\u2018Jewish\u2019 Senior Officers In Hitler\u2019s armed forces: Erhard Milch, Wilhelm Keitel, Walther von Brauchitsch, Erich Raeder, and Maximilian von Weichs during a Nazi rally in Nuremberg, Germany, 12 Sep 1938.<\/p>\n
Paul Kendal, writing for The Telegraph<\/em> in Britain, reported that in 1941 a medical officer named Major Leo Skurnik received the Iron Cross from the German high command. Notably, Skurnik was Jewish. Kendal further observed that Skurnik was not an isolated case; more than three hundred Jews served on the German side when Finland\u2014sharing a common adversary in the Soviet Union\u2014entered the war in June 1941.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Yet Kendal, without offering any meaningful critical reflection, asserts: \u201cThe alliance between Hitler and the race he vowed to annihilate \u2014 the only instance of Jews fighting for Germany\u2019s allies \u2014 is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Second World War, and yet hardly anyone, including many Finns, knows anything about it.\u201d[2] The serious historical questions that Kendal fails even to raise\u2014and which are often, and in some cases quite deliberately, elided by the mainstream Holocaust narrative\u2014are as follows: If Hitler\u2019s ultimate objective was the extermination of an entire people, how does one account for the presence of thousands of individuals of Jewish descent living in Nazi Germany during the war? Is it historically or intellectually coherent to uphold both propositions simultaneously\u2014that Hitler sought total annihilation, and yet that large numbers of Jews continued to live, serve, or even be decorated under his regime? Is it philosophically defensible to suggest that these Jewish individuals were merely \u201cduped\u201d and entirely unaware of Hitler\u2019s alleged intentions? Were they oblivious to what is now said to have been their inevitable destiny in the concentration camps? What, in fact, motivated them to join or cooperate with the Third Reich in the first place? These are among the questions I posed to an author who published a widely circulated monograph on Nazi Germany under the imprint of the University of California.<\/p>\n In our extended private correspondence, he repeatedly asserted that Hitler\u2019s unequivocal objective was the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Yet throughout his analysis, he never meaningfully addressed the deeply problematic fact that the documented presence of individuals of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany stands in stark tension with\u2014if not poses a direct challenge to\u2014the prevailing claim that Hitler sought the destruction of all European Jews. Jewish historian Walter Laqueur recognized this enduring difficulty and attempted to resolve it. He conceded that such individuals did exist within the Reich, but he maintained that:<\/p>\n \u201cNazi policy toward half- and quarter-Jews (Mischlinge of the first and second degree) was contradictory and changed over time. Half-Jews who were not brought up as Jews (Geltungsjuden) were not deported and killed: There were legal problems, and Hitler, who did not want to be bothered by lawyers, declared that he would take a binding decision only after the final victory. Those of military age had to serve in the army both at the beginning of the war and its end when the armed forces were depleted. But in between they were excluded from military service, and they were not permitted to serve in positions of command.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n Is this historically accurate? What, then, is the broader historical context underlying these complexities, and by what analytical methods can one critically evaluate and respond to the prevailing claims advanced by the Holocaust establishment?<\/p>\n Jewish historian Bryan Mark Rigg observes in Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers<\/em> that \u201cnumerous areas relating to the Holocaust and the Nazi era in general remain largely unexplained or poorly understood.\u201d[4]<\/a> According to Rigg, these gaps persist in part because interpretations that diverge from the dominant historiographical paradigm\u2014even when grounded in archival documentation\u2014are frequently dismissed without substantive engagement. It is therefore not surprising that Walter Laqueur denounced Rigg\u2019s study as \u201cmalevolent, more often ignorant, and breathtakingly obtuse in its conclusions.\u201d[5]<\/a> Yet much of Rigg\u2019s research draws upon primary archival sources and extensive personal interviews with individuals of Jewish descent who served in the German military. Rather than interacting with this evidence on its own terms, Laqueur appears to forego substantive refutation in favor of ad hominem dismissal.<\/p>\n Rigg contends that \u201ctens of thousands of men of Jewish descent served in the Wehrmacht during Hitler\u2019s rule,\u201d estimating that the number of soldiers of Jewish extraction\u2014a group he designates as Mischlinge<\/em>\u2014exceeded 150,00.[6]<\/a> He cautions, however, that \u201cprevious estimates varied and future scholars may devise more advanced computations to produce a more precise figure. All such efforts should lead to the same significant conclusion: the number of Mischlinge in the Wehrmacht was far greater than anyone previously imagined.\u201d[7] Officers such as Bernhard Losener were well aware that if Hitler \u201ctreated half-Jews as Jews, the armed forces would probably lose 45,000 soldiers.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n Hitler \u201callowed some Mischlinge to apply for exemptions under section 7 of the supplementary decrees of November 1935. In some cases, if Hitler approved, the Mischlinge was allowed to call himself or herself an Aryan.\u201d[9] Similarly, Jewish historian Sarah Gordon notes, \u201cIn Germany, some Jews even supported Hitler despite his anti-Semitism\u2026Max Naumann, the head of the Association of German National Jews, ardently solicited support from the Nazi party after Hitler had come to power, pointing out the national loyalty of his members and their service to the German nation. \u201cGerhart Hauptmann, a Nobel Prize recipient for literature, even voted for Hitler. Many Jews were quite comfortable living in Germany despite latent anti-Semitism, whether intellectual or social.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n Hitler \u201cplayed a direct role\u201d in allowing such Jews to remain in his service.[11]<\/a> Those Mischlinge families \u201chad lived in Germany for generations, and most had lost all contact with their Jewish heritage. They had helped develop German society, fought in her wars, and furthered her culture. Some had not known of their Jewish heritage until Hitler came to power.\u201d[12]<\/a><\/p>\n Historian Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California states that some Jews supported the Third Reich \u201cat its creation; they had prospered materially in it, and they remained reticent to criticize it in a fundamental way.\u201d[13]<\/a> What\u2019s more startling is that Hitler \u201ceven allowed some to become high-ranking officers. Generals, admirals, navy ship captains, fighter pilots, and many ordinary soldiers served with Hitler\u2019s personal approval.\u201d[14]<\/a><\/p>\n More importantly, \u201cMany German Jews and Mischlinge thought that Hitler based his anti-Semitic tirades on Ostjuden [German and Eastern Jews] who had emigrated from the \u2018land of Bolshevism.\u2019 The Nazis reinforced this preconception when they issued decrees against Ostjuden in 1933 and later when they forced eighteen thousand of them to leave the Reich in 1938\u2026Dr. Max Naumann, a Jew and a retired World War I army major and founder of the militant right-wing organization of National German Jews, wrote, \u2018Hitler on 20 March 1935 that he and his followers had fought to keep Ostjuden out of Germany.\u2019 Naumann felt that these \u2018hordes of half-Asian Jews\u2019 were \u2018dangerous guests\u2019 in Germany and must be \u2018ruthlessly expelled.\u2019\u201d[15] Academically and economically, those Ostjuden made little progress largely because they learned \u201cPolish Talmudic barbarism, as contrasted with refined German Bildung (education).\u201d[16]<\/a><\/p>\n Lindemann writes that \u201cWestern Jews often described Ostjuden as parasitic and filled with hatred of non-Jews, those specifically Jewish qualities that were the source of the most insistent and hostile remarks by anti-Semites about Jews generally.\u201d[17]<\/a> The Ostjuden were humiliated by the German Jews, who viewed them as \u201cirrational, mystical,\u201d and believed that their \u201csuperstitious religion\u2026no longer had a place in a world based on reason and scientific knowledge.\u201d[18]<\/a> Therefore, for the fully assimilated German Jews, \u201cHitler\u2019s anti-Semitism\u201d was \u201ca reaction to the culture of the Ostjuden.\u201d[19] Karl Marx himself despised the Ostjuden.[20]<\/a><\/p>\n It was no accident, then, that a group of wealthy intellectual Jews who were already immersed in Enlightenment thought and practice would despise some German Jews because of their \u201cprimitive lifestyle.\u201d[21]<\/a> Wolf Zuelzer, \u201ca 75 percent Jew,\u201d declared that \u201cfor the majority of German Jews, the Orthodox Ostjuden dressed in his caftan, fur hat and ritual side-locks was a frightening apparition from the Dark Ages.\u201d[22] As a result, at the dawn of the twentieth century, \u201cmany of the local Jewish communities in Germany refused to allow Eastern Jews to vote in community elections on the grounds that they were not German nationals.\u201d[23]<\/a><\/p>\n Robert Braun, a Mischlinge, noted, \u201cGenerally, Mischlinge are very anti-Semitic.\u201d[24] Unsurprisingly, a number of Jewish groups strongly supported National Socialism, because they saw the Ostjuden \u201cas a grave danger to their social standing who, if allowed to stay in Germany, would only intensify anti-Semitic feelings. In several public statements during the 1920s and 1930s, liberal German Jews labeled Ostjuden \u2018inferior\u2019 and asked for state assistance to combat their immigration\u2026Robert Braun recalled that his Jewish father, Dr. R. Leopold Braun, was an anti-Semite who did not like Ostjuden.\u201d[25] Not only that, most of the Mischlinge \u201cfelt Aryan and did everything they could to disassociate themselves from Jews and to be viewed as faithful Germans.\u201d[26] What becomes increasingly evident is that Hitler\u2019s racial ideology did not emerge in a vacuum. In the early 1920s, he directed much of his animus toward Eastern European Jews and Jewish Communists, whom he regarded as inseparably linked. Hitler believed that Communism itself was a Jewish political enterprise, a perception reinforced by his experience in Munich during the Socialist revolution of 1918\u20131919, led by Kurt Eisner, whom Hitler derisively labeled \u201cthe international Jew.\u201d In Hitler\u2019s view, so-called \u201cJudeo-Bolsheviks\u201d such as Eisner bore responsibility for Germany\u2019s military defeat in World War I and had subsequently exploited the nation\u2019s political instability for their own gain.[27] As the historical record indicates, Hitler was not alone in believing that Bolshevism would unleash political and social catastrophe in Europe. Figures such as Winston Churchill and a number of other Western statesmen likewise expressed concern about the ideological character and potential consequences of the Bolshevik movement. Churchill, for example, explicitly linked Bolshevism with Jewish revolutionary activity in his public writings in the early 1920s. From Hitler\u2019s perspective, the association between Jews and revolutionary politics was further confirmed by the events of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, where individuals of Jewish origin, such as Eugen Levine, played prominent roles in the short-lived regime. Witnessing these developments firsthand in Munich, Hitler characterized the episode as a \u201crule by the Jews.\u201d Convicted by the belief that Communism was both a Jewish-inspired and intrinsically destabilizing force, he ultimately focused his hostility toward Jews as a perceived existential threat to Germany.[28] A widespread perception of Jewish cultural superiority over ethnic Germans contributed significantly to the urgency with which National Socialist thinkers sought to formulate a response to what they regarded as Jewish ascendancy. As historian Albert Lindemann observes, in the early twentieth century \u201cGentiles could hardly miss noting how many liberal German-speaking Jews had begun to assert that a Jewish background engendered enlightenment, while a Germanic heritage was a burden, pulling in the direction of irrationality and barbarism.\u201d Likewise, historian Steven Beller notes that Jews in this period \u201cbegan to see themselves as bearers of the Enlightenment\u201d in Austria and Germany. From the perspective of many Germans observing these trends, such assertions of intellectual and moral preeminence appeared to confirm an imbalance of cultural influence that they believed threatened the nation\u2019s identity and cohesion.\u201d[29]<\/a><\/p>\n Lindemann further notes that this sense of ideological antagonism was not merely perceived but was sometimes openly articulated within Jewish intellectual circles. In private correspondence, the historian Heinrich Graetz expressed his hostility toward German cultural traditions and Christianity in particularly explicit terms. Writing to Moses Hess in 1868, Graetz stated, \u201cI am looking forward with pleasure to flogging the Germans and their leaders\u2014Schleiermacher, Fichte, and the whole wretched Romantic school,\u201d adding elsewhere in the same letter that \u201cwe must above all work to shatter Christianity.\u201d[30] This ideological framework exerted a significant influence during the Bolshevik Revolution, shaping not only Jewish revolutionary activists but also the convictions and self-understanding of many non-Jewish participants in the movement.[32] Yet this dimension of the historical record rarely appears in mainstream Holocaust historiography, largely because its inclusion would destabilize the central interpretive framework on which that school of thought rests. For example, in his more than one-thousand\u2013page volume A History of the Jews in America<\/em>, Jewish historian Howard M. Sachar devotes an entire chapter to Nazi Germany, yet he does not address these ideological dynamics or the broader intellectual context in which National Socialist perceptions of Jewish political influence developed.[33]<\/a><\/p>\n Instead, Sachar emphasizes claims of Jewish victimization, asserting that \u201canti-Semitic discrimination in all echelons of the Polish economy kept a quarter million Jews endlessly dependent on soup kitchens, clinics, orphanages\u201d[34] Moreover, Sachar does not address the sexually permissive and culturally radical aspects of Weimar Germany, developments that some contemporaries attributed to revolutionary activism by Jewish intellectuals and that, in turn, provoked anti-Jewish sentiment among certain racial theorists and secular writers. Instead, he praises the Frankfurt School as producing \u201cextraordinary research, in both quantity and quality,\u201d[35]<\/a>without critically examining the broader social and cultural consequences of its work. This selective approach reflects an ideological framework that discourages engagement with controversial evidence, allowing Sachar to maintain the thesis that Jewish persecution was primarily the product of irrational hatred rather than a complex interplay involving revolutionary activity and social upheaval.<\/p>\n Although Sachar acknowledges that some Jews participated in the Bolshevik Revolution, he mitigates this observation by asserting that \u201cthe largest numbers of Russian Jews had never adopted a Bolshevik political agenda.\u201d[36]<\/a> More broadly, Sachar frames Jewish persecution primarily as a consequence of Jewish success rather than as a response to political or revolutionary activity![37] Although many Germans of the period opposed anti-Semitism, some observers perceived that a portion of the Jewish population was primarily concerned with asserting influence rather than integrating into broader society. As Lindemann notes, \u201cmany Jews themselves were not genuinely interested in mixing but were rather bent on destruction and domination\u201d[38]<\/a> A similar perspective is recorded by Rigg, who cites Quarter-Jew Horst von Oppenfeld\u2014a captain and adjutant to Stauffenberg\u2014observing that Orthodox Jews encountered difficulties because they resisted assimilation: \u201cTheir problem,\u201d Oppenfeld asserts, \u201cis due to the fact that they want to be different[39]<\/a><\/p>\n aniel Jonah Goldhagen, in his controversial work Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, argues that anti-Semitism was so deeply embedded in German society that even ordinary citizens were implicated in its pervasive influence.[40]<\/a> Other scholars, including Lucy Dawidowicz and Steven T. Katz, have expressed positions broadly consistent with this thesis.[41]<\/a> Yehuda Bauer, while agreeing with several of Goldhagen\u2019s arguments and seeking to defend his work from complete marginalization, offers significant critiques, particularly regarding his use of sources. For example, Bauer notes that Goldhagen conflates all forms of anti-Semitism, including liberal efforts aimed at Jewish assimilation or conversion, with the violent, exterminatory anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, citing Uriel Tal inaccurately in support of this claim.[42]<\/a><\/p>\n In contrast, Lindemann offers a markedly different perspective, noting that \u201cracism and anti-Semitism were, in the eyes of many German-speaking Jews, more accurately seen as products of reactionaries and of the mob. Hatred of Jews, they believed, was most typically to be found in eastern Europe, or in the less developed parts of the German-speaking world.\u201d[43]<\/a><\/p>\n From a historical perspective, Goldhagen\u2019s thesis appears deeply problematic when examined in the context of Jewish life in Germany during the nineteenth century. Notably, Sarah Gordon, writing years before Goldhagen formulated his widely criticized argument, observes:<\/p>\n \u201cCultural explanations that include anti-Semitism as a central reason for Hitler\u2019s electoral success are inadequate as explanatory tools because of their nebulous formulation and because counterexamples from the works of famous scholars and writers indicate that cultural influences were diverse; for example, Treitschke wrote an anti-Semitic tract, but Mommsen wrote a countering statement. Thus German\u2019s cultural heritage was not uniformly anti-Semitic. Moreover, a deep commitment to a legal and constitutional state was shared by late-nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives. Both groups rejected all attempts to nullify the legal equality of Jews; not a single law was passed between 1869 and 1933 to rescind the new freedoms granted during the foundation of Germany. Of course, in practice there were many instances of job discrimination, social snobbery, and other types of hostility toward Jews; these were common in all Western countries at the time. Nevertheless, legal emancipation was accepted as part and parcel of the new state despite pressure from rabid anti-Semites to re-impose legal restrictions on Jews. Not only liberals and conservatives but also many Catholics and Protestants were opposed to anti-Semitic legislation on ideological or intellectual grounds\u2026This was obviously a rational pragmatic stance, but in addition it was an expression of the humanitarianism embodied in Christian ethics.\u201d[44]<\/a><\/p>\n Prior to the 1930s, organizations that promoted anti-Semitic propaganda influenced only a limited segment of the population and \u201cnever drew a large percentage of the total votes. Only in the election of 1930 and subsequent years did the Nazis achieve substantial support\u2026and the causative role of anti-Semitism in this success is by no means clear.\u201d[45] Moreover, \u201cBetween 1887 and 1912 anti-Semitic deputies represented only 2 percent of all Reichstag delegates, including all who were reelected, and by 1914 the anti-Semitic parties were practically defunct and their press was in ruins. After World War I additional small anti-Semitic parties arose with racist programs, but once again their electoral strength was less than 5 percent of all valid votes. These small volkisch groups eventually either allied with and were absorbed by the Nazis or gradually faded into insignificance. The track record of anti-Semitic parties was very poor even from their own point of view.\u201d[46] After examining the historical context of anti-Jewish sentiment, Gordon concludes that \u201cthe attributions of anti-Semitism to a uniquely distorted \u2018German mind\u2019 or \u2018German character\u2019 are largely irrelevant, whether based on psychology, sociology, intellectual history, or demonology.\u201d<\/p>\n If Goldhagen\u2019s thesis were accurate, Jews would not have attained such significant influence in Germany. As Gordon observes, \u201cGerman universities admitted Jews on an equal footing as early as 1790, and Jews were overrepresented among university professors and students between 1870 and 1933.\u201d Despite comprising less than 1 percent of the population in 1909\u20131910, Jews accounted for \u201calmost 12 percent of the instructors at German universities, and an additional 7 percent were Jewish converts to Christianity, so that 19 percent of the instructors in Germany were of Jewish origin.\u201d[47] Rigg writes that \u201cbetween 1800 and 1900, around seventy thousand Jews converted to Christianity in Germany and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These numbers do not include those Jews who left Judaism and did not embrace another religion.\u201d[48] Many of those Jews, after their conversions, as Michael A. Meyer puts it, \u201coften associated almost exclusively with fellow converts. In Germany they were referred to as Tauffuden, baptized Jews. They had not really become Christians but had taken on a borderline identity in which they still feared the verdict of the Gentile.\u201d[50]<\/a><\/p>\n Karl Marx\u2019s father, for example, accepted Christianity more \u201cfor practical reasons than heart-felt conviction.\u201d[51]<\/a>There were also instances where \u201cJewish parents would baptize their children in infancy while retaining their own religious status.\u201d[52]<\/a><\/p>\n In the nineteenth century, the Tsar recognized that some Jews were involved in revolutionary activities and implemented policies aimed \u201cto Russify the Jews through conversionist assimilation\u201d[53]<\/a> According to Haberer, this process largely constituted forced assimilation. However, Jewish scholar Benjamin Nathans presents a more nuanced view, suggesting that these policies were not purely coercive. Instead, the Tsarist government sought to encourage integration by creating educational programs tailored to Jewish participation, with universities serving as \u201cthe setting in which selective Jewish integration achieved its most dramatic success.\u201d[54]<\/a><\/p>\n There were also Jewish-led movements that sought to \u201c\u2018Europeanize\u2019 Russian Jewry through secular education and general socio-cultural self-regeneration.\u201d[55]<\/a> One of the unintended consequences of these initiatives was that \u201cJewish gymnasium students and rabbinical seminarians\u201d appropriated elements of nihilist thought and employed it as a vehicle for \u201cpreaching socialism, propagating revolution,\u201d and related radical causes. This development drew resistance not only from the Tsarist establishment but also from Orthodox Jews and traditionalist Gentiles, both of whom regarded nihilism as corrosive to social order and religious life.<\/p>\n \u201cOn almost every level [the nihilists] had to struggle against unyielding opponents who viewed their unconventional behaviour and unauthorized activity as subversive to the established order of traditional Jewish and official Russian society. For those who persevered this was a \u2018school of dissent\u2019 which imbued them with a sense of mission, gave them the stamina to fight on, and trained them to operate in a hostile environment.\u201d[56] Heinrich Heine exemplified the pattern of Jews who converted to Christianity for political or \u201copportunistic reasons\u201d[57]<\/a> His motivations became explicit when the revolution of 1830 erupted in France. While on vacation at the time, Heine declared that he, too, felt compelled to join the revolutionary cause, writing: \u201cGone is my longing for peace and quiet. Once again I know what I want, what I ought, what I must do\u2026 I am a son of the revolution and will take up arms\u201d[58] When Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, failed to put his musical talent to revolutionary use, Heine scolded him. He lamented to one of his friends in 1846, \u201cI cannot forgive this man of independent means, because he sees fit to serve the Christian pietists with his great and enormous talent. The more I admire his greatness, the more angry I am to see it so iniquitously misused. If I had the good fortune to be Moses Mendelssohn\u2019s grandson, I would not use my talents to set the piss of the Lamb to music.\u201d[59]<\/a><\/p>\n During his last days, when his health was deteriorating, Heine gave signs that his conversion was not sincere. He said, \u201cIf I could walk with crutches I\u2019d go to church, and if I could walk without I\u2019d go to the whorehouse.\u201d[60]<\/a><\/p>\n He called Christianity \u201ca gloomy, sanguinary religion for criminals,\u201d and later noted that \u201cI make no secret of my Judaism, to which I have not returned, because I have not left it.\u201d[61]<\/a><\/p>\n Around 1835 Heine met Marx and Engels, and in 1842 he foresaw that Communism would terrorize the entire world. \u201cThough Communism is at present little talked about, vegetating in forgotten attics on miserable straw pallets, it is nevertheless the dismal hero destined to play a great, if transitory role in the modern tragedy\u2026[It will be] the old absolutist tradition\u2026but in different clothes and with new slogans and catch-phrases\u2026there will then be only one shepherd with an iron crook and one identically shorn, identically bleating human herd\u2026Somber times loom ahead\u2026I advise our grandchildren to be born with a very thick skin.\u201d[62]<\/a><\/p>\n The central question that requires careful historical investigation is this: if Hitler did not set out to exterminate all European Jews\u2014as is commonly asserted in mainstream Holocaust narrative\u2014why did he nonetheless pursue systematic persecution of Jewish communities? What were the principal grievances or perceived threats that motivated his hostility?<\/p>\n Answering these questions properly demands a separate, methodical study\u2014grounded in scholarly sources, attentive to competing historiographical interpretations, and careful in its use of evidence\u2014rather than a brief excursus within a broader polemic.<\/p>\n Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Paul Kendall, \u201cThe Jews Who Fought for Hitler: \u2018We Did Not Help the Germans. We Had a Common Enemy,\u2019\u201dTelegraph<\/em>, March 9, 2014.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Walter Laqueur, \u201cHitler\u2019s Jews: Max Von Oppenheim and the Myth of German Jewish Guilt,\u201d Tablet Magazine<\/em>, August 21, 2013.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military <\/em>(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 1.Around ten years ago, one of Rigg\u2019s agents contacted me, saying that Rigg would be happy to be interviewed. We eventually conducted the interview, which I published on Veterans Today<\/em>. Within days of its publication, I received numerous emails from Rigg\u2019s agent reporting that Rigg was furious, having discovered that Veterans Today<\/em> was allegedly an \u201canti-Semitic\u201d website. The agent asked me to take down the interview, and to calm the situation, I complied. I believe the tension arose in part because I had begun probing Rigg about Iran, which he essentially regarded as a rogue state seeking to exterminate Israel. Later in life, Rigg discovered that he was Jewish himself and was eventually recruited by the IDF.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Laqueur, \u201cHitler\u2019s Jews: Max Von Oppenheim and the Myth of German Jewish Guilt,\u201d Tablet Magazine<\/em>, August 21, 2013.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Rigg, Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers<\/em>, 1.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ibid., 51.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Ibid., 96.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Ibid., 98.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the \u201cJewish Question\u201d <\/em>(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 47.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Rigg, Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers<\/em>, 1, 19-20.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Ibid., 24.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Albert S. Lindemann, Esau\u2019s Tears: Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews<\/em> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 332.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> Rigg, Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers<\/em>, 1-2.<\/p>\n [15]<\/a> Ibid., 12.<\/p>\n [16]<\/a> Ibid., 10.<\/p>\n [17]<\/a> Lindemann, Esau\u2019s Tears<\/em>, 51.<\/p>\n [18]<\/a> Bryan Mark Rigg, Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler\u2019s Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 10.<\/p>\n [19]<\/a> Ibid., 10.<\/p>\n [20]<\/a> Lindemann, Esau\u2019s Tears<\/em>, 164.<\/p>\n [21]<\/a> Rigg, Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers<\/em>, 12.<\/p>\n [22]<\/a> Ibid., 12.<\/p>\n [23]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [24]<\/a> Ibid., 24-25.<\/p>\n [25]<\/a> Ibid., 13.<\/p>\n [26]<\/a> Ibid., 25.<\/p>\n [27]<\/a> Ibid., 15.<\/p>\n [28]<\/a> Ibid., 15.<\/p>\n [29]<\/a> Lindemann, Esau\u2019s Tears<\/em>, 331.<\/p>\n [30]<\/a> Ibid., 141<\/p>\n [31]<\/a> Ibid., 331.<\/p>\n [32]<\/a> Ibid., 443.<\/p>\n [33]<\/a> See Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America <\/em>(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), chapter 14.<\/p>\n [34]<\/a> Ibid., 465.<\/p>\n [35]<\/a> Ibid., 751.<\/p>\n [36]<\/a> Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World <\/em>(New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 326.<\/p>\n [37]<\/a> Ibid., 227-228.<\/p>\n [38]<\/a> Lindemann , Esau\u2019s Tears<\/em>, 331.<\/p>\n [39]<\/a> Rigg, Hitler\u2019s Jewish Soldiers<\/em>, 48.<\/p>\n [40]<\/a> See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust <\/em>(New York: Vintage Books, 1997).<\/p>\n [41]<\/a> Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth<\/em>(New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 7.<\/p>\n [42]<\/a> See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust <\/em>(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), chapter five. Even he takes issue with some of Goldhagen\u2019s citations: \u201cGoldhagen puts all anti-Semitism in the same basket, including the liberal type that wanted to see the Jews disappear by assimilation and conversion. He quotes Uriel Tal, but Tal never said that liberal efforts to assimilate the Jews were the same as extermination programs\u201d (98).<\/p>\n [43]<\/a> Lindemann, Esau\u2019s Tears<\/em>, 332.<\/p>\n [44]<\/a> Gordon, The \u201cJewish Question\u201d<\/em>, 27<\/p>\n [45]<\/a> Ibid., 29.<\/p>\n [46]<\/a> Ibid., 32.<\/p>\n [47]<\/a> Ibid., 48.<\/p>\n [48]<\/a> Ibid., 13.<\/p>\n [49]<\/a> MacDonald, Separation<\/em>, 220; also Bakan, Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition<\/em>, 46.<\/p>\n [50]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [51]<\/a> Lindemann, Esau\u2019s Tears<\/em>, 162.<\/p>\n [52]<\/a> MacDonald, Separation<\/em>., 220.<\/p>\n [53]<\/a> Erich E. Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteeth-Century Russia <\/em>(Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.<\/p>\n [54]<\/a> Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 201-202.<\/p>\n [55]<\/a> Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Russia<\/em>, 11.<\/p>\n [56]<\/a> Ibid., 16, 17.<\/p>\n [57]<\/a> Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit<\/em>, 581.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/a>Similar attitudes surfaced in later decades. As early as 1902, the Viennese Jewish writer Solomon Ehrmann argued that the world needed to be \u201cJewified\u201d in order to become genuinely enlightened and thus fulfill what he considered the universal aims of Judaism.[31]<\/a><\/p>\n
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\n<\/a>Even more striking is his treatment of the Frankfurt School: while he briefly acknowledges that it was largely funded by Jews and staffed by Jewish leftist intellectuals, he does not engage substantively with the School\u2019s more radical cultural program or its role in advancing revolutionary social critique, including its permissive and often subversive positions on sexuality.<\/p>\n
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\n<\/a>Many Jews understood assimilation as the primary pathway to social and professional advancement, a process that sometimes involved conversion\u2014whether genuine or opportunistic. For Heinrich Heine, conversion to Christianity served as the \u201centrance ticket to European civilization\u2026Most Jews who now converted to Christianity did so simply as a mode of qualifying per se and, as often as not, without really relinquishing their family and social ties with the Jewish community.\u201d[49]<\/a><\/p>\n
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\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe Central Question<\/strong><\/h2>\n