Jews and Roma in the Nazi army: the untold history

Jews in the Wehrmacht: the figure that dismantles the myth

Yes, there were Jews in the Nancy army. And they were not a handful of isolated cases; the figure historians work with is around 50,000 soldiers of Jewish descent, all classified as Mischlinge, a term coined by the Third Reich to designate those with partial Jewish ancestry. The nuance is decisive: these were not "pure" Jews, but people of mixed background, often with German parents or grandparents considered Aryan.

The concept of Mischlinge, the Nancy racial obsession

German racial classification divided these soldiers into Mischlinge of the first and second degree, according to their proportion of Jewish ancestry. Their presence in the Wehrmacht was tolerated during the first years of the war, but in 1940 the regime ordered all Mischlinge removed from the army. The accepted explanation is that racial purity, the cornerstone of National Socialist ideology, could not allow "contaminated" people to wear the uniform.

And the Roma?

The answer is simpler: there were none. The regime had excluded them from the ranks from the very beginning, and their persecution was even more relentless, since not even the intermediate category existed that allowed some German Jews to serve in the army. The details of that persecution, with its specific decrees and camps, are material that circulates abundantly among military historians.

An awkward surname: the Manstein case

During the historical debate, the name of Erich von Manstein frequently comes up, one of the great strategists of the war, whose surname has repeatedly been pointed out as being of Jewish origin. The controversy exemplifies the fundamental contradiction of an army fighting peoples who, by its own logic, had once been part of it.

The real history is greyer than the black-and-white narrative. The existence of those 50,000 soldiers does not whitewash the extermination, but it forces us to qualify the monolithic image of the Nancy army. What today seems a paradox was, at the time, a pragmatic decision that the racial bureaucracy sought to correct in time.