Rating: 
Summary: STOP! Life is NOT Black and White but Grey
Review: This excellent book goes way beyond its subject, although if it did not it still would rate 5 stars, in the presentation of unbelievable facts mixed with ancedotal recitations of history. The personal disclosures by German military officers and enlisted men of their Jewish heritage, most of whom were half to quarter Jews, and their tribulations due to their ancestry coupled with acceptance at the highest levels was amazing.Additionally, Hitler's hatred and obession with Jews was also tempered with his empathy for "Mischling's"(mixture of German and Jew)in certain situations such as the mother with a yellow Star of David on her clothes who had trouble getting food and Hitler helping her because of her son's military service to Germany. On the other hand, some "Mischlinge" were sent to concentration camps. The author states: "Ironically, Hitler was the one who allowed them both to serve and to apply for exemptions." As the war progressed he became less lenient. The final days found him in his bunker still worried about the Jewish question and how to rid society of Jews. Yes, his main objective was the eradication of Jews but at the same time one found him giving out many exemptions. His behaviors were obviously erratic and disturbed. There he was locked in battle with the Soviet Union at Stalingrad and his obesssion was with granting exemptions not with the battle per se. The book was absorbing and scholary at the same time. As a former professor I appreciated the referencing of all the surprising data. As a psychologist I know life is not always black and white but I find I and most people need to be constantly reminded of this simple fact. One of the most informative and interesting boooks I've read in the last few years.
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Summary: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers
Review: This is a masterful work on a subject known but somewhat ignored previously by historians. Mischlinge or half breeds(Half Jews or Quarter Jews)were a double edged sword for the Third Reich. Many mischlinge held prominent positions in the Thrid Reich, as high as Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who was basically the second in command of the Luftwaffe, and many others held high commands in the German war machine. Mr Rigg's research is first rate and he tells this story well. He relies mainly on oral history, collected almost entirely by himself, stories from those who lived through a period that at its best can be described as "difficult". He visits the questions of why someone who was of partly Jewish descent would serve the Third Reich of Hitler. He also explains how in a system devoted to the pursuit of anti-semitism could countenance the prescence of half Jews serving for a nation devoted to snuffing out the existence of the racial group it belonged to in some form. Mr Rigg also takes on the question of whether the soldiers, sailors, and airmen knew of the Holocaust. Mr Rigg provides compelling evidence of what was known and not known. Hopefully this work will answer this question which I believed has baffled or scared historians from answering it previously due to its potentially taboo nature. Mr Rigg has presented a solid work of research that is well worth study by both the expert and the just plain curious.
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Summary: Finally Told
Review: This is truly a landmark book and an amazing achievement both in scholarship and in humane sensitivity to an excruciatingly difficult subject. The title of the book, while seemingly gratuitously sensational, does sum up the subject of the study: those serving in the various armed forces of the Third Reich, as officers and as ordinary soldiers and sailors, who happened to be of Jewish descent. The chapter titles show how Rigg examines the various facets of the matter: Who Is a Jew?
Who Is a "Mischling" ['partial Jew']
Assimilation and the Jewish Experience in the German Armed Forces
Racial Policy and the Nuremberg Laws, 1933-1939
The Policy toward "Mischlinge" Tightens, 1940-1943
Turning Point and Forced Labor, 1943-1944
Exemptions from the Racial Laws Granted by Hitler
The Process of Obtaining an Exemption
What Did "Mischlinge" Know about the Holocaust? Interspersed among the chapters are four collections of (usually personal) photographs of Jewish and 'partially Jewish' officers and men of the Wehrmacht, SS, and Waffen SS, among others. It seems to me a measure of the scrupulous, indeed rigorous fairness of Rigg's treatment of this most painful subject that the reader (well, I at any rate) was struck again and again by the unfamiliar sensation of, among other high officials of the Third Reich, even Hitler sometimes actually coming across as human, showing what seems--against that ghastly backdrop, of course--to be real decency and compassion for (partial) Jewish veterans, and indeed others whose special circumstances recommended them to his attention. The easy and in fact almost inescapable thing is to simply demonize Hitler et al. and be done with it. Rigg has given the devil his due. Not everyone is going to be delighted with the book, but there it is. Pace Keats, Beauty is not Truth, and Truth is not Beauty.
Rigg's examination of the central question of who knew how much when about what is, again, scrupulously yet sensitively handled. A personal note: Thirty-some years ago, I was studying at a Goethe-Institut in Germany. One of my instructors mentioned one day that his father, whose mother was Jewish, received a phone call one evening in the late '30s from a friend at the local police station, who told him his file had come through for "processing." The friend told him that in a few minutes he would go down cellar to stoke his furnace, and with permission that file--and the man--would cease to exist officially. My instructor's father thanked his friend, and the family hid him in the attic throughout the war. His father's physical and mental health were shattered by the experience. My instructor (telling his class this in 1969) remarked that when he received his draft notice he could easily have evaded conscription, but in fact he served with Rommel in North Africa. He witnessed a ceremony in which Rommel himself decorated a subordinate who had been in charge of capturing some town and afterward had turned his men loose, allowing them to behave as they pleased for a few days. After pinning the medal on this general, he said, Rommel then made a brief speech about how atrocities reflected on the German Army, the German People, and the German Reich, then he drew the general's sidearm from his holster and executed him, just like that. My instructor remarked, "Unter Rommel gab es keine Schweinerei." Until reading Rigg's book, I had assumed that my instructor's experience as a Jewish soldier of the Third Reich was very unusual, if not unique. As Rigg makes clear, this misperception was common, even among these soldiers themselves, even well after the war was over. If you read only one serious nonfiction book this year, this should be the one.
Rating: 
Summary: Refutes One Major Holocaust Myth
Review: Typically, the Jewish victims of the German Nazis are exclusively featured in educational Holocaust materials while the tens of millions of non-Jewish victims are either ignored or labeled "other". One of the arguments adduced for such thinking is the allegation that Jews were, without individual exception, targeted for complete annihilation, whereas only parts of other national groups were to suffer the same fate. This myth-shattering book turns this argument on its head. Does this in any way minimize the suffering of the Jews? Certainly not. Nor should it. But it does soundly refute the claim that all known Jews within the jurisdiction of Nazi Germany were targeted with destruction. It is high time that Holocaust education be changed to reflect this fact, and to pay more attention to the non-Jewish victims of the Germans.
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Summary: It is an important book
Review: What interested me, as a survivor of several concentration camps, is that in the book "Hitlers Jewish Soldiers" by Bryan Mark Rigg, he has finally documented that Hitler was personally responsible for who was to be saved from and to be murdered in the camps. Most historians who I am aware of, have claimed that there is no (written) proof that Hitler actually was in charge of the extermination process. Now, Dr. Rigg shows, through his extensive research, each of Hitler's signed "Genehmigung" (or exemption) was truly a cancellation order for a death sentence. By clear inference, Hitler personally and in writing, following meticulous checking, decided to save the lives of a few and left the murder of the remaining millions to his underlings to carry out as he had earlier instructed them. The book makes chilling reading. What more proof does anyone need for the fact that Hitler was the author and the executioner of the "Final Solution" or murder of all the Jews. This book shows how certain people can be victimized if the rest of us look the other way. Dr. Rigg has done humanity a valuable service. It is very hard for me not to draw certain conclusion from this book that reflect current events. For survivors of WW2 concentration camps, even today as certain "Swiss Settlements" and "German Foundations" are set up to compensate them, they see "exemptions" or "Genehmigung" being made to protect the perpetrators and leave the traumatized victims to continue living in their ruined mental and economic state. These acts have been made possible only through the actions of so called benevolent, but self serving, facilitators in the U.S. This is a very timely book that sends a message to all that we must not go along with the acts of a few who mislead us. They may appear to perform benevolent acts toward a few, when in fact their acts fulfill their personal pathological needs...
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Summary: History of Ethnicity in the 20th Century
Review: What is the meaning of ethnicity and culture for an individual in modern society? What is the relationship between individual ethnicity and membership in a modern state?
These two questions are critical for understanding Western History in the 20th century. The answer to these questions often proved to be a conceptual portal which ended in murder and extermination. Answers that support life-enhancing visions of human culture remained the exception.
In the Third Reich these questions gained immediate, deadly consequences. Prof. Rigg demonstrates in this masterful work what it meant to be caught in this horrific hall of ethnic mirrors.
The book makes gut wrenching reading. We follow how the individual had to negotiate the dizzying rapids of ethnic categories, Nazi racial madness, political loyalty to a state, the shaping of personal identity and personal survival during a world war. For those who were lucky to survive these extremely painful conceptual dilemmas resonate until today.
The book is a must read for all people interested in how ethnicity has been used and abused during the 20th century. The absurd fates of individuals captured in these pages defy social science categories or simplistic finger pointing. It is a timely reminder of what can happen if a state and its leadership puts ethnicity and culture above the guiding lights of individualism and humanities.
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Summary: Outstanding and Groundbreaking
Review: When one considers the incalculable number of words written about World War II, it is astonishing that no one has tackled the subject of Jewish soldiers in the Wehrmacht before now. Bryan Mark Rigg breaks this new ground in a scholarly and exhaustive manner. Impressive research (much of it eye-witness interviews), copious endnotes, and a serious style give this book the credibility demanded by readers skeptical of its premise: men of Jewish ancestry served in the German Armed Forces (including the Waffen SS) by the tens of thousands. The book is replete with fascinating historical esoterica such as Heydrich's possible Jewish ancestry, accounts of Goring protecting high-ranking Luftwaffe Mischlinge (partial Jews), and the role many individual partial Jews played in the German war machine. It also documents in detail the sometimes bureaucratic, sometimes pragmatic way that exemptions from the Nuremburg Laws were handed out. Throughout Hitler's Jewish Soldiers the reader is repeatedly confronted with the absurdity of Nazi racial policy, as were high-ranking Nazis themselves. By 1933 Jews had become so integrated into German society that many citizens didn't realize they had Jewish blood in their ancestral past. Nazi researchers unearthed these skeletons so effectively that many patriotic Germans and even Party members were turned into outcasts and became a target of the German government instead of having their patriotism harnessed to help an increasingly hopeless war effort. Some Nazis recognized this, leading Himmler to his famous lament "each (German) has his decent Jew". Rigg's view however, is that while many Mischlinge escaped the full weight of Nazi racial policy during the war for pragmatic reasons, they would have faced an unfortunate fate after a German victory. Perhaps the most compelling chapter is the final one. An examination of what Mischlinge knew about the Holocaust, Rigg demonstrates that generally speaking, they didn't understand what was going on in the extermination camps. Given that some of these people had had dozens of relatives deported, in retrospect that seems astounding. However most Mischlinge were fully integrated members of secular German culture and the idea of their own society exterminating them en masse was beyond their imagination. Since one would expect Jewish Germans to know more about the holocaust than Aryan Germans, this conclusion does seem to stand in contrast to that of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Hitler's Jewish Soldier's is essential to fully understanding Nazi racial policy and its practical implementation. Bryan Mark Rigg has made an impressive debut and I look forward to his next work.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and Well Written
Review: Who would have thought? Many soldiers serving in the Wermacht during World War II were Jewish--or at least part Jewish. This extremely valuable and well researched book, which I read in a day because I could not put it down, details what happens to some of these men. Many of them went to great lengths to stay in the Wermacht believing it would protect their families. It often did not. Many went to great lenghts to obtain a certificate naming them as an Aryan. Hitler actually reviewed almost all these requests. Applicants had to submit detailed photographs. No one who "looked Jewish" need apply. Despite their desire to serve, many half Jews (with one Jewish parent) were discharged from the Wermacht. After all, to Hitler and his Nazi fanatics, being a "pure Aryan" was more important than winning the war. Those with only one Jewish grandparent were often allowed to stay in the service, but anyone with Jewish roots often found promotion impossible. Did you know former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was 1/4 Jewish? Anyone interested in German Jewish history and/or the Nazi era will find this book absolutely fascinating.
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