BBC Production of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

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.