Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

[Kyt]

DVD Talk Review: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military

The Movie:
Some may find the four elderly gentlemen at the core of this fascinating documentary poster children for Stockholm Syndrome, and yet their chilling stories show that events and choices can sometimes be so complex as to literally boggle the mind, and that one's primal instinct for survival trumps any trite considerations of which is the lesser of any number of evils. It may surprise people to find out that Hitler's wehrmacht had a fair number of men with Jewish ancestry, but the fact is there were literally thousands of so-called mischlinge (a term that prior to Hitler had been used to designate dogs of the mutt variety) filling the ranks of various German armed forces. These half-, quarter-, eighth- and so-on Jews were eagerly drafted by the Germans in their late 30s rush to rearmament. The draftees were not, understandably, quite so eager, but they literally had no choice--either they consented to service or knew they faced certain death before a firing squad or, perhaps even worse, slow death at the burgeoning concentration camps.

The interviews of these men, all in their 80s in the mid-2000s when the interviews were conducted, provide a certain amount of self-justification and rationalization with just as much cold, calculated observation about what life was really like for them. Some of them were actual poster children for the German army (until their Jewish heritage came to light); others lied about their "racial" identity; still others simply abided by a policy that would later become famous for another reason in the U.S. military: don't ask, don't tell. All of them appear surprisingly unconflicted about the choices they were forced to make, and they all steadfastly deny any role in any atrocities that were committed.

What emerges from the documentary is an intriguing sidebar to the general horrors of Hitler's reign, but also an interesting insight into how individuals in a persecuted class can join their ostensible tormentors and find a certain degree of security, even while living with the daily fear that their "true nature" would be discovered. Director Larry Price augments the core interviews with other experts on the subject, including the director of the Yad Vashem center, and author Bryan Mark Rigg, whose book of the same name "inspired" the documentary. Price wisely refrains from judging his subjects, allowing their own words and experiences to literally speak for themselves.

As we now live in our own era of "enemy combatants," even within an ostensibly more homogenous society, the choices these men were forced to make have a visceral impact as we examine the choices that people globally are being forced to make in various socio-political conflicts in the present day.

and the book:

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

[Ron Goldstein]

Originally Posted by Kyt

DVD Talk Review: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military



and the book:

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers

Kyte

The fact that there were the odd Jewish soldiers in the German Army surprises me not at all, in fact I would have been more surprised if there were no stories of this type.

The ultimate aim of all humanity is to survive and people will do the most amazing things in order to achieve this.

I have always been eternally grateful that I personally was never put to the test of having to survive starvation or torture, both of which were readilly used by the Third Reich to achieve their nefarious purposes.

It is also well known and understood that within the concentration camps themselves some Jews chosen to carry out the most unthinkable tasks in order to save their lives and again, I and others, can understand this and be thankful that we were never called upon to make choices of this kind.

So dear Kyte, I am not surprised by these stories, just grateful that I never had to face the experience myself.

Ron

[PeterG]

I would add that there is no such thing as a half-Jew or a quarter-Jew or a sixteenth-Jew. To resort to such absurd classifications is to play the race game. There is no Jewish race. There is a Jewish religion, Judaism, and an ancient and highly respected Jewish culture. Many non-practising Jews belong to the latter and are proud to be known as Jews.

Die-hard high-ranking Nazis such as Milch, for example, were not by any stretch of the imagination Jews, and certainly not 'half-Jews'. Having completely and totally rejected Judaism and Jewish culture by no stretch of the imagination could they be considered Jews, nor were they that utter absurdity 'Aryan'.

However, when Fascism was founded in 1919 by Mussolini, many of the founding members, the Fascisti della prima ora were Jews, as were many right-wing Italian Nationalists. Nazism and Fascism were then quite different political concepts, it was Stalin who in the 1930s first described them as being the same. It is not surprising that there should have been Italian Fascists who were Jews. Jews like any other members of society embrace the full range of political beliefs, from extreme left to extreme right. It was only in 1938 that Italian Fascism began to ape Nazi racial beliefs, based on the myth of Aryan superiority, and thousands of Italian Fascists were expelled from the party. To their credit most Italians and many Fascists thought the whole idea was a farce, and Mussolini himself secretly encouraged his military commanders during WW2 to stall, ignore, and otherwise frustrate Nazi efforts to have Jews shipped to Germany either from Italy or any area occupied by Italians.