Swastikas on Their Uniforms, Jewish Ancestry in Their Files: The 150,000 Soldiers Trapped by Nazi Race Law

In 1939, one of the recruitment posters on German city walls showed a blue-eyed, blond infantryman. On his steel helmet a swastika gleamed just below the imperial eagle. The slogan announced him plainly: the ideal German soldier. Yet by the regime's own race laws this young man, Werner Goldberg, should never have been enlisted at all; because his father was Jewish, the Nazis classed him as mixed blood, a Mischling. Seen by millions, that poster put the absurdity of Nazi race ideology on display from day one.

Goldberg's father was one of roughly a hundred thousand Jewish men who had fought for Germany in the First World War. When Hitler took power in 1933, his front-line medal protected him no more than any other Jew, and the pressure began. His son Werner first joined the compulsory Reich Labour Service, trained alongside his school friends, and enlisted in the Wehrmacht as an infantryman. In 1939 he fought in the invasion of Poland: a young man of partial Jewish descent serving in the army of conquest on soil where SS death squads were murdering Jews. A former school friend's rise inside the SS, and the protection that friendship bought the family, shielded the Goldbergs from the worst of the persecution for a while. Before the face on the poster was identified, the regime had no idea it had found its ideal in a man of Jewish descent.

The Nazis believed blood was everything; to them Jewishness was not a faith but a biological stain. Anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents counted as a full Jew, those with two as first-degree Mischlinge, and those with one as second-degree Mischlinge. Full Jews were barred from the army, while men of mixed descent could serve, at least early in the war. Military historian Bryan Mark Rigg, working from German military records, arrived at a striking breakdown: nearly 150,000 men of mixed descent served in the Wehrmacht, 60,000 of them half-Jewish and 90,000 quarter-Jewish by Nazi definitions. The total exceeded the combined manpower of Germany's elite Panzer divisions.

Most of these soldiers did not feel Jewish at all; some learned of their descent only after enlisting, others had converted to Christianity without a thought for a grandparent's Sabbath candles. Some were at peace with their Jewish side yet assumed the regime was after Orthodox Jews or communists, and that they, as patriotic Germans, would be treated apart. The words of one veteran, recorded in old age, capture that blindness: they had never believed the Germans would come for them. But they did, and as the war dragged on the regime moved to purge every trace of Jewish blood from the military. Some men were shielded by their commanders, others had to defend their ancestry before military bureaucrats, and at least one was murdered by an officer who learned he was Jewish.

So why did a regime bent on destroying the Jews keep 150,000 men of Jewish descent at the front? The answer is the clash between ideology and military necessity; deleting that many soldiers at a stroke would have torn a hole in the army. The regime knew the price: at the Wannsee conference in 1942, bureaucrats openly discussed the damage that ripping Jews out of their jobs would do to the war economy. Their decision was to keep Jews in posts vital to the war until suitable Aryan replacements could be found. As the war wore on, the obsession with racial purity crushed even that calculation, and tens of thousands of trained soldiers and skilled workers were discarded instead of used.

Finding out who was Jewish demanded a sprawling bureaucracy; the Nazis combed church registers and civil records, collecting birth, baptism, and marriage certificates. For most people, proving that all four grandparents were non-Jewish was enough, while SS members had to document an absence of Jewish ancestry back to 1750. Under the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, teachers, judges, lawyers, doctors, and even musicians had to produce Aryan certificates. Exemptions once granted to First World War veterans were ground away over the years; having risked your life for Germany no longer satisfied the regime.

The two most striking exceptions show how the regime bent its principles in exchange for loyalty. An investigation ordered by Himmler into Emil Maurice, one of Hitler's oldest comrades and member number two of the SS, found a Jewish great-grandfather in his line. Hitler intervened personally, and Maurice was declared to be of German blood. The case of Erhard Milch, Inspector General of the Luftwaffe, was murkier still: his mother signed a statement declaring that his biological father was not her half-Jewish husband but her own uncle, and Milch received a German Blood Certificate. Political loyalty and military need had overruled supposedly immutable laws of blood.

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their rights, identity, and freedom, and the 1938 Decree on the Elimination of the Jews from German Economic Life, issued after Kristallnacht, shut nearly every remaining door to earning a living, from retail shops to the crafts. Shoemakers, tailors, grocers: ordinary Jewish tradespeople could no longer work. Yet modern war rested on industrial output, engineering, and innovation, and the Nazis were idling some of the brightest minds in those fields for being Jewish. In 1942, General Curt Ludwig von Gienanth warned the high command in writing that removing war-essential Jewish workers from the arms industry was harming the military potential of the Reich. The warning changed nothing; ideological purity defeated military necessity.

Whenever it needed them, the regime cheated its own racial code without blushing; the Japanese allies were declared Honorary Aryans wholesale. Helene Mayer, the silver-medal fencer who gave the Nazi salute on the podium at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was of partial Jewish descent, and Propaganda Minister Goebbels forbade any comment on her non-Aryan ancestry. General Helmuth Wilberg of the air force, one of the architects of blitzkrieg tactics, was a first-degree Mischling. Nobel laureate Otto Heinrich Warburg counted as first-degree because his grandparents were Orthodox Jews, yet he stayed in Germany through the war, neither deported nor persecuted. In the same years, Jewish industrialists such as the Warburg banking family were forced to sell their firms for a fifth of their true value, and by 1938 two-thirds of Jewish-owned businesses had been closed or seized.

Hitler personally signed Declarations of German Blood for around 77 high-ranking officers of Jewish descent. Lieutenant General Johannes Zukertort, Knight's Cross holder Colonel Walter Hollaender, decorated naval officer Paul Ascher, and Luftwaffe Major Rudolf Schmidt, also a Knight's Cross holder, were heroes whose blood was officially tainted on paper. Awarded some 7,200 times in various grades through the war, the Knight's Cross was the mark of exceptional bravery in an army of 18 million, and at least 20 of its recipients were of partial Jewish descent by Nazi classification. Rigg counts at least 77 generals, lieutenant generals, major generals, and colonels of Jewish descent. Had the principles been truly unbreakable, these men should have faced persecution; instead, because they were useful, the Nazis rewrote the rules as they went.

The decorated men at the front, meanwhile, could not save their families; even those who never grasped the scale of the extermination program watched their relatives stripped of rights and driven from their homes. One officer Rigg interviewed visited his father in Sachsenhausen wearing a German uniform: a surreal image, a servant of Hitler walking in to see a parent imprisoned by that same regime. Another risked his life in combat knowing his relatives were being sent to Auschwitz, powerless to act. A part-Jewish soldier captured by the British met his father in the same POW camp, the old man having fled Germany to escape persecution. By Rigg's count, 2,300 relatives of 1,000 Mischling soldiers did not survive; some soldiers had been approved by Hitler himself, and their relatives were murdered anyway.

When Goldberg heard his sick father was under pressure, he appealed to his commander; the general of the Potsdam garrison heard him out and intervened, and the father escaped deportation in 1940. But the face on the poster had become an embarrassment to the regime; Werner was discharged along with thousands of other men of partial Jewish descent, and the poster was never used again. In 1943 the father was arrested by the Gestapo and nearly deported; what saved him was the Rosenstrasse protest, when thousands of women filled a Berlin street. The women demanding the release of their Jewish husbands from mixed marriages held their ground against machine-gun threats, and most of the detainees walked free. The video puts the crowd at 6,000 and the survivors at 4,000; academic counts of the detentions run lower, a gap I take up in the evaluation section.

In April 1940, Hitler ordered every Mischling discharged from the military; soldiers returning from the Polish campaign found their families persecuted and themselves bound for forced-labour camps. Men like Ernst Hess, who reported to the Aryanization Office in Munich in 1944, lost their protection in a single day and were sent to live in so-called Jew Houses. The July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life drove the regime's paranoia to its peak; around 7,000 people were arrested, and every remaining Mischling was declared a security risk. Ordinary discharged men were sent to the construction sites of the Todt Organization, a gigantic building network employing 1.5 to 2 million labourers, of whom about 185,000 died. Run on a strict racial hierarchy with Slav and Jewish workers at the bottom, the camps still worked most of their 10,000 to 20,000 Mischling labourers hard; most survived, the labour was brutal, and in the end it all came to nothing.

When the war ended, the Mischling soldiers were left in a historical no man's land; the Nazis had questioned their blood, stripped their rank, expelled them from the armed forces, and sent them to labour while their relatives were murdered. Among the tens of thousands of Germans tried after the war, almost no Mischling was convicted; one exception, Honorary Aryan Field Marshal Erhard Milch, received a life sentence for the use of forced labour, later commuted. Emil Maurice, Hitler's loyal Mischling servant, was classed a Category II offender and sentenced to four years in prison. Most of the men drifted quietly back into society, counted as neither victims nor perpetrators, yet somehow both. Some wrestled with bureaucracy over pensions and compensation at once. The words of one veteran who had felt German through and through have stayed with me: he had never imagined that the kids he grew up with, his teachers, and his local policemen could belong to a system that would murder his family.