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While millions of German Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis, many of their relatives, willingly or not, were fighting for the Third Reich.

Photo Credit: Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, far left, with Hermann Goring, Adolf Hitler, and SA Stabschef Viktor Lutze. Milch, who otherwise would have been considered a “half-Jew” or Mischlinge, was “aryanized” by Hitler, who claimed the power to change an individual’s ethnicity. Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers While millions of German Jews were being persecuted by the Nazis, many of their relatives, willingly or not, were fighting for the Third Reich. This article appears in: Winter 2014 By Bryan Mark Rigg On September 15, 1944, as Allied armies squeezed Germany from east and west, and the Third Reich needed all the experienced, able-bodied soldiers it could find, a strange but far from unusual letter was being written. On that day an officer in the headquarters of SS head Heinrich Himmler had requested that Generalmajor Wilhelm Burgdorf, deputy chief of the Wehrmacht personnel office, dismiss from the Army on Himmler’s personal orders a colonel by the name of Ernst Bloch. Bloch, it seems, had been targeted for discharge from the service not because he was deficient as a soldier but simply because he was a Mischling—a half-Jew; his father was Jewish. He also might have been discharged because Himmler may have discovered that Bloch had helped rescue some Jews, one of them the famous Rabbi Joseph Schneersohn, in 1939 from the SS, although this was done under the orders of his boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the German Secret Services (Abwehr). Eleven days later, Burgdorf informed Himmler’s office that Bloch had been dismissed but added that in 1943 the colonel, who had earned an Iron Cross for bravery, had asked to be “sent to the front despite his several World War I wounds.” Burgdorf’s halfhearted protest did not succeed in easing Bloch’s plight. It also did not seem to matter that Bloch was described as a “positive National Socialist.” Bloch left his post on October 27, 1944. On February 15, 1945, Hitler signed the official order discharging him because of his Jewish heritage and Burgdorf officially informed Bloch of his discharge: “The Führer has decided as of 31 January 1945 to discharge you from active duty. It is an honor to thank you on behalf of the Führer for your service rendered during war and peace for our people and fatherland. I wish you all the best for the future. Heil Hitler.” Bloch was flabbergasted because he knew Hitler had once personally declared him deutschblütig (of German blood). However, Bloch probably did not know the particulars behind his discharge. He was simply ordered to leave, and he obeyed without questioning. Walter Brockhoff, a close friend of Bloch’s, wrote to Bloch’s wife, Sabine, after the war to ask why his friend had been discharged. Brockhoff wrote, “One doesn’t dismiss a brave and battle-tested officer away from the front during the hour of greatest danger. There have been and will be few officers of his caliber.” Yet the brave Bloch did not simply fold his tent and return home. As the Soviets closed in around Berlin, Bloch joined a Volkssturm (people’s militia) unit and prepared to defend the capital. He was killed during the Battle of Berlin shortly before war’s end. However odd the story of Ernst Bloch may seem, it is far from being an isolated case. Thousands of Mischlinge—field marshals, generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, and enlisted men—were summarily dismissed from the German military; many ended up in forced-labor camps. And many of their Jewish relatives also reached a tragic end in Nazi Germany’s slave-labor, concentration, and extermination camps. Finding and documenting men of Jewish descent who fought in the Wehrmacht was a research project I undertook throughout most of the 1990s. The stories of the nearly 500 veterans I interviewed helped me document a largely unknown and undocumented chapter of World War II history. Many of the stories, like Ernst Bloch’s, illustrate the tragedy and complexity of German society under Hitler. And for many today, it presents several troubling issues about identity and history. This is even the case for the very subjects themselves. By way of illustration, back in 1994 I interviewed a couple in Berlin. He, Heinz Z., was a half-Jew who had false documents during the Third Reich claiming he was an Aryan. As he discussed his time in the military, his second wife Sabine sat next to him silently listening to him describe his experiences under Hitler. Heinz told me that he felt his false documents helped him protect his first Jewish wife and their infant son. His status came under the Nazi legal designation of “privilege mixed marriage.” In other words, he helped protect his wife from persecution by staying married to her. While Heinz was on the Russian Front in 1943, he got a notice in the mail that his wife and infant son had been deported to Poland. His commander, on learning this, immediately granted him emergency leave to put “things in order.” As Heinz explained, he thought at that moment, “Wh...