Bank agricultural economist.

When asked about his awareness of the Holocaust, Oppenfeld took a deep breath and shook his head. “I knew things weren’t good for Jews and that I needed to be careful . . . but I never thought they were gassing people.” One day, far behind the fighting, Oppenfeld heard machine-gun fire and inquired of some soldiers of a construction battalion, “Are there partisans here?” “No,” they answered, “don’t you know what’s going on here? Last night SS police surrounded this town, identified and segregated all Jews—men, women, and children. Over there they made them dig a deep ditch, shot and buried them.” When Oppenfeld expressed his skepticism, one of the soldiers said, “Look at these horse-drawn wagons, loaded with the shoes of the poor killed people.” Oppenfeld and his men, who had never heard about such crimes, were horrified. When asked why he did not try to stop it, Oppenfeld claimed that he “lived for the day and didn’t pay much attention to all of it.” Many, like Oppenfeld, quickly adapted to their surroundings and did what was expected of them.

When asked whether he felt Jewish, Oppenfeld said he did not. “I had no contact with Jews. My ancestors who were Jews had converted.” Asked why he thought Jews have had so many problems, he replied that they, especially Orthodox Jews, do not assimilate. “Their problem,” he claimed, “is due to the fact that they want to be different—they think they’re better than everyone else.” The fact his family did not want to remain different “saved [his] life.”

When asked if he ever felt guilty about his service, Oppenfeld said no, and then explained he should not feel guilty for serving his country—“It was my duty.”

As a Prussian, Oppenfeld was raised with the ethical norm that one remained loyal to the Fatherland no matter what. His service was something he believed was necessary, and he felt that he did not really have another choice.

Most likely, the Nazi propaganda and the horrible events he learned about in Russia did cause Oppenfeld some trauma. Many Mischlinge, as well as full Jews, struggle with the fact that they served a regime that oppressed and killed people like them and their relatives. Yet most respond to this fact by asking, “What were my options?” One must keep in mind the existential and the morally prescriptive elements of their decisions.

Like Arno Spitz, Horst Oppenfeld felt his story was boring. And this is important to note. The lives of many Mischlinge were influenced by events beyond their control. They were powerless to shape what was happening and thus they felt insignificant and not responsible for many of the situations they found themselves in.

Half-Jewish Unteroffizier Günther Scheffler

Günther Scheffler is a man of slender build, yet his physique shows that he was an athlete when younger. In fact, he played field hockey for years. He believes his conditioning helped ensure his survival during World War II. Often he explains that he feels amazed that he survived the war. He can give “sixty reasons” why he should have died but has a difficult time finding one why he ultimately survived. He thinks that he has had more luck than anyone else on the planet. During the interview, he sat close to his wife, whom he clearly cherishes. Scheffler feels content with his life.

Born on 4 April 1918 in Kiel, he was the youngest of three sons. His father, Max, was a gentile from a hard-working family of six children. Scheffler’s Jewish mother Helena (née Weiss) came from Königsberg. She worked as a talented pianist, giving lessons before she married. Scheffler’s maternal grandfather, Julius, a successful entrepreneur, had converted to Christianity to help his business, and had five children with his wife, Cäsilia, also a gifted pianist. When her daughter Helena married Max Scheffler, Cäsilia converted to Christianity to protect the family from problems.

Many German Jews converted to Christianity starting in the eighteenth century. They frequently did so not out of religious conviction, but to better their lot in a society that was increasingly prejudiced. As with many religious people, they accepted a faith not because they wanted to live it, but because they desired for others to perceive them in a positive light. Most joined the majority to avoid the effort it took to remain part of a minority.

Scheffler’s Jewish family also had a strong military tradition. One of his mother’s brothers volunteered for service in 1914 and became an officer. The other brother died in battle in World War I. Yet, until Hitler came into power, Scheffler did not know about his Jewish background, and no one bothered his family about it.

Scheffler had a normal childhood, and his parents raised him in the Protestant tradition. They prayed both before and after dinner and often attended church, particularly when his gentile grandmother Ursula visited. But Scheffler and his brothers disliked their paternal grandmother’s insistence on religious observance and good manners. They called her “die Hexe” (the witch).

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Scheffler learned about his mother’s background and his family started to worry. “I felt horrible to discover I was half-Jewish. It embarrassed and confused me,” Scheffler said. “You heard how bad the Jews were and I became insecure. I felt that we were second-class people.” When Scheffler had to enter the Hitler Youth in 1934, he discussed his application with his father. He encouraged Scheffler to insert “Stein” instead of “Goldstein” for his grandmother Cäsilia. He did so and nobody asked him about it. “My family tree then looked quite Aryan,” Scheffler said, smiling. He enjoyed the Hitler Youth with its camping activities and war games.

In 1935, the Nazis issued the Nuremberg Laws, which prohibited Scheffler and his brothers from marrying Aryans and pursuing certain jobs. His family discussed leaving Germany, but they had neither the money for such a move nor relatives abroad for support. Yet other relatives did move. A Jewish cousin emigrated to Palestine with her family.

In school, Scheffler lived in fear that someone knew about his Jewish past. One day, his teacher asked if anyone had Jewish ancestors. Since his mother and Jewish grandparents had converted, Scheffler felt they were technically not Jewish and remained quiet. The issue was not discussed again.

In 1936, Scheffler noted that before and after the Olympics, the Nazis dramatically toned down their persecution of Jews. “Store signs discouraging Jews from entering were taken down. I felt life might return to normal,” he said. Hitler had actually ordered that such anti-Semitic posters be removed. “Hitler could afford to bide his time in dealing with the Jews.”⁴⁷ However, several months after the Olympics, the signs returned and the persecution increased.

In 1937, Scheffler finished high school and started working for Siemens. Also in that year his parents divorced. His father became a Nazi and distanced himself from his “Jewish family.” He worried that, because of his Jewish wife, he might lose the business he had inherited from his Jewish father-in-law. He even complained in front of his wife and children that his greatest mistake was marrying a Jew and acquiring three “Jewish” sons to support. Scheffler’s mother felt so distraught by her husband’s mistreatment that she tried to commit suicide by drowning herself.

Even though Scheffler’s father held on to his business, he seems to have had problems keeping it solvent. Eventually he had to find other work. Ironically, Max had been a World War I comrade of the half-Jew Erhard Milch, who helped him get a job. In 1944, the Luftwaffe needed people, so Milch, now a field marshal, reactivated Max as a major, and he served at Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin.

When asked how he knew Milch was a “half-Jew,” Scheffler said, “We all knew back then. I continually heard jokes about it and everyone knew that Hitler had declared him an honorary ‘Aryan.’ Hitler could decide who was Jewish and who wasn’t.”

Scheffler remained at Siemens until drafted into an artillery battery in Potsdam in December 1939. He hid his ancestry and remained in the army although he had mixed feelings about his service. On the one hand, he wanted to serve because it allowed him to be like everyone else and possibly protect his family. On the other hand, he hoped Hitler would lose the war because this would give him a life free of discrimination. He knew that only a German defeat could rid him of Hitler. “I felt torn in many ways back then. Not only were we half-castes split by the Nazi racial laws, but also the whole situation split our souls,” Scheffler said. Many Mischlinge felt divided between loyalty to their nation and hatred toward the government in control of their country that persecuted them. Consequently, the Nazis actually forced them to come to terms with their Jewishness. Many developed an attachment to the origins of a loved one—in Scheffler’s case, it was his mother. They had to struggle with questions of identity.

Scheffler did his best to perform his duty as a soldier and hoped thereby to protect his mother. In 1940, he became a member of the 193rd Artillery Regiment in the Saarland. After Hitler’s decree of April 1940 ousting half-Jews from the Wehrmacht, someone wrote to Scheffler’s unit about his ancestry. But his commander ignored this complaint and Scheffler remained in the battery during its attack on France. “It really wasn’t a war. The French didn’t fight back. We continued to follow retreating troops,” he said. When the French war was over, his battery returned to Potsdam.

In summer 1940, the army discharged both of his brothers, Hubertus and Karl-Heinz, because they were half-Jews. At this time, Scheffler’s Spiess (nickname for first sergeant) asked the battery whether any half-Jews served among them. Scheffler remained quiet. He reasoned that if it became a topic of discussion later, he would simply explain that his Jewish grandparents had converted to Christianity. “I convinced myself that my grandparents weren’t Jewish because they converted. I didn’t want to admit they were Jewish though I knew it,” Scheffler said. His subterfuge kept him in the army. Though his captain eventually found out about his past, he respected Scheffler and retained him, valuing him as a person more than he did the racial laws.

When asked why he thinks his brothers were discharged but he was not, he explained, “They were asked whether they were Mischlinge. I was just asked about Jewish grandparents and could honestly rationalize that they were Christians—a small difference—but one I could defend.” Yet his Jewish ancestry continued to oppress him like “a large rock on my back.” “Today I probably wouldn’t have lied,” Scheffler continued, “but back then I didn’t want to leave, and I really felt it protected my mother.”

On leave, he always visited his Jewish mother in uniform. He wanted people to see that she had a soldier son. This was common among Mischlinge.

In the invasion of Russia in 1941, Scheffler’s battery fought around Leningrad. “I cried during this conflict,” Scheffler said. The chilly, wet, and muddy landscape took its toll on his nerves and one night, as he tried to sleep in a pit of mud and icy water, he wept, bemoaning his fate. “Didn’t one of America’s famous generals say ‘War is Hell’? Well, my war was a very cold Hell,” Scheffler said.

When Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, Scheffler and his comrades knew they would not win. He thought, “How will I be able to get out of this shit alive? I actually continued to fight to survive. I couldn’t say, ‘I want to go home.’ That would have meant my death. The military police would have surely killed me had I tried to desert. We were shot at from the front and from the back.” He did admit that he thought about desertion, but said this was not an option on the Russian front. The Soviets did not take prisoners.

By 1942 the Germans had encircled Leningrad. Scheffler was stationed at Kronstadt west of Leningrad, where they bombarded the Russian lines. The Soviets, using outdated tactics, sent waves of soldiers in the attack but the Germans just mowed them down with heavy machine guns. Scheffler remembered men getting their heads blown off and their brains splattered over the ground and the horrible smell coming from unburied bodies. Often, he could see the skin of the dead bubble as the maggots feasted on the flesh in the hot sun. The stench affected soldiers so much in one sector that Russian soldiers sometimes fought with their gas masks on.⁴⁸

In the summer of 1942, while on leave, Scheffler traveled to Munich with his brother Karl-Heinz. During this trip, Scheffler’s secret was almost revealed. As military police conducted a document inspection on the train, Scheffler and his brother showed their papers. Scheffler was wearing his uniform but his brother wore civilian clothes. As the official looked through their military passports, he expressed confusion as to why only one of them served. “I worried what would happen if the policeman asked what ‘n.z.v.’ written in my brother’s passport actually meant,” Scheffler said. (Standing for nicht zu verwenden [not to be used], “n.z.v.” was usually a dead giveaway that one was a half-Jew.) “After we explained it meant that the army had placed him in the reserves, the policeman just smiled and handed our papers back. I had the feeling that he knew but didn’t care.” Had the policeman wanted to, he could have reported Scheffler for falsifying documents.

Though the Leningrad front remained stable, Scheffler believed the loss at Stalingrad in 1943 proved Hitler would lose the war. In 1943, the Russians pushed the Germans back west and Scheffler’s battery started a full retreat. While fighting around Ilmen Lake in 1943, Scheffler was wounded and was sent to Estonia to recuperate. There, he heard that the SS took Jews to large ditches and executed them. However, he thought neither he nor his mother was in danger. “In that climate, you just thought of your survival and did not understand the horror around you. You lived one day to the next,” Scheffler said.

But it was also in 1943 that his mother told him the Nazis had deported his eighty-three-year-old Jewish grandmother to Theresienstadt. Ironically, she had earlier received the Nazi “Mother’s Cross” for having so many children. “I was sad and angry and didn’t understand it. Unfortunately I couldn’t help her,” Scheffler said.

After two weeks of recuperation, he returned to his unit. By 1944, his company was in Riga. He knew the war would soon end and hoped he would survive. “Yet, I never thought I would really survive. I just asked God to allow me to live one more day after the sun went down,” Scheffler said. When asked whether he felt strange serving as a half-Jew, he said he did not think much about it. He knew that this sounds odd today. “I also, in a strange way, took pleasure in proving, secretly of course, that Jewish men were brave warriors.” According to Scheffler, he and others felt more concerned about receiving mail, sleeping with girls, and surviving than about philosophizing about the war.

During this time, his commander realized that he could not promote Scheffler to officer because of his Jewish background. Scheffler found this frustrating, but he knew if he tried to become an officer, the Nazis would discover his lie because of the extensive background check the proposed promotion would trigger. Since the officer valued Scheffler and wanted to keep him, he kept him at his current rank. So Scheffler, who had received the Iron Cross Second and First Class, the Eastern Campaign Medal, and the Wound Badge, had to resign himself to remaining the “eternal” Unteroffizier (corporal).

Scheffler had received one of his Iron Crosses during the battle for Stalingrad. His battery, along with several infantry divisions, moved forward between Moscow and Leningrad to draw away enemy units from the southern front. In the deep snow, they fought crack Soviet troops. Their actions allowed several infantry units to maintain the integrity of the forward lines.

During one battle, the Soviets attacked with a great “Hurrah.” “We only had pistols and a few grenades,” Scheffler said, “and right before the Russians attacked, our infantry came with their MG 42’s [machine guns] and we fired into the lines and killed most of the Russians. The Soviets thought they were going to take over an undefended artillery battery. That day I was a warrior.” He described himself not as a hero, but as a person who knew how to get out of the danger and fight effectively.

The Russians often used mass formations to overwhelm the Germans by sheer numbers. Frequently, they had to get drunk on vodka to conduct these operations.⁴⁹ Although these tactics were suicidal for the first few waves, most Germans facing such attacks admired the “blind heroism and boldness” of these soldiers “that even a mountain of dead compatriots wouldn’t stop. We knew that under such circumstances combat often favors simple numerical superiority . . . we would throw ourselves back into battle to try to drive off the red monster about to devour us.”⁵⁰

The sight of the dead troubled Scheffler. He described the pain of seeing comrades sprawled out on a battlefield covered in blood, intestines, bone, and brain matter.

As the war wound down, Scheffler found himself fighting outside the East Prussian port city of Königsberg in 1945. While the Russians overran it, he managed to leave on one of the last ships. The Soviets conquered several port towns in eastern Germany, causing much panic. Mingled in with the fleeing soldiers were civilians and in the commotion, many families became separated. One soldier wrote: “The children were the most heart-wringing. Many were lost. When they tired of calling for their mothers, they collapsed into floods of tears . . . These were the smallest ones, too young to grasp any explanations. Their faces, dabbed with tears which instantly froze, remain one of the most pathetic images of that time.”⁵¹ Russian planes would often unmercifully strafe the crowds waiting on the landing docks, killing many.

German soldiers remaining in Königsberg and other Prussian port towns died or spent several years in Soviet POW camps. Scheffler’s ship luckily made it to western Germany in May 1945 and soon thereafter, he became a British POW. Six months later the English released him. “I had incredible luck,” Scheffler said. “Most of my comrades entered Soviet captivity and did not return.” For example, out of around 100,000 Germans sent into Soviet POW camps after Stalingrad, only a few thousand came home after the war.⁵²

When asked about his knowledge of the Holocaust, Scheffler said that he did not know about it. He knew that the Nazis persecuted Jews, but that they systematically murdered them lay beyond his awareness. He did know that the Nazis deported people, but nobody spoke about it. However, the details about the Final Solution, according to Scheffler, remained unknown. “People just didn’t know that most Jews were being killed,” he added. He does not feel guilty for his service and explains that he tried to protect himself and his mother during the war. He was saddened by what happened but did not feel responsible.

Did Scheffler believe he was the only half-Jew in the Wehrmacht? After talking about his two brothers who served, he said that he knew of three other partial Jews who served besides that “famous asshole Field Marshal Milch. Everyone knew he was a half-Jew and he denied his ancestry his whole life.” “I had a good friend, Wolfgang Kröncke, who was a quarter-Jew. His grandmother was Jewish and his mother was half-Jewish,” Scheffler continued, “and he even became a first lieutenant. He had relatives who were high-ranking officers who protected him. Oh, I also knew about another half-Jew who served—Schwarz. He died in battle in Russia. Another quarter-Jew whom my wife knew was taken prisoner after Stalingrad. His name was Klaus Fichte and her best friend was his sister. But since he was a doctor, he survived his five years in POW camp in Russia due to the better treatment he received.” Fichte was a direct descendant of the famous anti-Semitic philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Of course, Klaus’s Jewish ancestry came through his mother’s side.

When asked during the interview if he felt Jewish, Scheffler said he did not. His wife added at this point that when they were traveling in Israel, several Orthodox women asked her why they had come. She explained that they had always wanted to see Israel and added that her husband was a half-Jew. “That’s interesting,” one of the women said, “was his father or mother Jewish?” When Frau Scheffler answered that it was his mother, the woman responded that Scheffler was a Jew by Halakah. “That was the first time I ever heard about Jewish Law,” Scheffler said. He believed that Jews are the smartest people in the world and was proud of this aspect of his Jewishness, but he did not feel Jewish, “regardless of what some Orthodox Jews believe,” he added.

After the defeat of the Nazis, Scheffler felt as if he was born again and had a new life. Once Hitler killed himself, he could live as a free man again. “Hitler misused the nationalism of the Germans. We were taken advantage of,” Scheffler said. After 1945, he returned to Siemens and retired in the 1980s.

Many of Scheffler’s relatives were not so lucky during the wars. His gentile uncles Georg Scheffler and Willy Scheffler both died in World War I. One “Aryan” cousin, Jobst Scheffler, died in Russia in 1941, and another cousin, Eberhardt Reinecke, died in 1942 as a U-boat officer. One half-Jewish cousin, Annegret Dankwardt, died during an air raid in Berlin. Scheffler ended our conversation saying, “The war taught me never to give up. It also showed me how to survive.”

Scheffler’s life illustrates how random survival in war can be. He was luckily always in the right place at the right time. Although fifty years had gone by, Scheffler felt a sense of awe at how he made it through it all. His brother Karl-Heinz commented: “After fighting four years in the bloody fields of Russia and escaping the Soviets, who were no better than the Nazis, and then surviving the Fascist pigs we had, I can say a man cannot have more luck than my brother.”

Scheffler’s story exemplifies how many Mischlinge were fighting two wars—one on the battlefields against Germany’s enemies and the other at home against the Nazi persecutors of their families and themselves. They experienced incredible burdens of trauma with the “physical hardships, the psychological burden, and the often crushing anxieties of death and killing that constitute the everyday life”⁵³ of combat while also worrying about their families’ and their own persecution at the hands of their countrymen. Jewish and Mischling soldiers not only served in the armed forces controlled by a government hostile to them as “racially” inferior beings, but many also witnessed the disappearance and occasionally the death of their relatives. Tragically, the Mischlinge had to remain loyal to a regime that was never loyal to them.

Conclusion

The stories of the soldiers in this chapter, whose racial origins remained unknown to the Nazis, illustrate the diverse experiences one could have in the Wehrmacht. Although all except Jacoby experienced combat in World War II, their motivations to fight and their feelings about their participation ranged from service being a grim choice made solely to survive the Nazis, like Löwy, to serving proudly, like Oppenfeld. More importantly, these men demonstrate that the main activity of Wehrmacht personnel was fighting and not killing Jews, a misconception that often is voiced by those with a superficial knowledge of the war and Holocaust. In other words, when people ask, “How could these men serve and kill their relatives?” they display how ignorant they are of the time and people.

When these men discussed the Holocaust, most claimed they did not truly understand what was going on. This is hard to believe because many lost relatives in the Shoah. They do admit they should have known more, but ultimately they either repressed what they heard and saw or failed to understand the systematic murder common under Hitler. Many did not want to believe that their fellow citizens did what Hitler had always promised he would do—eradicate the Jewish people. This is a sad testimony to people’s inability to understand man’s inhumanity to man until it is too late. The majority documented in this chapter learned later how horrible Nazism was, but this knowledge after the fact did those victims little good back then. Yet, their acknowledgment of this and their willingness to discuss their past and pain will help some make a difference in the future. At least, this is their hope.

Looking at their religious convictions, one finds it interesting that six out of the seven finished the war with no belief in God. Most had exposure to religion, both Jewish and Christian, as youths, but World War II and the Holocaust offered them enough proof that God did not exist. As Kopp said, “Plato said only the dead have seen the end of war. Well, I say further that also the dead discover there’s no God. Most humans believe in God because they want to live forever. War shows us what a myth this is.” Most of the men in this section saw how religion was abused during the Third Reich. Most Christian leaders they knew were moral failures and most Christians around them failed to live according to the creeds of love and kindness. Moreover, some witnessed how their families used religion, both Christian and Jewish, to discriminate against one another, as seen so clearly in Kopp’s story. This damning commentary on religion will also be shown later with Friedrich Schlesinger’s and Dieter Fischer’s biographies. Thus, most in this study had nothing to do with religion after the war.

These men’s experiences show how fragile the human condition is. Most of us are swept along by events beyond our power to control. Consequently, most of these men did their best to survive a situation that had turned unforgiving and cruel.

Given the circumstances, these men were lucky not only to survive the war, but also to escape the Holocaust. In one sense, their survival physically and emotionally is more complicated than that of those who survived Auschwitz and other extermination camps. In such a situation, it is difficult to draw the line between the “bad” and “good guys.” With Jews and Mischlinge serving in the Wehrmacht and even in the Waffen-SS, knowing where to draw that line remains difficult. Although the men in this chapter did not know about the horrors of the Shoah then, today they have had to cope with losing relatives while they served in an armed force controlled by Hitler that helped create an environment for the death machinery. Had the Nazis known about many of these men, they would have “exterminated” them, especially Kopp, Löwy, and Hirschfeld, who were technically “full Jews” under the Nazis. Had they been found out, they did not have Aryan wives to protect them as Jacoby did. Although not heavily analyzed during this study, the weight of such issues must have had a strong impact on their lives.

The lessons of these men demonstrate how difficult it is to look at the Third Reich in extremes of black and white. Not every German soldier was a Nazi and not everybody of Jewish descent died in Auschwitz. They also demonstrate that the Wehrmacht had some honorable men among its ranks, especially those who knew about the Jewish backgrounds of their men and still helped them by not divulging this knowledge, as seen with the superiors of Scheffler, Oppenfeld, Jacoby, and Spitz.

These men’s stories illustrate that, provided they did not die in combat, the Wehrmacht offered a good hiding place. As a result, the men claim they can live with the fact that they served in this organization even after the facts about the Holocaust became known. Ultimately, these stories show that the survival instinct is strong. These men did the best with the options presented them, which in most cases were few and usually clear-cut if one wanted to continue living.