Three Faces of Shoah Interpretation

By Michael Berenbaum
Published on April 28, 2005

Raul Hilberg was not encouraged when he approached his professor, Franz Neumann, about writing his doctoral dissertation on the role of the German civil service in the Holocaust. Neumann assented, but warned: “It’s your funeral.”

The Nazi Who Saved the Rebbe

By Gaby Wenig
Published on March 3, 2005

"Rescued From The Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe," by Bryan Mark Rigg, Yale University Press, 2004.

When a German army officer trawled the streets of Warsaw in 1940 looking for Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, people either pleaded ignorance or ran away in fear.

Jews in the Nazis’ Ranks

By Dennis Gura
Published on June 13, 2002

"Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and the Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military" by Bryan Mark Rigg (University Press of Kansas, $29.95).

Bryan Mark Rigg's most controversial assertion is "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers'" least relevant matter. In a complicated opening chapter, he claims that 150,000 individuals (almost exclusively male) served in the German military who were, by Nazi racial standards and laws, Jews of some quantity. By his calculations, perhaps as many as 6,000 "full" Jews (with four Jewish grandparents) were in the Wehrmacht -- but the greater number comes, of course, from the highly assimilated, aggressively nationalistic, and thoroughly acculturated "quarter" and "half" Jews, those with one or two Jewish grandparents, respectively. (The mathematics is darkly amusing: two half-Jewish parents make up one half-Jewish child.)