By David Strom
CARDIFF BY THE SEA, California—On a Tuesday evening at Temple Solel, a large crowd came to hear historian and author Mark Rigg talk about his latest book, Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers. His lecture was well received.
Dr. Rigg began his Nov. 3 lecture talking about himself and his background, including his childhood learning disability. This seemed strange at first since the audience was there to learn about the 150,000 Jewish soldiers in the Nazi army. However, Dr. Rigg’s story of how he had overcome rather grim predictions about his abilities to succeed in life gave his audience the opportunity to more fully appreciate his remarkable achievements as an author and researcher.
As a youngster attending public school he had difficulty with social skills, which in turn affected his academic performance. He couldn’t sit quietly in class. Eventually he was diagnosed as a “special student” with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly known as ADHD. While he drove some teachers and his fellow students “nuts” with his very active behavior, he bonded with one teacher who understood him, worked with him and got him interested in school learning. Besides this wonderful teacher, his mother never lost sight of the fact that he was a person with his own being and intelligence.
Rigg emphasized the point that with his condition as a special needs student in Nazi Germany, he might have not survived. One of the first groups slated for death were the young who were mentally and/or physically challenged.
Mark Rigg explained how by Jewish law, he is a Jew, although in his childhood, his Jewish identity was not developed. In Hitler’s Germany he would have been considered a “mischlinge,” a part Jew because his father was a Christian. He was not raised in the Jewish religion, but as an adult he studied at a yeshiva. During his talk he called himself a “yeshiva bocher-a student at a religious Jewish college. When he was in the U.S. Marine Corps he would say the “Shema” along with the few other Jewish marines.
At the age of twenty-three with some grant funding and scholarship money, Rigg went to Germany to study. Leaving a movie theater in Germany where he was one of only two patrons to see the film Europa, Europa he struck up a conversation with the other person. This elderly gentleman who spoke many languages and had been in the Nazi army and knew the stories of many mischlinge who had served under Hitler. This encounter was among the first of a series of unlikely but remarkable encounters that lead him deeper and deeper into his intriguing research of Hilter’s Jewish soldiers through personal accounts and stories told by the soldiers themselves and their comrades.
Rigg interviewed over 200 Jewish/mischlinges who had served in the German army. He gathered over 20,000 pages of documents in his research. In his current work he focuses on the lives of 21 of the interviewees. At his lecture he mentioned three. One man in his nineties invited him to come immediately to interview him-he was ninety-four and ill. It was difficult to reach this former soldier as he lived in the country with little local transportation to his isolated and majestic estate. Rigg arrived at the closest train depot, about seven miles from the mansion of the person he was to interview.
With a backpack of 150 pounds, he rode a bicycle to the interview. When he arrived, he was tired, dirty, yet warmly welcomed by the soldier who was close to death and wanted desperately to have his story recorded for posterity. After a shower and some food the interview took place. A few weeks later, the interviewee died, confirming that the sense that Rigg had that “time was of the essence” was true, adding urgency and importance to each encounter in his research, no matter the obstacles and hardships required to document these events for history.
One man, with the last name of “Levy,” was in the SS. He said the Shema everyday while serving in the SS. He had six children and with the stroke of the pen, Hitler made them all official Aryans, erasing their Jewish ancestry and declaring them to be “pure Germans.”
Assimilation in Germany was very high. More Jews were killed fighting for Germany in World War One than all the Jews killed fighting for modern Israel in all of its wars. German Jews were loyal citizens of Germany. They were Germans first, Jewish second. They could not believe that Hitler would kill so many of them.
Knowing and understanding what was occurring in Nazi Germany was difficult for most Mischlinges. They only had a narrow view of what was happening. They knew that some of their relatives were taken away. What happened to them, they did not know. As soldiers they heard a little about the concentration camps. Some saw the slaughter of Jews at the beginning of the war, but most did not. Most did not regret having served in the Nazi army and participating in the war machine. They wanted to protect their family from harm. If they fought and showed bravery their comrades in arms would accept them.
Rigg stated that the social dynamics of war made the fighting group a cohesive unit. All depended on each other. The bravery of the Jewish soldier wiped any prejudice a particular soldier may have held prior to this wartime reality. However, the Mischlinges expressed regret for what they didn’t know about the Nazis´ murder of the Jews.
Rigg described vividly the deep conflict in the psyches of those who learned after the fact of the horrible fate of their relatives and loved ones while they had been shielded from this same fate because their military service had been useful to Hitler and to Nazi Germany.
Rigg’s presentation was inspiring and informative, since the author himself has a remarkable story to tell and has been relentless and determined in his pursuit of otherwise forgotten history of what it meant to be even part Jewish during the Nazi era.
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University