Citation needed. Preferably not from a holocaust denial site or someone’s dubious blog. The only info that I could find from a quasi reputable source–Wikipedia–was about Milch, who, in an astonishing coincidence, is the only officer you have named. Milch was, according to Wikipedia, a man of murky ancestry which may have included some Jewish ancestors, possibly his father. He was classified as a “first degree mongrel” under the Nuremberg laws. Later he was reclassified as Aryan by Hitler himself.
Hitler didn’t murder anybody, as far as I know.
You must be referring to the Kastner train, but that is probably the most misleading way it could possibly be described. The Kastner train consisted of about 1500 Hungarian Jews released after negotiations between Zionist-affiliated Jewish groups and Adolf Eichmann. The Jews were released in exchange for about 1.6 million dollars (1944, about $20 million today), not due to some sort of Nazi affinity for Zionism.
I Second that, jezzaOZ always do check if the sources you use are using are not like that.
The impression I got after learning about the historical period is that Hitler and his buddies showed an interest in Zionism with the idea that they were shipping the Jews away, but also to counteract with propaganda the awareness that many people had about the growing ugly developments seen in Germany when the Nazis began to use the law to remove the rights of the Jews.
Hitler did promise that “if the combined forces of Judaism should again succeed in unleashing a world war, that would mean the end of the Jews in Europe.” in 1939, of course then the Nazi propaganda did wonders to demonstrate with falsehoods (at least inside Germany) that the world war was caused by others, mostly the Jews.
Indeed, that Zionist support shown by Goebbels was just for show, it was just one part of the plan to remove the Jews from Europe first, remove their rights and then to exterminate them. Removing this context is a favourite move made by Holocaust denier sites and antisemites, so yes, once again we need better cites.
:dubious: One of these three is not like the other, in this context. Are you on the level, OP?
Hitler’s Jewish Army By Bryan Mark Rigg. ISBN 0-7006-1178-9
Hereis a review of the book referred to. The basic point is that almost all of these people were of part Jewish (rather than full) ansestry and therefore Jewish under Nazi (not AFAIK Jewish) rules.
There were ethnic Jews who fought on the German side and won the Iron Cross…but they were Finns.
See Israeli Nationality Rules on who is a Jew according to Israel. Slightly more restrictive than the Nazi rules, but not much.
Regarding the Iron Cross there were practising German Jews in the Wehrmacht who won them (and survived the war). I understand around 20 Knights Cross were awarded to full or part Jews in the Wehrmacht alone.
Even the notorious Wannsee protocol had a special exemption for Jewish soldiers who had won bravery medals in defence of Germany.
I have found accessible on the google books an interesting book on this subject
French Colonial Soldiers in German Captivity during World War II, Cambridge 2014
It is interesting to read even the excerpts. It remainds us that the first nazi reponse to the muslim colonial soldiers captured, the senegalese (actually these are the mix of the Malians and the senegalese due to the colonial usage of those days) were executed after the surrender, so it is clear ‘Musliim’ as Muslims understand it was not a help. The excerpts also make clear the point that there was not a “Muslim” collaboration with the Nazis but some specific groups. From the chapter that is available in this serious book, it is clear the Nazi found little success in their Mulsim focus propaganda attempts later with the Maghrebines and with the Senegalese. And there was a difference - the prisoners from the drafted forces were more open -but not very - to the propaganda, and the volunteer force, which was the large Moroccan force and the Senegalese, not open at all.
So we have the test case (outside of the problems of the soviet test case), it is the French Army of Africa, and it is seen that it is the Nazi racial ideology and not the religion that mattered. To be too dark and be Muslim meant execution or being put in bad camp conditions. Lighter, not as bad. There is no real religion sympathy, only a strange expression of the nazi race ideology.
It is the same with the Bosniak division, that as the wiki notes, had trouble raising enough actual bosniaks and had to be filled under-strength with the Croats (catholics), and which actually rebeled to join the other side when in the France for training and saw a number of its members and leaders executed by the Nazis.
It is a falsehood, perhaps deliberate, to promote the idea of a Nazi-Muslim collaboration (using Muslim to imply wide and general) with the implications (no accident I think this has become a popular discourse, while the real history of the Moroccan volunteer divisions fighting for the allied forces is passed in silence) of Islam as in the extreme right discourse of the usa, Islamonazi I think is the term invented…
Of course the laws are similar - that’s the whole point. If someone has enough Jewish ancestry to be killed by the Nazis, Israel has an obligation to take them in, even if they’re not actually Jewish.
There are several hundred thousand non-Jewish immigrants in Israel, most of whom came in the wave of immigration from the former USSR in the early 1990’s. Some have converted to Judaism, most haven’t.
italics added
Both of these paragraphs are insane. “Transfer,” as you put it, of German Jewry as a whole was considered early in the Nazi domination of Germany before world-wide extermination was decided upon. The he part in Italics on the tragic Kaztner train episode of “one truck one life spared” in Hungary, up to a “promised” 10,000, as part of the liquidation of Hungarian Jewry is mordantly amusing.
Rigg’s work, which you cite, among many others, is sound on the “half-breeds,” children of Christian-Jewish marriages, who, like millions of Jews then and today, put country over religion or “race” when, and if, God forbid, they are forced to. A scant few, under the Nuremberg Laws, were declared mischlinge, and a minority of them were temporarily spared for their prowess and dedication.
The laws of of US nationality, for example, like those of most, if not all countries, are far more restrictive, providing for no recognition of descendants not born on the soil of that country.
The “Nazi rules” on who is a Jew, codified in the Nuremburg Laws, was about who is a Jew, not who is a citizen of a state.
The casual comparison, hightened with “ironic” and, in the second sentence, is on a par with tropes of anti-Semitism (and most anti-Zionism) is “the Nazi had/Did x, so do Jews/Israelis”…and one must therefore make conclusions on the equivalence or derivation of one from the other." This post and your subsequent are disturbingly tendentious.
[…quote]Regarding the Iron Cross there were practising German Jews in the Wehrmacht who won them (and survived the war). I understand around 20 Knights Cross were awarded to full or part Jews in the Wehrmacht alone.
[/Quote]
See my comments above.
This a damnable lie. Minutes of the Wannsee conference early in 1942 on the plans for killing 11,000,000 European Jews (by their count) is one of the most significant documents in world history. Please read it.
Former (West) German chancellor (1974-1982) Helmut Schmidt was a First Lieutenant (and battery commander) in the Air Defense Artillery during WWII:
Quoting exactly from the Wannsee notes
*In addition to these age groups - of the approximately 280,000 Jews in Germany proper and Austria on 31 October 1941, approximately 30% are over 65 years old - severely wounded veterans and Jews with war decorations (Iron Cross I) will be accepted in the old-age ghettos. With this expedient solution, in one fell swoop many interventions will be prevented.
*
My point of exemptions for Jewish war heroes stands.
The rest of your points can wait for tomorrow but most are flakey at best.
This referred to veterans of WWI in which Jews served in the German army. But AFAIK, even this didn’t eventually save them from being murdered.
Are we going to have to go through another round of Holocaust denial?
I think Alessan has the right answer to this sterile conversation.
What can we learn from this?
the Nazis had views that did not resolve very well to a religion as a religion. They had ideas based on their ideology of the race, and for both the Jews and the Muslims, the racial idea was primary over the persons own ‘real’ religion.
to try to make sense of this and make assignments that the christians or the muslims or some group of jews ‘really’ collaborated with their ideology is sterile.
We have the evidence that the Bosniak muslims get a pass from the nazis because they were defined as the croats who happen to be muslim and the nazis had the ideology that the croats were not real slavs but only the true aryans who came to speak a slavic language… and we have the case of the nazis executing muslim soldiers of the France captured for not being the right race in the nazi view.
it was a sick ideology that had not one logical sense in it.
There has to be a better term than “Godwins’s Rule” but I think whatever it is, you’ve breached it.
no, I think we are having another round of ‘the muslims are really secret nazis’ with some of the incoherent asides that will lead to the debates about what and who is really a jew …
Where the hell in the “Holocaust Denial” in this entire fucking thread? Saying that some Jews served in the German Armed Forces, does not equate to Holocaust denial, anymore than pointing out that the SS executed Concentration Camp personnel for (unauthorised) abuse of prisoners, which also happened.
Whatever the case may be, if the question is: Did the Nazis prosecute Muslims (adherents of Islam) for religious reasons, the answer is a clear: No.