Hide In Plain Sight

Tonight on Dateline.

It was such an intense moment, a terrifying moment.

27 years after the murder of young Martha Moxley.

Did you look at Michael Skakel?

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Was there ever a point where you thought there would be a hung jury?

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If he'd kept his mouth shut all those years, this trial never would have happened.

They were German soldiers, part of the Nazi killing machine.

They were also of Jewish descent.

You were wearing the uniform of the army that had killed your father?

That's correct.

Your mother?

Yes.

And there were tens of thousands of them.

You're not ashamed of serving in the military.

Some even served with the approval of Adolf Hitler himself.

These certificates basically said, you know,

I, Adolf Hitler, declare you of German blood.

How did they escape?

Extermination.

And how do they see their service now?

Josh Mankiewicz with Hiding in Plain Sight.

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From our studio in Rockefeller Center, here is Jane Pauley.

Good evening.

Maybe you're feeling a nagging unease about the world today,

a little more vulnerable than before.

Keep that in mind as you watch tonight's story

about the darkest days of World War II.

You know about the Holocaust and the millions sent to their deaths

and Hitler's final solution.

But what you may not know about is the thousands,

perhaps hundreds of thousands,

of German men with Jewish backgrounds

who were able to escape extermination

and how they did it by hiding from the Nazi killing machine.

But incredibly, hiding in plain sight.

Here's Josh Mankiewicz.

I was afraid for every minute from them.

I was suspicious for every move from them.

I thought that behind me somebody's going to kill me.

He's Jewish.

But during World War II,

Nehemia Verma not only wore a German army uniform,

he helped feed and supply German soldiers.

Not because he sympathized with them,

but simply to survive.

Any sense of guilt about that?

That you're sort of, you know,

working with the same army that wanted to exterminate you?

The best hiding place was in the mouth of the wolf.

And Verma wasn't alone.

He was also a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

He was a soldier.

It didn't surprise you to learn that while Adolf Hitler

was working toward the domination of Europe

and the extermination of the Jews,

thousands of young men of Jewish descent

were serving in the Fuhrer's armed forces.

How many of the other German boys in the army

knew that your mother was a Jew?

In the army, nobody knew.

You didn't tell anyone?

No.

The irony is stunning.

Even as millions of Jews were falling in concentration camps,

some soldiers who were Jewish by Nazi standards

became decorated and distinguished German heroes.

And incredibly, thousands of partial Jews served with Adolf Hitler's personal blessing.

It's totally shocking.

In fact, when I began this research, I didn't even believe that this was possible.

It's an unusual chapter in Holocaust history that might not have been publicized

without the fervent, if not obsessive, work of a rather unusual historian.

Brian Mark Rigg isn't a grandchild of survivors or an established Holocaust historian.

In fact, he's an earnest, 31-year-old former Marine

who had no real interest in the Holocaust

before visiting Germany the summer after his freshman year at Yale.

It's such a beautiful place,

and it was an event of unimaginable evil that took place here.

We spoke with Brian Rigg at the place where the details of Hitler's final solution

were agreed on by the Fuhrer's senior counselors,

the infamous Wannsee Villa in Berlin,

a city that's also the birthplace of Brian Rigg,

and where Rigg's search for the truth

about the overlap between German Jews and the German army.

I was here in Berlin in 1992 learning German,

and I asked one of my instructors if he could recommend a film I could watch

to improve my German,

and he told me that I should go see the film Europa Europa.

The film is based on the true story of a German Jew

who survived the war by working for the German army

and hiding his real identity.

In the theater,

Rigg met an older man who told him he had lived a similar life,

and Rigg wondered if there were more like him.

After four years of crisscrossing Germany by bicycle and train,

Rigg says he found 430 former soldiers

and documented thousands more who were both German and of Jewish descent.

It's an enormous piece of work that has to be respected.

Michael Berenbaum is a distinguished Holocaust scholar,

one of several professors,

who warned Brian Rigg not to waste his time

trying to find these soldiers.

He says he was happy to be proven wrong.

It's the triumph of perseverance.

Without perseverance, this could not have been done.

He surprised you?

It shocked me.

Rigg went on to get a doctorate from Cambridge University

and to write a book called Hitler's Jewish Soldiers.

That's where the research ends and the controversy begins.

It strikes me that in a way that's a little bit of a misnomer.

Some of them didn't consider themselves Hitler's soldiers,

and a lot of them didn't consider themselves Jewish.

So the reason why I named my book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

was Hitler thought of these people as Jewish,

and they were only his Jewish soldiers.

The provocative title has provoked a response,

even from his friends.

To call these people Hitler's Jewish soldiers

is A, to presume a Nazi definition of who is Jewish,

namely to do it not by the religion,

but by the religion of Hitler.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

That's a good thing.

by the identity we affirm, but the accident of the blood that we have within it.

That's a Nazi definition.

The Nazis referred to children of mixed marriages as half-Jews or quarter-Jews,

or used the collective term Mischlinge.

Mischlinge is a horrible term. It means bastard, mutt, hybrid.

And nowadays it's used for dogs of mixed breed, mutts.

It just shows you the connotation behind the word that the Nazis used for these people.

And by using that Nazi definition, Rigg has come up with a jaw-dropping estimate

that has caught the attention of historians worldwide.

I estimate that 150,000 Mischlinge soldiers served during the Third Reich.

If true, that would represent less than 1% of the German armed forces.

And several Holocaust scholars say even that estimate of 150,000 Mischlinge soldiers is way too high.

Rigg says he bases his estimate on birth and mixed marriage

in the United States.

But his larger point is that their existence in the German military,

no matter what the number, is in itself significant.

How could it have been that the Nazi party, so committed to eliminating Jews,

not just from here in Germany, but elsewhere in Europe as well,

would allow half-Jews or people with one Jewish grandparent to serve in the German army?

I think on the one hand, Hitler allowed these men to serve

because he did not want to deny the Wehrmacht so many potential soldiers.

So the Fuhrer's desire to...

to field an army was stronger than his hatred for Jews?

Well, that might have been one reason.

But it's very difficult to find rational explanations for Hitler's behavior.

Just as hard to explain is why anyone of Jewish descent would have wanted to serve.

In fact, at the outset of the war, men the Nazis called half-Jews were drafted.

They had to serve.

Not in the Gestapo or the SS, both filled with true believer Nazis

charged with enforcing Hitler's racial policies, but in the regular armed forces.

Some served in the Gestapo or the SS, but not in the Gestapo.

Some served as a way of hiding themselves, some as a way of protecting their families.

And for some, it was simply an extension of the life they had led before the war.

This was the first concentration camp the Germans built, Dachau, outside Munich in 1933.

Today, large portions of the camp stand relatively undisturbed,

both as a memorial and as a lesson.

And to understand the lesson of what happened here,

you also have to understand that long before it was fatal to be a Jew and German,

it was an inconvenience, an obstacle to a successful life.

And that's why many Jews and partial Jews did everything they could

to keep their religious background a secret.

Today, Friedemann Lichtwitz is 83.

His father was a Jew who went to synagogue on Friday nights.

Friedemann never went with him.

Like his mother, he was raised as a Christian.

You didn't like being called Jewish.

Yes, you were persecuted and you couldn't say anything.

You had to keep it hidden that you were a half-Jew.

Half-Jew as they called it.

And that was not pleasant.

Hans Geert Falkenberg, also raised Protestant,

remembers having a chip on his shoulder about being called a half-Jew.

If a 10-year-old boy or 11-year-old boy is told in biology by a teacher

that the Aryan race is the most wonderful race

and the Jewish race is minor

and the Jewish race is minor,

and the Jewish race is minor,

and the Jewish race is minor,

The most terrible things are mixed up people.

So from that moment on, I tried to behave differently to prove that I was not minor.

You weren't raised Jewish, you didn't feel Jewish, but you knew that teacher was talking

about you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But in 1935, life in Germany changed, not just for Jews, but for people of partial Jewish

descent as well.

That's when Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws, which not only redefined what a Jew was, but

also severely restricted the ability of Jews to work and function in society.

Though many saw Hitler and the Nazi Party as a political fad that wouldn't last, Jews

who could afford to began fleeing Germany in large numbers.

For those who couldn't get out, life was turning bleak.

By 1939, Jews were being corralled in ghettos.

Deported to concentration camps.

Because they'd been drafted, many young men could only watch as their Jewish relatives

left Germany.

They had no choice but to stay and fight.

I went into the army at the first day of the war, yes, on the 26th of August, 39.

What would have happened if you hadn't gone in the army?

What would have happened if you'd left the country?

I would have been deserted.

So that was an easy choice?

There was no other choice at that moment.

As they started joining the German army, Hitler began to struggle.

The German army in the late 1930s, the soldiers the Nazis called Mischlinge were filled

with dread, terrified both of the men they were fighting against and the ones they were

fighting next to.

Would life in the army protect these men from the terror that was about to roll across

Europe?

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A day's event.

The last blast dance.

A moment of truth for two people torn apart by a lie.

Is there any chance that you can forgive me?

Days of our lives.

It was the fall of 1939.

Hitler had invaded Poland.

World War II was underway.

And the German armed forces desperately needed soldiers.

Millions of Americans.

And the police.

And the soldiers.

And the police.

And the soldiers.

And the soldiers.

And the soldiers.

And the soldiers.

And the soldiers.

And the soldiers.

and the german armed forces desperately needed soldiers millions of young germans had been

drafted including as in the past tens of thousands of men of jewish descent being a transport driver

was a very brilliant job there was no question geert falkenberg was part of the german forces

that invaded france in 1940 his family including his jewish father had fled to england did you

ever think of deserting and trying to join them probably i had the idea but i couldn't do it how

you know europe was fascistic so it was safer to just stay in the army certainly it was this

the safest thing was to stay in the army no question in the german army i was in a pretty

good situation people were not persecuted it was a good bunch of guys i felt comfortable there

but

these soldiers felt safe their jewish family members did not as historian brian rigg found

out there were many complaints from soldiers about how their jewish relatives were being treated at

home many of these men were coming home from the battlefronts and they were finding that their

families were being severely persecuted dad lost his job mom was being spit on in the street many

of these men went to their commanders and said hey look i've served this country honorably i have the

iron cross and look how they're treating my family it may have been due to those complaints or it may

be that adolf hitler simply decided he no longer wanted half jews in his army whatever the reason

in april 1940 hitler ordered all of them expelled from the armed forces and with his words the idea

that military service could protect the michelin soldiers or their families instantly vanished now

the only lawful way to remain in the military was through a loophole offered by the fuhrer himself

in the third reich it was actually possible to apply for a legal exemption

from being jewish partially jewish soldiers flooded the fuhrer's office with applications

and remarkably hitler reviewed thousands of them personally while the issue of exemptions

has been known by historians for a long time it was brian rigg who brought to light the extent

of adolf hitler's involvement every application that came in he wanted photographs front and side

shots of these men because he wanted to see how they looked you know physically

did they have a big nose big ears or did they have blonde hair and blue eyes

eyes.

Hitler actually wrote special permissions for individual soldiers?

He had his Secretary of State, you know, formulate the legal language, but then he would sign

off on them.

And these certificates basically said, you know, I, Adolf Hitler, declare you of German

blood, according to the racial laws, and sign it.

And that's how a handful of men of Jewish descent were allowed to stay in uniform and

even rise through the ranks.

One even became a field marshal, the equivalent of a U.S. five-star general.

Without an exemption, most of the so-called Michelinga were kicked out of the armed services

by the end of 1940.

With the stroke of a pen, battlefield heroes had been marked for their eventual extermination.

Geert Falkenberg never had a chance to apply for an exemption before it was too late.

He was put up for promotion.

But the paperwork that promotion triggered meant his secret, that his father was Jewish,

would be discovered.

And I said, Captain So-and-so, please stop it.

It's impossible.

I am half-Jewish, so I cannot become an officer.

And it was too late already.

He had done this.

How long after he put in your papers were you dismissed?

That went quick.

Those who couldn't get an exemption had to figure out how to beat the system or just

hope they wouldn't be found out.

Arno Spitz managed to get promoted, perhaps because he was such an accomplished soldier.

Spitz, a paratrooper, won three medals for bravery.

He was a veteran in close combat.

Unusual for a man who, because of his Jewish father, could easily have been in a concentration

camp instead of in the army.

You were, by almost any standard, a first-rate soldier.

In my heart, I was not a soldier.

In your heart, you may not have been a soldier, but on the battlefield, you were a soldier.

Yes.

I sort of get the feeling that the Fuhrer and those around him would have described

you as a hard-working, dedicated, accomplished soldier, somebody they'd be proud of.

There is a great latitude between admiration for Hitler and serving in the German army.

So you were fighting not for the Nazis, but for Germany?

Sure.

Even though Germany was controlled by the Nazis?

Yeah.

There's a difference?

There is a difference.

It's a thin distinction, but not an uncommon one.

In numerous cases Brian Rigg documented, German officers knew full well that their men were

Jewish or partially Jewish.

He did nothing about it.

There's many men that have said to me, you know, I went to my commander, I told him I

was half-Jewish, and the commander said, hey, don't do too much, don't do too little, and

you're safe by me.

You're protected.

I could care less about your ancestry.

For me, you're a German soldier, you're a loyal comrade, and that's all I care about.

So the U.S. military wasn't the first place to come up with a don't ask, don't tell policy.

That's correct.

Yeah.

Consider the extraordinary story of Nehemia Vermin, a Polish Jew.

He was sent to a labor camp in 1944.

His father was executed there.

Vermin managed to escape, once from the labor camp and again from the German military police

that arrested him days later.

He ran east, hoping to find the Russian army on the other side of the front.

So finally, I came to a place, a burned-down village.

I saw Germans, German soldiers.

If I will escape, they will see somebody running away, they could kill me.

But he didn't.

Instead, he walked straight into the camp.

And by the end of the day, Vermin had become Marion Schmidt, assistant chef for the German

72nd Infantry Battalion.

At night, he bunked with a supply officer, who gave him better food than the soldiers

were eating, and who soon decided his new chef should look the part.

He took me in, and he gave me a German uniform, completely, with a swastika, with a belt,

like a German soldier.

With a head.

With boots.

I looked in the mirror, I said, how could a Jewish boy look like, you know, wearing

an uniform from the beasts?

You were wearing the uniform of the army that had killed your father?

That's correct.

Your mother?

Yes.

And you were thinking, I'm lucky to have it.

Not I was lucky to have the uniform, but I was lucky that I'm alive.

One night, the supply officer called Vermin over.

He said to me, Marion.

Yes?

Are you a Jew?

I didn't answer him.

He said, I know exactly that you are Jewish, but don't be afraid.

So long as I live, you live.

I didn't open my mouth to say yes or no, nothing.

Because you're still not sure that if you say yes, maybe he's going to shoot me.

But nothing happened, and that's, I went back to sleep.

Nehemia Vermin, a Jew, had survived discovery.

Yes.

He was not better off than many of the so-called Mischlinga back in Germany, because the war

had begun to turn on Adolf Hitler, and he'd already begun turning on them.

From the creator of Law and Order.

He would torture me, take me somewhere to the forest.

Crime and Punishment, a real-life Law and Order.

I'm going to kill her, and nobody's ever going to find her body.

No actors, no scripts.

He thinks he got away with murder.

And while they were having sex, he would strangle her.

He would see her dead.

He's capable of killing me.

Everything you see is real.

You're a selfish little punk.

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By 1944, the war was going badly for Germany.

Its armed forces had been driven back on the Eastern Front.

Italy's dictator Mussolini had capitulated, and the Allies were landing on the French

coast.

Hitler needed lots of men.

Any men.

Suddenly, the men the Nazis called Mischlinge found themselves wanted again.

Only this time it wasn't for military service.

It was for a network of forced labor camps.

Geert Falkenberg was called up.

He'd been told he was joining a special army-like unit.

But when he arrived, he looked around and saw not other soldiers, but...

Criminals.

Some people who were not, could not do any military service anymore.

With some half-Jewish people.

With some gypsies.

And with some homosexuals.

You're describing to me a group of people.

All of them.

All of whom were being persecuted in different ways by the Nazis.

And all of whom were unacceptable to serve in the army.

Yes.

We went to this forced labor camp and did our job.

But after a few weeks, we started to realize that something is not right here.

They were treating us more harshly.

Eventually it got so bad, I knew I needed to escape.

Friedemann Lichtwitz did escape.

But soon he was caught.

And then he was brought here.

The former hard-working radio artillery man was now a prisoner at Dachau.

A concentration camp where, by the end of the war, an estimated 32,000 people had been killed.

What was it like for you to start the war, serving in the army, and end it here at Dachau?

I can't say.

I don't know how to answer that.

From this camp, there would be no escape.

And it's debatable whether the living were better off than the dead.

Basically, you just had to, you know, plan with his comrades in the bed how they were going to sleep.

Because you had six people up here.

And so they say, hey, okay, I'll lean on my left side, you're on your left side.

And they'd have to stay that way the entire night.

Six per bed.

Six per bed.

In the end, soldiers like Friedemann Lichtwitz, no matter how loyally they'd serve Germany,

were, in the eyes of the Nazis, just Jews to be exterminated.

Lichtwitz began the war as a soldier.

He ended it as a Holocaust survivor.

And other survivors will easily identify with his experience.

But how will the other Mischling soldiers be viewed?

As victims?

Or villains?

Brian Rigg, who in the course of his research discovered Jewish ancestry of his own,

says he knows this will be a difficult story for some people to hear.

Because the story of Hitler's Jewish soldiers blurs what was to some a clear image of the past.

The Third Reich.

The Third Reich and Hitler and so on, it's not all black and white.

Not everybody of Jewish descent was exterminated in the death camps.

And not every German soldier serving in the army of the Third Reich was a Nazi, as we use that term today.

There are going to be people in this audience tonight who, when they hear you say things like,

the Third Reich is not black and white, what they hear is,

which means they weren't all bad and the Holocaust didn't happen.

No. Absolutely not.

The Holocaust did happen.

My research, I think, sheds new light on the Holocaust.

Just how crazy, how corrupt, how bankrupt these Nazi laws were, but how deadly they also were.

And how they affected hundreds of thousands of people who the Nazis called Jews,

but they themselves would not have called themselves Jewish or Jews.

And that's also quite tragic.

The question is, will the book serve a noble purpose or will it be misused by haters who will now claim,

you see, the Jews were part of the Nazi equation.

That's the great fear.

Rabbi Marvin Heyer is dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,

a Jewish human rights agency.

Should this research, or could it, lead people to sort of reevaluate their conclusions about the Holocaust?

I think that this book, look, the book could be used by revisionists.

The revisionists will turn around and say,

you see, there were 150,000 Jews that served the Nazis.

That would be preposterous.

The explosive issue is whether Rigg's research encourages people to think that Jewish soldiers killed other Jews.

Brian Rigg didn't document any examples of that.

But Helmut Kopp, who'd been raised Jewish and was using the army as a place to hide,

certainly received a hostile reaction right after the war at the immigration office when he was trying to leave Germany.

A man about 10 or 15 years older than me came in and said,

I heard you were in the German army.

I said, yes.

What was I supposed to do?

Either go to the camps or falsify documents and go along?

I never killed a Jew with a weapon in my hand.

And he said, from the looks of you, you would kill the first Jew who comes through that door.

He called me an anti-Semite.

I was very much hurt when my daughter thought that by belonging to the German Wehrmacht,

I had somehow participated in the crime.

I had committed crimes against Jewish people.

And this is definitely not so.

A lot of Jews will tell you that the Nazis could never have achieved the power they had

or held the power they had or done the things they did without the cooperation of the military.

That's right.

That's right.

Still, that does not mean that the military and the Nazism was identical.

We're identical.

No.

Spitz, like many of the Michelin soldiers Brian Rigg interviewed,

insisted he didn't know what was really happening to the Jews until after the war.

Helmut Kopp says he did know, but couldn't say anything.

I couldn't.

It would have been open with my comrades if they would know I was a half-Jew.

They would have turned on me.

They wouldn't have said I was a friend anymore.

Do you think the former soldiers who say they had no idea what was going on with the Jews,

do you think they're telling the truth?

Nein.

They knew.

If they're saying that now, it's just to protect themselves.

Geert Falkenberg.

Falkenberg, fighting in France, actually got letters from his Jewish grandmother telling him what was happening.

In those letters, she wrote what she expected.

And that was so terrible that I didn't believe it.

I couldn't believe it.

His grandmother died in a concentration camp.

You feel guilty about what you did?

I feel guilty

about what I didn't do.

I didn't try to save my grandmother.

I didn't have the idea.

I can tell you that I had no money, no connections, all that.

That's not what I mean.

I mean to go there to try to get her and to push her about the Swiss war also.

That is what I should have done.

But Falkenberg is a rare example.

Few of these old soldiers have any regrets about the war.

Or their role in it.

In part because of that famous German sense of duty.

In part because many feel they don't need to apologize for donning the uniform of evil in order to survive.

When you talk to people today and they ask you what you did during World War II, you tell them.

Well, sure.

I didn't, I didn't have to, I didn't do anything that is a crime.

You lost members of your own family to the Nazis.

Yeah.

My aunt, my cousins were sent off to Riga in 1941.

And they were all murdered.

And during that time you were still fighting for the same army that was supporting the man who was killing them.

From today's point of view you can't understand that then you didn't think about the Fuhrer or the nation.

I thought only about myself.

That either my tank or something will be hit and then I'll be gone anyway.

Or I'll make it through.

You're 80 years old.

When you look back.

Are you ashamed of what you did?

Nein.

I never was ideologically on the side of the Nazis.

As we say today, I only did my job.

I've been sent to the concentration camp.

I don't really know if I'd be alive today.

Despite what happened to their families at the hands of the Nazis, Helmut Kopp, Gerd Falkenberg and a number of these former soldiers stayed on in Germany.

When asked why, Falkenberg said he felt in some way he owed his survival to a handful of Germans.

And wanted to be with them and help them rebuild.

To read an excerpt from Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, you can log onto our website.

The address is dateline.msnbc.com.

Still ahead, 27 years after the murder of Martha Moxley, how did these jurors find Michael Skakel guilty?

The most important piece was anything that Michael Skakel himself said.

He literally, for me, clinched the deal of his guilt.

What were the jurors thinking? And what are they saying now?

Eichner to serve. What's he doing?

He may be tired and trying to stall. He's been getting punished all day.

I wonder what's going on.

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Monday on NBC Nightly News.

The sounds of silence.

Is all this baby hears.

But now.

Jacob.

An extraordinary breakthrough.

They tell you it's not a miracle, but it's as close as you can get.

A remarkable new way to help tens of thousands who can't hear break the silence.

NBC Nightly News Monday.

NBC Monday.

Discover the number one new crime drama crossing Jordan.

Who killed a senator's daughter?

She had all these drugs in her system?

No defensive wounds.

All the clues point to one place.

Stacey died in her own house.

But there was one problem.

Getting rid of the body.

She was still alive.

Crossing Jordan.

NBC Monday.

Here again is Jane Pauley.

After nearly 27 years of rumor and suspicion, Michael Skakel was found guilty Friday of the murder of his young neighbor, Martha Moxley.

Given the hurdles facing prosecutors, a case more than two decades old with no eyewitnesses and no forensic evidence directly linking Skakel to the crime.

How did jurors reach their decision?

Four of them spoke with Chris Hansen.

After you had reached the verdict, describe for me the feeling in your stomach when you walked into the courtroom.

Never been in a more uncomfortable, dissatisfying, unsatisfying, emotional moment in my entire life.

I felt tremendous sorrow for Michael Skakel.

And had difficulty keeping my composure for a moment.

It was such an intense moment.

It was almost a terrifying moment.

Because even after you rendered the verdict, and then defense attorney Michael Sherman says, I want to poll the jury.

Right.

And goes from person to person, is that and was that your verdict?

Right.

And you have to stand up on your own, all alone.

I didn't know we had to do that.

That was very frightening.

And answer the question.

Right.

My knees were knocking.

Did you look at Michael Skakel?

He was very composed.

The moment that I caught him, he was very composed.

He looked very red in the face, and I'm sure very emotional.

But he was keeping it together.

I didn't think he registered much of anything.

He said he'd like to make a statement, and the judge would not allow him to make a statement.

I thought his tone had some anger to it then.

Did he look like he was taken off guard here?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

I don't think he expected to be...

Convicted.

Convicted, yes.

I want to ask each one of you what the most critical testimony was for you.

It really was the sum of all the different pieces and the length of time and the conscience of guilt that was shown over a period of time.

There was no direct physical evidence in this case.

That is correct.

Did that bother you?

Yes.

It made it tougher for us to make a decision.

No fingerprint.

Right.

No blood.

Right.

No DNA.

Right.

There was a lot of testimony about drug and alcohol abuse.

Do you think it's possible that maybe even Michael Skakel doesn't really know exactly what happened the night Martha Moxley was killed?

It's possible.

I've thought about that.

The thing that convinced me that he does really know he's done this crime is that he went to great pains to try and cover it up in his own book that we heard the testimony of the ghostwriter.

If he really wasn't sure, I don't think he ever would have made those confessions to various people throughout his life, and I don't think he would have been so concerned about covering his tracks.

On at least 12 different occasions, according to testimony, he made some statement about the killing that could be construed as a confession.

The prosecution, I think, made a valid point.

And I think it was one that we considered.

When he used several times the phrase consciousness of guilt.

Consciousness of guilt.

Yes.

And that which leads people, they just can't hold it in.

They just can't stop talking about it.

And I thought that was a valid point.

The defense argued that the so-called confessions that occurred at the Elan school weren't valid because they could have been correct.

Right.

They could have been coerced.

When he actually spoke to people was in quiet moments when it was just two people alone, when he was under no threat of any kind of punishment.

In the end, did Michael Skakel damn himself with his own words?

Yes.

Personally, that was my opinion, yes.

It was part of it.

I believe that if he'd never said a word from 1978 to 1998, we would never have gone to trial.

This was a brutal killing.

Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club, stabbed through the neck with the golf club.

Is this something that a 15-year-old kid is capable of doing?

You know, when you look at the piece of the golf club, it's hollow inside.

And it is entirely possible for it to break in motion that way, yes.

And he was an athlete.

There was testimony that he was the best athlete in town, in the neighborhood.

And very strong.

So, yes, it could be done.

It was really telling that the handle to the golf club, which had the Skakel name on it, was missing.

So the part of the golf club, which was the murder weapon, that actually had the Skakel name on it, was missing?

Right.

Yes.

Never retrieved.

Never been found.

To you, that says what?

Somebody took it away.

Somebody hid it.

Yeah.

Somebody hid it.

But prior to hearing the closing statements from the prosecutor and the defense lawyer, what was your take on this case?

It was still undecided.

I was decided before the closing argument.

Guilty or not guilty?

Guilty.

How important was the prosecutor's closing argument?

It was a great roadmap.

And it was a great tying together of a lot of different pieces.

Michael Sherman, the defense lawyer, is no slouch.

He's very articulate.

Did he create any reasonable doubt in your mind?

I think he underestimated the jury.

Really?

My personal feeling.

I think on a number of occasions, frequently, he would repeat something that was objected to.

But by virtue of having it repeated several times, I think he thought we'd take it as fact.

And I didn't think that was a good tactic.

But was there a sense in the jury room that this guy, this Kennedy relative, had gotten away with this for 27 years because his family had money and he was connected to the Kennedys?

No.

Absolutely not.

No.

Not at all?

No.

Never ever came up?

I would say not in the jury room.

I have to say that for the last 24 hours since I've had time to think about it, I believe that in 1975 when the crime was committed, the family, both the Kennedys and the Skittles, were not involved in it.

Both the Kennedys and the Skittles had a lot more influence in Greenwich than they do today.

Is this a case where he just couldn't control his guilty conscience?

That's what my opinion is on this.

Yes.

And I got that from during the trial.

I felt that way all along.

Anything he said somehow pointed to the fact that he's admitting it in some way.

Guilty conscience and also, I think, a little hubris.

I think he still had the idea that he was somehow...

Not like the rest of us.

I'm wealthy.

I'm powerful.

Kennedy relative?

I'm just beyond being caught.

You're never going to get that far.

How would you describe Michael Skakel?

You mean the current Michael Skakel or the Michael Skakel on the whole as a human being?

As a human being.

I would describe him as a person who had a very unfortunate childhood, who really didn't have the parental love and the love of his family.

The parental love and direction and support and discipline that we are all entitled to, to grow up with.

What would the appropriate sentence be for Michael Skakel?

It's so hard to answer a question like that extemporaneously and off the top of my head.

I thought about it a little bit.

I guess the fact that he was 15 years old at this point might come into play.

The Moxley family should have some say in this matter.

And from what I understand, they're allowed to speak at the sentencing hearing.

They are.

I've heard John Moxley say he'd like them to get 27 years for the length of time it's taken to get there.

Perhaps that's appropriate.

Did you feel that you formed some kind of an emotional bond with Martha Moxley's mother?

I did not, no.

It was completely avoided.

You felt sympathy for both families.

It's a tragedy for everybody, and it wasn't something where we were trying to, at least to my mind,

we weren't trying to right a wrong by finding someone as a scapegoat.

We did what the judge asked us to do.

I agree with that completely.

I believe that we were very methodical, very fact-based, and didn't really think about that.

Closure for Dorothy Moxley, I'm glad she's had her closure.

I'm glad we were able to reach a decision, but it really wasn't about her.

It was about the evidence we saw.

Coming up on Dateline Tuesday.

Hello.

Love you.

We're glad we're free.

They were rescued by American troops and welcomed home as heroes.

Two young aid workers held for three long months as prisoners of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Now there are new questions about their mission.

Why not just be really clear and upfront about it?

A mother's heartache.

Let me just recover.

A daughter's faith.

Who's going there to tell them God loves you?

I believe that there are some things worth living and dying for.

And next, cream of the crop.

Can't get it fast enough, huh?

Or not so hot.

Who makes the best-tasting ice cream?

A Dateline Consumer Reports exclusive.

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NBC Sundays this Wednesday.

This fall, a new drama with a unique storytelling style.

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All of them leading you to the truth.

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Boomtown.

NBC this fall.

Shaq put on a show as the Lakers moved one step closer to another title.

Now Jason Kidd and the Nets must come through at home.

Coming up next on NBC.

How much ice cream do you have a year?

More?

Or less than the average American eats?

Well, how much do Americans eat on average?

How about five gallons each?

We are a nation of ice cream lovers.

And we have dozens of brands of ice cream to choose from at the supermarket.

Is one the best?

Tonight, chief consumer correspondent Lee Thompson lets us in on one of summer's best-tasting secrets.

In a Dateline Consumer Reports exclusive.

I'm your ice cream man.

Stab me when I'm passing by.

On my, my, I'm your ice cream man.

Stab me when I'm passing by.

Most of us would probably describe ice cream like this.

Delicious.

But at the lab, the definition is not so simple.

It's actually a suspension of liquids and fats and ice crystals in a semi-solid form that melts in your mouth.

Tasting ice cream is a science at Consumer Reports,

where earlier this year Erin Godot led an ice cream study.

We don't go by yuck.

We don't go by yum.

We go by does it meet the criteria that we're looking for.

That no-nonsense approach to ice cream has been a tradition at Consumer Reports for more than 60 years.

And this year, Dateline has the inside scoop.

But first, meet members of the ice cream team who demonstrated the taste test for us.

When they reported for duty, the tasters had been carefully trained

to recognize the taste and textures of ice cream.

Then they each spent hours scrutinizing spoonful after spoonful after spoonful of the stuff.

Their mission?

Find the best of 40 brands of vanilla, chocolate, and butter pecan ice cream.

The lowest rated of these ice creams is still not anything you would spit out.

This is ice cream.

But spit they did because tasters can't be fettered by satiation.

Nor should they be wooed.

They're wooed by attractively rounded scoops.

Instead, the ice cream was cut into unidentifiable blocks.

And to avoid tainting taste buds with kitchen smells,

the ice cream was served through negative airflow doors.

The tasters filled out ballots rating a variety of criteria

from flavor intensity to sweetness on a scale of 1 to 15.

Right away, they noticed texture.

Does it feel dense?

Does it feel creamy smooth?

Is it icy?

When the ice cream begins to melt,

the delightful details of flavor emerge.

There may be a what we call woodiness, nuttiness,

a slight pruney dried fruit type note.

That's vanilla she's describing, if you couldn't tell.

But do those subtleties really matter to the average ice cream eater?

Godot says yes.

Even if you can't describe the particulars,

you know a good one when you taste it.

Among the highest-rated ice creams,

Consumer Reports found a pattern.

They all have twice the fat of most ice creams,

and their ingredients are simple.

Eggs, cream, sugar.

The three vanilla ice creams Consumer Reports rank excellent are

Ben & Jerry's, Haagen-Dazs, and Dreamery by Edie's or Dreyer's,

depending on where you live.

As for chocolate, Ben & Jerry's is reformulating,

so it wasn't included.

But Haagen-Dazs chocolate and for bittersweet chocolate lovers,

Godiva Belgian Dark both rank excellent.

Not as good news for butter pecan lovers.

None is buttery enough for these discerning taste buds.

Even the best rank only very good.

Haagen-Dazs, Breyers, and Dreyer's or Edie's Grand.

Consumer Reports also picked these best buys.

Although they rank only very good,

they are less than good.

They're less expensive and they contain less fat.

But when it comes to ice cream,

who worries about that?

For more information, log on to our website.

The address is dateline.msnbc.com.

That's all for this edition of Dateline Sunday.

We'll see you again for Dateline Tuesday at 10, 9 central.

I'm Jane Pauley.

For all of us at NBC News, good night.

Dateline is a presentation of NBC News.

More Americans watch NBC News than any other news organization in the world.

Tonight on Dateline.

It was such an intense moment, a terrifying moment.

27 years after the murder of young Martha Moxley.

Did you look at Michael Skakel?

How did the jury find Michael Skakel guilty?

Was there ever a point where you thought there would be a hung jury?

Chris Hansen learns what drove the jurors' painful decision

and what they're thinking now.

He kept his mouth shut all those years.

This trial never would have happened.

They were German soldiers, part of the Nazi killing machine.

They were also of Jewish descent.

You were wearing the uniform of the army that had killed your father?

That's correct.

Your mother?

Yes.

And there were tens of thousands of them.

You're not ashamed of serving in the military.

Some even served with the approval of Adolf Hitler himself.

These certificates basically said,

you know, I, Adolf Hitler,

declare you of German blood.

How did they escape extermination?

And how do they see their service now?

Josh Mankiewicz with Hiding in Plain Sight.

It's a tough job.

Mmm.

But somebody's got to do it.

Mmm.

And Consumer Records did.

They raided the freezer to rate your favorite ice creams,

searching for the best tasting of all.

We don't go by yuck.

We don't go by yum.

We go by, does it meet the criteria that we're looking for?

Lee Thompson with a Dateline Consumer Reports exclusive.

From our studio in Rockefeller Center,

here is Jane Pauley.

Good evening.

Maybe you're feeling a nagging unease about the world today,

a little more vulnerable than before.

Keep that in mind as you watch tonight's story

about the darkest days of World War II.

You know about the Holocaust and the millions sent to their deaths

and Hitler's final solution.

But what you may not know about is the thousands,

perhaps hundreds of thousands,

of German men with Jewish backgrounds

who were able to escape extermination

and how they did it by hiding from the Nazi killing machine,

but, incredibly, hiding in plain sight.

Here's Josh Mankiewicz.

I was afraid for every minute from them.

I was suspicious.

I was suspicious for every move from them.

I thought that behind me somebody's going to kill me.

He's Jewish, but during World War II,

Nehemia Verma not only wore a German army uniform,

he helped feed and supply German soldiers,

not because he sympathized with them,

but simply to survive.

Any sense of guilt about that,

that you're sort of, you know,

working with the same army that wanted to exterminate you?

The best hiding place

is in the mouth of the wolf.

And Verma wasn't alone.

It might surprise you to learn that while Adolf Hitler

was working toward the domination of Europe

and the extermination of the Jews,

thousands of young men of Jewish descent

were serving in the Fuhrer's armed forces.

How many of the other German boys in the army

knew that your mother was a Jew?

In the army, nobody knew.

You didn't tell anyone?

No.

The irony is stunning.

Even as millions of Jews were falling in concentration camps,

some soldiers who were Jewish by Nazi standards

became decorated and distinguished German heroes.

And incredibly, thousands of partial Jews

served with Adolf Hitler's personal blessing.

It's totally shocking.

In fact, when I began this research,

I didn't even believe that this was possible.

It's an unusual chapter in Holocaust history

that might not have been publicized

without the fervent, if not obsessive, work

of a rather unusual historian.

Brian Mark Rigg isn't a grandchild of survivors

or an established Holocaust scholar.

In fact, he's an earnest 31-year-old former Marine

who had no real interest in the Holocaust

before visiting Germany the summer after his freshman year at Yale.

It's such a beautiful place,

and it was an event of unimaginable evil that took place here.

We spoke with Brian Rigg at the place

where the details of Hitler's final solution

were agreed on by the Fuhrer's senior counselors,

the infamous Wannsee Villa in Berlin,

a city that's also the birthplace

of Brian Rigg's search for the truth

about the overlap between German Jews

and the German army.

I was here in Berlin in 1992 learning German,

and I asked one of my instructors

if he could recommend a film I could watch

to improve my German, and he told me

that I should go see the film Europa Europa.

The film is based

on the true story of a German Jew

who survived the war by working for the German army

and hiding his real identity.

In the theater, Rigg met an older man

who told him he had lived a similar life,

and Rigg wondered if there were more like him.

After four years of crisscrossing Germany

by bicycle and train,

Rigg says he found 430 former soldiers

and documented thousands more

who were both German and of Jewish descent.

It's an enormous piece of work

that has to be respected.

Michael Berenbaum is a distinguished Holocaust scholar,

one of several professors who warned Brian Rigg

not to waste his time trying to find these soldiers.

He says he was happy to be proven wrong.

It's the triumph of perseverance.

Without perseverance, this could not have been done.

He surprised you?

It shocked me.

Rigg went on to get a doctorate

from Cambridge University

and to write a book called Hitler's Jewish Soldiers.

That's where the research ends

and the controversy begins.

It strikes me that, in a way,

that's a little bit of a misnomer.

Some of them didn't consider themselves Hitler's soldiers,

and a lot of them didn't consider themselves Jewish.

So the reason why I named my book

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

was Hitler thought of these people as Jewish,

and they were only his Jewish soldiers.

The provocative title has provoked a response,

even from his friends.

To call these people Hitler's Jewish soldiers

is, A, to presume a Nazi definition of who is Jewish,

namely, to do it not by the religion we live,

by the identity we affirm,

but the accident of the blood that we have within it.

That's a Nazi definition.

The Nazis referred to children of mixed marriages

as half Jews or quarter Jews,

or used the collective term Mischlinge.

Mischlinge were...

It's a horrible term.

It means bastard, mutt, hybrid.

And the Nazi...

And nowadays it's used for dogs of mixed breed, mutts.

It just shows you the connotation behind the word

that the Nazis used for these people.

And by using that Nazi definition,

Rigg has come up with a jaw-dropping estimate

that has caught the attention of historians worldwide.

I estimate that 150,000 Mischlinge soldiers

served during the Third Reich.

If true, that would represent less than 1%

of the German armed forces.

And several Holocaust scholars say even that estimate

of 150,000 Mischlinge soldiers is way too high.

Rigg says he bases his estimate

on birth and mixed marriage records.

But his larger point is that their existence

in the German military, no matter what the number,

is in itself significant.

How could it have been that the Nazi party,

so committed to eliminating Jews,

not just from here in Germany but elsewhere in Europe as well,

would allow half-Jews or people with one Jewish grandparent

to serve in the German army?

I think on the one hand, Hitler allowed these men to serve

because he did not want to deny the Wehrmacht

so many potential soldiers.

So the Fuhrer's desire to field an army

was stronger than his hatred for Jews?

Well, that might have been one reason.

But it's very difficult to find rational explanations

for Hitler's behavior.

Just as hard to explain is why anyone of Jewish descent

would have wanted to serve.

In fact, at the outset of the war,

Nazis called half-Jews were drafted.

They had to serve.

Not in the Gestapo or the SS,

both filled with true-believer Nazis

charged with enforcing Hitler's racial policies,

but in the regular armed forces.

Some served as a way of hiding themselves.

Some as a way of protecting their families.

And for some, it was simply an extension

of the life they had led before the war.

This was the first concentration camp the Germans built,

Dachau, outside Munich in 1933.

Today, large portions of the camp stand relatively undisturbed,

both as a memorial and as a lesson.

And to understand the lesson of what happened here,

you also have to understand that long before it was fatal

to be a Jew in Germany, it was an inconvenience,

an obstacle to a successful life.

And that's why many Jews and partial Jews

did everything they could to keep their religious background a secret.

Today, Friedemann Lichtwitz is 83.

His father was a Jew who went to synagogue

on Friday nights.

Friedemann never went with him.

Like his mother, he was raised as a Christian.

You didn't like being called Jewish.

Yes, you were persecuted and you couldn't say anything.

You had to keep it hidden that you were a half-Jew,

as they called it.

And that was not pleasant.

Hans Geert Falkenberg, also raised Protestant,

remembers having a chip on his shoulder

about being called a half-Jew.

If a 10-year-old boy,

or 11-year-old boy,

is told in biology by a teacher

that the Aryan race is the most wonderful race

and the Jewish race is minor

and the most terrible things are mixed-up people.

So from that moment on,

I tried to behave differently

to prove

that I was not minor.

You weren't raised Jewish.

You didn't feel Jewish.

But you knew that teacher was talking about you.

Yeah, yeah.

But in 1935, life in Germany changed,

not just for Jews,

but for people of partial Jewish descent as well.

That's when Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws,

which not only redefined what a Jew was,

but also severely restricted the ability of Jews

to work and function in society.

Though many saw Hitler and the Nazis

as the only people

in the Nazi party

as a political fad that wouldn't last,

Jews who could afford to

began fleeing Germany in large numbers.

For those who couldn't get out,

life was turning bleak.

By 1939, Jews were being corralled in ghettos,

deported to concentration camps.

Because they'd been drafted,

many young men could only watch

as their Jewish relatives left Germany.

They had no choice but to stay and fight.

I went into the army

at the first day of the war.

Yes, on the 26th of August, 1939.

What would have happened

if you hadn't gone in the army?

What would have happened

if you'd left the country?

I would have been deserted.

So that was an easy choice?

There was no other choice at that moment.

As they started joining the German army

in the late 1930s,

the soldiers the Nazis called Mischlinge

were filled with dread,

terrified both of the men they were fighting against

and the ones they were fighting next to.

Would life in the army

protect these men from the terror

that was about to roll across Europe?

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A day's event. The last blast dance.

A moment of truth for two people torn apart by a lie.

Is there any chance that you can forgive me?

Days of our lives.

It was the fall of 1939.

Hitler had invaded Poland.

World War II was underway.

And the German armed forces desperately needed soldiers.

Millions of young Germans had been drafted, including, as in the past,

tens of thousands of men of Jewish descent.

Being a transport driver

was

a very brilliant job.

That was no question.

Geert Falkenberg was part of the German forces that invaded France in 1940.

His family, including his Jewish father, had fled to England.

Did you ever think of deserting and trying to join them?

Probably I had the idea.

But I couldn't do it. How?

You know, Europe was fascistic.

So it was safer to just stay in the army?

Yeah, certainly.

The safest thing was to stay in the army.

No question.

In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation.

People were not persecuted.

It was a good bunch of guys.

I felt comfortable there.

But if these soldiers felt safe, their Jewish family members did not.

As historian Brian Rigg found out,

there were many complaints from soldiers

about how their Jewish relatives were being treated at home.

Many of these men were coming home from the battlefronts,

and they were finding that their families were being severely persecuted.

You know, dad lost his job, mom was being spit on in the street.

Many of these men went to their commanders and said,

hey, look, I've served this country honorably, I have the Iron Cross,

and look how they're treating my family.

It may have been due to those complaints,

or it may be that Adolf Hitler simply decided

he no longer wanted half Jews in his army.

Whatever the reason, in April 1940,

Hitler ordered all of them expelled from the armed forces.

And with his words, the idea that military service

could protect the Michelin soldiers or their families instantly vanished.

Now the only lawful way to remain in the military

was through a loophole offered by the Fuhrer himself.

In the Third Reich, it was actually possible

to apply for a legal exemption from being Jewish.

Partially Jewish soldiers flooded the Fuhrer's office with applications.

And remarkably, Hitler reviewed thousands of them personally.

While the issue of exemptions has been known by historians

for a long time, it was Brian Rigg who brought to light

the extent of Adolf Hitler's involvement.

Every application that came in, he wanted photographs,

front and side shots of these men,

because he wanted to see how they looked physically.

Did they have a big nose, big ears,

or did they have blonde hair and blue eyes?

Hitler actually wrote special permissions for individual soldiers?

He had his Secretary of State formulate the legal language,

but then he would sign off on them.

And these certificates basically said,

you know, I, Adolf Hitler,

you of German blood, according to the racial laws,

and sign it.

And that's how a handful of men of Jewish descent

were allowed to stay in uniform and even rise through the ranks.

One even became a field marshal,

the equivalent of a U.S. five-star general.

Without an exemption, most of the so-called Mischlinge

were kicked out of the armed services by the end of 1940.

With the stroke of a pen,

battlefield heroes had been marked for their eventual extermination.

Geert Falkenberg never had a chance

to apply for an exemption before it was too late.

He was put up for promotion,

but the paperwork that promotion triggered

meant his secret, that his father was Jewish,

would be discovered.

And I said, Captain So-and-so, please stop it.

It's impossible.

I am half Jewish, so I cannot become an officer.

And it was too late already. He had done this.

How long after he put in your papers were you dismissed?

Hmm. That went quick.

Those who couldn't get an exemption

had to figure out how to beat the system

or just hope they wouldn't be found out.

Arno Spitz managed to get promoted,

perhaps because he was such an accomplished soldier.

Spitz, a paratrooper, won three medals for bravery and close combat,

unusual for a man who, because of his Jewish father,

could easily have been in a concentration camp

instead of in the army.

You were, by almost any standard,

a first-rate soldier.

In my heart, I was not a soldier.

In your heart, you may not have been a soldier,

but on the battlefield, you were a soldier.

Yes.

I sort of get the feeling that the Fuhrer

and those around him would have described you

as a hard-working, dedicated, accomplished soldier,

somebody they'd be proud of.

No.

There is a great latitude between,

between admiration for Hitler

and serving in the German army.

So you were fighting not for the Nazis,

but for Germany.

Sure.

Even though Germany was controlled by the Nazis.

Yeah.

There's a difference.

There is a difference.

It's a thin distinction, but not an uncommon one.

In numerous cases Brian Rigg documented,

German officers knew full well

that their men were Jewish or partially Jewish

and did nothing about it.

There's many men that have said to me,

you know, I went to my commander,

I told him I was half Jewish,

and the commander said,

hey, don't do too much, don't do too little,

and you're safe by me.

You're protected.

I could care less about your ancestry.

For me, you're a German soldier,

you're a loyal comrade,

and that's all I care about.

So the U.S. military wasn't the first place

to come up with a don't ask, don't tell policy.

That's correct, yeah.

Consider the extraordinary story of Nehemia Vermin.

A Polish Jew, he was sent to a labor camp in 1944.

His father was executed there.

Vermin managed to escape,

once from the labor camp

and again from the German military police

that arrested him days later.

He ran east, hoping to find the Russian army

on the other side of the front.

So finally, I came to a place,

a burned-down village.

I saw Germans, German soldiers.

If I will escape,

they will see somebody running away,

they could kill me.

Instead, he walked straight into the camp,

and by the end of the day,

Vermin had become Marion Schmidt,

assistant chef for the German 72nd Infantry Battalion.

At night, he bunked with a supplier

officer, who gave him better food

than the soldiers were eating,

and who soon decided his new chef

should look the part.

He took me in,

and he gave me a German uniform,

completely,

with the swastika, with the belt,

like a German soldier,

with the head, with boots.

I looked in the mirror, I said,

how could a Jewish boy look like,

you know, wearing an uniform from the beasts?

You were wearing the uniform of the army.

Yeah.

That had killed your father?

That's correct.

Your mother?

Yes.

And you were thinking,

I'm lucky to have it.

Not I was lucky to have the uniform,

but I was lucky that I'm alive.

One night, the supply officer called Vermin over.

He said to me, Marion, you are Jew?

I didn't answer him.

He said, I know exactly that you are Jewish,

but don't be afraid.

So long as I live, you live.

I didn't open my mouth

to say yes or no, nothing.

Because you're still not sure

that if you say yes...

Maybe he's going to shoot me.

But nothing happened,

and that's, I went back to sleep.

Nehemia Vermin, a Jew,

had survived discovery.

He was actually a lot better off

than many of the so-called Michelinge

back in Germany,

because the war had begun to turn

on Adolf Hitler,

and he'd already begun turning on them.

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He thinks he got away with murder.

And while they were having sex,

he would strangle her.

He would see her dead.

He's capable of killing me.

Everything you see is real.

You're a selfish little punk.

In the new Muth Magazine,

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By 1944, the war was going badly for Germany.

Its armed forces had been driven back on the Eastern Front.

Italy's dictator Mussolini had capitulated,

and the Allies were landing on the French coast.

Hitler needed lots of men.

Any men.

Suddenly, the men the Nazis called Mischlinge found themselves wanted again.

Only this time, it wasn't for military service.

It was for a network of forced labor camps.

Geert Falkenberg was called up.

He'd been told he was joining a special army-like unit.

But when he arrived, he looked around and saw not other soldiers, but...

Criminals.

Some people who were not...

could not do any military service anymore.

Some half-Jewish people.

Some gypsies.

And some homosexuals.

You're describing to me a group of people,

all of whom were being persecuted in different ways by the Nazis,

and all of whom were unacceptable to serve in the army.

Yes.

We went to this forced labor camp

and did our job.

But after a few weeks,

we started to realize that something is not right here.

They were treating us more harshly.

Eventually, it got so bad,

I knew I needed to escape.

Friedemann Lichtwitz did escape,

but soon he was caught,

and then he was brought here.

This former hard-working radio artillery man

was now a prisoner at Dachau,

a concentration camp where, by the end of the war,

an estimated 32,000 people had been killed.

What was it like for you to start the war,

serving in the army,

and end it here at Dachau?

I can't say.

I don't know how to answer that.

From this camp, there would be no escape,

and it's debatable whether the living

were better off than the dead.

Basically, he just had to, you know,

plan with his comrades in the bed

how they were going to sleep,

because he had six people up here.

And so they say, hey, okay,

I'll lean on my left side, you're on your left side,

and they'd have to stay that way the entire night.

Six per bed.

Six per bed.

In the end, soldiers like Friedemann Lichtwitz,

no matter how loyally they'd served Germany,

were, in the eyes of the Nazis,

just Jews to be exterminated.

Lichtwitz began the war as a soldier.

He ended it as a Holocaust survivor,

and other survivors will easily identify

with his experience.

But how will the other Michelin soldiers be viewed?

As victims or villains?

Brian Rigg, who in the course of his research

discovered Jewish ancestry of his own,

says he knows this will be a difficult story

for some people to hear,

because the story of Hitler's Jewish soldiers

blurs what was to some a clear image of the past.

The Third Reich and Hitler and so on,

it's not all black and white.

Not everybody of Jewish descent

was exterminated in the death camps.

And not every German soldier serving

in the army of the Third Reich

was a Nazi, as we use that term today.

There are going to be people in this audience tonight

who, when they hear you say things like,

the Third Reich is not black and white,

what they hear is,

which means they weren't all bad

and the Holocaust didn't happen.

No, absolutely not.

Holocaust did happen.

My research, I think, sheds new light on the Holocaust,

just how crazy, how corrupt,

how bankrupt these Nazi laws were,

but how deadly they also were,

and how they affected hundreds of thousands of people

who the Nazis called Jews,

but they themselves would not have called themselves

Jewish or Jews.

And that's also quite tragic.

The question is,

will the book serve a noble purpose

or will it be misused by haters

who will now claim,

you see, the Jews were part of the Nazi equation.

That's the great fear.

Rabbi Marvin Heyer is dean and founder

of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,

a Jewish human rights agency.

Should this research,

or could it,

lead people to sort of reevaluate

their conclusions about the Holocaust?

I think that this book,

look, the book could be used by revisionists.

The revisionists will turn around and say,

you see, there were 150,000 Jews

that served the Nazis.

That would be preposterous.

The potentially explosive issue

is whether Rigg's research encourages people to think

that Jewish soldiers killed other Jews.

Brian Rigg didn't document any examples of that.

But Helmut Kopp,

who'd been raised Jewish

and was using the army as a place to hide,

certainly received a hostile reaction

right after the war at the immigration office

when he was trying to leave Germany.

A man about 10 or 15 years older than me

came in and said,

I heard you were in the German army.

I said, yes.

What was I supposed to do?

Either go to the camps or falsify documents

and go along.

I never killed a Jew with a weapon in my hand.

And he said, from the looks of you,

you would kill the first Jew who comes through that door.

He called me an anti-Semite.

I was very much hurt

when my daughter thought that

by belonging to the German Wehrmacht,

I had somehow participated

in the crimes against Jewish people.

And this is definitely not so.

A lot of Jews will tell you

that the Nazis could never have achieved the power they had

or held the power they had

or done the things they did

without the cooperation of the military.

That's right.

That's right.

Still, that does not mean

that the military and the Nazism were identical.

No.

Spitz, like many of the Michelin soldiers

Brian Rigg interviewed,

insists that he didn't know

what was really happening to the Jews

until after the war.

Helmut Kopp says he did know

but couldn't say anything.

Wow.

I couldn't.

I would have been open with my comrades

if they would know I was a half-Jew.

They would have turned on me.

They wouldn't have said I was a friend anymore.

Do you think the former soldiers

who say they had no idea

what was going on with the Jews,

do you think they're telling the truth?

Nein.

They knew.

If they're saying that now,

it's just to protect themselves.

Geert Falkenberg, fighting in France,

actually got letters from his Jewish grandmother

telling him what was happening.

In those letters,

she wrote what she expected.

And that was so terrible

that I didn't believe it.

I couldn't believe it.

His grandmother died in a concentration camp.

You feel guilty about what you did?

I feel guilty about what I didn't do.

I didn't try to save my grandmother.

I didn't have the idea.

I can tell you that I had no money,

no connections, all that.

That's not what I mean.

I mean to go there to try to get her

and to push her about the Swiss border also.

That is what I should have done.

But Falkenberg is a rare example.

Few of these old soldiers have any regrets

about the war or their role in it,

in part because of that famous German sense of duty,

in part because many families

feel they don't need to apologize

for donning the uniform of evil in order to survive.

When you talk to people today

and they ask you what you did during World War II,

you tell them.

Well, sure.

I didn't, I didn't have to,

I didn't do anything that is a crime.

You lost members of your own family to the Nazis.

Ja.

My aunt, my cousins were sent off to Riga in 1941

and they were all murdered.

And during that time,

you were still fighting for the same army

that was supporting the man who was killing them.

From today's point of view,

you can't understand that then

you didn't think about the Fuhrer or the nation.

I thought only about myself,

that either my tank or something will be hit

and then I'll be gone anyway

or I'll make it through.

You're 80 years old.

When you look back,

are you ashamed of what you did?

Nein.

I never was ideologically on the side of the Nazis.

As we say today,

I only did my job.

If I'd been sent to the concentration camp,

I don't really know if I'd be alive today.

Despite what happened to their families

at the hands of the Nazis,

Helmut Kopp, Gerd Falkenberg

and a number of these former soldiers

stayed on in Germany.

When asked why,

Falkenberg said he felt in some way

he owed his survival to a handful of Germans

and wanted to be with them and help them rebuild.

To read an excerpt from Hitler's Jewish soldiers,

you can log on to our website.

The address is dateline.msnbc.com.

Still ahead,

27 years after the murder of Martha Moxley,

how did these jurors find Michael Skakel guilty?

The most important piece was

anything that Michael Skakel himself said.

He literally, for me,

clinched the deal of his guilt.

What were the jurors thinking?

And what are they saying now?

Eichner to serve.

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Monday on NBC Nightly News,

the sounds of silence.

Is all this baby hears?

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Discover the number one new crime drama,

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Who killed a senator's daughter?

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No defensive wounds.

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Stacy died in her own house.

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She was still alive.

Crossing Jordan.

NBC Monday.

Here again is Jane Pauley.

After nearly 27 years of rumor and suspicion,

Michael Skakel was found guilty Friday of the murder

of his young neighbor, Martha Moxley.

Given the hurdles facing prosecutors,

a case more than two decades old,

with no eyewitnesses and no forensic evidence

directly linking Skakel to the crime,

how did jurors reach their decision?

Four of them spoke with Chris Hansen.

After you had reached the verdict,

describe for me the feeling in your stomach

when you walked into the courtroom.

Never been in a more uncomfortable,

dissatisfying, unsatisfying,

emotional moment in my entire life.

I felt tremendous sorrow for Michael Skakel

and had difficulty keeping my composure for a moment.

It was such an intense moment.

It was almost a terrifying moment.

Because even after you rendered the verdict,

and then defense attorney Michael Sherman says,

I want to pull the jury.

Right.

And goes from person to person,

is that and was that your verdict?

Right.

And you have to stand up on your own, all alone.

I didn't know that we had to do that.

That was very frightening.

And answer the question.

And my knees were knocking.

Did you look at Michael Skakel?

He was very composed.

The moment that I caught him,

he was very composed.

He looked very red in the face

and I'm sure very emotional,

but he was keeping it together.

I didn't think he registered much of anything.

He said he'd like to make a statement

and the judge would not allow him to make a statement.

I thought his tone had some anger to it then.

Did he look like he was taken off guard here?

Yes. Oh, yes.

I don't think he expected to be...

Convicted.

Convicted, yes.

I want to ask each one of you

what the most critical testimony was for you.

It really was the sum of all the different pieces

and the length of time and the conscience of guilt

that was shown over a period of time.

There was no direct physical evidence in this case.

That is correct.

Did that bother you?

Yes, it made it tougher for us to make a decision.

No fingerprint.

Right.

No blood.

Right.

No DNA.

Right.

There was a lot of testimony

about drug and alcohol abuse.

Do you think it's possible that maybe even Michael Skakel

doesn't really know exactly what happened

the night Martha Moxley was killed?

It's possible.

I've thought about that.

The thing that convinced me that he does really know

he's done this crime is that he went to great pains

to try and cover it up in his own book

that we heard the testimony of the ghostwriter.

If he really wasn't sure,

I don't think he ever would have made those confessions

to various people throughout his life,

and I don't think he would have been so concerned

about covering his tracks.

On at least 12 different occasions,

according to testimony,

he made some statement about the killing

that could be construed as a confession.

The prosecution, I think, made a valid point,

and I think it was one that we considered

when he used several times the phrase

consciousness of guilt.

Consciousness of guilt.

Yes, and that which leads people,

they just can't hold it in.

They just can't stop talking about it,

and I thought that was a valid point.

The defense argued that the so-called confessions

that occurred at the Elan school

weren't valid because they could have been coerced.

When he actually spoke to people

was in quiet moments when it was just two people

alone when he was under no threat

of any kind of punishment.

In the end, did Michael Skakel damn himself

with his own words?

Yes.

Personally, that was my opinion, yes.

It was part of it.

I believe that if he'd never said a word

from 1978 to 1998,

we would never have gone to trial.

This was a brutal killing.

Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club.

She was stabbed through the neck with the golf club.

Is this something that a 15-year-old kid

is capable of doing?

You know, when you look at the piece of the golf club,

it's hollow inside, and it is entirely possible

for it to break in motion that way, yes.

And he was an athlete.

There was testimony that he was the best athlete

in town, in the neighborhood, and very strong.

So, yes, it could be done.

Is it really telling that the handle to the golf club,

which had the Skakel name on it, was missing?

So the part of the golf club, which was the murder weapon,

that actually had the Skakel name on it, was missing?

Right.

Yes.

Never retrieved.

Never been found.

To you, that says what?

Somebody took it away.

Somebody hid it.

After hearing all the evidence,

but prior to hearing the closing statements

from the prosecutor and the defense lawyer,

what was your take on this case?

It was still undecided.

I was decided before the closing argument.

Guilty or not guilty?

Guilty.

How important was the prosecutor's closing argument?

It was a great roadmap,

and it was a great tying together of a lot of different pieces.

Michael Sherman, the defense lawyer, is no slouch.

He's very articulate.

Did he create any reasonable doubt in your mind?

I underestimated the jury.

Really?

My personal feeling.

I think on a number of occasions, frequently,

he would repeat something that was objected to,

but by virtue of having it repeated several times,

I think he thought we'd take it as fact.

And I didn't think that was a good tactic.

But was there a sense in the jury room that this guy,

this Kennedy relative, had gotten away with this

for 27 years because his family had money

and he was connected to the Kennedys?

No.

Absolutely not.

Not at all?

No.

Never ever came up.

I would say not in the jury room.

I have to say that for the last 24 hours

since I've had time to think about it,

I believe that in 1975, when the crime was committed,

the family, both the Kennedys and the Skakels,

had a lot more influence in Greenwich than they do today.

Is this a case where he just couldn't control

his guilty conscience?

That's what my opinion is on this, yes.

I got that from during the trial.

I felt that way all along.

Anything he said somehow pointed to the fact

that he's admitting it in some way.

Guilty conscience and also, I think, a little hubris.

I think he still had the idea that he was somehow

not like the rest of us.

I'm wealthy. I'm powerful.

Kennedy relative?

I'm just beyond being called that.

You're never going to get that far.

How would you describe Michael Skakel?

You mean the current Michael Skakel

or the Michael Skakel on the whole as a human being?

As a human being.

I would describe him as a person

who had a very unfortunate childhood,

who really didn't have the parental love and direction

and support and discipline that we are all entitled to,

to grow up with.

What was that?

What would the appropriate sentence be

for Michael Skakel?

It's so hard to answer a question like that

extemporaneously and off the top of my head.

I thought about it a little bit.

I guess the fact that he was 15 years old

at this point might come into play.

I think the Moxley family should have some say

in this matter and from what I understand

they're allowed to speak at the sentencing hearing.

Yeah.

I've heard John Moxley say he'd like them

to get 27 years for the length of time

it's taken to get there.

Perhaps that's appropriate.

Did you feel that you formed some kind of

an emotional bond with Martha Moxley's mother?

I did not, no.

It was completely avoided.

We felt sympathy for both families.

It's a tragedy for everybody

and it wasn't something where we were trying to,

at least to my mind,

we weren't trying to right a wrong

by finding someone

as a scapegoat.

We did what the judge asked us to do.

I agree with that completely.

I believe that we were very methodical,

very fact-based

and didn't really think about that.

Closure for Dorothy Moxley,

I'm glad she's had her closure.

I'm glad we were able to reach a decision

but it really wasn't about her.

It was about the evidence we saw.

Coming up on Dateline Tuesday...

Love you, we're glad we're free.

They were rescued by American troops

and welcomed home as heroes.

Two young aid workers held for three long months

as prisoners of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Now there are new questions about their mission.

Why not just be really clear and upfront about it?

A mother's heartache.

Let me just recover.

A daughter's fate.

He's going there to tell them God loves you.

I believe that there are some things

worth living and dying for.

And next, cream of the crop?

Can't get it fast enough, huh?

Or not so hot.

Who makes the best-tasting ice cream?

A Dateline Consumer Reports exclusive.

Race-inspired cockpit.

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Introducing the Lexus IS 300 5-speed.

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Especially starting at under $30,000.

For an incredible value,

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It's the first shaver who's had moves from side to side,

so it captures more hair and cuts closer.

Only it moves so fast you can't see it,

but you can hear it.

And to keep it feeling like a new shaver every day,

here's how to clean it.

Tomorrow at 9 a.m.,

every Victoria's Secret store opens

for the greatest lingerie sale ever.

The Victoria's Secret semi-annual sale starts tomorrow.

When the world's best lingerie brand outdoes itself,

you've just got to be there.

With Verizon Wireless, now you can talk.

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Or access the web.

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unlimited night and weekend minutes to use nationwide.

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That's the best wireless value.

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From the best national wireless network.

Plus, pick up a sleek, web-ready LG phone.

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But the offer's not.

Verizon Wireless.

We never stop working for you.

NBC Sundays this fall.

A new drama with a unique storytelling style.

One crime.

Tweeting, you're gonna be okay.

Seen from many points of view.

All of them leading you to the truth.

What are you doing?

Back up your car.

I'm chasing a very bad man.

Boomtown.

NBC this fall.

Shaq put on a show as the Lakers moved one step closer to another title.

Now Jason Kidd and the Nets must come through at home.

Coming up next on NBC.

How much ice cream do you have a year?

More or less than the average American eats?

Well, how much do Americans eat on average?

How about five gallons each?

We are a nation of ice cream lovers.

And we have dozens.

And we have dozens of brands of ice cream to choose from at the supermarket.

Is one the best?

Tonight, Chief Consumer Correspondent Lee Thompson lets us in on one of summer's best tasting secrets.

In a Dateline Consumer Reports exclusive.

I'm your ice cream man.

Stop me when I'm passing by.

On my mind.

I'm your ice cream man.

Stop me when I'm passing by.

Most of us would probably describe ice cream like this.

Delicious.

But at the lab, the definition is not so simple.

It's actually a suspension of liquids and fats and ice crystals in a semi-solid form that melts in your mouth.

Tasting ice cream is a science at Consumer Reports where earlier this year Erin Godot led an ice cream study.

We don't go by yuck.

We don't go by yum.

We go by does it meet the criteria that we're looking for.

That no-nonsense approach to ice cream has been a tradition at Consumer Reports for more than 60 years.

And this year, Dateline has the inside scoop.

But first, meet members of the ice cream team who demonstrated the taste test for us.

When they reported for duty, the tasters had been carefully trained to recognize the taste and textures of ice cream.

Then they each spent hours scrutinizing spoonful after spoonful after spoonful of the stuff.

Their mission, find the best of 40 brands of vanilla, chocolate, and butter pecan ice cream.

The lowest rated of these ice creams is still not anything you would spit out.

This is ice cream.

But spit they did because tasters can't be fettered by satiation.

Nor should they be wooed by attractively rounded scoops.

Instead, the ice cream was cut into unidentifiable blocks.

And to avoid tainting taste buds with kitchen smells,

the ice cream was served through negative airflow doors.

The tasters filled out ballots rating a variety of criteria from flavor intensity to sweetness on a scale of 1 to 15.

Right away, they noticed texture.

Does it feel dense? Does it feel creamy smooth? Is it icy?

When the ice cream begins to melt, the delightful details of flavor emerge.

There may be a what we call woodiness, nuttiness, a slight pruney, dried fruit type note.

That's vanilla she's describing, if you couldn't tell.

But do those subtleties really matter to the average ice cream eater?

Godot says yes.

Even if you can't describe the particulars, you know a good one when you taste it.

Among the highest rated ice creams, Consumer Reports found a pattern.

They all have twice the fat of most ice creams.

And their ingredients are simple.

Eggs, cream, sugar.

The three vanilla ice creams Consumer Reports rank excellent are

Ben & Jerry's, Haagen-Dazs, and Dreamery by Edie's or Dreyer's.

Depending on where you live.

As for chocolate, Ben & Jerry's is reformulating, so it wasn't included.

But Haagen-Dazs chocolate and for bittersweet chocolate lovers,

Godiva Belgian Dark both rank excellent.

Not as good news for butter pecan lovers.

None is buttery enough for these discerning taste buds.

Even the best rank only very good.

Haagen-Dazs, Breyers, and Dreyer's or Edie's Grand.

Consumer Reports also picked these best buys.

Although they rank only very good, they are less expensive and they contain less fat.

But when it comes to ice cream, who worries about that?

For more information, log onto our website.

The address is dateline.msnbc.com.

That's all for this edition of Dateline Sunday.

We'll see you again for Dateline Tuesday at 10, 9 central.

I'm Jane Pauley.

For all of us at NBC News, good night.