Lives of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

Lives of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

As Walter Gross led his reconnaissance patrol on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1942, things went badly wrong. Discovered by Soviet troops, every member of his unit was summarily wiped out with bullets and mortars, and Gross barely made it back to his defensive trench. Suffering from a belly wound, he died in the arms of his best friend. Two months later, his mother committed suicide. The death of her son—and the prospect of being sent to Auschwitz—was simply too much for her to bear.

Gross was one of many thousands of men of Jewish descent who served in the German war machine in World War II, only to have their family members persecuted by the Nazis. Bryan Rigg revealed the surprisingly large number of Jews who fought for Germany in WW II—as many as 150,000 Jewish or part-Jewish (Mischlinge) personnel—in his acclaimed work Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, which received the William E. Colby Award for Military History and has been translated into 11 languages. Now, in this highly anticipated companion volume, Rigg provides a close, personal look at the lives of 21 Jewish Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS soldiers.

Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers is a nightmare put to paper. While ordinary German soldiers bore their burden, the Jews and Mischlinge of Germany’s military were saddled with psychological pressures difficult to comprehend. Many considered themselves Germans first, Jews second. Many were raised as Christians, with no practical ties to Judaism whatsoever. And others had simply begun their military careers prior to the Nuremberg Law supplements of 1935, which were the first German laws to establish Hitler’s paranoiacally exacting definitions of “Jewishness”; these military careerists suddenly found themselves in an untenable situation.

Rigg covers in impressive detail the stories of such men as Helmuth Kopp, who fought courageously on the Eastern Front in a tank-destroying unit—and witnessed the deaths of more than half his comrades within the first four months of combat; Edgar Jacoby, who earned the Iron Cross in World War I and went on to run a propaganda unit in the next war; and Berhnhard Rogge, “Aryanized” by Hitler so he could continue serving as a commander in the German navy.

The men covered in this book fought in almost every major campaign of the war. The half-Jewish Wehrmacht soldier Richard Reiss confessed after the war that, in serving, he felt “guilty, but logically I had not other choice. But I now think I did something I shouldn’t have done . . . We were just not allowed to think under Hitler.”

Illuminating, fascinating, and at times disturbing, Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers unveils combat stories, Nazi policies and personal traumas that have been all but buried for seven decades.

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas ( March 01, 2009 )

Item #: 88-3462

ISBN: 9780700616381

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.84 inches

Product Weight: 18.0 ounces