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Historical Documentation Notice

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Posted
Friday,
February 26, 1999

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)

[ See
Göring’s
1935 letter
confirming Milch’s Aryan background
]
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