Entertainment understand as much as I could before putting pen to paper," says Rigg, who includes personal photos and copies of documents to provide a deeper sense of the people behind the numbers. "Readers will have to step back from any polarized view of this history and see that not every German soldier was a Nazi as we use the term today and not everybody who was of Jewish descent was a victim of the death camps. "They also will see that there were probably hun- dreds of thousands of people who were persecuted by the Nazis not because they called themselves Jewish but because the Nazis called them Jewish and treated them accordingly." In Pursuit Of Racial Purity A former German lieutenant and a Jew, Paul-Ludwig (Pinchas) Hirschfeld holds his War Service Cross Second Class with swords in a military cemetery outside Hanover in 1996 "Service in the Wehrmacht was my salvation," he said. "My brother, sister, family all died in the Holocaust. The whole family" Hirschfeld claimed that during his military service, he remained religiously Jewish as best he could and recited the Shema evay day. Lt. Hirschfeld falsified his papers and cut all ties with his family, except for his Jewish fiancee, whose papers he also falsified and whom he later married. For his tactical abilities, he was nicknamed "the wise Jew" by his comrades. BLURRING BLOODLINES Nowhere was the application of racial purity laws more fraught with contradiction than in Hitler's German military. SUZANNE CHESSLER Special to the Jewish News B ryan Mark Rigg traveled to Germany to trace his family ancestry and returned with startling information about ancestry search- es of the German military under Hitler. Just as Rigg, a Bible Belt Protestant, learned that he had a Jewish great-grandmother and other Jewish relatives, he also discovered that, among the soldiers of the Nazi regime, there had been many thought- to-be Christian Aryans who had Jewish forebears. Rigg, a Texas-based history professor at the American Military University and a 1996 Yale honors graduate, was an undergraduate in the early 1990s when he start- ed to uncover the information and wrote an independ- 5/24 2002 66 ent study. More research on the subject led to his sen- ior essay at Yale and his master's and doctoral concen- tration at England's Cambridge University. Riggs research is being released this month as a com- prehensive book, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story ofNazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (University Press of Kansas; $29.95). Dateline: NBC . is devoting its entire Sunday, June 9, broadcast to the text and its author, talking with some of the people Rigg interviewed. That program will be discussed in advance during the Today show airing Friday, June 7. The extent of the Jewish representation in the German military — estimated at 150,000 by Rigg — makes this research significant and opens new under- standings of the Nazi regime. The author came up with the number after interviewing veterans and their families and then combing documents, some signed by Hitler, found in armed forces archives. Only two individuals of the 430 he interviewed did not give him consent forms to check personnel files for verification. At times, he evaluated the oral histories as more accurate than what was in writing. "I gave 10 years of my life to this subject and did my best to The critical word in Riggs work is "Mischlinge," the designation given by Nazis to people who had vary- ing proportions of Jewish heritage. Through the author's examination of what gave someone a desig- nation of "half-Jew" or "quarter-Jew" or any other kind of Jew, there is new insight into Hitler's obses- sion about what he defined as racial purity. Rigg describes the way Hitler decided whether Mischling soldiers should be exempted from the racial laws and declared to be Aryan, of German blood, so they could continue military service. Hitler went over forms completed by soldiers of mixed ethnic heritage, checked their service records and viewed their pictures to evaluate whether they had what he termed "Jewish" features. "This is a new chapter of Hitler's life that hasn't been looked at closely," Rigg says. "He was doing this for not only generals and admirals, which is shocking in itself, but he also was doing this for privates, people who had no influence on the war. It shows how obsessed he was with this racial ideology in that he believed only he could dis- cern a person's racial makeup." Hitler's Jewish Soldiers also explores the motiva- tions for serving in the military by those aware of their Jewish backgrounds, treatment of partial Jews by various members of the military, the effects of the Nuremberg Laws over time and the Mischlinge's knowledge of the Holocaust. Rigg believes his book opens issues of religious iden- tity that continue to affect people. In the extreme, he references a Mischling soldier dismissed from the German military because he was considered Jewish based on his father's lineage. The man, who went on to serve in the Israeli military, was not considered Jewish in Israel because his mother was Christian. Author Bryan Mark Rigg, left, and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1995. Schmidt, a "quarter-Jew," served as a Luftwaffe first lieutenant during World War II, a time during which he claimed he was unaware of Holocaust atrocities. He has admitted that without his Jewish grand father, he could have become a Nazi.