ADOLF HITLER personally allowed at least 77 army officers of Jewish descent, including 25 generals, to fight for the Nazi cause in the German Wehrmacht during the second World War, an American historian said yesterday. Mr Bryan Rigg, reporting on his research in the weekly Die Zeit, said tens of thousands of Germans, officially classed as Jews under Nazi race laws, fought for the Third Reich.
Some were patriots decorated in the first World War and some thought serving the Nazis would save them and their families from the Holocaust, wrote Mr Rigg, who is currently interviewing Wehrmacht veterans and researching old military files.
One worked for propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and another helped a prominent Lubavitcher rabbi escape from the Warsaw, Ghetto to safety in the US, he said.
"Jews and so called mixed bloods had very different reasons to serve in the Wehrmacht and Nazi policy was much more contradictory than one might assume," Mr Rigg wrote.
"In many cases, Hitler decided personally what should be done with soldiers of Jewish descent - and he made different decisions from case to case."
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws made German Jews into second class citizens by barring them from some professions and forbidding marriages between them and Christians.
They divided Jews - many of them fully assimilated and some even baptised - into "full", "half" and "quarter" Jews according to the number of Jewish grandparents they had.
Mr Rigg said Hitler personally approved the "Aryanisation" of the 77 senior officers listed in a staff notice from the army high command. All were discharged from the military after the failed officers' coup on July 20th, 1944.
"Many brothers, cousins and sons of these officers were not on this list, although they should have been there," he wrote. "The list is very spotty and there are most probably many other cases of this type."
The most senior general of Jewish origin was Field Marshall Erhard Milch, who rose to be general inspector of the Luftwaffe and was convicted of war crimes after 1945. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering promoted him to be his deputy in the 1930s with the comment: "I decide who is a Jew."
In his article in yesterday's edition of Die Zeit, Mr Rigg illustrated his findings with three cases of Jewish soldiers. Col Ernst Bloch got his "German blood certificate" with help from the chief of military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. He used this connection and his daring to rescue Rabbi Joseph Schneersohn, leader of the ultra orthodox Lubavitchers, from Warsaw and smuggle him through Latvia to the US.
Another officer, protected by forged identity papers, worked as a propaganda officer in Paris until his Jewish background became known and he was dismissed. The third was decorated for destroying six Soviet tanks in Kursk, the second World War's biggest tank battle.