Jews in Nazi military service

Reply-To: H-NET List for History of the Holocaust <[email protected]>
Sender: H-NET List for History of the Holocaust <[email protected]>

Author: Charlotte Opfermann

If memory serves me well, Dohnyani also was related to Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Also, a relative (nephew?) of Dohnyani is now mayor of Hamburg and took a 'strange' stand during the recent Walser controversy.

Further, a German colleague (Dr Guenther Schubert, Berlin) sent me this information:

Die Liste von aktiven Offizieren, die selbst oder deren Ehefrauen jüdische Mischlinge sind und vom Führer für deutschblütig erklärt wurden, findet sich im Bundesarchiv in Aachen-Kornelimünster, Zentrale Nachweisstelle. Sie wurde vom Heerespersonalamt im Januar 1944 aufgestellt und enthält die Namen von 48 Wehrmachtsoffizieren jüdischer Abstammung, wobei mit peinlicher Sorgfalt vermerkt wird, ob der jüdische Blutsanteil 50 oder nur 25 Prozent beträgt. Von Hitler persönlich waren sie zu Ariern erklärt worden.

I'll be happy to share the essay in its entirety with German-speaking colleagues. He gave me permission. Personally, I am not sure that this list is complete -- as I could probably 'rattle off' such a number of 'jüdisch versippte' Wehrmacht members from memory. My father-in-law Wilhelm Opfermann held the rank equivalent to a general in the Wehrmacht supply corps (in spite of his 100% Jewish wife) with many great perks (limo, permanent suite at the Wehrmacht-occupied Hotel Quai d'Orsay in Paris, et al.)

Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann
College of the Mainland,
Cont.Ed. Dept. English,
Texas City
Houston TX USA

and Nikolaus Kopernikus University Torun/Poland

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David Irving sent this message to: Charlotte Opfermann

Dear Charlotte 

I SAW your interest in the Jewish members of the Wehrmacht. You (or someone) mentioned Milch (picture). I wrote Milch's biography (Little, Brown Inc), and had complete access to his family papers. But I was not permitted to reveal what I found out. The low-down is this: although his father Anton Milch was Jewish (and this was established again in the 1990s beyond doubt using German and Polish (including Jewish) archives by the late Klaus Herrmann, a Montreal professor, who died earlier this year), in fact his natural father was his mother's (Aryan) uncle Carl Bräuer, a rich Berlin Baumeister. That effectively got the field marshal off the hook. There are allusions to this in his private diaries. He showed me the letter his mother wrote him in 1933, confessing the whole sordid business (which affected his brothers and sisters too). Challenged by R H Jackson, at R M W Kempner's instigation, at Nuremberg, "You are in fact a Jew?" Milch bit his lip and said he was not. But he could hardly reveal, so he told me, what the true story was (his mother was at that time alive).

Yours sincerely
David Irving (currently writing in Key West, Florida)