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Heads They Won: tails, they lost
A peculiar sort of hell befell the Jews who fought for Hitler. Some joined the Nazi forces because they hoped their families would survive; others were ambivalent and a few were rank opportunists willing to make a devil's bargain with a murderous regime. Lives of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers; Untold tales of men of Jewish descent who fought for the Third Reich by Bryan Mark Rigg. ISBN: 978-0700616381-1.
by John A. Rippo
Mischling in German means a person who is a mix; either of ethnicities, races or anything that is not one of a kind. The Third Reich did not like mischlings, especially the Jewish kind; no matter if they were people long assimilated who considered themselves culturally, socially and patriotically German and whose religious tendencies had been smothered or converted by generations of living among "Aryan Christians". Like any mixture of anyone, there were those who fit in neither category of origin, but when the new leader with the funny mustache came to power in 1933, all German Jews soon found out that their identity was no longer theirs to define. It soon became a question of how soon their identity became a death warrant. This book tells of what some of them did to survive. It’s not a pretty tale.
Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, by Bryan Mark Rigg is a fascinating, infuriating, gripping read that details the lives and war tales of a handful of Jews who wore the uniform, won the medals and strove to be heroes of the Third Reich loony land that was dedicated to erasing the Jews off the face of the earth. The book begs more questions than it answers and leaves a reader with a deeper knowledge of the unvarnished evil that was the Hitler regime. Besides that, it underscores the pity of individuals who had to make a bargain with the Devil in order to survive and perhaps come through it all with their lives, families and sense of self intact.
Nothing in the stories of these men is cut and dried or predictable. We meet Helmuth Kopp, a half Jew who suffered miserably in two families as a boy because he was neither Aryan or Jewish enough for his relatives and who volunteered for the army in 1940 believing it was safer to be in the service instead of on the streets waiting to be picked up by the Gestapo. He got chided by inspecting doctors for his "Jewish tip” and learned to lie convincingly enough to keep his circumcision from betraying him to the death camps. Kopp later became part of a tank destroyer unit on the Russian front. Like so many others in Lives, Kopp illustrates the twisted dichotomy of life in Hitler’s army; he was promoted for saving a fellow soldier’s life in battle and remarks that "in war, your love for your fellow comrade was all you had.” A few lines later, describing the death of Russian partisans hanged by Germans, he muses “...that if they knew about me, then I could also be strung up on a lamp post and find myself kicking my way to death.” Story after story in Lives describes the same choice; Lowy, the SS captain who recalled "slaughtering" American infantry in France in 1944 and who “did what he could to survive”; Klaus Peter Scholz, a gay, half Jewish, convert-in-the shadow to Protestantism whose photo shows him with his Jewish liebe mama while wearing his swastika armband, and who to this day fondly recalls his cameraderie in the artillery. Men who believed, or wanted to believe that their service might save their Jewish relatives who strove to prove their "regular-guy" status pulled the triggers, manned the guns and sailed the ships to further the aims of a dictator bent on conquering a world that would be rid of them and their mischlinge kind. For most of them, their hopes and trust were misplaced—permanently, even though few of them admitted to knowing what was happening to their fellow Jews.
The worst of them was a half-Jewish mischling named Erhard Milch; a professional soldier who was an ardent careerist who cared nothing for anyone that couldn’t advance his ambition. Milch knew how to hitch his star effectively and joined the Nazi Party in 1929—four years before it took power. Colluding with high ranking Nazis, he persuaded his own mother to falsely claim that she had incest with a non-Jewish relative so that Erhard could claim that he was not a Jew which safeguarded him from the wrath of the Nazi state he served. Eventually, Erhard Milch became Secretary of State for Aviation and a Field Marshal in the Luftwaffe, and was second only to Hermann Goering in the German Air Force’s table of organization. Milch was the man who developed the planes—like the Stuka divebomber—that carried the Blitzkrieg across Europe; he established the organization that created the pilots, planes and tactics that led to the terror bombings of Rotterdam, Coventry and London. He made the V-1 Buzzbomb and V-2 Rocket a reality. And he carefully monitored and supported the medical experiments at Dachau Concentration Camp that used Jewish prisoners as guinea pigs in tests to measure how alititude, freezing and oxygen starvation killed fliers. The German war machine couldn’t have been as successful as it was in World War II without Erhard Milch. Yet he missed the end that his boss Goering got; sentenced to life in prison at Nuremburg in 1947, he was eventually released and lived until 1972.
Lives is a window on a circle of hell that Dante never imagined, but one that begs many questions for us now. The stories of these men call to mind other soldiers in World War II; the black Tuskegee Airmen and US 442nd Regiment of American-Japanese soldiers who fought for a nation that oppressed them and their families because of their race. It forces the reader to ask whether it’s acceptable to compromise one’s life and dignity by working for a state that criminalizes the individual for his heritage and hazards his future; At what point does one lose one’s soul when serving monsters? How can this be prevented? The men who are interviewed in Lives offer a pragmatic answer: One goes along with terror just to survive and tries not to think about it too much and hopes for the best. Like a battered woman controlled by an abuser, the individual means nothing any more and a fellow who suddenly finds himself defined by others as a sub-human menace to society has no way out and has to keep his identity a secret just to keep breathing. This is the cruellest fate because it demands compliance from a victim in actions that will ulitmately harm him and his loved ones. The men in Lives are like others; no one wants to die and they convinced themselves that things weren’t as bad as they were. Even now, most of them do not admit they knew much about what was happening to the Jews of Europe at the time. Denial is the enabler of abuse and terror, then and now. Lives is worth the time reading it and the long time thinking about how to prevent authoritarianism and racism and religious prejudice from taking more control of thought, word and deed in the future. Beyond that, you have to buy the book to find out how the Nazis actually went out of their way to save the live of a revered rabbi—using Mischling soldiers to do this in order to appease the US government, and why that amazing and ironic effort was such a bad idea.
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