2 Half-Jews, the Wehrmacht, and OT Forced Labor Camps

The plight of thousands of half-Jewish men during the Third Reich began for most with military service and ended with forced labor. Although the Third Reich required half-Jews to serve in the Wehrmacht, it still treated them like second-class citizens and persecuted their families. Often while serving, these men would receive news that a father had lost his job, a parent had been put in prison, or a grandparent had committed suicide.

One wonders what many thought when their loved ones were taken away from them either due to suicide or deportation. Many were able to delay and even sometimes prevent the persecution of some relatives because of their military service, but countless other family members did not benefit at all. Ultimately, most relatives were caught in the Nazi net of genocide.

Some men discussed in this chapter would never have survived World War II had they been allowed to serve throughout the deadly Russian campaign. The Nazis had issued discharge orders for men known to the authorities as half-Jews on 8 April 1940, but these men often served throughout late 1940 and into 1941. The cases of Helmuth Kopp and Günther Scheffler (chapter 1); Karl-Arnd Techel and Friedrich Wilhelm Schlesinger, presented in this chapter; and Horst Geitner (chapter 4) illustrate that some half-Jews served well into the war in Russia and even for its entire duration. A small minority—such as the half-Jews Field Marshal Erhard Milch, General Helmut Wilberg, Captain Ernst Prager, and Lance Corporal Dieter Fischer—received official exemptions from Hitler to remain in uniform because of their commendable abilities and service; thus many served throughout the war.

When the army discharged a half-Jew, he returned home and usually found work or continued his studies if he had a distinguished military career. But in 1944, the Nazis imprisoned most discharged half-Jews in Organization Todt (OT) forced labor camps. Some avoided this by going underground or having bosses who retained them as “employees essential to the war effort.” Although many had a chance to escape, the majority reported to the deportation centers designated by the Gestapo or local employment offices.

The half-Jews discussed in this chapter display diverse experiences with family dynamics, comrades, superiors, the racial laws, and Jewish identity. Many of the decisions they made reveal not the flexibility of their choices, but their constraints. Had the war been prolonged or had Hitler won it, these men would have shared the fate of the Jews in the death camps.

Half-Jewish Gefreiter Karl-Heinz Scheffler

Karl-Heinz Scheffler is a bitter and sarcastic man. Unlike his brother Günther (discussed in chapter 1), who rarely talks about their dysfunctional family, Scheffler often mentions how it affected him from 1933 to 1945. He is angry about his youth and about how Hitler and his father stole his innocence. Scheffler would love to have had a chance to relive his life in a different time and place, a wish shared by many half-Jews. He often makes a point of discussing it; he expresses his opinions openly about how and why his life has turned out the way it has.

Born on 13 August 1916 in Berlin, he was one of three brothers; an older brother, Hubertus, was born on 23 December 1914 in Kiel, and younger brother Günther was born on 4 April 1918, also in Kiel.

The marriage of Scheffler’s Jewish mother, Helena Weiss, and gentile father, Max, was not a happy one. Members of the Weiss family often married non-Jews. Helena’s three brothers had also converted and married non-Jews. As a boy, Scheffler did not know about his Jewish past, and no one bothered his family about it. Only in 1934, when the new German government implemented its campaign against the Jews with laws like the Aryan Paragraph, did Scheffler and his brothers find out about their Jewish background.

When Scheffler learned of his ancestry, he said he “felt horrible to know I was part of the subhumans the Nazis hated. I was young, nervous, and I didn’t even know what it meant to be Jewish. I mean, who is a Jew?” During that time, Scheffler read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, something few Germans had done. He found Hitler’s ideology horrendous and says that “everything that pig wrote about he did. His whole blueprint of destruction was there—the destruction of France and Russia and the systematic killing of Jews . . . everything was there. I should’ve taken it more seriously.”

images — Karl-Heinz Scheffler at dinner in Frankfurt, circa 1994.

His father, feeling pressure from the Nazis, started to distance himself from his family in the 1930s. He worried that if he remained married to a Jew, he would lose his business, which he had inherited from his Jewish father-in-law. He said his greatest mistake in life was marrying a Jew, which left him three “Jewish” sons to support. In 1937, he divorced his wife, who fell into a depression and tried to drown herself in Krummelanke Lake outside Berlin.

Max became a Nazi and ignored his sons throughout the Third Reich. Scheffler said: “He always was putting us down. ‘You guys are losers,’ or ‘Your mother is a disgrace,’ or ‘I wish you never had been born.’ Simply horrible.” Their sports club provided the only place where Scheffler and his brothers felt free from persecution. They played tennis, soccer, and especially field hockey well, and their skills seemed to matter more than their family tree. The other “Aryan” kids in the club treated them as equals, even though they knew about the Scheffler Jewish background.

The brothers thought about emigrating but had no money. “Where would we go and who would have taken us?” Scheffler said. “Besides, Germany was our home.”

After their father left the family, the sons did everything they could to protect their mother. They felt military service would do the most to help. They also came from a strong military tradition and did not see anything wrong with serving. Three of Scheffler’s Jewish uncles, all brothers of his mother, had served in World War I. One died in battle and two became officers.

In March 1937, Scheffler started his seven-month service in the Reichsarbeitsdienst (National Labor Service). While there, he learned about another man, Rudolf Sachs, who also had a Jewish mother. They then discovered a third half-Jew, Hannes Bergius, in their platoon of twenty-two men. He said, “There must have been numerous half-Jews in the Wehrmacht if our platoon is an example.”

On 15 November 1938, the Wehrmacht drafted Scheffler into the Twenty-third Antitank Regiment along with Sachs and Bergius. He had a difficult time adjusting to army discipline, and one of his superiors considered him physically and intellectually inferior to most soldiers. One day when an NCO ordered Scheffler to do some “stupid job,” Scheffler refused and told the man to “shove it up your ass.” He was punished with three days in the brig. He simply did not like the Wehrmacht.

Prior to the campaign against Poland, Scheffler served in the 176th Panzer Abwehr Regiment on Germany’s western border between the Moselle and the Saar. He remembers the excitement of his fellow soldiers later, in France, over their victories. “It was really sad to see the French attack our positions with bad tanks. It was almost embarrassing and I actually laughed at those poor bastards. We took care of their tanks with-out any problems,” Scheffler said. This must have been a rare occurrence, because in fact, the French had relatively good armor, superior to what the Germans had, and plenty of it. They just didn’t use it as well as the Germans did.

Scheffler participated only in a few engagements throughout Luxembourg and along the Maginot Line. In June his unit took part in the battle of Verdun, where he witnessed several atrocities. He saw German soldiers take black colonial French prisoners out into the fields and execute them. According to historian Raffael Scheck in his book Hitler’s African Victims, the German army murdered at least 1,500 black man mainly from Senegal, Mauritania, and Niger. Such acts made Scheffler wonder what they would do to him, another “racially inferior person.” Soon thereafter, Germany defeated France.

After three months of occupying France, the army transferred his unit to East Prussia. By now, Scheffler had adjusted to the army lifestyle and had become a good soldier. While working in his regiment’s office, he read the order ousting half-Jews from service and reported his status to his commander. Although his superior did not want to see Scheffler go, he complied with the decree. In July 1940, Scheffler, having just been promoted to Obergefreiter (private first class), was discharged. “It felt strange, but I am sure glad it happened,” he said. “My whole company disappeared at the battle of Stalingrad. No one returned.” After his discharge, Scheffler returned to Berlin and wrote to both of his brothers about the regulation.

At home, after some intense arguments, his father finally agreed to hire him in the family’s company. Scheffler said it was hard for him to hear his father yell “Heil Hitler” and play the part of a Nazi. “My father was the biggest coward ever. I was surprised that he hired me. I would not stay there long.”

When Hubertus received news from Scheffler about Hitler’s discharge order, he immediately reported this to his commander. Since his ancestry documents were not filed, it took his unit three weeks to get the paperwork to prove that he was a half-Jew, disqualifying him from service.

As discussed in chapter 1, Scheffler’s brother Günther reacted differently to the news that half-Jews could not serve. He, unlike his brothers, felt safe in his unit. Günther went to his officer when he found out about the laws and requested to stay. Without hesitation, his captain told him that he could. Günther did not want to return to civilian life, where he had experienced problems related to his Jewish status. He felt that he lived among equals in the army. A few of his comrades and superiors knew about his ancestry, but they protected him.

Besides his good experience with his commanders and comrades, Günther hoped that as long as one of his family members served, the Gestapo would leave his mother alone. Service to the Fatherland seemed to protect them against persecution. This was a common belief among several families.

In 1942, Karl-Heinz Scheffler left his father’s company for a job in a consulting firm. During this time, he bought a pistol on the black market. He told himself that if anyone tried to deport his mother, he would shoot him. Earlier the same year, the Nazis had deported his old, sick Jewish grandmother to Theresienstadt and this troubled him greatly. Later, someone who had accompanied his grandmother to the station reported that when she boarded, she smiled, waved goodbye, and said she would soon return home. Scheffler never saw her again. “Luckily, my Jewish grandfather died in 1932 and did not have to experience all the shit under the Nazis,” Scheffler said.

In October 1944, the Nazis deported him, along with other half-Jews, to an OT forced labor camp near Sitzendorf in Thuringia. He had thought he could avoid deportation, but someone, probably in his workplace, denounced him as a half-Jew. Soon thereafter, he and other half-Jews boarded a train to an unknown destination. When they arrived at the camp with towers behind barbed wire, Scheffler knew his future looked bleak. He worked in a plant that produced synthetic gasoline from coal and as a member of a construction crew building roads. Working conditions were horrible. They did not have much to eat and the sparse food they received was of poor quality.

Scheffler had bad eyesight and needed glasses to work. He learned that if he broke his glasses, he would have to go into town to get new ones. This would give him a whole day. He broke his glasses several times when he worked there and amazingly was given daily passes every time to get them repaired. “This was one way I got out of work and I’m surprised that they did not punish me for it,” Scheffler said. One morning in March 1945, he woke up to discover the guards had abandoned their posts. Along with a few others, he returned to Berlin.

When he reached his home in Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin, he happily found his mother alive and well. “I took my mother in my arms and told her how glad I was to see her,” Scheffler said with emotion. Yet, life was still dangerous. As he walked around the streets of Berlin in April, he saw bodies strung up on lamp posts with signs around their necks accusing them of desertion. According to historian Anthony Beevor in his book The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis executed 10,000 Germans soldiers for this crime in Berlin alone. Scheffler worried about what the Nazis would do to him.

Yet, both he and his two brothers survived the war.

Scheffler said that by 1943 he knew about the extermination of the Jews. The Nazis had already deported his grandmother, and his brother Günther wrote how he had heard that the SS had driven Jews to a ditch and executed them. “I never understood why my brother remained a soldier. What he saw was horrible. That was the first time I heard anything about this,” Scheffler said. However, strangely enough, he was never scared for his own life. “I was only scared for my mother. I did not think they would harm half-Jews like they did Jews,” Scheffler claimed. Knowing what he does about the Third Reich today, he felt lucky to have been spared the trauma and the pain many had experienced. “I’m so happy that I came through this history with so few problems,” he said.

Scheffler said that while he did not feel Jewish, he never felt embarrassed about his Jewish mother and he now takes a special interest in Israel’s current events. When asked what he thinks about the fact that Halakah considers him Jewish, he said he believes Halakah is just another racial theory placing people into “in and out groups.” “Sometimes you just have no control over what laws are out there. The Nazis called me a half-Jew with their laws, and religious Jews call me a Jew according to their laws. Whatever happened to people deciding for themselves who they are?” Scheffler asked, shaking his head. He claimed he has no contact with Jews and cannot understand any racial theories. He believes most people are weak and change with the society in which they live.

A case in point occurred after the war when Scheffler’s father suddenly saw the advantage of having a Jewish wife again. Remarkably, Helena took him back and they remarried. “It was sad. My mother always loved my father. He didn’t deserve her love,” Scheffler said. Their three sons were the groomsmen—“this just doesn’t happen,” Scheffler says. The second marriage of his parents did not last. His father had an affair with the maid a year after the remarriage and left his wife for a second time. “What a load of shit,” Scheffler said. “We humans sometimes never learn from our mistakes.”

Scheffler’s story is dramatically different from that of his brother Günther. Quite often research for this book revealed that brothers could have extremely different experiences under Hitler. Sometimes within a family, one brother stayed in the military while others left. Hitler gave some special exemptions while rejecting others.

Scheffler’s pain and suffering mirrors that of many Mischlinge. Scheffler’s father was an opportunist who knew no loyalty to his wife or children and destroyed the family’s unity. Indeed, Nazi racial ideology helped destroy families even more by giving some spouses, like Max Scheffler, an added incentive to discard those they deemed unworthy of their time or care.

Unlike a few others in this study, Karl-Heinz Scheffler did not enjoy the military. Since Germany had a universal draft, the Wehrmacht conscripted everyone. The Third Reich banned half-Jews from the military only in mid to late 1940. Nonetheless, many in the army had no business serving. Scheffler was a poor soldier both from a psychological and a “racial” point of view. He shows that many soldiers were not the hardcore Prussian types or pure “Aryans” that many think the Third Reich had at this time.

In his straightforward way, Scheffler ended his interview by pointing out again that Halakah is nonsense, that the Jewish laws of citizenship are ridiculous, and that they are doing more to divide people than to unite them, concluding rhetorically, “You would think the Jews would have learned that racial laws do not work.”

Half-Jewish Gefreiter Helmut Krüger

Helmut Krüger enjoys life. He is witty, full of passion, and not afraid to call a spade a spade. People usually take pleasure in getting to know him. Saddened that people throughout Germany have not recognized the plight of Mischlinge, he quickly blames Jewish organizations for failing to give adequate attention to the many groups in addition to full Jews who were persecuted by Hitler during the Holocaust. He wants people to learn from the past but fears they rarely listen unless they are directly affected.

Krüger was born 20 January 1913 in Mannheim to a Jewish mother, the former Camilla Davidson, and an “Aryan” father, Max Krüger. He had a brother, Answald, born in Heidelberg in 1918, and a sister, Brigitte, born in Münster in 1923.

As a young child, Krüger knew about his mother’s background. He also knew that his Jewish grandfather, the lithographer Ezekiel Davidson, came from Holland and that his Jewish grandmother, Rebeka (née Stern), from Hungary. Krüger pointed out that he represents a Mischling of many different “races.” He never knew his Jewish grandfather because he died when Krüger’s mother was a child. However, he did know his Jewish grandmother, who lived with them. She died in their house in Freiburg on Christmas Eve in 1924, and the family buried her in the local Jewish cemetery. Krüger did not have much experience with Jewish traditions and heard about Jews and Judaism only from his mother when she talked about growing up in Vienna.

Krüger’s paternal grandfather, Johann Krüger, born in the German village of Deutsch Evern outside Lüneburg, served in the army as a reserve soldier and worked as a municipal secretary. His paternal grandmother was Mathilde (née Leidenroth), from Halle. The son she bore in 1884 was Helmut’s father, Max.

Max’s family did not know any Jews or know about Jewish culture. They felt apprehensive about Max’s marrying a Jew, but Camilla’s personality quickly won them over, and the families grew to accept one another. In 1923, Max began a prestigious position managing the Freiburg Theater.

In 1930, amid the political chaos of Weimar, Helmut Krüger, then only seventeen years old, decided to join the Communist Party because he felt it would fight the Nazis. A year later, due to growing anti-Semitism, his mother left the Jewish community. She felt this act would protect the family if the Nazis gained power.

When Nazi persecution spread, Krüger did not understand why some labeled him a “dirty Jew.” Even today, he feels strange being associated with Jews because this concept is foreign to him. His family brought him up Christian and he had little understanding of what it meant to be Jewish. He says in Berlin’s Jewish Community Center Library, he feels like a stranger doing research there and complains when Jews try to claim him as a Jew. He has no Jewish friends today since “Hitler wiped most of them out.” Though he struggled for twelve years to convince the Nazis he was a loyal German, he never succeeded. Today, when he meets religious Jews, they try to convince him that he is Jewish. “It’s so confusing,” Krüger said.

Although according to Halakah, Krüger is Jewish because of his Jewish mother, he points out that he had nothing to do with his mother’s Jewishness. Halakah means nothing to him: “Should I then also be called a Nazi because my uncle, Hermann Krüger, was a local Nazi Party leader? The answer is no just as much as it’s no that I’m a Jew.” He was born a German and raised as a Christian. Krüger dislikes being called a Jew, not because he is anti-Semitic, but because he does not feel Jewish.

Some rabbis claim that people like Krüger demonstrate Jewish self-hatred, renouncing their Jewishness because they feel afraid to admit who they are. Krüger believes he is a German born by chance to a German Jewish mother who, like many Jews, shed her Jewishness to integrate fully into the dominant, Christian society.

His attitude represents that of many Mischlinge. The vast majority do not know much about their own Jewish heritage and feel puzzled when observant Jews tell them they are Jewish. Others, however, feel Jewish not so much because they have Jewish mothers, but because the Nazis persecuted them for their Jewishness. Their Jewish identity was born of persecution rather than of religious or cultural heritage. Until 1933 Krüger’s Jewish ancestry rarely became a topic. But after 1933, it dominated his life.

Krüger excelled at mathematics and enjoyed engineering, but after Hitler came to power, the Nazis limited his studies. In March 1933, life for his family changed dramatically. The police searched their home because of Krüger’s earlier Communist Party activities, although he had left the Communists a few years before. The police found an antique pistol and arrested Krüger and his father. Through family contacts with the police, they were released after twenty-four hours. But local Nazis later threw bricks through their windows and made threatening phone calls.

In October 1933, Krüger’s mother took another step toward protective assimilation and converted to Protestantism. Yet, by late 1933, his father had to leave his job in Freiburg for a smaller and less prestigious theater because of his Jewish wife. His career was ruined.

After his arrest, Krüger fled to Dresden and worked as a bricklayer. In October 1933, his parents and two siblings also left Freiburg and moved to Berlin hoping to escape the authorities and hide their Jewish connection in the big city. Krüger soon followed his family to Berlin to help support them. He worked in a construction company and was able to continue his studies.

In 1935, a cousin of Krüger’s father in America offered to help Krüger emigrate. He almost accepted, but decided to stay in Germany because he wanted to finish his studies and lacked the courage to start a new life abroad. Also, he did not feel right leaving his mother, brother, and sister behind to face an uncertain future while he lived free in America.

His family struggled to protect their livelihoods and dignity and came up with few solutions for coping with a seemingly impossible predicament. Krüger’s mother tortured herself with blame for jeopardizing her entire family with her ancestry.

Fortunately, Krüger’s friends were not bothered by his racial background. “The strange thing then,” he said, “was that most people I knew were not racists in spite of being consistently bombarded with Nazi propaganda.” He spent most of his free time with young people who were passionate athletes. “They just cared how well you played and whether you were a good pal or not,” he said.

Also, in hindsight, Krüger feels fortunate to have had a Jewish mother during the Hitler years. Had she been Aryan, he claims, he might have joined the Nazi Party or the SS. He knew many who succumbed to the seductive power of Nazism.

In 1935, Krüger volunteered for service as a way of protecting his family. He felt that appearing home on leave in uniform might help improve his family’s image. “People would see that our family had a soldier amongst their members,” he explained, “and leave us alone.” In April 1936, he joined the Wehrmacht. After he completed boot camp, he felt ill at ease swearing an oath of allegiance to Hitler. From July to September 1936, he served with Reserve Battalion 15 in Berlin. Many comrades and superiors felt sorry for him for having a Jewish mother and, because he was such a good comrade, treated him with respect.

Krüger’s father’s problems continued and in 1936, he lost his job again because of his Jewish wife. To help support the family, Krüger found additional work at a gas station. All the while, Krüger pursued his university education even though he carried the yellow ID card for Jews and Mischlinge.

His brother did not have such luck. In 1937, Answald had to leave high school a year before completion because his parents had fallen on such hard times. He then worked in an export company to help the family make ends meet.

Unable to take the stress and believing her husband could earn a better living without the “dead weight of a Jewish wife,” Krüger’s mother requested a divorce in 1937. She thought she could then resume her Dutch citizenship and circumvent the German laws. Though divorced, Max continued to support his ex-wife and children as best he could and a friend of the family, Wolfgang Koepke, helped Krüger finance his studies. “Not everyone back then was a Nazi,” Krüger said.

Early in the morning of Reichskristallnacht, 9 November 1938, Krüger, looking out of his bedroom window, saw SA¹ men vandalizing Jewish stores with clubs and axes during the infamous pogrom. His future turned black.

Although prohibited from dating “Aryans,” Krüger did so anyway and was quite a hit with the ladies. In late 1938, he became serious about one special woman named Hertha Eckhardt and they became engaged. She knew about his background but did not care, and her parents accepted him. Her brother did not seem bothered by his sister’s fiancé either, even though he served as an SS man and a personal guard of Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front. In 1939, Krüger applied to the government to marry Hertha but received no response.

In August, the army called him up for service in the Seventh Infantry Regiment. He and his comrades were accompanied by their girlfriends, fiancées, and wives to the train station to report for duty. Unbeknownst to them, they were headed to war.

In the Polish campaign, Krüger’s unit saw no action as they marched to Radom and Sielce on the River Burg, the demarcation line agreed upon by Stalin and Hitler in August 1939. Throughout the fighting, his unit marched through bombed-out villages and along roads lined with the remains of dead horses, Polish civilians, and soldiers caught up in the maelstrom of battle. Sometimes his unit would march 20 miles a day with full packs weighing over 70 pounds.

During Krüger’s time in Poland, he did not witness much persecution of Jews. He saw a soldier attacking a Jew, but this was rare. One day, when soldiers vandalized a synagogue, he reminded them that they stood in a sacred house. Surprisingly, the men stopped and left. Krüger’s intervention was unusual. Most Mischling soldiers seemed to worry little about the mistreatment of the eastern Jews around them. They celebrated the victories with their comrades and hoped that their service would alleviate their discrimination back home.

After the Poland campaign, Krüger was promoted to Gefreiter (private first class). He jokingly says that he had reached the rank the “great warrior” of the “German Reich, Adolf Hitler, had during World War I.” He also became the squad leader of eleven men although according to law, half-Jews were not supposed to occupy leadership positions in case they “started acting like Jews.”²

His unit was then sent to Germany’s western border and in January 1940 had its first casualty during the “Phony War.” Alfred Palm, a good friend of Krüger, died. A few days before his death, on hearing that Krüger was a half-Jew, he had confided in Krüger that he was dating a Jewish girl. They agreed that Hitler and his racial laws were absurd.

While his unit readied itself to invade France in spring of 1940, Krüger volunteered for reconnaissance missions. As a soldier, he always had Nazi expressions ringing in his ears, such as Jews are “flat-footed cowards.” “By some dumb logic, I felt I had to prove them wrong.” So Krüger volunteered for dangerous missions. When Krüger’s officers awarded him the Iron Cross Second Class for his bravery, he hoped the medal would secure protection for his family.

Yet Krüger increasingly came to dread the future and thought about ways to escape. Often, while staring off into no-man’s-land, Krüger contemplated deserting to the French, but he did not want to endanger his siblings and mother. One man in his unit actually did run to the French. After Germany defeated France, the Nazis found and executed him.

While in France, his unit marched an average 35 miles a day and hardly saw any action. Krüger felt excited by Germany’s victory over France in only a few weeks.

After the cessation of hostilities in the summer of 1940, Krüger was hospitalized with a severe case of the flu. His officer, Lieutenant Oesterwitz, visited him and during their conversation asked if Krüger had heard the rumor about a half-Jew serving in their ranks. Krüger lied and said he had no idea. He did not think his superiors would check the personnel files for possible non-Aryans.

Krüger did not know that Hitler had ordered the discharge of half-Jews in April 1940. He did not want to leave his fellow soldiers, whom he described as a wonderful group of guys and a surrogate family. This affection was apparently mutual. For example, for his birthday in 1940, his comrades threw him a party where they all got drunk.

In late 1940, Günther, one of his comrades, suddenly left the unit for a job back home. At least this was what he shared with Krüger. Later Krüger learned that Günther was a half-Jew and that the army had forced him to leave. Krüger felt bad for the soldier who shared his own situation but now became even more convinced that he should hide his ancestry. He did not want to leave a place where he felt he could protect his family and himself. On several occasions, his mother sidetracked the Gestapo by showing them pictures of her soldier sons. They would leave claiming they could not deport a mother with children in the army.

In April 1941, the army finally discovered Krüger’s secret and discharged him. Another soldier, hearing about Krüger’s upcoming dismissal, said he envied Krüger for going home. His commander, Lieutenant Teuke, a Nazi Party member and SA man, tried without success to retain him. He could not believe that the Wehrmacht would dismiss a man with the Iron Cross.

Many comrades envied his dismissal. Ironically, several half-Jews were worried about leaving because they faced an uncertain future, but their comrades only saw that they could go home and escape combat.

So Krüger felt disappointed having to leave, but when looking back felt lucky the army discharged him because the Soviets decimated his company during the battle for Moscow in the winter of 1941–1942 and his comrades now “fertilize Russian soil.” In the first month of the invasion of Russia, German losses had already exceeded those they had incurred in the west and by November 1941, infantry “formations had lost half of their personnel.” By March 1942, the casualties would rise to over a million, with 250,000 being either killed or missing in action.³ These numbers reflect only the first eight months of the war in Russia, which would go on for several more years. In the face of such statistics, the envy of Krüger’s fellow soldiers is easily understood.

Krüger’s brother, Answald, had a different relationship with the army. He also received the Iron Cross Second Class and served in the elite special operations force of Brandenburg Regiment 800 as a Gefreiter. Answald, unlike his brother, admired Hitler’s successes, although he had a difficult time justifying his political views when the very political system he supported persecuted him. In March 1942, the military also discharged him for racial reasons. “He was an excellent soldier and thrived in battle . . . His discharge was one of his greatest disappointments,” Krüger said.

Krüger admits that people like himself and his brother were lucky. He thinks of the thousands of half-Jews who remained in service and probably met their deaths in Russia. “Eighty percent of Germany’s killed-inaction occurred on the eastern front,” Krüger claims. His estimate is not off by much: Germany suffered 3,250,000 combat deaths during World War II, of which some 70 percent—2,300,000—occurred in Russia.⁴

When asked if he knew other half-Jews in the army, Krüger said that everyone knew that Field Marshal Erhard Milch was a half-Jew. Following his discharge, he also met a few other half-Jewish veterans who were part of his circle of friends or who had served in his unit. And in 1944, he heard from a major in the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) that 80,000 half-Jews and men married to Jews had been discharged by the Wehrmacht. His sister, Brigitte, heard a similar rumor from professors at her university.

Once discharged, Krüger continued his studies in Berlin and later worked for a construction company in Brest, France, building U-boat bunkers. Paradoxically, the Nazis placed a group of Jewish forced laborers under his control, most of whom the authorities later deported to an unknown destination.

In February 1942, he reapplied for permission to marry Hertha, with whom he was now living, attaching a supporting letter from his former commander, now a company commander and bearer of the Ritterkreuz (Knight’s Cross). Nonetheless, his application was denied and he continued to live with Hertha in a wilde Ehe, or “wild marriage.” In November, their first child, Gabriele, came into the world. “It was such a happy moment in my life because everything else had been so shitty,” Krüger said. But Hertha could not claim Krüger as the father because she feared the Nazis would charge her with Rassenschande (racial defilement). After the birth, she denied knowing the father and “admitted” that her baby was born out of wedlock. It was difficult for Krüger to walk away from the hospital unable to claim his own daughter. Soon after the birth Krüger took his fiancée and child to the village of Deutsch Evern where his gentile relatives lived. There, a cousin of his father and the town’s local Nazi Party leader, Hermann Krüger, made sure that Hertha received papers allowing the family to house her and the baby.

Also in 1942, Krüger and his brother moved their mother, Camilla, and sister, Brigitte, out of their apartment in Berlin to one in Wannsee (suburban Berlin) without telling the authorities about it. However, in February 1944, the SS found out where Camilla lived and picked her up in a furniture wagon for deportation. Brigitte witnessed the horrible event and called Krüger who, in turn, quickly called up his brother. They all then traveled to where they knew the Nazis were holding Jews for deportation at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. There, they saw their mother through a window with tears in her eyes. Helmut yelled at his brother Answald, “Where is your shitty Brandenburg Division now?” While the authorities held Camilla for several hours, Brigitte brought her some clothes. Soon thereafter, the Nazis deported her to Theresienstadt, where she remained until war’s end.

After their mother’s deportation, Krüger and his brother visited SS headquarters in Berlin to ask for her release. There, they met Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, SS major Rolf Günther, at the entrance. When they explained their situation, asked for the return of their mother, and added that they were willing to serve again, Günther looked at them hatefully and said, “Every criminal is courageous,” and left. Krüger and his brother also tried to reenter the army at different Wehrmacht offices to help their mother but were rejected. “We both were traumatized that our military service didn’t protect her. We felt alone. We just wanted to survive with our family intact,” Krüger said.

In the fall of 1944, the Brandenburg Division became an SS division. Even so, Answald Krüger still had contact with his comrades. One of them, an SS sergeant, felt horrified by what happened to Answald’s mother and offered his sympathy. The Krüger brothers even went to Brandenburg’s base outside of Berlin near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to visit this comrade. Helmut Krüger was stunned to see the camp inmates working nearby in their blue striped clothes under horrendous conditions.

In the fall of 1944, things took another turn for the worse for Krüger. One of his Nazi relatives forced Hertha to leave the village of Deutsch Evern and take her child with her. He did not like harboring Krüger’s wife and quarter-Jewish child. She and the baby returned to Berlin where they were secretly married in the Swedish Lutheran church.

On 10 January 1945, the Nazis deported Krüger and his brother to an OT forced labor camp. In normal passenger trains they traveled to the encampment at Miltitz-Roitschen near Meissen/Saxony. A large fence enclosed the camp and Ukrainian guards roamed the area with menacing German shepherd dogs. The Nazis immediately put them on work details constructing buildings for processing synthetic gasoline.

Men other than half-Jews worked there, including many husbands of Jewish wives. Krüger later found out these wives had been deported to Theresienstadt like his mother. Many inmates were highly decorated World War I veterans. One wore the German Pilot Badge and his Iron Cross First Class from the Great War and explained that his half-Jewish son was serving in the Luftwaffe under Göring’s protection. Another half-Jew had lost an arm in combat and worked in the office as a clerk.

In February 1945, the camp authorities transferred Krüger and his fellow inmates to Coswig, near Dresden, where they worked alongside Russian and Polish POWs. In the middle of February Krüger witnessed the horrible Allied firebombing of Dresden, which probably killed around 35,000 civilians. After the bombing, he and his fellow workers had to clean up the streets and bury the dead. He hated the fact that the Allies bombed German cities, but accepted it knowing this strategy would help end the war sooner.

Laboring away in the OT camp, Krüger realized what could eventually happen to him unless he escaped. Consequently, he, along with others, planned to break out, and in March they successfully did so. Krüger and some comrades were sent to pick up some machine parts, and on the way to Hamburg, Krüger went AWOL in Berlin. Later, an anti-Nazi military doctor helped Krüger obtain papers documenting him as an injured soldier in case he met military police. These documents proved invaluable since the military police executed numerous men on the spot as deserters (going AWOL) if the men could not provide the authorities with proper papers. For instance, on a street in Danzig in 1945, the Nazis had hanged several German soldiers from the streetlights with placards around their chests labeled “Coward.”⁵ Krüger wanted to avoid such a fate.

For added safety’s sake, the preacher at the Swedish church in Berlin helped Krüger obtain another document stating he was a half-Jew and a persecuted person of the Third Reich in case he fell into Allied hands.

Krüger eventually made it back to the village of Deutsch Evern, where his wife and child had returned. Since it was apparent the Nazis would soon lose the war, some of Krüger’s relatives suddenly had a change of heart. When the Allies entered the town, Krüger removed the sign that read “Jews not allowed” at the village outskirts, and he and his wife felt the heavy burden of many years of persecution fall from their shoulders. They now could start their lives as husband and wife in freedom.

When asked about the Holocaust, Krüger stated that he lost about nine relatives in the death camps, including his mother’s brothers Nati and Julius Davidson, who perished along with their entire families. He also knew about two Jewish sisters who lived in his apartment complex who committed suicide because of Nazi persecution. However, he did not know about the systematic extermination of Jews under Hitler. “That information was kept secret and besides we had other worries. I think even if I’d heard anything about it I wouldn’t have believed it,” Krüger said. He now thinks that half-Jews would have been killed had the war continued.

After the war, Krüger continued to have problems because of his half-Jewish status and military past. When he met up with an American Jewish soldier, the soldier told him, “You’re still alive so you must’ve been a Nazi.” Krüger had problems at his interrogation when he explained that half-Jews had to serve. Although this confused the Allied interrogators, they eventually cleared him and labeled him a civilian. After 1945, Krüger simply tried to forget his Mischling past.

Several months after the war ended, Krüger found out that Russian troops had liberated his mother and that she had returned to Berlin. His reunion with her in late 1945 was one of the happiest days of his life. However, she was a broken woman. The Nazi era had aged her terribly and she died only nine years later. Although she had converted to Christianity, the Jewish community allowed Krüger and his siblings to bury her urn with that of her mother in the Jewish cemetery in Freiburg.

After 1945, Krüger quickly finished his education and started to work as an engineer helping to rebuild Germany. In 1955, he applied for compensation from the government for his persecution. The authorities denied his claim. The officials did not know how he could have served in the Wehrmacht as a half-Jew. Smiling, Krüger commented that “people have little knowledge about half-Jews and their plight during the Third Reich. They don’t care about us half-breeds. We’re outcasts and will always be stuck between two chairs.” Krüger’s frustration is common among half-Jews. They feel that history has excluded them from its books and created no place for them.

Although unfounded, Krüger’s mother’s feeling of guilt for having brought this horrible situation on the family was experienced by many Jewish parents of half-Jewish children. In particular, Jewish mothers often seemed to have felt things more deeply and felt more responsible for their children than did Jewish fathers.

Moreover, Krüger’s family’s situation mirrored that of many families in this research in other respects. Like the families of Arno Spitz, Helmuth Kopp, and Pinchas Hirschfeld, to name just a few, Helmut’s family moved around in order to find an adequate hiding place in Nazi Germany. Krüger’s life represents those of many Mischlinge in that they felt army service ensured their own and their families’ survival. Yet, this tactic proved largely unsuccessful.

However, as Krüger’s experience shows, army service did at least delay the persecution of Jewish relatives. This provided a false sense of security because ultimately no half-Jew, much less a full Jew, was safe in Nazi Germany.

As Helmut Krüger and Karl-Heinz Scheffler both state, their discharge probably saved their lives. Many Mischlinge like Krüger and Scheffler (and Scholz, Techel, and Schlesinger in later chapters) would have died in Russia had Hitler not made it law in 1940 that half-Jews could not serve. This was the greatest irony of all—percentage-wise, more Aryans than half-Jews died in combat because they were deemed worthy to serve the Reich. The era of the Third Reich is full of paradoxes.

Half-Jewish Oberschütze Klaus-Peter Scholz

Klaus-Peter Scholz lives life with passion and he often uses animated gestures to express himself. As a gay man, he experienced the Third Reich from the perspective of not just one but two persecuted groups. He feels that life has been unfair and his emotions often border on the extreme. Yet, he is kind and feels for others who are in pain. He often mentions his troubled relationships with women and it becomes apparent that he suffered under an overbearing mother.

Scholz was born in Hamburg on 2 April 1918 to a Jewish mother, Olga (Olli) Gertrud (née Samuel), and an “Aryan” father, Julius Scholz. His parents divorced in the 1920s because of his father’s wife-beating and extramarital affairs. It was a bitter breakup and Julius refused to pay alimony. As a result, Olga took him to court. She won and he had to pay, but with his knowledge as a lawyer, he made sure that she received the bare minimum. Several family members felt upset that she had married a Goy and many scolded her, saying, “We told you that you shouldn’t have married him.”

Scholz learned about his Jewish background as a child when he told his mother he and some schoolmates had poked fun at Jews on the street. She told him not to do that because she herself was Jewish, then added he should keep their ancestry quiet because if that knowledge got out it could only harm them.

When the Nazis came into power Scholz thought about his future. As long as Hitler controlled the government, he knew he would not fare well. Also, after the political climate changed, his father succeeded in further reducing the alimony from 1,500 RM to a mere 110 RM per month because his ex-wife was Jewish, hurting Scholz since he depended on her income as well. “That was the pig my father was,” Scholz said.

In 1933, Scholz’s mother sent him to the Hermann Lietz boarding school in Erfurt, but he hated it. So in 1934, he returned to his mother in Hamburg, where he attended public school. After finishing his secondary education, he worked for an import/export company run by Oscar Friedlaender, a Jew.

At that time, he attended a reform temple in Hamburg on Oberstrasse and felt warmly accepted there. “My mother was upset about it,” he said, “but I told her that we cannot hide from who we are. I wanted to be around Jews. She told me that I was taking a step backward.”

In 1937, Friedlaender offered to take Scholz with him to Brazil. Friedlaender and his wife knew they needed to get out of Germany and told him they had a business there where he could work. Scholz wanted to leave, but his mother dissuaded him, “You have to serve in the army. And besides, who’ll take care of me? You cannot go.” He did have to serve, but if he left the country for good, then his mandatory service could have been ignored. Scholz’s mother did not make his decision whether to escape easy and after many arguments, he decided to stay. “She told me that nothing would happen to us. Her brother had served four years as an officer during World War I and the Germans would not harm a family with such a brave relative.” She was sorely mistaken, but it would take several more years of Nazi rule to prove just how wrong she was.

Sometime in 1937, Scholz’s father pleaded with him to get baptized a Protestant. Scholz expressed surprise that his father suddenly concerned himself about his religion because his father had shown little interest in Scholz at all. The father insisted he do this because it would help the family and his practice. Scholz told him he felt Jewish and did not like Christianity. His father yelled at him that all his troubles in life were due to “that woman—your mother” and to his Jewish son.

The father then suddenly changed his tactics and offered Scholz a gold watch if he converted. Scholz asked, “Are you bribing me with gold?” However, he needed money and decided to do the ceremony. His mother approved of Scholz’s baptism and came to the confirmation. However, his father did not allow her to sit with the family, relegating her to the balcony. “That was the type of asshole I had to call father,” Scholz said.

In 1938, Scholz volunteered for the army. He thought the sooner he finished his required duty, the faster he could leave the country.

In April 1938, he started his National Labor Service. In his first week there his barracks leader, Obertruppführer (NCO) Krause, called Scholz a typical half-Jew with dark hair and blue eyes. Scholz immediately went to the camp commander and requested to be sent home. When asked why, Scholz reported what had happened. After hearing about the situation, the commander marched back to the barracks with Scholz and yelled at Krause in front of the others that this was no way to treat a man. “Thereafter, I never had any problems,” Scholz said.

Scholz completed his labor service and joined the Wehrmacht in November. His mother felt proud and thought his service proved their Germanness. When they walked around town, she told everyone her son had joined the army. Scholz thought his service was simply a necessary evil.

He served as an artillery loader in the Seventy-sixth Infantry Regiment in Hamburg, a motorized tank-destroyer unit. “THAT’S WHY I CAN’T HEAR SO WELL TODAY,” Scholz said loudly, with a laugh. He found he enjoyed the camaraderie of military life: “It felt good to serve and that my comrades accepted me after so many years of feeling like an outsider.” Many Mischlinge felt this way. They wanted society around them to acknowledge them as German citizens with equal rights. Service restored some of their dignity, but this feeling of equality often stopped when they were passed over for promotions or discharged.

After training, Scholz’s company traveled to Berlin to take the oath of allegiance in Hitler’s presence on 20 April 1939, the Führer’s birthday. “I was in the first row of the company and Hitler stood right in front of me in a Mercedes convertible. I could see his bright blue eyes and they stared right through me.” Scholz was armed that day with his pistol, the customary weapon carried by artillery loaders. When asked why he did not shoot Hitler, he said, “I wasn’t allowed any ammunition—it would’ve been difficult to have hidden the bullets. And anyway, I wanted to continue living. I didn’t want to die. If I had killed Hitler what would that have done for me? Death! I would’ve been a criminal killing the highest authority in the land. Remember, at that time, everyone loved Hitler. He hadn’t yet murdered millions of Jews or led Germany into another horrible military defeat in a world war.”

On 1 September 1939, Scholz’s unit entered Poland. When asked if he felt scared, he said, “Sure, when soldiers go to war, they’re always scared. Any soldier who tells you differently is lying. However, we knew we fought against an inferior enemy, and this was proven when we were in battle. After we discovered we were up against poor troops, we lost our fear and the thrill of victory took over.” The few times his unit entered combat, it attacked and easily destroyed outdated Polish tanks. Approaching Brest-Litovsk, they overcame the defenders and entered the city. For his meritorious service, Scholz’s officer promoted him to Oberschütze (private first class).

After the campaign’s end, the Wehrmacht transferred his unit to Germany’s western border in preparation for invading France. On 10 May 1940, the unit crossed the Dutch border, continued through Belgium, and entered France. “The French were poor fighters and gave up their country easily. We had few casualties and hardly ever saw the enemy.” They reached the northern coast of France in a few weeks and the hostilities quickly ceased. Scholz thought the war was “horrible.” However, when asked if he ever felt guilty about serving, he said, “No, why should I feel guilty for something that was required of all Germans? My commander and comrades liked me and I did my duty.”

When asked if he felt shy with his comrades because of his sexual orientation, Scholz said no. The quarter-Jew Florian Stahmer, on the other hand, explained that due to his racial status and homosexuality, he “retreated more or less into his Ivory Tower,” meaning that he did not associate with many and mistrusted most.⁶

Homosexual Mischlinge suffered as both Jewish and “sexual degenerates,” two of several groups the Nazis persecuted. Most Mischling homosexuals and bisexuals documented successfully hid their sexual orientation, but not their ancestry. For example, the army almost discharged Fritz Bayerlein, the later famous general and Rommel’s chief of staff in Africa, in 1934 when the Arierparagraph came out. However, because of his abilities, Hitler probably awarded him an exemption. Although he could not hide his quarter-Jewish status, he surprisingly could escape persecution for his bisexuality. Although police files existed about his homosexual activities prior to 1933 and even though some of his subordinates knew about his behavior, Bayerlein prevented that information about his life from reaching the authorities. He became one of the most successful German generals, adding the Oak Leaves with Swords to his Knight’s Cross and commanding the Panzer Lehr Division.⁷

Since the Third Reich prohibited homosexuality, when the Nazis found a Mischling guilty of this crime, they judged him harshly. For example, half-Jew Herbert Lefèvre had received Hitler’s Genehmigung (special permission) and served in the navy (see chapter 4 for more about the Genehmigung). He was also a member of the Nazi Party and SA. In 1944, a court found him guilty of homosexuality and sentenced him to death. He had misused his position as a cook by giving extra food to fellow sailors in return for sexual favors. Naval judge August Berges ruled that as a half-Jew, Lefèvre should have taken advantage of the chance to prove himself a worthy member of the Wehrmacht. Instead of seizing this opportunity, he had revealed the true “criminal instincts of his Jewish heritage.” His party membership and Genehmigung did not excuse his dastardly behavior as a sailor. The court, reasoning that Lefèvre should have been extra conscientious in fulfilling his obligations because of his privileged status, showed no mercy. The Nazis hanged him on 6 July 1944; it took him seven minutes to die.⁸ In light of this case, Scholz was lucky his sexual status remained unknown.

In the fall of 1940, when Scholz reported to headquarters, his commander explained that they would have to discharge him. A few days later, in Hamburg, the authorities gave him papers stating “that the military no longer wanted me because I was a half-Jew.” Scholz said his discharge rescued him from dying in the east. All his comrades died in Russia during 1941 and 1942. “They were slaughtered on the fields of Russia. I’m here today because of Hitler. Hitler allowed me to live. Strange paradox, isn’t it?”

After his discharge, Scholz looked for work. When people asked why he was not in the army, he answered honestly, saying, “I’m a half-Jew and I’m not allowed to serve.” Hearing this, potential employers rejected him. Since he had no place to turn, Scholz went to his father for help in December 1940.

His father was a successful lawyer with the motto “Scholz entscheidet schnell” (Scholz decides quickly). Although his father was a miser and anti-Semite, Scholz knew this was his best chance for employment. His father gave him some money for the first month to pay bills, but no job. In this time period, Scholz failed to find work and returned to his father for further support. Instead of receiving more assistance, Scholz got into a dispute with his father when he refused to help.

During the argument, Scholz mentioned his veteran status and called his father a coward for not serving in World War I. (He knew that before his father visited his draft board in 1914, he had drunk a lot of coffee to make his heart beat quickly. The ruse worked and the board rejected his father, thinking he had a heart condition.) Enraged, his father screamed, “Get out, you Jew! Out, you dirty Jew. And I don’t want to have anything to do with you until your Jewish mother is six feet under.”

When Scholz returned home, his mother panicked and told him, “I’d hoped your military service would help me. Oh, no, life’s over. What am I going to do? I didn’t choose to be a Jew. Why’s this happening?” Scholz felt irritated and asked, “Mother, what about me? What am I going to do to support us?”

Eventually, he found work in Hamburg at the Peltzer & Sussmann plant. Run by the Wittenburg family, the plant produced air conditioners and heating utilities. Since the owner’s wife was Jewish, they made an effort to help half-Jews.

Scholz’s mother continued to have problems. Several Gestapo agents threatened her with deportation, and sometime in 1942, the Nazis ordered her to show up for a train headed to Theresienstadt. On her deportation day, 20 July 1942, Scholz accompanied her to the station. She was hysterical. Noticing the panic-stricken woman, an SS man asked what was going on. When Scholz explained, the SS man said that, if he wanted, Scholz could accompany his mother. Scholz declined, saying he could do more for her by staying in Hamburg. “I’m glad I didn’t get on that train,” he said. “I might not be here today had I done so.” On 6 December 1942, his mother wrote from Theresienstadt to wish Scholz a “Merry Christmas,” claiming in jittery handwriting that she was all right and healthy.

In July 1943, things took a turn for the worse when a Gestapo agent denounced Scholz for anti-Nazi activities. He was arrested. “The agent had even claimed that I smelled like a Jew,” Scholz said, shaking his head. The Nazis then deported him to Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp in a suburb of Hamburg.

Before leaving, he said goodbye to his sister Eva Maria. Later, she explained her brother’s problem to her Aryan lover, who had a friend from law school working in the Hamburg Gestapo office. Amazingly, this friend obtained Scholz’s release from the camp after only a week there. His arrest may have saved Scholz’s life, because his incarceration took place during the ghastly bombing of Hamburg in late July, which killed more than 30,000 inhabitants.⁹ “The place where I had been staying,” Scholz said, “was burned to the ground.”

After his release, Scholz worked gathering steel beams in the destroyed areas of Hamburg, where he came across the charred remains of human beings. “That was horrible to see these burned bodies,” he said, waving his hands.

He continued to receive letters from his mother and did his best to always answer her. On 8 August 1943, he wrote her that he felt “happy to hear good news from you” and reported he had survived the last bomb attack. He told her he would send her a food package soon. Many of his letters never reached her. For example, on 23 August, the Organization for Jews in Germany returned to Scholz a card to his mother from 8 August, telling him that letters with news about bombings “aren’t allowed to be sent to Theresienstadt.”

Scholz’s mother wrote a friend on 25 April 1944 that she worried about her children, from whom she had not heard in a while. She felt sad her son had “forgotten her.” This was not true. Scholz wrote his mother continually. Very likely the bombings, the breakdown of the postal system, and the Nazis at Theresienstadt prevented delivery of his letters. Ironically, Scholz’s mother’s outgoing mail always seemed to reach its destination.

In February 1945 Scholz’s boss fired him. At the same time, Scholz heard that the Nazis were deporting half-Jews and he felt the walls closing in. He decided to flee to Trendelburg in central Germany, where his sister was hiding. His Aryan girlfriend Ilse Leopold and her family helped him escape.

Remarkably, both he and his mother survived the war. “However, though my mother may have survived physically, she became crazy. The Nazi persecution made her insane,” he said. They also lost many family members. Scholz’s uncle and his wife and two daughters died in the Holocaust. The Nazis also killed his cousin Alice Rosenbaum (née Kallmes) and her daughter Josefine Rosenbaum (née Elbe) in Riga on 4 December 1941. Right before her deportation, Scholz saw his cousin Alice, who told him, “Don’t worry about me, Klaus-Peter. You know I’ll not let them do away with me!” The Nazis shot his cousin and great-aunt along with another relative, Liesel Abrahamsohn, after they arrived in Riga. After the authorities sent his uncle Hermann Samuel to the ghetto at Lodz, he was never heard from again. His uncle Heinemann David and aunt Dora David (née Rosenbaum) died in Theresienstadt. When the Germans deported Heinemann, he was nearly ninety years old and was taken away on a stretcher. “Talk about the Nazis having a small penis complex when they send 90-year-old decrepit men off to their deaths for fear of what they might do to the ‘Movement,’” Scholz said.

When asked about his awareness of the Holocaust, Scholz said he knew about deportations and the general persecution but not about the systematic gassing of millions. “Who could’ve thought of it?” he said and added that most Germans probably did not know either, “but had they known, they would’ve been happy about it. Anti-Semitism is big in Germany.”

Scholz went on to explain he is pleased with modern Germany because it has done so much to admit its guilt and has helped support the study of the Holocaust by preserving historical sites and funding archives and museums. He feels the country has done a lot to make restitution to its victims, although he admits more could be done. “I’m proud of the Germans,” he said. “They’ve done a better job than the Japanese, who have been a disgrace with the way they have dealt with their genocidal campaign against China and other nations. Aren’t the Japanese about honor and respect? Well, I find them cowards for not admitting what they did during the war. Many of their leaders still visit the shrine where notorious war criminals like Tojo are buried [Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo]—this is like German politicians visiting Himmler’s or Eichmann’s grave. The Rape of Nanking is evidence enough that the Japanese were every bit as evil as the Nazis were.”

Scholz’s statements are true. Japan has a poor record when it comes to admitting its crimes against humanity during World War II, even though these crimes are well documented. At least 15 million Chinese died under Japanese rule alone, and the majority died due to extermination policies.¹⁰ As the Encyclopedia of Genocide notes, the 15 million who died did so from “bombing, starvation, and disease that resulted from the Japanese terror campaign.”¹¹

Japanese officials and historians have “systematically kept all mention of their atrocities out of the nation’s history textbooks.”¹² Journalist Honda Katsuichi wrote, “Unlike the Germans and Italians, the Japanese have not made their own full accounting of their prewar actions.”¹³ In the end, Scholz’s observation about the Japanese is true, and it is sad that Japan has problems dealing with its wartime past.

After the war, Scholz tried to live in Germany but felt he could no longer remain in a land that had given birth to Nazism. In 1957, he emigrated to Canada, worked for a company that dealt with kitchen appliances, and retired as a director.

In 1958, he decided to reaffirm his Jewish beliefs. “I told my mother, ‘We’re who we are, Jews. I’m tired of living in denial of this, Mother. I want to be a Jew.’” He went to Rabbi Stern at Temple Emanuel in Montreal and said, “I want to be a Jew and I want to make it official. I’ve always felt Jewish.” Scholz underwent circumcision and became a temple member. He was quick to explain that he converted not because he believed in God, but because he wanted to affirm his cultural and ethnic identity. Scholz does not believe in God and thinks people who do believe in God are misled and weak.

Scholz is exceptional for his passion about his history. He remains traumatized by his persecution and evidently by his relationship with his mother. His story illustrates how difficult it can be to step out of the shadow of pain experienced when young.

Scholz always “felt” Jewish and came to treasure his Jewishness, as reflected by the formal steps he took in 1958 to “make official” his identity as a Jew. He felt that by doing so, he could claim a part of himself that had been denied him. This has helped him deal with the pain of the past and started him on a road of remaining true to himself. Yet during the interview, he admitted, “I struggle with who I am. But isn’t that the way all humans live their lives?”

Half-Jewish Unteroffizier Karl-Arnd Techel

With his white beard and handlebar mustache, Karl-Arnd Techel, at the time he was interviewed, looked as if he had stepped out of a nineteenth-century portrait standing next to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche or Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He radiated energy and intelligence. As he discussed his past, he explained that God drives everything in life. His belief in God gave him peace and comfort. Consequently, he learned to take life as it comes, because worrying accomplishes nothing and God does everything for a reason.

Techel, born 19 November 1920 in Wilhelmshaven, had a gentile father, Arnold, who served as a career naval officer, and a Jewish mother, Paula (née Pick), who worked as their homemaker. On marrying Arnold, Paula converted to Christianity. She did so for love and because she believed in Christ’s message. As a result, she raised her children in a strong Protestant tradition. Techel had one sibling, a younger brother, Hanns-Dieter, born on 22 December 1921.

When young, Techel did not know his mother was Jewish. In 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, Techel’s parents worried about their sons’ future and wondered whether they should talk with them about their mother’s Jewish background. They decided to keep it quiet, reasoning that “what the boys don’t know won’t hurt them.” Yet they still allowed their sons to spend time with their Jewish relatives, and their Jewish grandmother lived with the family. “Even when she died in 1935 and was buried in a Jewish cemetery, I still didn’t think I was Jewish . . . I knew she was Jewish but as a small child I didn’t understand that this affected me. So much for being aware of your surroundings as a teenager,” Techel commented.

One day, as Techel left for school, his father gave him a letter for his teacher explaining their situation in case his son needed assistance. He gave strict directions that his son should not read it, and Techel obeyed. His father trusted the teacher with this delicate information. Many Mischlinge experienced problems in school because, as historian James Tent wrote, “A pattern of social exclusion for Mischlinge was emerging all over Germany as National Socialism permeated the educational system.”¹⁴

Techel remembered strange things happening in his home during this time, which, as a young person, he was unable to understand. For example, his father was prohibited from displaying the Nazi flag outside their window, as the neighbors did, because a Jew lived there. Techel’s father, a war veteran, found this shameful. Despite such problems and the departure of Jewish relatives from Germany, Techel’s family stayed. They did not think life would turn dangerous, especially since Admiral Erich Raeder had offered his help to Arnold.

In school, Techel enjoyed studying the “Aryan” racial theories. Since he was blond and blue-eyed, his teachers often told him that he came from the Aryan “master race.” “Little did those people know that my mother was a Jew. That would’ve shocked them,” Techel said with a laugh.

During his boyhood, Techel participated in a Protestant youth group that sponsored camping trips, cookouts, and tours of Europe. The group also conducted Bible studies and community projects. Techel loved his comrades and admired his youth minister, Helmut Siegelerschmidt, who also happened to be half-Jewish.

In 1936, the Nazis disbanded the group and transferred its Aryan members to the Hitler Youth. As a half-Jew, Techel was not allowed to join. Only then did he learn of his Jewish ancestry, and he felt dismayed to belong to an unpopular minority. But the thought that Jesus, “the son of God,” was a Jew gave him strength.

Yet, he still felt like an outcast. “It was strange to be in school on days when all Hitler Youth members were required to wear their uniform. It was obvious that those who didn’t were Mischlinge,” Techel said. After the Nazis disbanded his youth group, Techel joined the Confessional Church under Martin Niemöller, the famous theologian and World War I U-boat captain.

Though everyone knew he was a half-Jew, most of Techel’s schoolmates treated him well. However, a bully in his class often harassed him, and one day, when the “punk” pushed him too far, Techel lost his self-control and beat him into a “bloody pulp.” “Afterwards,” Techel said, “the bully never bothered me again. I’m glad I beat him up. Other than this guy, I didn’t have any problems. My other classmates treated me well and I even had a few girlfriends.”

But he felt nervous about having girlfriends, fearing the Nazis would punish him for committing Rassenschande. In those times, he wished his mother was not Jewish.

Techel finished high school in 1939 and entered the National Labor Service in preparation for the Wehrmacht. Ironically, the Nazis had kicked Techel’s father out of the navy because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife. His mother felt guilty at having brought this misfortune upon her family. She considered divorce—a step taken by Helmut Krüger’s mother, who believed it would improve her family’s situation, as discussed earlier. However, Arnold refused to separate from his wife, whom he loved deeply.

Techel’s extended family was suffering. The Gestapo had arrested and then beaten up his aunt Johanna Pick, and one of his cousins, Johanna Sussmann (née Pottlitzer), committed suicide because of Nazi persecution. Her children Irma and Ruth emigrated. Irma traveled to Shanghai, and Ruth to London. He never heard from them again.

After Techel finished his National Labor Service in 1940, he entered the paratroopers, the elite branch of the Luftwaffe, right at a time when half-Jews were banned from military service. “They were a crazy group, these paratroopers,” Techel said, “and I was proud to be a member.” He trained as a field medic and felt excited by this job because it allowed him to help others. Soon after Techel’s enlistment, his brother Hanns-Dieter was drafted.

Techel’s first action took place on the island of Crete in the middle of the Mediterranean in May 1941. Now an Unteroffizier (corporal), he took care of the medical needs of his company. When he and his comrades got the news they were headed for combat, they felt excited. He wrote in his diary, “It’s finally here. The time that we’ve waited for so long. The deployment! The ‘jump’ against the enemy!”

Göring attacked Crete, hoping to regain some of the prestige the Luftwaffe had lost for failing to win the Battle of Britain. Hitler approved the attack and gave the operation the code name Mercury. In total, 600 Junkers-Ju52 planes carried thousands of paratroopers and hauled 80 gliders full of light tanks and personnel. An additional 280 bombers, 150 Stuka dive bombers, and 200 fighters flew air cover and provided ground support. Altogether 22,000 men invaded the island, one of whom was Techel.¹⁵

As they flew to the drop zone on 20 May, Techel looked at the godforsaken brown rock they were about to assault surrounded by a dark blue ocean. As he jumped with the others, Techel yelled “attack” and then waited for his chute to fill with air.

On the way down, he saw the flashes of gunfire and heard the whiz of enemy bullets fly by his head. He saw men shot in the air and watched their bodies go limp with death. He hoped to hit the ground alive and prayed to God. “Later I found out that the British had been reading our radio messages and knew our drop locations. It was a turkey shoot,” Techel said.

When Techel and his comrades landed, they discovered they had missed their target area by several miles. Also, since German paratroopers dropped weapon canisters separately, they had to first scramble around to locate their rifles and machine guns. Unfortunately, the canisters had drifted off course a mile away from their drop zone.

While gathering their weapons, Australian troops attacked them. Only the officers and NCOs with their pistols returned fire. Techel shot back with his sidearm, but “pistols are no match for machine guns they used against us,” he explained.

Techel and his comrades set up a defensive perimeter and fought for hours, taking heavy casualties. As Techel tended the wounded, the explosion of an artillery shell lifted him off the ground. As he regained his bearings, he felt the warm ooze of what he thought was blood on his neck. He put his hand to his neck and then brought it before his face. Grayish white gunk stuck to his fingers, and he recognized it as brain matter. Over to his left lay a fellow soldier with eyes wide open. Shrapnel had taken off the top of his skull as cleanly as if a large can opener had done it. His brains lay everywhere, especially all over Techel. He pulled himself together and continued to help the wounded.

The German casualties were appalling. One company of the Third Battalion, First Assault Regiment, lost 112 out of 126 men. By the end of the first day, 400 of the original 600 men of this battalion were dead.¹⁶ Meanwhile, Techel stayed extremely busy saving the wounded. Besides worrying about the Allies, the Germans concerned themselves with the civilian population. Since many Germans did not have their weapons, the Cretans attacked them, “including women and children,” using flintlock rifles, axes, and spades.¹⁷ The fight for Crete was a bloody affair.

For twenty-four hours, Techel’s group fought a losing battle until a nearby company came to their rescue and defeated the Australians. After several days, the Germans took the island. For his brave actions, Techel received the Iron Cross Second Class, a rare award for a medic.

After Crete, Techel returned to Germany and his unit prepared for the attack on Russia. Germany’s invasion of Russia started in June 1941, and a few months later, Techel and his comrades flew to the outskirts of Leningrad near the great Ladoga Lake. During heavy fighting one day, Techel performed what would be his bravest act by pulling a man off the battlefield and saving him from certain death. Wounded in the process, Techel received the Wound Badge.

When asked if any comrade knew about his ancestry, he said none did. He added, “Remember, I also didn’t wear it on my sleeve. I was a German with Germans. I didn’t find it strange to serve as a half-Jew in the Luftwaffe. I was raised as a patriotic German. I felt like the others. My unit became my home and in order to keep it that way, I knew that I couldn’t discuss my ancestry.”

In spring of 1942, the military granted Techel leave to study medicine in Germany. While he was attending medical school, the Luftwaffe informed him in October of his dismissal from the Wehrmacht because he had reported his ancestry incorrectly. He was not disappointed, because he had seen too much suffering and was tired of war.

Yet Techel felt mixed emotions about leaving, explaining, “It was a great camaraderie. I felt honored to be a paratrooper and serve Germany, but I hated the fact I had to serve Hitler to do so. When I was discharged I no longer had to struggle with this dilemma. My brother was dismissed later in 1943, and he also expressed relief at not having to serve that madman anymore.” Today, Techel feels his discharge saved his life. Most of his comrades died and the longer one served against the Soviets, the worse his odds for surviving became.

Techel was lucky that he was only discharged. Sometimes not revealing one’s ancestry got one into severe trouble. According to Holocaust survivor Moshe Mantelmacher, while he worked at Buna-Auschwitz in the work station there, three half-Jewish soldiers arrived who had recently fought on the Russian front. The Mischlinge told Mantelmacher that while serving on the front, the Nazis had discovered their lie and deported them.¹⁸

In 1943, after finishing two semesters at medical school, the authorities forced Techel to leave the university because of his racial background. Dr. Cropp in the Reich Ministry of the Interior wrote Minister of Education Bernhard Rust that he did not think Techel had a good character because he had lied about his ancestry to remain in the military. Rust agreed, and Techel was expelled.

After his expulsion from medical school, Techel worked in a laboratory in Berlin. Living as a civilian, he felt uncomfortable on the street, in the underground, and at work when people asked why he was not in uniform. He made up stories about war injuries for strangers, but could not lie to those with whom he worked, and it quickly became known on his jobsite why he could not serve. Many coworkers shunned him.

In 1943, he fell in love with Irmgard Wendlandt. Her father, Friedrich, wanted to stop the relationship. Although an anti-Nazi and deeply religious, Friedrich worried about the problems that Techel’s half-Jewish status could create for his daughter and asked Techel to leave her alone. This hurt Techel deeply, but luckily for him, Irmgard refused to break off with him. Soon thereafter, they became engaged.

As a half-Jew, Techel was ordered in November 1944 to perform forced labor for the Organization Todt—Action B. Such laborers were then called “OT-men” or “B-men.”¹⁹ “B-men” is based on Bewährungsmänner (men on probation, although Historian James Tent writes that the “B” actually stood for “bastards,” which meant “mixed race” in Nazi bureaucratic jargon).²⁰ About 700 other half-Jews, most of them young, were at Techel’s deportation center. After a few hours of waiting, the Nazis sent them to Spandau, a suburb of Berlin. Techel did not know why the Nazis had called up the half-Jews or where the authorities were sending them. He did not even know about Auschwitz until after the war and surprisingly did not fear for his life.

He quickly learned that half-Jews were being sent to OT camps throughout Europe. The Germans deported some to work on defensive works in the west, others to synthetic gas refineries in central Germany, and still others to work camps in France and Italy. This gave him an idea he thought would make his life easier.

He went to the OT office at the deportation center and talked to the OT secretary, Olga Pankraz (née Kornrumpft), who surprisingly was also a half-Jew. He told her that he was a medic and wondered if he could find a camp where he could use his skills. She was helpful and put his name on a different list and he, along with hundreds of other half-Jews, boarded a train headed for southern Tyrol for an OT camp in Italy. Before they left, they received normal train tickets—“such was Germany’s efficiency,” Techel said, shaking his head. At his camp, the inmates produced canned foods and built roads, and when needed, Techel tended the sick and injured. The OT commanders treated the inmates respectfully and made special brown uniforms for them since Mischlinge could not wear the standard gray OT uniform.

In this camp, he was allowed to write his loved ones and his fiancée, Irmgard. While he labored away in the camp, she was drafted to a flak unit. Confused about how to direct fire on Allied planes, Irmgard asked Techel for advice and he found himself in the strange position of writing to her how best to shoot down attacking bombers.

At war’s end in the spring of 1945, Techel woke up one day to find his guards gone and to hear the rumble of approaching Soviet tanks. Freedom was close at hand. When the Russians liberated his camp, he told them that the inmates were half-Jews. The Russian interpreter was skeptical, believing Hitler had murdered the half-Jews. It took several hours of explaining until the Soviets understood that most German half-Jews were still alive. Techel was lucky. Some half-Jews elsewhere were not so fortunate. When half-Jew Karl Helmut Kaiser tried to explain his situation to impatient Russian soldiers, they shot him in cold blood.²¹

Although Techel had served in Russia, he still did not know that Hitler had systematically murdered the Jews. The atrocities dumbfounded him, and he discovered after 1945 that at least eight relatives had disappeared in the east. He also learned that had Germany won the war, he himself would have also been executed.

Many half-Jews did not think their lives were in danger. Even after his deportation, Techel did not believe this marked the beginning of his own end.

When asked if he feels Jewish, Techel said he does not. He knows that by Jewish law, religious Jews consider him Jewish, but “this sounds like the Nazis to me, splitting up people between those who are accepted and those who are not. My Jewishness is just as important to me as it was for the musician Felix Mendelssohn—in other words, it’s not. I’m just a human being,” Techel said. He continued, “I also have a hard time saying that I’m partially Jewish. I think most half-Jews have a problem with admitting they have a Jewish parent. We are always scared of discrimination.”

After the war, Techel married Irmgard, had children, studied theology, and became a Protestant preacher. He enjoyed living his “life for God” and had no regrets. One month after my interview in 1997, he passed away.

Techel was deeply religious, an uncommon quality among the men documented in this research. Many had had some belief in God as boys, but as they experienced war and the Third Reich, they felt the absence of God. Men like Karl-Arnd Techel and Pinchas Hirschfeld are rare in that they were able to survive Hitler’s evil with their faith intact.

Techel was also a different kind of soldier because he served as a medic. This helped him in war since he spent his combat hours saving lives, not taking them. Although he provided healthcare to Hitler’s armies, he felt he was doing good among the host of bad options presented him.

Half-Jewish Schütze Hans Meissinger

Hans Meissinger approaches history and its lessons as he does everything else—scientifically. He was a NASA scientist and one of the world’s leading space engineers. His speech rarely shows emotion, but it is full of content. He comes across as a kindly “grandpa” type who has enjoyed his life and family. He often smiles and his good humor about life would never betray the pain and trauma he experienced under the Nazis. He survived Hitler and has learned that a positive attitude brings out the full richness of life. He said that his experience under the Third Reich was a nightmare and “the sooner you forget, the better.” But then he added that you can never truly forget but only repress something unpleasant in the past and that memory is always there.

Meissinger was born on 25 November 1918 in Villingen, a small town on the eastern side of the Black Forest at the source of the Danube River. His family had its roots in Hesse near Frankfurt am Main, and Meissinger considers himself a “Frankfurtonian.” His mother, Rosa (née Oppenheimer), was Jewish and his father, Karl August, was a gentile. He had three siblings: a brother, Ernst, born in 1910, and sisters Lilli, born in 1915, and Marlies, born in 1920.

Meissinger’s mother alienated her parents and her entire Orthodox Jewish family by marrying a Goy. She was rebellious and tired of living in a narrow-minded, strict Orthodox Jewish world and wanted to break free from it.

After World War I, when Meissinger was an infant, the family moved back to Frankfurt. Meissinger enjoyed school, excelled in his studies, and had a normal childhood until 1933, when Hitler came to power. In his spare time, Meissinger hiked or biked in the mountains with his siblings or friends. He also enjoyed exploring the ancient Roman ruins scattered around the Frankfurt region. Living conditions for Meissinger and his family grew steadily more difficult and threatening under the Nazis’ relentless persecution of non-Aryans. At that time over 600,000 Jews lived in Germany and, according to a number of sources, probably well over 1 million Mischlinge.²² Many German Jewish people emigrated during the 1930s, but not all escaped Nazism. Many perished during the Holocaust because they sought refuge relatively nearby in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland in the 1930s, countries that Germany later would conquer.

Because both Meissinger’s Orthodox Jewish grandparents, Seligmann and Fanny Oppenheimer, disapproved of their daughter Rosa’s marriage to Karl August, they had little or no contact with her and her children. However, Rosa’s two brothers and two sisters and their families maintained normal family relations and often helped her in times of need, especially after her husband left her and the family in 1930. Consequently, Meissinger became familiar with Jewish religious traditions. Some of his relatives, primarily his uncle Joseph Oppenheimer, often invited him to observe Shabbat (Sabbath) and share meals marking religious holidays.

At the time of Meissinger’s parents’ marriage in 1909, his paternal grandparents had already died. Had they been alive, they would have strongly opposed the union. Most of his father’s relatives objected to the marriage, including the majority of his twelve siblings, and some tried to deter him. They did not think it wise to marry a person of such “tainted” ancestry.

By 1930 the marriage of Karl August and Rosa Meissinger was on the rocks. Karl August became unfaithful and left Rosa in 1930 to live with another woman, who soon bore him a son. Meissinger’s father wanted a divorce, but his mother refused it since she and their four children depended on his financial support. In 1934, the Nazis dismissed Karl August from the school where he taught not only because of his Jewish wife, but also because he had written articles against Hitler. In 1935, after the enactment of the race laws, it was easy for a non-Jewish German to get a divorce from a Jew and Meissinger’s father finally succeeded. The Nazi court understood that he did not want to remain married to what it termed a “racially inferior person.”

Although Meissinger’s father got rid of his Jewish wife, he still had problems since the authorities had marked him as an anti-Nazi and, thus, barred him from teaching high school. Remaining unemployed, he was able to support himself by writing historical novels that were widely published in Germany.

After 1933, Meissinger’s high school years in Frankfurt’s prestigious Lessing Gymnasium were adversely affected by his racial status. Nonetheless, only a few of his teachers and classmates treated him poorly. Yet while his friendship with some Aryan classmates remained intact, he associated more with the Jewish and half-Jewish children in class. The Jewish ones ultimately left the school, lucky to emigrate in the mid-1930s. He quickly learned which classmates were half-Jewish, and when asked how, he said, “I don’t know anymore. I just knew.” Of a class of twenty-five students, he recalls only about five being Nazis. Nevertheless, he suffered discrimination. One day during band practice, the teacher ordered Meissinger out because he was a half-Jew. Also, because of his ancestry, the school did not allow him to compete in athletic events. This depressed him because while the teachers recognized everybody else for their physical feats, he had to stand on the sidelines. The school also excluded Meissinger from field trips, though some of his teachers protested this. In those years, every day, his family felt oppressed, and “it was sad,” he said, “to see the circle of ‘friends’ shrink.”

Starting in 1935, when the Nazis issued the Nuremberg Laws, Meissinger had to refer to himself as a “half-Jew” or “non-Aryan” in official documents. These laws made “things worse than one thought possible.” Meissinger said that at this point, Germany ceased being a nation of law and decency.

In 1937, Meissinger graduated from high school at the top of his class, with honors. He feels grateful to the principal, who had to fight teachers to let this happen. As was the case for Karl-Arnd Techel’s brother, Hanns-Dieter, some half-Jews were not allowed to finish their secondary education.

Meissinger then entered the National Labor Service to complete his mandatory seven months of duty before beginning academic studies at the Technical University of Berlin, the only university that would take him regardless of his background. Later, when at the university, one of his professors, Dr. Kucharski, wrote Meissinger a recommendation in case he emigrated and continued his studies abroad. When Kucharski handed him the recommendation, he asked, “Do you think you can get out of this prison?” Meissinger told him that he indeed hoped to do so, but unfortunately, his efforts to leave failed.

Meissinger and his family unsuccessfully tried to emigrate in 1938 and 1939, but few people in the foreign consulates wanted to help and the family simply did not have the necessary funds. The U.S. Consulate in Berlin even told Meissinger that his family was not sufficiently threatened to warrant immigration visas. Of course, after the war started in 1939, all chances to escape disappeared.

During these years, Meissinger hesitated to date Aryan girls because the laws prohibited such relationships. So he dated half-Jewish girls. “There were ways to find each other,” he said. A half-Jewish subculture in Berlin did exist. They jokingly called themselves Mampes, after the popular cocktail Mampe Halb & Halb (Mampe Half-and-Half), based on a half-sweet, half-bitter brandy made by the Berlin beverage company Mampe.

Meissinger lived in a part of town where the Nazis destroyed stores and synagogues and arrested and murdered Jews during the pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht, 9–10 November 1938. His family, living in apartments belonging to Jewish landlords, was gripped by the horror of that night. “I felt unwelcome in my own country,” Meissinger said.

After three academic semesters, the army drafted Meissinger in 1939. One week before World War II broke out on 25 August 1939, he started his basic training at the Küstrin infantry base, 50 miles east of Berlin. Meissinger felt ill at ease in “Hitler’s army,” but believed it might help him regain a more normal life as a citizen. Having suffered under the discrimination, he hoped the army would help him regain his self-respect. “I made my peace with being drafted,” Meissinger said, “and after all, it was the law, and I had no other choice than to serve.” Meanwhile, his older brother, Ernst, barred from teaching at a public school, had taught for five years at some Jewish high schools, first in Frankfurt and later in Berlin. He recalls part of a long conversation with Ernst, who came to visit him at the base soon after war started.

“Is there any way of getting out of serving?” Ernst asked.

“No,” Meissinger answered, “though we’re half-Jews, we have to serve. They’ll kill us if we refuse. And what about Mom?”

“Yes, you’re right about Mom. This may help her. I guess I’ll have to serve just like you,” Ernst replied.

This was the next to last time Meissinger saw his brother before Ernst was killed in action during the 1940 French campaign.

Meissinger and his brother did not find serving strange since they came from a family with a military tradition. Their father had served as an officer in World War I and was decorated with the Iron Cross. Their grandfather, Friedrich Meissinger, had volunteered in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 as a seventeen-year-old and became a decorated sergeant at the battles of Metz, Gravelotte, and Noisseville. Two of their Jewish uncles, brothers of their mother, also served with distinction in World War I.

When Meissinger and his brother left for the army, their mother cried. Rosa did not want her sons to go to war but knew they had to. She hoped that the army would dismiss Meissinger from service for a lung ailment he had contracted as a child. But a special medical examination of his condition did not change his status.

After boot camp, Meissinger became accustomed to soldiering and started to feel like a “normal German.” During this time, Germany defeated Poland and his fellow soldiers celebrated the victory. But after Poland, Meissinger thought that the Wehrmacht’s success actually increased the threat to his family. More power gained by Hitler meant more persecution for them. However, his insecurity did not interfere with his sense of duty.

Meissinger became a good marksman and tried to excel at whatever he did. He found that being a soldier “gave me a sense of not being an ‘outcast,’ which is what I’d experienced in civilian life.” In early 1940, after the army transferred his infantry regiment to the western front near Trier, he started working as a scout and messenger. He reconnoitered and drew up maps of the surrounding region. His engineering background aided him greatly in this assignment. As a messenger, he kept the line of communication open between his company and battalion headquarters. Field telephones were not as widely available as one might have expected.

In April 1940, several weeks before the French campaign, Meissinger’s company commander ordered half-Jews to report to headquarters. Their personnel files were pulled and the company sergeant questioned the men about their ancestry and noted their answers. The sergeant informed them that a change of regulations required their dismissal, although they were not immediately sent home. Meissinger volunteered the information about his Jewish mother; he simply felt he had no other choice.

Soon thereafter, in May 1940, Meissinger’s company, part of the 230th Infantry Regiment, started to invade France. Along with other units, they attacked through Luxembourg and Belgium to bypass the Maginot Line, the principal fortification the French had built against invasions. When Meissinger’s unit entered Belgium and then France, they did encounter considerable resistance and took some casualties through artillery and machine-gun fire. In his company of 120, they had around 10 casualties. Meissinger’s company participated in the battles for Sedan, Verdun, and Toul.

On 11 June 1940, a shell blast almost killed Meissinger while he was digging a trench. Fortunately, the soil he had dug up shielded him from the shrapnel. “I was lucky to be alive,” he said. “I could’ve just as easily stood above the trench and been torn to bits.” The way Meissinger described his luck could have come from Erich Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, in which one of the soldiers says, “It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.”²³

Meissinger’s brother, Ernst, was not so fortunate, and chance was not on his side. On the same day that Meissinger experienced the shell blast, near the city of Rheims, about 50 miles north of Meissinger’s unit, the French killed Ernst while he was crossing the Aisne River at Bouilly. The day before he died he wrote Meissinger, “If I have one more day like today, I won’t make it.” That was the last Meissinger ever heard from him. The loss of one’s brother is devastating by itself, but “the fact that he had to die for Hitler was horrible for me and my family. I was shocked, embittered, and saddened beyond words,” Meissinger said.

Ernst knew of the impending dismissal of half-Jews at the time of his death, but he never told his commanding officers about his background. His superior, Lieutenant Rudolf Herzog, wrote Meissinger’s mother a kind letter of condolence describing how her son had died in battle. He stated how much his comrades and superiors liked Ernst. Hans Metzger, one of Ernst’s comrades and friends, also wrote the family after Ernst’s death, saying he had been standing nearby when the enemy shot Ernst through the head and that Ernst “died not only for Germany, but for all of you.” His comrades buried Ernst in a graveyard in France.

A few months later, Meissinger and the other half-Jews in his company were sent home. Before Meissinger’s commander dismissed him, he asked if he wanted to remain in the unit since he was a good soldier, but Meissinger declined, explaining he wanted to follow the law. He also wanted to return home to help his mother, who had already lost one son in the war and lived alone. The officer agreed with Meissinger’s decision.

Actually, Meissinger did not want to serve anymore, but he could not then put it in those words. He claims that “being a soldier in the army of the Third Reich naturally gave me a bad feeling. The conflicting emotions are hard to reconstruct today. Of course, I had some confidence that doing what other Germans had to do provided some protection for my mother from the ever-present threat facing her. After I was dismissed from the army, that shield was gone.” At regimental headquarters in Brandenburg, Meissinger was officially dismissed. “I was handed my papers and declared wehrunwürdig [unworthy of service] and a civilian.” Meissinger thought being declared wehrunwürdig was absurd in view of his combat record. Ironically, some comrades told him “they wished that they were in the same spot! They didn’t want to stay in the army.”

After Meissinger’s dismissal, he and his mother heard from a comrade of Ernst who wanted to pay his respects to the family. This “friend,” Sergeant Plorin, met them at a café in Berlin. Plorin praised Ernst for his camaraderie and described how he had bravely died in battle. During the conversation Frau Meissinger told Plorin the particular agony she felt at having lost her son in “Hitler’s army” because she was Jewish. Plorin had not known this about Ernst. Shocked, he cursed the Jews as the cause of all the ills that had befallen Germany. Frau Meissinger tried to contradict this by describing her two brothers, Rudolf and Leopold Oppenheimer, who had served honorably in World War I. In hindsight, Meissinger wished he had “said to that monster, ‘For heaven’s sake, have you no shame?’” but instead he grabbed his mother and quickly left “the scene of that terrible encounter.” Frau Meissinger broke down and cried.

Later, Plorin’s wife called Frau Meissinger to add her own insults and threatened her, saying she would soon be deported. With each passing day any illusion that “half-Jews” may have had before April 1940 that their military service would help them was slowly extinguished by ever-increasing anti-Jewish measures.

Soon after his discharge, Meissinger applied for federal financial assistance for his college studies. A civil servant replied that as a “non-German,” Meissinger was disqualified from federal aid. Enraged, Meis sin ger wrote back that since he had served in the military and since his brother had died for Germany, his family had indeed proven they were German. He received no reply.

Nonetheless, Meissinger managed to resume his studies in Berlin, received his engineering degree in 1942 and, with the help of Professor Karl Klotter, found work as an aeronautical engineer at the aviation research institute in Berlin. There he did research on the guidance and control of aircraft and air-to-ground missiles until war’s end. He later learned that this institution also had allowed other half-Jews to work there and that his supervisors took repeated steps to protect him from the Nazis. After the end of the war, he sent letters of gratitude to these people for their protection.

Meissinger’s sisters, and particularly the younger one, Marlies, had to endure more persecution than he since the Nazis had prevented the women from entering the university and restricted the type of work they could do. To escape threatening Gestapo action, both girls, together with their mother, fled from Berlin in early 1945, escaping to southern Germany.

Meissinger’s father, who had largely neglected the family by having his ex-wife and their four children fend for themselves, was greatly shocked by Ernst’s death. After 1940, he showed more interest in his ex-wife’s survival and protected her by finding places in Munich and Stuttgart to hide her during a period of threatened deportation in 1943 and 1944. Fortunately, Meissinger’s mother survived the Nazis.

His father also stood up to family members who were against her. One of his brothers even threatened her with deportation. That brother, Hermann Meissinger, a passionate Nazi, hated that his brother had married a Jew and prevented any contact between his “Aryan” family and “those Jewish people.” He expressed his horrendous anti-Semitic hatred in a comment he made after he learned of Ernst’s death. When asked to offer his condolence to the family, he just said, “If they want my condolence, they can come and pick it up here.” Meissinger’s father never forgave his brother. Meissinger gratefully remembers his father’s hospitality in allowing him to stay with his new family when Meissinger was stranded in Munich on a trip at the end of the war. His father was learning to be more tolerant and kinder.

Questioned about the Holocaust, Meissinger said he did not know the Nazis systematically murdered the Jews. After the war, he found out that one of his aunts, Bertha Elias, had been sent to a camp in the east and died there. Her husband, Markus Elias, had left her behind in Germany when he emigrated to the United States and eventually became a rabbi in Chicago. Meissinger said, “I hope he made his peace with his cowardly act of abandoning his wife to the Nazis.” Meissinger’s other aunt and uncle, Joseph and Josephine Oppenheimer, and their daughter Fanny were taken from Holland, where they had emigrated before World War II, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Fanny and her baby died there, but her parents luckily made it to Palestine in exchange for the release of German prisoners by the British. Their son, Erich, also survived the war, having lived in hiding in Amsterdam with the help of courageous Dutch people.

When talking further about the “Final Solution,” Meissinger said, “Neither Hannah [his wife, who was also half-Jewish] nor I knew much about the Holocaust during the war, nor did any of our friends, but we had terrible fears for the Jewish relatives who were deported. We didn’t even hear of Auschwitz! No one could imagine the monstrous genocide that was under way . . . poor ignorant sheep that we were.” They could not fathom that “Germany could do a thing like that.” However, Meissinger heard a rumor in early 1940 that the Nazis had gassed Polish Jewish prisoners in buses. But he did not fully comprehend what he heard. Only after the war did he and Hannah learn about the Holocaust. He lost four relatives and Hannah two in Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.

Meissinger’s statements about the Holocaust reiterate what many in this study have said. Both their actions and their testimonies show that most half-Jews truly did not know what was going on. As in Meissinger’s case, he did not know what happened to his deported relatives, and not surprisingly, he did not know what was going to happen to him.

Not only did most Mischlinge like Meissinger not know about the systematic extermination, but also a large majority of Jews did not understand what was happening. Historian Jonathan Steinberg wrote, “Holocaust records show that Jews themselves often refused to believe what was happening in spite of the evidence of their own eyes.”²⁴ Historian Marion Kaplan also wrote: “But a far more effective barrier to their comprehension was the sheer inconceivability of the genocide. Even those who received information frequently reacted with disbelief or repressed it.”²⁵ So Meissinger was not alone in his ignorance.

When asked if he felt Jewish, Meissinger said he had never felt that way but that he did understand some things about the Jewish faith. Although his mother had broken away from her Orthodox roots, she did not convert to the Lutheran faith of her husband. “She retained many Jewish ideas,” Meissinger said, “and often prayed Hebrew prayers with us children.” At that point in the interview, Meissinger started to quote the familiar blessing “May the Lord bless you and keep you” in its original Hebrew version. He knew that according to Halakah, because his mother was Jewish, he is considered Jewish, but Halakah means nothing to him.

Meissinger, his mother, and his two sisters emigrated to the United States in 1947. The expertise gained in his job in Germany involving the performance and control of aircraft and missiles helped him find a job in New York. In 1949, he and Hannah, who had been one of his sister’s schoolmates, married and in 1955 they moved to Los Angeles, where Meissinger worked on aircraft and spacecraft programs sponsored by the air force and NASA. Hughes Aircraft employed him first, and then TRW Space and Electronics, where he worked for almost thirty years. Meissinger became a successful aeronautical and astronautical engineer and worked in this field as a research scientist and project manager. He published more than fifty technical papers in the United States and abroad, as well as chapters in several textbooks on computers, aeronautics, and astronautics. He is widely known for his contributions and holds five U.S. patents in the fields of computer and spacecraft design.

The story of Meissinger’s family is full of tragic events common to many families of mixed descent. That Meissinger’s Jewish grandparents rejected his parents’ marriage is not unusual. Countless people in this research have talked about the painful acts of rejection their parents, most often their Jewish parent, experienced from their family. As mentioned in chapter 1, Helmuth Kopp’s horrible experience with his Jewish grandparents made him hate them for their prejudice and cruelty. Unfortunately, Meissinger was not unique.

Yet the rejection could work both ways, as in Meissinger’s family. Unfortunately, Meissinger was not alone. We see this also in the despicable behavior of the fathers of Klaus-Peter Scholz and Karl-Heinz and Günther Scheffler and in Helmut Krüger’s uncle. The anti-Semitism that Herr Scholz and Herr Scheffler in particular showed their ex-wives and sons illustrates the painful situations that interracial families often experienced in the Third Reich. Meissinger’s father, to his credit, helped save his Jewish ex-wife. Sadly, it took the death of his son Ernst to awaken in him the moral integrity necessary to save lives. The Meissinger family’s experience with assimilation was typical for the families of many of the men documented in this book. The men themselves were caught in the middle in more ways than one.

Meissinger felt lucky to have survived and still mourned his brother’s death. He believed war is wasteful and in most cases unnecessary. This aspect of war is often overlooked. “The unquantifiable cost” of war “is in emotional suffering, by which the pain of one death is often multiplied many times, through the network of family relationships, and in long-term, indeed lifelong, deprivation.” Emotional loss can never be made good.²⁶ Due to such pain, Meissinger questioned why humans go to war at all. He wished people would see how horrible hatred and killing are, but he did not have much hope for humanity. His experience taught him how much harm happens when humans fail to see the beautiful bridges that connect us and instead focus on the tiny little streams of ideology, religion, and culture that divide us. As the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote:

We must be friends!—Disdain my folk, as much
As ever you will. For neither one has chosen
His folk. Are we our folk? What is a folk?

Are Jew and Christian sooner Jew and Christian
Than man? How good, if I have found in you
One more who is content to bear the name

Of man!²⁷

Meissinger echoes Lessing’s sentiment that we are all Mischlinge in one form or fashion.

Half-Jewish Gefreiter Friedrich Wilhelm Schlesinger

Friedrich Wilhelm Schlesinger is a physical wonder. In his eighties at the time of our interview, he still enjoyed mountain climbing and snow skiing. Only his deeply wrinkled face with its weathered skin indicated his age. Otherwise, his energy and activities created the illusion that he is a middle-aged man. Dressed as a refined gentleman, he wore a silk scarf with his starched white dress shirt. He prided himself on his family’s business success and plainly enjoyed life’s material pleasures.

Schlesinger, born on 27 July 1915 in Werdohl, Germany, was raised as a Christian, as was his Jewish father, Paul, and his gentile mother, Luise (née Stromberg). Luise came from a prominent family of Lutheran preachers and lived a deeply religious life. One of her grandfathers was the distinguished Protestant Erckenschweig minister for South Westphalia, Germany.

Schlesinger’s father’s family was wealthy and owned several businesses. His grandfather, Adolf Schlesinger, a successful entrepreneur, had lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and London. He owned hotels, restaurants, mines, and factories in Europe and America. Although born Jewish, he and his wife had converted to Christianity early in life and raised their seven children as Christians.

Schlesinger grew up in a mansion and enjoyed an excellent education. As a child, he did not know about his background. “My Jewish past,” Schlesinger said, “was pushed away. We never talked about it.” The way Schlesinger found out about this past shocked him.

After Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, the SA absorbed the ultra-nationalistic Stahlhelm youth group, to which Schlesinger belonged. As a proud member of the Stahlhelm, Schlesinger had participated in street fights with Communists. During the ceremony to mark the SA’s takeover of his Stahlhelm unit, someone stepped forward and shouted that they could not accept “that Jew Schlesinger.” “I was stunned,” Schlesinger said. “I couldn’t believe they were talking about me because I had not ever thought of myself as being Jewish.” He left the meeting humiliated. He immediately called his father, who sent a car for him.

When home, he discussed with his family their ancestry and what to do about it. They asked whether anyone knew any Nazi Party “big shots.” No one did. Next, they discussed problems Schlesinger would face in school and thought about moving him to another high school. “I worried about my future,” he said. And sure enough, a few classmates mistreated him, and many teachers told him he was unwelcome. Often he felt the poor grades he suddenly started to receive were due to his racial background. A few classmates and even some teachers seemed to watch for him to fail. As a result, he lost his self-confidence.

His mother’s brothers, Hermann and Franz Stromberg, as SS members, promised to protect him. They remained close to the family throughout the war and helped Schlesinger and his father where they could.

After finishing his Abitur in 1936, Schlesinger started working in the family business in Cologne. For the next few years, he had few problems.

Several universities rejected Schlesinger because of his Jewish past, but Karlsruhe University accepted his application to study mechanical engineering in 1937, probably due to the connections the family had at the college. However, the persecution of his family increased.

Schlesinger’s Jewish uncle, Wilhelm Schlesinger, ran a manufacturing plant until the Nazis removed him in 1938. During that year, Schlesinger’s uncle and father lost a lot of their clients. One man told his father, “We’re really sorry that we cannot do business with you any longer because of your situation. I regret that we must take our business elsewhere.” Shortly before Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, his family had to sell their home because the local authorities were making their lives miserable. On 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Schlesin ger and his family believed the war would quickly end, reuniting East Prussia with the mainland. They did not believe it would continue for five years.

On 6 September 1939, Schlesinger started his service in horse-drawn Artillery Regiment 213 at the Priesterwald barracks in Heilbronn. He had a difficult time because he had to clean out stalls for the horses “and shovel their shit day and night.” Since he loved mechanical engineering, he desired to serve in a Panzer unit. So he felt upset to serve in a horse unit. After a few weeks, though, he started to like his regiment and believed he was part of an elite unit. He assumed no one there knew about his Jewish background and he did everything he could to bury it.

Schlesinger’s parents also felt relief. They told him, “Since you can now become a soldier nothing worse can happen to our family,” but they were mistaken.

After boot camp, the army sent Schlesinger’s company to the Ruhr region in northern Germany. While stationed there, his depressed father came to visit him. “It was a strange situation to have your Jewish father visit you while you served in an army loyal to Hitler. Back then, I hoped my service would help protect him,” Schlesinger said.

At the beginning of 1940, the Wehrmacht transferred his battery to Lower Silesia at Kotzenau (now the Polish town Chocianow) near Lubin, where it continued training. In that town, he dated a young woman and told her his situation. She did not care.

During this time Schlesinger’s father became sick. While on leave in the spring of 1940, Schlesinger visited his father in the Jewish hospital in Cologne where he had to stay. It gave him back his self-confidence to have his son, dressed in uniform, come and see him. He also hoped that his son’s service would force the Nazis to treat his son as a full German.

The conditions in the hospital were horrible. There was not much to eat and no medication for him. Schlesinger’s mother had to bring him his food from home. Schlesinger cried as he left his father at the hospital. That day would mark the last time he saw his father alive. A few months later, his father died there.

The army granted Schlesinger leave to attend his father’s funeral. After the burial, he had to take the death certificate to the courthouse. When an official, seeing that his father had died in a Jewish hospital, asked, “Is your father Jewish?” Schlesinger answered yes. Visibly dumbfounded, the official nervously filled out the paperwork.

In the summer of 1940, Schlesinger’s unit traveled to Lublin in eastern Poland, a region the Nazis called the General Government. While there, he witnessed how the Nazis mistreated the Ostjuden (eastern Jews). He felt appalled to think that some of his ancestors may have looked like the “strange” Hasidic (Orthodox) Jews dressed in their traditional garments. Even children and old people wore the Star of David, and Schlesinger heard that the SS had deported young people from the Jewish sections of town. Schlesinger did not discover where the Nazis sent them. “We didn’t want to believe the rumors we heard,” Schlesinger said. “How could one believe that people were being sent away to be killed? This was impossible to think.”

In the winter of 1940–1941, his unit returned to the German state of Silesia. Schlesinger and his comrades drank, chased women, and enjoyed life when not training. Then, in March 1941, they moved to East Prussia. There, they repeatedly practiced moving their horse-drawn cannons over difficult terrain, setting them up, and placing ordnance on a prescribed target.

One night in June 1941, Schlesinger stood watch at the radio hut. Suddenly he heard Hitler announcing war against the Jewish-Bolshevistic enemy. Soon the roar of hundreds of planes and the screams of diving Stuka sirens pierced the morning air as they rained bombs on enemy positions. It was 22 June 1941 and the invasion of Russia had begun.

The next day after the attack, Schlesinger’s unit followed on the infantry’s heels through Lithuania into heavy forestlands. Attached to the 403rd Security Division, his regiment moved deep into Russia, witnessing the destruction done by the advance units: dead enemy soldiers, burned-out tanks, mangled civilians, and killed horses lay along the roads. The smell of death filled the air. During those early summer months the German army labored away in the heat to conquer Russia. The dust kicked up on the dirt roads got into everything, and the metal helmets of the men were magnets for the sun’s heat. The uniforms of most showed streaks of salt from heavy sweating. War had become a hot and dirty business.

One day, Schlesinger noticed Germans loading hundreds of Jews onto a freight train. He and his comrades thought they were traveling to forced labor camps. They did not know about Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads), and death camps were unimaginable. “I didn’t know what I could do—should I try to help? Where should I go if I tried to escape? It was a strange situation to be in and I hated being half-Jewish. However, I don’t know what would have been better—to have been totally Aryan and oblivious to the danger or totally Jewish and go to the camps. Today, we know that had I been a Jew I would not be here anymore,” Schlesinger said. Though he had a chance to ask what was going to happen to those Jews, he kept his mouth shut. “I didn’t want to know,” Schlesinger said, “and I feared what they might suspect if I showed interest.”

By September, Schlesinger and his unit reached Vilna, the ancient capital of Lithuania. Many wrongly think that the Wehrmacht was all mechanized, but 625,000 horses joined the 3.5 million soldiers invading Russia.²⁸ Their advance continued at a furious pace until heavy fall rains slowed them to a few miles a day.

His commander wanted to promote Schlesinger to corporal since he had performed well. However, Schlesinger remained at his current rank since his commander did not want to risk losing him by having to disclose his racial background. Schlesinger had become his battery’s forward observer, a dangerous duty that required him to move with the infantry and radio-target locations. The life expectancy of forward observers was short, usually only a few weeks. Sometimes, he had to run across open fields to his observation position under hostile fire. “The first time I knew they were really firing at me, I became scared. However, in war, you start to get used to the most absurd situations,” Schlesinger said.

With falling snow, the situation started to turn worse for Schlesinger and his comrades. They had entered Russia in their summer uniforms because Hitler had expected the war to last only a few weeks. However, he had miscalculated once again and thousands of soldiers froze to death in Russia’s heartland. That winter turned out to be one of the coldest on record. General Guderian noted that temperatures fell to –63 degrees Fahrenheit and “it was death to squat in the open and many men died while performing their natural functions as a result of a congelation [freezing] of the anus.”²⁹

“And the cold wasn’t the only thing that was bad,” Schlesinger said. “We were also not camouflaged for this environment. Running around in the snow in gray uniforms provided easy targets for snipers, and they were everywhere. We had to cover ourselves with stolen bedsheets from homes to prevent the Russians from seeing us.” Schlesinger said that those who were not careful would get their brains blown out.

Still, they continued to move gradually forward and by late November, Schlesinger’s regiment was attached to the 255th Infantry Division near Smolensk. His unit made its way slowly to the south of Moscow. In December, they took up positions at Sukhinichi, and by Christmas, after the Soviet counteroffensive, they, along with two divisions, found themselves encircled. The Germans now had to supply them by air.

After several weeks of constant attacks, a Panzer division freed them, and in the bitter cold they marched several miles back to the rear echelons. Often their cannons would not fire because traversing mechanisms (moving parts of the gun) had frozen. Throughout the day, temperatures sometimes dropped to –30 to –40 degrees Fahrenheit and at night, it could get even colder. Sometimes the cold would immobilize all weapons except grenades, and so the battle turned into one where it came down to those who could throw the most grenades quickly and accurately.³⁰

For the living, the harsh weather damaged exposed skin and men often urinated on their “numbed hands to warm them, and hopefully, to cauterize the gaping cracks in our fingers.”³¹ It was so cold, Schlesinger said, that urine would freeze before it hit the ground. And in order to use the restroom and not experience frostbite on this part of the body, men had to wrap their penises in thick cloth.³² Often people would wake up to find others, especially the wounded, frozen to death. The cold took such a toll on men’s nerves that many had nervous breakdowns. Some even committed suicide.³³ The elements often proved more difficult to deal with than the enemy.

In February 1942, while attached to the 216th Infantry Division, Schlesinger’s unit found itself retreating through a village under artillery fire. He remembers a shell slicing a horse literally in two and a separate blast knocking him to the ground and spraying his leg and arm with shrapnel. Deep red, his blood soaked into the snow. He yelled for help. When he reached an aid station, a medic cleaned his wounds and explained he would recover. However, after a few days, he came down with a fever and his leg wounds started to ooze pus. They operated on his leg and extracted a piece of his pants and some metal. The swelling soon went down and the fever disappeared.

Instead of staying in the hospital, Schlesinger insisted on returning to his comrades. Also, he had seen how the wounded were treated and felt he had a better chance of surviving with his battery than in a field hospital. When he arrived at his unit, the army had transferred it again to another division, this time the Eighteenth Panzer Division. One month later the unit moved yet again, to the 208th Infantry Division. “It was typical for a battery to be switched around a lot,” Schlesinger explained.

During one battle, he and his fellow soldiers spotted an approaching Russian tank. They immediately engaged it while coming under heavy fire. They hit the tank between the body and the cannon, sending the turret flying into the air. As the men rejoiced, they started to take fire from a nearby house. They tried to connect their cannon to an armored car to get the “hell out of that place,” but the snipers killed everyone except Schlesinger, who received only a shrapnel wound. He eventually connected the cannon to the Panzer by himself. “I don’t know why I was not hit. Bullets were flying everywhere. However, I got the cannon out of there. I mean, as an artillery man you’re not much worth to the infantry without your cannon,” Schlesinger said.

As the tank drove away, Schlesinger placed his helmet on the machine-gun turret only to have it shot off by snipers. He survived with a small grenade splinter in the temple that a nurse later removed at a first aid station.

For his bravery, Schlesinger’s superior awarded him the Iron Cross Second Class. One of his sergeants, however, protested on the ground that Schlesinger was a half-Jew. Nonetheless, Schlesinger’s officers felt he deserved the medal and he received it. After this experience, his ethnicity likely became a topic of discussion. One day, one of his comrades said, “You know, there’s something wrong with the Jews. But not you, Friedrich, you’re all right.”

By mid-1942, his unit participated in trench warfare at Shistra in northern Russia. At mail call, he received a letter from his mother, who wrote that she had not heard from his Jewish uncle Wilhelm since being sent to Theresienstadt. “I only found out after the war that the Nazis had sent him to Auschwitz from there. It sickened me to think that while I fought on the Russian front wearing the Iron Cross, my wonderful uncle was sent to the gas chambers in the east,” Schlesinger said. One time he shared the story of his uncle’s deportation with his commander, who expressed sympathy and could not believe the mistreatment.

During late 1942 and early 1943, Schlesinger’s unit fought bitterly with the partisans. They were everywhere. “It became a nasty war and we hated them,” he said. The partisans hurt the Germans a lot. Between August and November 1943, they blew up 200,000 rails, wrecked or derailed 1,014 trains with 814 locomotives, and destroyed or damaged 72 railway bridges.³⁴

Their hatred only increased the Germans’ anger toward the Russians. The Wehrmacht commander for Belorussia claimed that in reprisals for partisan activities, “10,431 prisoners [were shot] out of 10,940 taken in ‘battle with partisans’ in October [1942] alone, all at the price of two German dead.” This was just one of many “so-called ‘anti-partisan campaigns.’”³⁵ The war in Russia turned into one without rules where each side often sought eradication of the other by any means.

In March 1943, Schlesinger’s unit traveled away from enemy lines to a remote village to recuperate and receive new equipment. In his free time, Schlesinger read Heinrich Heine, the well-known German Jewish author. Although Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had burned Heine’s books, Schlesinger felt comfortable carrying around several of Heine’s works with him. His comrades, instead of discussing the progress of the war, now just wished it would soon end. They now liked to talk in their off hours about how many girls they “had laid.” “Few of us really faced what was happening. We just wanted to have fun and have peace like most young men do in any era,” Schlesinger said.

In June 1943, after the army stationed his battery at Minsk in Ukraine, Schlesinger’s superior told him he could not remain in the Wehrmacht because of his half-Jewish background. “I’d started to feel I was protected and had nothing to fear except Russian bullets. But when they explained I couldn’t be a soldier, I became scared. I think I was more scared than when I was in battle. I almost cried when I was told to leave,” Schlesinger said. His commander regretted the decision, but felt he could not go against the new regulations that banned half-Jews from the German service.

Schlesinger said his situation was strange. On the one hand, he felt pleased to finish his studies. On the other hand, he felt unprotected from Nazi attacks. His commander, Lieutenant Schlesremkämber, wrote Schlesinger a glowing letter of recommendation, dated 13 July 1943. Schlesremkämber stated that the “intelligent” and “brave” Gefreite Friedrich Schlesinger had received the Iron Cross and the Assault Badge and would have obtained the rank of “Unteroffizier long ago” had he not been half-Jewish. He also told Schlesinger that if he ever needed any help he should contact him.

Schlesinger returned to Karlsruhe, where he resumed his academic work with the support of the university’s rector (president) Weigel. He continued to worry about his family and his own life. However, Schlesinger said that during this period, he knew nothing about the systematic murder of the Jews. “I should’ve known about it because of my situation,” he said, “but even I didn’t know what Hitler was really doing to the Jews.”

He kept in touch with some of his Wehrmacht buddies, many of whom envied him. “It’s strange to think that they fought in the east, with few of them ultimately ever returning home after 1943, while I had a good life from 1943 to 1945 studying engineering and sleeping with lonely women.”

Having finished his studies and received his diploma at the beginning of 1944, Schlesinger started to work for I. G. Farben in Frankfurt. His boss knew about his background, but joked that he would protect him as his private “Jew.”

As a civilian, people often asked him why he was not on the front. Just like Karl-Arnd Techel, Schlesinger had difficulties explaining his situation. He often told them he was in the reserves.

At the beginning of 1945 the Gestapo ordered him to report for forced labor to the OT. Ignoring the order, Schlesinger moved among different cities, where girlfriends hid him.

At war’s end, Schlesinger welcomed the Americans in Frankfurt. He told the first soldier he met that he felt happy to see Germany free and Hitler dead. The soldier smiled and said, “Hey man, do you want a cigar?”

Schlesinger later encountered problems from the occupation forces because they did not realize that thousands of people of Jewish descent actually served in the Wehrmacht. One American officer challenged Schlesinger’s service because he could not believe Schlesinger could be a soldier when at the same time his uncle was in Theresienstadt. This American officer plus countless other Allied personnel wondered why men of Jewish descent served under Hitler when they and their families were being persecuted. Yet, in the end many Mischlinge succeeded in explaining their situations adequately enough to get the papers they needed to be released earlier from prison or to work or study. Schlesinger eventually convinced this American officer to leave him alone and he soon returned to a normal routine. In late 1945, he started a business career and in 1955 joined the U.S. company W. R. Grace as a manager in Hamburg for one of its plants, where he worked for decades.

When asked about his religious beliefs, Schlesinger replied that although raised a Christian, he had “religious doubts” and that after his experiences during the Third Reich he did not believe in God. “If there’s one,” he said, “he doesn’t care about us.”

Schlesinger’s experiences display the difficult situations of Mischling soldiers. On the one side, they felt good in the military and performed their duties well, but on the other side, they knew the Nazis persecuted and killed their families. And why, in the end, would God allow this?

Schlesinger echoes what many surviving Mischlinge feel about God. Several Mischlinge started out with strong faiths, but after having lost so many family members and seeing so much death in battle, most feel a strong aversion to religion and God. If God is just and merciful, they feel he must have been asleep during the war. Karl-Arnd Techel and Pinchas Hirschfeld, whose faith remained intact following the war, are exceptions to most of the men studied. The majority documented here have rejected religion and God. Schlesinger is typical in saying, “If God does exist, then He is a disgrace. He either chose not to prevent the Holocaust or he simply couldn’t because he can’t or because of the stupid rules He made for humanity not to intervene with free will. What a disgrace!”

Like Schlesinger, many Mischlinge express their disbelief in religion and God because a vast number of German Christians supported and even committed crimes against humanity. For example, the Protestant minister and leader as well as Nazi Party member Emmanuel Hirsch wrote of Hitler, “No other Volk in the world has a leading statesman such as ours, who takes Christianity so seriously.” Hirsch believed “Hitler was a heaven-sent Christian leader” and that Jews were a “destructive force.”³⁶

Military reports and periodicals of the Third Reich era expressed the belief that “Providence has sent Germany the Führer at the right hour” or that the Wehrmacht’s success was “redefined as a spiritual phenomenon, created by the Nazi party and directed by a God-sent Führer.” Wehrmacht propaganda portrayed “Hitler and the Nazi creed as God’s instruments charged with protecting German culture and blood, and communism as Satan’s servant, unleashed from hell to destroy civilization.”³⁷

Not only the Wehrmacht but many churches also praised Hitler. Bishop Hans Meiser prayed in 1937, “We thank you, Lord, for every success . . . you have so far granted [Hitler] for the good of our people.” Many churches extolled Hitler as the defender of Germany and, by extension, “Christianity from godless Bolshevism.” The Catholic dioceses had church bells “rung as a joyful salute on Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1939 with prayers for the Führer to be said at the following Sunday mass.” Some leading church scholars and leaders like Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emmanuel Hirsh supported Hitler and felt that God stood behind him.³⁸ The Catholic Church never excommunicated Mussolini ot Hitler, both Catholics. In fact, the Pope, Pius XII, actually supported both of them.

So when Mischlinge as well as other German Christians saw a large percentage of church leaders ignore Nazi persecution and apparently an indifferent God in the face of Hitler’s atrocities, they rejected Christianity and its “pathetic god.”

Many, like Helmuth Kopp, also believed that their religious Jewish relatives, with their intolerance and prejudice, were not much better. Religion, God, and their religious relatives and fellow citizens simply failed most of them in a miserable way. As historian Robert Ericksen argued, if rationalism, intellectual capacity, and religious belief failed to prevent distinguished religious leaders from supporting Hitler, then societies at large must be careful, especially those under the influence of fundamentalist religious groups, like the United States or Saudi Arabia, if they “desire the Hitler phenomenon not to recur.”³⁹

Schlesinger believed religion prevents the pursuit of tolerance and that this is one of the most important lessons to come out of the history of Nazism. He felt that since religion often causes divisions of hatred and frequently is resorted to by those in power only to push through their own agendas, it should be avoided. Furthermore, he held that if closely analyzed, all religious texts—including the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Koran—support intolerance and should be avoided. When asked to extrapolate on this thought, he said that the Jewish Bible promotes genocide, as shown in Joshua when the Israelites murder whole cities of women, men, and children, and that both the Christian Bible and the Koran promote the belief that if you are not with them, you must be with Satan and be evil. Hitler’s intolerance was no different, and he often invoked God’s name in justifying his actions. In fact, Schlesinger noted, each of the religions just mentioned has perpetrated crimes on humanity similar to Hitler’s.

In the end, what Schlesinger has expressed about religion is a common theme among many Mischlinge documented during the research for this book. The German Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, which should have been the most aggressive in defending the helpless and denouncing Hitler, failed miserably in this task and abandoned many Mischlinge like Schlesinger to suffer under the Nazis.

Conclusion

The men presented so far illustrate the emotional turmoil Mischlinge experienced throughout their early lives. Their families were divided on religious and ethnic grounds. Several Jewish families, like Kopp’s and Meissinger’s, did not approve of their children marrying gentiles. Likewise, gentile families like the Krügers, Meissingers, and Schefflers felt it disgraced the family to bring a Jew into the fold. Such intolerant, and one might add dysfunctional, families caused much pain and trauma.

The families’ lack of unity affected the Mischlinge most when they needed to depend on relatives during times of danger. Members of many families have problems getting along, especially those who become related by marriage, but the unique stress these families experienced added a complicated dimension of dissension that distressed them. And sadly, many men, like Karl-Heinz Scheffler, Krüger, Scholz, Techel, and Schlesinger, felt embarrassed to have a Jewish background and tried to prove they were smart, strong, and honest, traits they had been conditioned to believe were the antithesis of being Jewish. Although most knew that the anti-Semites’ theories were nonsense, they still wanted to prove they did not possess the negative traits the anti-Semites labeled as inherently “Jewish.” In the end, they did much to disassociate themselves from such a persecuted minority. In order to do so, they sometimes changed their name, as we will see in chapter 5 with the Mendelssohn family, or performed brave acts in battle, as did Krüger, Günther Scheffler, and Schlesinger.

Due to the pressure to conform, many Mischlinge—like Günther Scheffler, Meissinger, Krüger, and Schlesinger—developed a deep sense of responsibility for their parents and a strong sense of self-reliance. In other words, many felt that when they were in the National Labor Service, the Wehrmacht, or out in society in school or at work, they had to do their best to prove to others and themselves that they were worthy human beings and honorable citizens. Most dramatically, one sees that when these men served, they did all they could to protect their families. Whether going on dangerous missions like Krüger or visiting a sick father in the Jewish hospital in uniform like Schlesinger, these men felt they needed to guard their loved ones.

Yet, just as they were establishing themselves in the military, the Nazis discharged many in 1940 with a new decree that prohibited Mischlinge from serving. The majority, like Meissinger and Krüger, felt that once discharged, they lost protection for themselves and relatives. Then, toward the end of the war, when deported to OT camps, they started to finally realize that they would never be able to live normally in Germany. In the camps, they sensed that the walls of Nazi Germany were inexorably closing in on them.

Shockingly, until then and even after, most did not truly know of the Holocaust, as demonstrated by Krüger, Meissinger, Schlesinger, and others. Karl-Heinz Löwy, the one person interviewed who did claim knowledge of the Holocaust, ultimately did not take any action because he felt he could accomplish little else than to save himself. Most half-Jews interviewed for this study echo Löwy in that they felt that even had they truly been aware of the genocide, they would have done nothing differently. Ultimately, had Germany prolonged the war or won it, the Nazis would have murdered half-Jews as well. This is what is tragic about most of these men’s cases: they were moved along by events and oblivious of their final destination. Even those who understood more about Hitler and the camps behaved the same as the others. Most felt powerless to change the events and, whether in the Wehrmacht or OT, continued to serve a land that had abandoned them and had persecuted and murdered their families. These events show how powerful society is and the pressure it puts on us to conform even in the face of horrible discrimination.