BBC Production of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers
Language: English (en)

Imagine your country goes mad. Imagine the place where your family has lived peacefully for decades suddenly declares you an enemy of the state. It strips you of all your rights, threatens you, haunts you. This is what happened to the Jews in 1930s Germany, thanks to the racial policies of one man, Adolf Hitler. But this terrible situation was faced not only by Germany's practicing Jews, but also by Germans who didn't even think they were Jewish. Most were Christians, who just happened to have distant Jewish relatives. It was ridiculous. Suddenly I heard that I'm a quarter Jew. The Nazis had a name for them. The Mischlinger, or half-breed. Mischling, singular, Mischlinger, plural, are horrible terms. They mean bastard, hybrid, mutt. Just shows you what the Nazis thought of these individuals. But amazingly, many Mischlinger and even some full Jews not only tolerated Hitler, they actively supported him. Many would fight for him. Some even joined the murderous SS. It begged the question, why? How could they have fought for someone hell-bent on their destruction? Were these Mischlinger traitors to their own people? Or were they simply doing their best to survive in an impossible situation? And then they would shout, you bandits, you criminals, and so on. And then someone would come and make a boom, and then I would have been dead. And no one would have helped. This is the strange story of the Jews who fought for Hitler. 33. On the streets and in the cafes, there was a new wave of optimism. After decades of political instability, economic depression and joblessness, things at last seemed to be on the up. And many put it down to their new leader, Adolf Hitler. Hitler had offered the Germans hope. Whilst many people knew of his hatred for the Jews, many German Jews simply didn't think he would carry out his anti-Semitic threats on taking office. When Hitler came into power, for all his exterminationist vocabulary, especially in Mein Kampf and then also in his speeches, most Jews did not see the writing on the wall. Neither did those Germans married to Jews or with distant Jewish relatives. They knew it was not good to be Jewish. They knew that having partial Jewish descent was also something that could be problematic. But they didn't equate themselves as being Jewish and didn't think that they were in the crosshairs of Hitler's Holocaust. Immediately after taking power, Hitler did exactly as he promised. Anti-Semitism became government policy. The Nazis set about removing Germany's half a million Jews from public life. It started slowly. At first, Jewish-owned shops and businesses were boycotted. They were daubed with graffiti and Nazi party militia turned customers away. Books were burned to cleanse German literature of Jewish writers. Then, anti-Semitism was enshrined in law with Aryans and non-Aryans legally segregated. They were made to sit in separate compartments in trams or specially designated rows in the cinema. And Jews were banned from the civil service in April 1933. Rolf von Suda was then just nine years old. He had a Jewish grandfather, Alexander. Rolf quickly witnessed the effects of Hitler's racial policy on his grandfather's life. He was a very famous doctor and he had to quit his practice. He was a doctor for the railway and so on. He was an officer in the First World War. But that doesn't make any difference. He was so. For him, it was a disaster. But for all their loathing of the Jews, the Nazis quickly hit a problem. Legally, who actually was a Jew? How do you define Jewishness? It was easy to tell the so-called Ostjuden, immigrants from Eastern Europe. They wore the readily identifiable garb of orthodoxy and spoke Yiddish. They had their own culture and ethnic identity. And crucially, they practiced Judaism. But very few German Jews did the same. They had lived in the country for centuries. These German Jews were fully integrated into German society, going to the same social events as Nazis. They wore the same clothes, ran businesses supplying the state. They were indistinguishable in appearance or practice from so-called Aryan Germans. In fact, they were Germans. For centuries, they had assimilated, intermarried, contributed to the culture, had served in the armies. And so they were very intertwined with German Gentile society. Many of them weren't even Jewish by religion, but by descent. Crucially, they were Christians. By the mid-1930s, 80% of German Jews had converted to Christianity. One such example was Rolf von Sudow's grandfather, Alexander. Despite having a Jewish mother, he had been raised in the Christian faith. He was not Jewish at all. He was Christian, and all his parents have married in the Christian way. Sometimes, German Jews integrated society simply for love. This is exactly what happened to Fritz Steinwasser's grandparents. My grandfather was a Jew. And then he met my grandmother. Well, that's how it is with young people. They fell in love, and then they got married. And then my grandfather converted to the Catholic faith. I didn't know that. He became a religious Catholic. Either way, the last thing many of these Germans or their descendants considered themselves was Jewish. I didn't have anything to do with Judaism, on the contrary. I was only confronted with it when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Until then, I didn't know that. September 1935. Nuremberg. The annual Nazi Party rally. It was an impressive showcase, and thousands saluted the Fuhrer. And it was here that Adolf Hitler announced the next stage in his racial policy towards the Jews of Germany and their descendants. In what became known as the Nuremberg Laws. The idea was to define who was a Jew and who was not, once and for all. Hitler bringing out the Nuremberg Laws was his attempt to bring order to his racial policies, to organize four groups of people. The Aryans, the Jews, and then two new racial categories, half Jews and quarter Jews. Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. To find any practicing Jew or anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as being fully Jewish, whether they practiced Judaism or not. These full Jews were deprived of their citizenship, denied the right to vote, and excluded from public office. But that wasn't the end of it. Hitler didn't just target full Jews. Germans who had one or two Jewish grandparents were targeted too. These people were labeled Mischlinger. Mischling, singular, Mischlinger, plural, are horrible terms. The Nazis used these terms to describe what they called half Jews and quarter Jews, half breeds. The literal definition of Mischling is mutt. You know, they use it for dogs of mixed breeds. But the connotation back then was that you were subhuman. You were inferior. Two Jewish grandparents made you a first degree Mischling or half Jew. One made you a second degree Mischling or quarter Jew. Suddenly, this new law labeled many people with distant Jewish relatives as half or quarter Jews. Rolf von Suda was a second degree Mischling or quarter Jew in the eyes of the law. When I was 11 years old in 35, suddenly I heard that I'm a quarter Jew because my grandfather was Jewish. It was ridiculous, definitely, yeah. I didn't like it, and I felt very, very bad. According to a Reich census from the late 1930s, there were over half a million full Jews in Germany, about 72,000 half Jews and 39,000 quarter Jews. Initially, persecution of these part Jews was less severe than for full Jews. They were restricted on who they could marry and had to obtain a certificate of fitness for marriage. In the race laws, half Jews could only marry other half Jews. Quarter Jews were allowed to marry Gentiles, but they had to get special permission. So it was all regulation of sexual behavior. And if you deviated from the group that you were supposed to interact with, you could be brought up on the charge of Rassenschande, racial defilement. So if you were a half Jew and you slept with a Gentile, you could be brought up on trial and sent to jail. Nearly 2,000 people would be charged with racial defilement. Meanwhile, half and quarter Jews instantly witnessed how their new status affected their lives. The thing I'll never forget was I was playing football with a boy just opposite the house of my grandfather. Suddenly, at the end of the play, the mother of him, she says, do you have to play with a Jewish boy? And it was the first time that I know that people knew about me now, and it was terrible. Fritz Steinwasser and his brother Willi were labeled quarter Jews. They saw how a family could be torn apart. Well, we were 15, 16 years old. As the mother said, the aunt greeted us when we met. And then one day she said, you don't need to greet me, you bengel, you Jewish bengel. I don't want to have anything to do with you. This sudden hardening in their day-to-day lives now left all categories of German Jews with a stark choice whether to stay or quietly leave. Then in November 1938, there was an event that would raise the stakes for all Germans of Jewish descent. The Nazi-sponsored anti-Semitic violence erupted on Germany's streets. Synagogues were burned. 30,000 full Jews were arrested. And 100 were killed. It became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Thousands of full Jews and some Mischlinger chose to leave. But for many, this was simply out of the question. These people were patriots through and through. And so it was very hard to ask these people who were German to leave Germany when that's all they knew and all they loved. One example of a full Jew who opted to stay was Edgar Jacobi. Jacobi had volunteered for service in World War I where he won the Iron Cross. He then worked as a film director in Hollywood in the 1930s before returning to Germany and meeting his Aryan wife. To marry her, he had to falsify his papers. He remained in Germany under this new, false identity. Jacobi was a German patriot. And despite the frightening violence against Jews, he was determined to fight for the fatherland if he got the chance. He put himself forward for the army reserves. Jacobi was a willing volunteer. But as a full Jew, he should never have been allowed in the army. At this stage, half Jews and quarter Jews, on the other hand, were still allowed to serve the fatherland in the military. As a result, they were safe from persecution for the time being, especially as Adolf Hitler needed them. September 1, 1939. The Germans attacked Poland. The German army rolled across the border. In its ranks were thousands of half Jews and quarter Jews, the so-called Mischlinger. Many of them saw fighting for the Reich as a way of gaining favor and a way to protect their families. On one side, I have to take an oath to Hitler, who I hate. But on the other side, I'm serving a nation that I love. And since I have to be here anyway, I might as well make the best of it, because if I have a good record and I get some respect from my superiors, it's going to help my family. And quite often, a lot of these soldiers would show up in public places with their Jewish relatives in uniform to show, hey, this is a respectable family. They have sons and grandsons in the military, and they should be respected. One example of a patriotic Mischling was half Jew Werner Goldberg. An article in a German newspaper in 1939 talked of the victory in Poland and showed a heroic image of a young warrior, the archetypal German soldier. It was Goldberg. He was blond, very clear blue eyes. For three months, he was in a lot of German military propaganda newspapers and magazines as the typical Aryan-looking soldier, until they found out that his father was a Jew. An estimated 100,000 other soldiers with Jewish heritage fought alongside Werner Goldberg in Hitler's conquering army. It showed just how flawed the Nuremberg Laws were. It wasn't just lesser ranks who were compromised by the Nuremberg Laws. Some of Hitler's most senior generals fell into the same dangerous categories. Three of Hermann Göring's top Luftwaffe officers were Mischlinger, including his most senior and capable Air Force commander, Field Marshal Milch, who had overseen the development and re-equipping of the Luftwaffe and built it into the modern and powerful force that spearheaded Hitler's Blitzkrieg. He reported directly to Göring. But many people have asked, how in the world does a half-Jew, Milch, become a Field Marshal in Hitler's military? He was a brilliant mind, no question about it. Ran Lufthansa in the 20s. Hitler called him in to help run the Luftwaffe. He was the most prominent personality for personnel planning and production. Hitler had said in 1936 that there are two names linked with the birth of our Luftwaffe, Milchs and Görings. Even though he was essential to the war effort, Milch was investigated by the Gestapo under the Nuremberg Laws. His father, Anton Milch, was a Jew. Göring would have none of it. In his book, he decided who was a Jew and not the Nuremberg Laws. When rumors were flying around about his Jewish background, his mother went to the officials and said, my Jewish husband, Anton Milch, is actually not the father of my six children, it's my Aryan lover, who happens to be my uncle, and by the way, he's dead. Göring encouraged Milch's mother to sign an affidavit confirming that her Aryan uncle had fathered her children. He personally took it to Hitler, and Milch was declared of pure Aryan ascent. And with a stroke of Hitler's pen, he was quote-unquote Aryanized. So we see in this case that during the Third Reich, you know, Jewish ancestry was horrible, but incest was okay. Göring had lied and reinvented the past to save Milch. But to ensure more valuable men were not investigated by the authorities, Hitler created various ways around the Nuremberg Laws. There was different classifications of exemptions that Hitler would give to half Jews and quarter Jews, to remain in the service or be promoted. The first types were just genehmigungen, or special permissions, that allowed a person to remain in the military. The second types were also genehmigungen, sometimes called Sondergenehmigungen, special exemptions, that allowed somebody to remain in the military and be promoted. And then there were other guys that immediately just got the straight-out Deutschpolitische Klerungen, and these were the German blood declarations. These exemptions, like the German blood declarations, let Hitler have the pick of those men with Jewish ancestry and Aryanize them, if he deemed them worthy. He often personally oversaw individual cases, and only a small proportion were ever successful. 22 generals and 7 admirals were Aryanized. They included Admiral Bernhard Roeger, a quarter Jew who received a German blood declaration in 1939. He was a tragic figure. His mother's mother was Jewish. He lost his wife and mother-in-law to suicide because of the Nazi persecution. He was persecuted. He was a deeply religious man. He hated the Nazis, but on the other side he had this duty that he felt obligated to, to his fatherland. Roeger served in command of the Atlantis, a merchant ship converted to carry guns and which harried Allied convoys. Roeger sank or captured almost two dozen Allied ships for a combined total of over 150,000 times. He went on to win the coveted Knight's Cross with oak leaves. Though much harder, any common soldier stood a small chance of being Aryanized too if they won similar prestigious bravery awards. In May 1940, Hitler's armies invaded France in another devastating Blitzkrieg attack. France and her allies were crushed in just over a month. It was another stunning victory. Once again, half-Jewish and quarter-Jewish soldiers fought in the ranks. Among them, quarter-Jew Fritz Steinwasser and amazingly, Edgar Jacobi, the full Jew who had falsified his marriage papers. He'd been called up just before the invasion. He led a company of combat cameramen and photographers. Jacobi's newsreels captured the lightning advance of the German panzers. Jacobi and many other soldiers of Jewish descent fought with distinction. They hoped their loyal service would be rewarded and get them acceptance in mainstream German society. Because when they returned to Germany, half-Jews, first-degree Mischlinger, were expelled from the army. Instead, they could only take up low-grade work. Werner Goldberg, the ideal German soldier, was one of them. It was a callous way to treat men who had risked their lives for their fatherland. Quarter-Jews, second-degree Mischlinger, were still allowed to serve. When Hitler's army stormed into Russia in the summer of 1941, there were tens of thousands of quarter-Jews in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, the German army. Fritz Steinwasser was one of them. His racial status was known to his superiors. However, other men feared that if they came clean about their Jewish ancestry, their treatment could get worse. So they decided to keep quiet. Rolf von Söder had been called up for military service and was fighting in Russia as a panzer gunner. Von Söder had never felt Jewish, so he decided to lie rather than admit he was a quarter-Jew. I lied because I wanted to prove them that I was a brave man and that I'm OK for being an officer. It's quite clear. Any other people would have done the same. They didn't want to do it. It's quite... Yeah, I want to show them that all the mixture things and all these bad things which are taught about the Richtmenschlinge, that's not correct. However, on the eve of promotion, Rolf von Söder would pay for his deception. He was summoned by his commanding officer. There came the Major and says, Herr von Söder, we have to speak and you can't be that. And he knew about now, about of my documents, that I am quarter-Jew. And then the whole thing was up and I was going to prison. He was imprisoned for 21 days as a punishment for his actions. Von Söder was demoted, but he would eventually rejoin his unit and continue to fight for Hitler. Another man who had lied and was found out was propaganda officer Edgar Jacobi. His true identity as a full Jew had been revealed. Jacobi was sent back to Germany and imprisoned. As a full Jew, he and countless others were now in grave danger. Because in the autumn of 1941, Germany's full Jews started to be deported, initially to ghettos in Eastern Europe and then to extermination camps. The first deportations of the German Jews to the ghettos began in October of that year. These evacuations invariably meant death. The Jews were even made to pay the cost of the journey to the East. 20,000 German Jews were sent to the Łódź ghetto in Poland. 25,000 were sent to Riga in Latvia. In November 1941, many of those German Jews arriving in Riga were massacred as soon as the train arrived. In Minsk, Bielorussia, German Jews suffered a similar fate. Yet surprisingly, very few of Hitler's quarter Jewish soldiers were aware what Nazi Germany had reserved for their relatives. But Fritz Steinwasser, a quarter Jewish soldier, did chance upon a horrifying spectacle whilst serving on the front line in Latvia. He was stuck in a traffic jam of advancing German vehicles when he saw the reality of the Nazi policy of genocide towards the Jews. Fritz Steinwasser, a quarter Jewish soldier, was told by the German government that he was in a terrible state. Fritz Steinwasser was requested by the German army to send the Jews to the West. But Fritz Steinwasser a terrible sight. And an old man with a beard and a little boy of maybe five years, four or five years, on his hand and the boy was crying. And then an old man comforted him and then said, I don't know what, I didn't understand it. But then he talked to him and then the boy smiled, his grandfather shone. My heart broke. Fritz Steinwasser's grandfather, along with 43,000 other German Jews, was later sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. His grandfather died there in 1943. Fritz would not find this out until afterwards. After the war, another man who was caught up in this policy was Rolf von Sudau's grandfather. This photo is the last known picture of his grandfather alive. It shows him being led away with other Germans for evacuation. He died in a hospital a few days later. Many thousands more like them were murdered in the death camps. Despite what was happening to the Jews and what some like Fritz Steinwasser had witnessed, they still chose to carry on fighting. No one can help someone. They can only have his friend . I would have outed myself alone. I would have wound средen up alone. I would have gone on it and then shouted you bandits you criminals and so on. There would have been someone who would have come and banged it and I would have been dead then. There had been nobody to help anyone. Hitler had wanted to go even further and reserved the same treatment for the half Jews. But then he changed his mind. He granted them a last minute reprieve. Rather than be killed in the extermination camps. Many half Jews found found themselves forced to work instead for another organ of the Nazi state. The organisation TOTE was a civil and military engineering group that built whatever Hitler needed, from prison camps to arms manufacture and massive engineering projects like the Atlantic War. Overseeing it all from 1942 was Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister for Armaments. The organisation TOTE numbered over a million men. From 1943 onwards, between 10,000 and 20,000 half-Jews were drafted into it. But by a strange twist of fate, the fact that they had been expelled from the army and ended up in TOTE actually spared many of them from death. As a result, there was spared combat, especially the killing fields of the Eastern Front where more and more Germans were being slaughtered by 1943 and where both Fritz Steinwasser and Rolf von Sudau found themselves. But a rare happenstance, a handful of German Jews didn't just fight. They actively embraced the most extreme expression of Nazi ideology. They joined the Waffen-SS. The SS were Hitler's political soldiers. They had their own special insignia and privileges and swore blind allegiance to Hitler. They took the Führer's ideology as their own. The SS had a reputation as ruthless fighters who murdered prisoners and civilians in cold blood. Some death camps were guarded by the SS, so the idea that a German Jew would sign up to serve and get away with it was unthinkable. Nevertheless, that is exactly what one full Jew ended up doing. Karl-Heinz Löwi was raised as a religious Jew. He was born in 1920 in Munich and both his parents were ardent German patriots. To avoid the Nuremberg Laws, he assumed the name Werner Grenacker and created an Aryan ancestry for himself. At the start of the war, he escaped to France. But then the Nazis caught up with him. When the Nazis came in, he felt the walls of Nazi Germany falling in on him. So he thought if he was proactive, he would be able maybe to protect himself. So with his false name, he went to a German recruiting station and said, I want to join the Wehrmacht. And the Wehrmacht said, you know, we don't have recruiting ability in foreign areas, but the Waffen-SS does. He was sent down to the Waffen-SS office. And then he was recruited into the Waffen-SS. When he faced the medical examination, he simply lied. He claimed that his circumcision was the result of an infection, leading his comrades to jokingly call him the Jew. Löwi fought with the SS on the Finnish front. Despite the daily risk of discovery, he showed exceptional bravery and was awarded the Iron Cross and prestigious close combat clasp for soldiers who had fought the enemy at close quarters. Löwi always maintained his SS colleagues had their hands full fighting the Russians and knew nothing of the Nazi death camps or the reality of the Holocaust. In fact, he counted them as friends. He was able to acclimate into an elite military unit that was extremely anti-Semitic and survive. And he said, you know, it's the craziest thing, Brian. On one side, I love these guys. They would do anything for me. They were elite warriors. They fought hard. But had they known, I was Jewish, they would have changed on me in a second and they would have hung me up on the first tree. So Löwi kept quiet and did what he needed to do to survive in the SS. However, by 1944, the war was coming to a close. As the Allies landed in Normandy and the Russians pushed ever deeper towards the heart of Germany from the east, the end was in sight for Hitler's German Jews and his Jewish soldiers. On May the 8th, 1945, the war in Europe, finally ended. Fritz Steinwasser survived the Russian front. Rolf von Söder fought the Allies in Normandy and was also still alive. And so, remarkably, was full Jew, Edgar Jacobi, who had languished in prison in Germany. He had only been saved when a bombing raid destroyed his prison records. By a mixture of fate, official pardons or the choice of remaining silent, many half and quarter Jews, and even some full Jews, survived the war and avoided the fate of their relatives. Of those who fought for Hitler, the most high profile was Field Marshal Milch, the Luftwaffe general whom Hitler had Aryanized in 1935. Germany came into a war in 1939. Eventually, Milch stood trial at Nuremberg for his complicity in the Nazis' crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was sentenced to life at Landsberg, but was released after seven years. Milch never spoke publicly about these crimes against the Jews and his own Jewish heritage. You could say he was a willing collaborator with Hitler in everything Hitler was doing. He was a criminal. He knew about forced labor going to Auschwitz. He knew about the experiments going on in Dachau, he even sanctioned them. He was a horrible individual. Half Jew Werner Goldberg, the so-called archetypal soldier, who was expelled from the army in 1940, survived the war. He would save his father's life after repeated attempts to send him to Auschwitz. He's an example of many men who went to bat for their family members by going to the actual prison areas and so on to try to get their family members out. Most were unsuccessful. Werner Goldberg was successful in his case. The fact that he could demonstrate against his father's treatment in his army uniform did his case no harm. Thanks to this brave action, his father avoided the infamous death camp. After the war, Werner Goldberg settled back into life in Berlin and had three children. Admiral Bernhard Roeger, the highly decorated naval commander, also survived the war. He went on to be a high-ranking officer in the post-war West German Navy and NATO. Full Jew Karl-Heinz Loewy, who had served in the Waffen-SS, deserted German lines and served and surrendered to the French. He remained in Munich and died in 2001. Another man to head to Allied lines at the first opportunity was Rolf von Suder, who had surrendered to the Canadians in Normandy in 1944. Rolf von Suder has always maintained the prejudice he experienced has made him a stronger person. He went on to have a successful career in television and movies. For his part, Fritz Steinwasser lost his brother in the war and was captured by the Russians. He spent several years in a prisoner of war camp before quietly returning to his life in Berlin. Today, those who survive are coming to terms with what they experienced. They face the curious reality of fighting for the very nation that wanted to destroy them and their relatives. That I have somehow suppressed people, that I have tortured people and so on. But the old Nuremberg people have gone along with the prisoners. To those who think he should have done something when he saw Jews being killed in 1941, Fritz Steinwasser has this to say. So when a Jew asks me, why didn't you do anything about it? And why did you watch when you were there with your people, and I'm a part of it, when you were killed? Then I would ask him what he would have done in this situation. These men have also had to wrestle with many awkward questions of collaboration and belonging, their relationship with Judaism and their place in German society. Today, Fritz Steinwasser has reconciled both the past and his mixed Jewish heritage. I am neither one nor the other. I am a human being. And as a human being, I am interested and tired of all the other people on earth, whether they are white or black or yellow or otherwise. We are to live together in good peace. That is my motto. So where does this leave the Jews who fought for Nazi Germany? Undoubtedly, they were faced with an impossible situation created by Hitler and his policy of racial hatred. This in turn led to impossible choices made just to live. Fighting for Germany was more often than not an attempt to save loved ones and relatives. Often, for these men, staying alive was a struggle. But they did survive. And this simple fact was a small victory for Hitler's Jewish soldiers.