Books

This book tells the story of soldiers of Jewish heritage who fought for the Germans in WWII.

The author visited dozens of WWII German military veterans and had them tell him their story. They were Jewish, had one Jewish parent or one or more Jewish grandparents, but still joined the German Armed Forces in WWII. Some were in the Army, the Navy, the Luftwaffe and strangly enough, even in the SS.

Bryan Rigg found evidence of hundreds and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Jewish WWII German soldiers. While this may seem strange to us now, remember that many Black American soldiers went into combat for the USA without the full rights of citizenship in two World Wars. Some of these Jewish soldiers were hiding from the Nazis, some hoped they could prove themselves "worthy" of being Germans and others were even dedicated Nazis themselves. A strange and interesting book. It is fully footnoted, it could have been edited a bit more to avoid some of the repetition but certainly it is filled with information you are unlikely to find elsewhere.

Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, the Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and the Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, by Bryan Mark Rigg, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2002

ISBN 0-7006-1178-9