![\"Jews-who-fought-for-Hitler-610x230\"](\"http:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Jews-who-fought-for-Hitler-610x230.jpg\")
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If you leave out parts of an equation the resulting answer you get is always incorrect. Here are some of the missing parts that make up the $3 Bill we know as \u201cWorld War II & the Holocaust\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n As many as 150000 Jews served in Hitlers military, some with the Nazi leader\u2019s explicit consent, according to a U.S. historian who has interviewed hundreds of former soldiers.<\/p>\n Bryan Mark Rigg, history professor at the American Military University in Virginia, told Reuters on Thursday that the issue of soldiers of partial Jewish descent was long a somewhat taboo subject, overlooked by most academics as it threw up thorny questions.<\/p>\n \u201cNot everybody who wore a uniform was a Nazi and not every person of Jewish descent was persecuted,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere do they belong? They served in the military but lost mum at Auschwitz.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Jews or those of partial Jewish descent were unfit for military service, but Rigg tracked down and interviewed more than 400 former soldiers of partial Jewish descent \u2014 labelled \u201cMischlinge\u201d (\u201chalf-caste\u201d) by the Nazis.<\/p>\n He estimates there were about 60,000 soldiers with one Jewish parent and 90,000 with a Jewish grandparent in the Wehrmacht, the regular army as distinct from the Nazi SS.<\/p>\n \u201cThey thought \u2018if I serve well they\u2019re not going to hurt me and not going to hurt my family\u2019,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n However, on returning home from the campaign in Poland at the start of the war to find persecution of their families worsening, many soldiers classified as half-Jewish started to complain, prompting Hitler to order their dismissal in 1940.<\/p>\n But many of these so-called half-Jewish soldiers continued to serve, sometimes due to delays in the discharge order reaching the front, because they concealed their background or because they applied and won clemency for good service.<\/p>\n Many senior officers with Jewish ancestry won special permission to serve from Hitler himself.<\/p>\n \u201cHistory is not so black and white. History about Mischlinge shows how bankrupt the Nazi racial laws were,\u201d said Rigg.<\/p>\n SENSITIVE SUBJECT<\/p>\n While Germany has long been aware of men serving as soldiers who Nazi race laws should have classified as Jewish, most notably former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Rigg\u2019s large estimate has surprised many.<\/p>\n Die Welt daily called Rigg\u2019s book \u201cHitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers\u201d \u201cone of the most important Holocaust studies of recent years\u201d. The author was in Berlin to launch the German language version.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Mischlinge suffered the same fate in academic life as they did in real life. There was nobody to speak for them,\u201d Rigg said. \u201cPeople thought it could be misinterpreted, it would be like saying: \u2018look they did it to themselves\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Rigg, who has served in the U.S. Marines and as a volunteer in the Israeli army, was moved to research the subject after he discovered his own Jewish ancestry while probing his family tree and after a chance meeting with a Jewish Wehrmacht veteran.<\/p>\n Many of his subjects were telling their story for the first time and in some cases their families knew nothing of their Jewish heritage. \u201cThey would talk their hearts out, telling me all about this schizophrenic story they went through,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He is convinced that most of the soldiers of Jewish decent were not aware of the Nazis\u2019 systematic murder of Jews, noting that most half-Jews reported to deportation stations in 1944.<\/p>\n \u201cMost say they do not feel guilty about serving in the military, they feel guilty about what they didn\u2019t do to save their relatives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Source Rense\/Reuters<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cMost say they do not feel guilty about serving in the military, they feel guilty about what they didn\u2019t do to save their relatives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,21],"tags":[183],"class_list":["post-2496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-10","category-21","tag-jews-served-on-hitlers-military","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"views":1413,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2496"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2552,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2496\/revisions\/2552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prizrenpost.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}