People of Jewish descent were the most endangered group under Adolf Hitler. Yet probably several thousand Jews and over one hundred thousand partial Jews (or Mischlinge) served in the Wehrmacht (German armed forces). This fact has surprised many who considered themselves knowledgeable about World War II and the Holocaust.
How these men dealt with their situations is a fascinating and moving story. One partially Jewish soldier, Heinz Bleicher, observed that few today can understand the heavy emotional burden of partial Jews during the Third Reich. Every year they felt sucked deeper into an abyss with no escape.1 Nevertheless, until at least 1941, the Nazis drafted many into the Wehrmacht during this time of trauma and confusion—a policy that seems contradictory, since Hitler called Mischlinge “blood sins” and “monstrosities halfway between man and ape.”2 Among them were career soldiers who, because Hitler had Aryanized them, were able to reach high rank, even though many of their relatives had to wear the yellow star and died in the Holocaust.
While lecturing from 2002 to 2008 about my books Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers and Rescued from the Reich, I was often asked about the lives of those identified as Hitler’s Jewish soldiers. How could they serve? Did they consider themselves Nazis or Jews? What did Hitler know about them? What did they know about the Holocaust? Did they feel guilty about serving? Many listeners found it difficult to accept that men of Jewish descent served in Hitler’s armed forces, sometimes with great distinction. The biographies of these German Jewish soldiers give a clearer understanding of their personal and legal complexities.
Until recently, historians have not explored Mischling history. For some, these “victims of the Holocaust” represent “embarrassing leftovers from the trauma of Hitler’s Germany.”3 These men often feel alone in their experience and harbor a fear that their testimony will be given “without an echo in the vast wasteland of war,” the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.4 Moreover, in general, German soldiers have really “nothing to celebrate and much, including dishonor, to forget.”5 So it is remarkable that Jewish and Mischling soldiers have shared their experience, when so often it is difficult for them to talk about serving in the military while they and their families were persecuted.
Mischlinge simply do not fit into neat categories of victim or perpetrator, Jew or non-Jew. Although a few of the men whose stories are presented here were Jews, most were Mischlinge, a category of people that never existed before the Nuremberg Laws. What unites Mischlinge is not only the discrimination they experienced, but also their anger, frustration, fear, and sense of inferiority.
The question of identity haunted many Mischlinge, not only those serving in the Wehrmacht. Most grew up as patriotic Christian Germans who suddenly learned after 1933 that their nation now viewed them as subhumans. The Nazis believed that being Jewish or partially Jewish made them unacceptable as full citizens. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that “government defines reality”;6 the Nazis violently upset the lives of millions by defining the new reality of this racial doctrine.
The nineteenth-century political philosopher John Stuart Mill described what happened to Jews and Mischlinge under the Nazis when he wrote: “Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right . . . it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression . . . it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”7 The men described here were persecuted by a system that issued “wrong mandates” about human value. They struggled to conform to the Nazi view of worthy Germans, though many of them failed to realize that their society had abandoned them. For example, Dieter Bergman wrote during the war that he represented what people wanted in a “good German.” He was tall, blond, trim, kind, good-natured, and a “warrior type.” Yet he realized that his destiny as a half-Jew hung from a pathetically slender thread in an environment without refuge and legal rights.8 This perilous condition affected their perception of themselves and their behavior. They had to honor laws that eliminated their rights. The situation had the elements of a play in a Theater of the Absurd.
In this book I use several Nazi terms to explain this history without implying any agreement with the Nazi racial theories that inspired their introduction. The book is organized according to the Nazi definitions for people of Jewish descent in order to simplify its structure. In sharp contrast to the Nazi racial laws, the men documented herein express a whole range of beliefs about who is a Jew and who is Jewish that follows neither Nazi classifications nor Jewish law. Such Nazi terms as “half-Jew,” “quarter-Jew,” “Mischling,” “Aryan,” and “non-Aryan” come from an evil system designed to eliminate people of “inferior” ethnicity from society. The Nazis introduced such vocabulary to abuse and dehumanize those they deemed Untermenschen (subhumans). The Nazi racial laws did not reflect the understanding of Jewishness prevalent in German society in the 1920s. The designation “Mischling” sounded just as foreign to the ears of Mischlinge as it does to ours. Bergman further explained, “half-Jewishness is a strange concept. It’s like being half-circumcised—it doesn’t exist . . . However, with Hitler, we had to try to understand what being a Mischling meant. Unfortunately, we were slow learners.” Interpretations not of their making and events beyond their control beleaguered most Mischlinge. For example, Heinz Gerlach wrote Minister of Education Bernhard Rust in 1941 that “I cannot help it that I’m a Mischling. Also, no one should blame my parents for my situation. They married during a time without racial laws.” Gerlach further clarified that his mother looked and acted like an “Aryan” and that his father’s family never thought twice about accepting her. He wrote that she had proven her disapproval of Judaism by marrying a Christian, baptizing her son a Christian, and raising him to “love his Fatherland and the Führer.”9 Gerlach struggled with the Nazis’ defining him as partially Jewish, a part of his background he had never accepted.
The lives of Jews and Mischlinge portrayed in this book show how the racial laws affected them on a personal level, the extent of their persecution, and the divided loyalties many struggled with during the Nazi years and afterward. They were put in the ludicrous position of serving in the military while the Nazis persecuted their family members.
Yet most did serve, and when one learns more about German society, this service does not seem so strange. Most Mischlinge grew up in an environment where their elders conditioned them to have a strong obedience to authority. They were taught to obey their parents, teachers, clergymen, and, most importantly, their government. A belief that the authority of superiors was based on “greater insight and more humane wisdom” was ingrained in German society. In the military, submission to authority was explicit. After the war, Gustav Knickrehm said, “The advantage of our armed forces lay in this monstrous training . . . You carried out all orders automatically . . . You acted automatically as a soldier.” Mischlinge learned Kadavergehorsam, or slavish obedience, even if it infringed on their personal freedom and the human rights of their family. In other words, the Nazis imposed “political and ideological conformity” on all subjects under their rule.10 Whatever Hitler ordered, they had to obey and they did so almost willingly because of their culture. Those who did not obey Nazi laws wound up in concentration camps or in front of a firing squad.
Also fundamental to comprehending the bizarre situation in which Mischlinge wore the swastika on their uniforms, while their relatives had to wear the Star of David, is an understanding of their religious identity. Most parents of Mischlinge did not raise them as religious Jews, and most Mischlinge did not consider themselves Jewish until Hitler persecuted them. But the Nazi racial laws considered them all Jewish to one degree or another.
On 14 November 1935, the Nazis issued a supplement to the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 that created the “racial” categories of German, Jew, “half-Jew (Jewish Mischling 1st Degree),” and “quarter-Jew (Jewish Mischling 2nd Degree),” each with its own regulations. These laws distinguished Germans from persons of Jewish heritage both biologically and socially. Full Jews had three or four Jewish grandparents, half-Jews had two Jewish grandparents, and quarter-Jews had one Jewish grandparent. If a person not of Jewish descent practiced the Jewish religion, the Nazis also counted him as a Jew. The Nazis resorted to religious records to define these “racial” categories, using birth, baptismal, marriage, and death certificates stored in churches, temples, Jewish Community Centers, and courthouses.11
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws provided the basis for further anti-Jewish legislation to preserve the purity of the “Aryan” race. The Nazis based their racial laws on the völkisch (ethnic in a racial sense) notion of the inherent superiority of the “Aryans.”12 These laws provided civil rights to those belonging to the Volk and having German “blood.” This created a “new morality which, in terms of the old system of values, seemed both unscrupulous and brutal.” The Nazis automatically denied Jews and Mischlinge citizenship privileges. However, under Article 7 of a supplementary decree of the Nuremberg Laws, Hitler could free individuals from the label Jew or Mischling by Aryanizing them with a stroke of his pen.13 In fact Hitler allowed several high-ranking officers of Jewish descent to remain in the military by Aryanizing them.
But most Mischlinge did not receive this clemency, and the German authorities despised them as an unwelcome minority. Most Nazis considered Mischlinge predominantly Jewish and wanted them treated as such. Both the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and SS General Reinhard Heydrich wanted Mischlinge exterminated just like the full Jews. But pressure on the SS and Nazi Party by “Aryan” relatives, prominent families, the military, and the government postponed the issue of how to deal with Mischlinge until after the war.
In addition to the racial laws, an essential element of this history explores Halakah (rabbinical law), which considers more of the men in this study Jewish (full Jews) than did the Nazi racial laws. Since the Nazis considered anyone who practiced the Jewish religion a full Jew, most Mischlinge were by definition Christians. However, according to Halakah, having a Jewish mother is the sole determining fact of Jewish identity, and based on this, the majority of half-Jews documented would be considered Jewish. Using this criterion, Halakah considers more than half of the half-Jews documented in this book as full Jews because they had Jewish mothers.
The conflicting terms of Nazi racial laws and Halakah make it difficult to understand the position of Mischlinge. Adding yet another layer of complication is the fact that many Mischlinge developed private connections to Judaism. Many developed Jewish identities, but the majority of those identities were born out of persecution rather than cultural or religious upbringing. Today, some Mischlinge “feel” Jewish, though their Jewish identity is private and complicated.
The following story illustrates the difficulties one encounters when identifying a Jew for the purposes of this research. After World War II, Wehrmacht veteran Karl-Heinz Maier decided to do something for his Jewish family. He traveled to Israel and fought in its War of Indepen dence. Even after he became a major, the local authorities did not consider him Jewish because his father, rather than his mother, was Jewish. For twelve years, Maier explained, the Nazis persecuted him because he had a Jewish father, but the Israelis called him a Goy (a derogatory Yiddish term for gentile) because of his gentile mother. Although he could fight for the Israeli army, the government did not consider him Jewish.14 The same type of identity crisis that Maier experienced also happened to tens of thousands of Mischlinge during and, for some, even after the Third Reich. So differences in religious belief, cultural background, ethnic makeup, historical experiences, and self-perception often make it difficult to answer the question, who is a Jew?
Until Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers it was not widely known that probably a few thousand full and tens of thousands of half- and quarter-Jews, as classified by the Nazis, served in the German armed forces during World War II. It is conservatively estimated that, between 1870 and 1929, about 85,000 mixed marriages between Jews and gentiles took place in Austria and Germany, with approximately 75 percent taking place after the turn of the century. If every family had two or three children, according to the averages of those years, there should have been between 168,000 and 252,000 half-Jewish children of these unions. And some of these half-Jews would have later married gentiles and their children would have been quarter-Jews during the Third Reich. After examining assimilation records, birthrates, and mixed-marriage rates with mathematicians and statisticians, this study estimates that 60,000 half-Jews and 90,000 quarter-Jews served in the Wehrmacht.15
Some served as high-ranking officers, including generals, admirals, and even one field marshal. Full Jews who served did so with false documents. Their commanders believed them to be “Aryans.” The estimated numbers of Jews and Mischlinge in the Wehrmacht have caused controversy because the assimilation records or definitions of Jewishness have not been carefully analyzed and deserve a closer look.
If one contends that Mischlinge were not Jewish because they had been born into Christian families, had converted, had not practiced Judaism, had not felt Jewish, or had only received this label from the Nazis, then one must also reevaluate the figure of 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of those exterminated did not consider themselves Jewish, but the Nazis labeled and treated them so. To comprehend this, a rudimentary understanding of the conversions going on in the lands Hitler controlled is needed.
Between 1800 and 1900, around 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity in Germany and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most Mischlinge also had Jewish relatives who had converted to Christianity and did not view themselves as Jews until the Nazis came to power. The Nazis did not accept assimilation. Quite often, since Germans defined citizenship through Christian definitions, many Jews embraced the religion to escape discrimination and become more German. Hitler cynically described the conversion process: “If worst came to worst, a splash of baptismal water could always save the business and the Jew at the same time.” The Nazis would make sure that “the ability to camouflage ancestry by changing religions will completely disappear.”16
The reader will therefore not find it surprising that the Nazis deported countless converted parents, grandparents, and other relatives of the Mischlinge documented in this study to Hitler’s death camps, even though, as Martin Gilbert wrote, “tens of thousands of German Jews were not Jews at all in their own eyes.” For instance, the Nazis sent the philosopher Edith Stein to the gas chambers at Auschwitz despite her conversion to Christianity. Half-Jew Dieter Bergman said, “I lost over a dozen relatives in the Holocaust and most of them wouldn’t have called themselves Jews—they’d converted to Christianity for Christ’s sake.” Half-Jew Hans Günzel, who lost fifty-seven relatives in the Holocaust, expressed his confusion about the Nazi definition of Jewishness when he claimed, “the sad thing about all of their deaths is that most had converted to Christianity and didn’t consider themselves Jews.” Even though an estimated 50,000 Jewish converts to Christianity lived in Germany in 1933, the Nazis treated them as racial Jews. They did so in other countries as well. For example, Chaim Kaplan, a distinguished principal of a Warsaw Hebrew school, took pleasure in 1939 in seeing that the Nazis treated Jewish converts to Christianity no differently than religious Jews. He wrote: “I shall, however, have revenge on our ‘converts.’ I will laugh aloud at the sight of their tragedy. These poor creatures, whose number has increased radically in recent times, should have known that the ‘racial’ laws do not differentiate between Jews who become Christians and those who retain their faith. Conversion brought them but small deliverance . . . This is the first time in my life that a feeling of vengeance has given me pleasure.”17 Obviously many Polish Jewish converts to Christianity had hoped their new religion would protect them, something that Kaplan described as painfully mistaken.
Furthermore, the Nazis labeled half-Jews in Poland and Russia as full Jews because they did not have “Aryan blood” and gentile relatives to protect them. Although most of these partial Jews had assimilated into their Christian society and converted to Christianity, the Nazis marked these non-German Mischlinge in the eastern territories for extermination. They died in the Nazi camps as Jews.18 The Reich Security Main Office for the Eastern Territories stated in the summer of 1941: “In view of the Final Solution . . . anyone who has one parent who is a Jew will also count as a Jew.”19
This policy for the occupied areas was clear: there would be no distinction between “half” and full Jews as in Germany. Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland, included Mischlinge in his plan of extermination in a report on 16 December 1941: “We have in the General Government an estimated 2.5 million, maybe together with Mischlinge and all that hangs on, 3.5 million Jews. We can’t poison them, but we will be able to take some kind of action which will lead to an annihilation success . . . The General Government will be just as judenfrei [free of Jews] as the Reich.”20
Frank felt that the Nazis could only free themselves of the “Jewish disease” by extending to Mischlinge their tactic of extermination. The policy implemented in Poland and other areas followed this line of thinking. For example, as early as the summer of 1940, the Germans started segregating Mischlinge in Poland into ghettos and included them in the plans for deporting Jews to concentration camps.21 They even included some Mischlinge from Greece, Hungary, and Italy for deportation. The German Jewish professor of romance literature Victor Klemperer, of the Technical University in Dresden, had met Mischlinge from the Bohemian Protectorate who had to wear the Jewish star under a law decreed after Heydrich’s assassination on 4 June 1942. Half-Jewish Danes felt the need to escape from Denmark since the Nazis forced them to identify themselves as Jews, like those in Luxembourg, Holland, northern France, Vichy France, Belgium, Poland, the Baltic states, and Russia.22 Hundreds of thousands of converts to Christianity and non-German Mischlinge ultimately died in the Holocaust.
Today, many historians and most Jews classify as Jews these German Jewish converts and non-German half-Jews, especially from Poland and Russia, who died in the Holocaust, although most of these victims did not call themselves Jews. Even though the majority of the 6 million killed would have labeled themselves as Jewish, a substantial number of them would not have done so. In other words, if one argues that the men documented in this study are not really Jewish, then that same person must also reevaluate his definition of Jewishness when discussing “Jewish” Holocaust victims.
While it may be difficult to accept the fundamental concept expressed in the book title Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, there is one key sense in which this phrase is accurate. Hitler’s racial laws designated Mischlinge as “Jewish” or “part-Jewish.” They were Hitler’s Jewish soldiers and no one else’s, since the majority of the German Jewish population and many Mischlinge seemed not to share Hitler’s definition.
People often ask, “How could those affected by these laws serve?” Most Mischlinge served because they were drafted by the Wehrmacht, which, until 1940, required half-Jews to serve. However, they could not become NCOs or officers without Hitler’s personal approval.
In April 1940 Hitler decided to order the discharge of half-Jews from the armed forces because their presence created problems. Many came home after the Poland campaign in 1939 to find that the authorities had severely persecuted their relatives. Hitler did not want to protect Jewish parents and grandparents because of the service of their children and grandchildren, so he discharged the half-Jewish soldiers. Many, however, remained on active duty, with exemptions from Hitler or because they had hidden their Jewish ancestry. Also, several stayed with their units for months after this discharge order, due to the war with Norway in April and the invasion of France in May 1940, which slowed the bureaucratic process of discharging them.
The authorities did not widely enforce this discharge order until late summer 1940, and even then, many officers ignored it. In addition, the search for half-Jews in the service often consisted solely of requiring soldiers to sign ancestry declarations stating they were not Jews. Many Mischlinge signed this statement in good faith, since they were not Jews according to their understanding. Others just lied and remained with their units. Known half-Jews who had won combat medals or battlefield promotions could apply for an exemption from the racial laws, enabling them to remain in the Wehrmacht because of their valor. Thousands submitted applications. Even before 1940 several half-Jewish officers had received exemptions from Hitler and obtained high ranks.
The military also drafted quarter-Jews. Unlike the half-Jews, they had to serve throughout the entire war. Yet they, like their half-Jewish counterparts, could not become NCOs or officers without Hitler’s approval.
The majority of half-Jews discharged after April 1940 returned home and resumed their studies if they had distinguished military records or found work until 1944. Then Hitler had them, as well as other nonveteran half-Jews, deported to forced labor camps of the Organization Todt (OT).23 They were joined there by the “Aryan” husbands of Jewish wives, many of whom were fathers of half-Jews at the camps. Fortunately, they were not in the camps long, and their treatment there was less severe than in the concentration camps. Thus, most survived these places of persecution.
The Nazis treated these partial Jews as objects without any self-determination. Hitler probably would have further persecuted and in many cases exterminated them had he won the war.
Historians have so far not closely examined the experiences of Mischlinge. These stories will give the reader a sense of what it was like to be a Mischling in the Third Reich, exploring many enduring lessons about the human condition.