Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers

After Adolf Hitler rose to prominence, Hirschfeld discarded his yarmulke, moved to Allenstein in East Prussia, and registered himself as a person who was gottgläubig (a believer in God without any religious affiliation), rather than a Jew. He then forged his Ahnenpass (“Ancestors’ Passport,” a Nazi document proving Aryan ancestry) and volunteered for an infantry unit in the Wehrmacht.

At his medical examination, although he stood nude in front of army doctors, his circumcision did not become an issue. When I interviewed him and asked why he chose to serve Nazi Germany, Hirschfeld answered that had he remained a Jew in Germany, the Nazis would have deported him, as he learned later, to a labor camp. He wanted to avoid persecution and felt the military offered him camouflage protection. “Inside, though, I remained a Jew. My service was strictly my way to survive,” he told me.

When asked how he felt when he took an oath to Hitler, he responded, “As a Jew, I hated Hitler, but I have to respect some of the things he did…He had a smart mind and accomplished many things for the economy and especially for the new armed forces. People often forget that Hitler had some good characteristics. Do you think the Germans would have followed a completely evil, deranged madman? No, he wasn’t all bad.”

After he finished his boot camp, Hirschfeld entered the reserves, completed his high school education and worked as a graphic designer in Stolp. In 1939, when Hitler was ramping up to invade Poland, Hirschfeld was recalled to active duty with Infantry Regiment 374, where he served as a cartographer and draftsman on the regimental staff. He admitted he was excited for Germany to win against Poland and France, two countries he hated and felt had taken advantage of Germany after World War I with the Versailles Treaty. Like many Germans, he secretly hoped that Hitler would be removed from power and that a normal Germany would return to the world.

Throughout 1941 until 1944, he served in the rear of the battles in northern Russia and helped keep maps and troop movements up to date. Everywhere he went, his officers respected him and gave him high praise for his work.

By May 1944, due to his excellent service, Hirschfeld became an officer. For his performance, he received the War Merit Cross with Swords, Second Class (the U.S. equivalent of the Bronze Star without the Valor device). “They called me the ‘Wise Jew’ because of my ability to second-guess the Soviets. If they’d only known!” He also received the Wound Badge in Black (the U.S. equivalent of the Purple Heart) proving he was often in the front lines, fighting with his men.

He felt he was placed in the military by God to save himself and to help other Jews when he could. “Where my unit marched east into Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia, I often secretly gave Jews rounded up by the SS and Military Police Passierscheine (special passes) so they could get food and travel home. I did more for those persecuted Jews than Jews who ran away to foreign countries!” He also said he was able to give some food to starving Jewish children in a Russian village where he was stationed. Hirschfeld said, “I stayed and did what I could from within the Wehrmacht. Jews today don’t understand this. One day, when I was at a Jewish conference in Bonn in the 1980s, I met another Orthodox Jew who had been an officer. He agreed with me that we did more for our fellow Jews by staying in the Wehrmacht than we could have done had we fled to an Allied country.”

He also claimed that throughout the war, he saved many soldiers under his command from being ambushed by Soviet forces. He had an uncanny ability to anticipate where the Russians would attack and knowing how to place his men or telling his higher ups where to position the FrontSchweine (grunts) in order to thwart the relentless attacks by the Soviets. He was especially skilled in how to place the MG-34 and MC-42 general purpose machineguns, to trap Russians in excellent kill zones.

When asked if he felt guilty for what he did, he replied, “Wehrmacht service was my salvation. My brother and sister and her children and husband all died in the Holocaust.” At this point in the interview, Hirschfeld stopped, choked with emotion, with tears streaming down his face. He did witness Jews doing forced labor, and that pained his heart, but he was powerless to do anything. He never felt guilty for what he did, but only for what he was not able to do, like help those Jews he witnessed in need.

Strangely enough, in 1943 he was able to save his Jewish fiancée, Ruth Loeper. He falsified her documents and actually married her. During this part of the interview, Hirschfeld then showed me pictures of his wedding, at which he wore his dress uniform and said sarcastically, “It was probably the only Jewish wedding of a Wehrmacht member.”

Hirschfeld said that while serving, he remained Jewish as best he could and recited Judaism’s central prayer, the Shema, every day and prayed when he could. On several occasions, he believes Hashem (God), spoke to him directly and saved his life. At the end of the war, he was lucky to fall into the hands of the Allies and was able to return home after being in a POW camp for only a few months (many German POWs weren’t released for much longer, especially if they found themselves in Soviet camps.)

When asked if he knew about the Holocaust, he said, “I knew nothing at the time [about Auschwitz and other death camps]. I did know that some Jews were being killed or sent to concentration camps, but I never knew the Nazis had decided to systematically murder millions. I could not believe people I grew up with, like my neighbors, school comrades and military buddies could support a system to slaughter millions of people like me. All these people, in general, who were my fellow Germans were good people. How could people like them do such things?”

At this point in the interview, Hirschfeld’s wife Ruth agreed and said, “No. It was impossible to know. We at home lived a sheltered life. We couldn’t have known.”

Hirschfeld had many things on his mind during the Third Reich. Besides being uprooted from their homes, traumatized by the Nazis and fighting the Soviets, he and his wife suffered personal tragedies. They lost two babies during the war, one to birth problems and the other to starvation at the end of the hostilities in 1945.

Hirschfeld was unique compared to the hundreds of Jews and men of Jewish descent who I interviewed who served in the Wehrmacht in that he remained religious during and after the war. Most men I documented, Christian and Jewish, discarded their beliefs and turned into atheists. However, Hirschfeld felt the Almighty guided his actions and ensured his survival. When asked why God saved him and did not help save 6 million other Jews, Hirschfeld drew a blank face and said that sometimes God works in mysterious ways.