Erhard Milch (30 March 1892 – 25 January 1972) was a German field marshal who oversaw the development of the Luftwaffe as part of the re-armament of Nazi Germany following World War I. During World War II, he was in charge of aircraft production; his ineffective management resulted in the decline of the German air force and its loss of air superiority as the war progressed. He was convicted of war crimes during the Milch Trial held before the U.S. military court in 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment; he was released in 1954.

Milch was born in Wilhelmshaven, the son of Anton Milch, a Jewish pharmacist who served in the Imperial German Navy, and Clara Milch, née Vetter. The Gestapo would later investigate Milch multiple times due to his Jewish heritage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Milch

Milch was then given a "get out of jail free" card known as a "German blood certificate" by Herman Goering. This made him an honorary aryan and exempt from anti-semitic persecution.

https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-high-ranking-Nazis-with-Jewish-ancestry

Emil Maurice was a cofounder of the SS and served as Hitler's chauffeur. He was a very early member of the Nazi Party, going back to before the Beer Hall Putsch. One of his great-grandfathers was Jewish. Hitler declared Maurice an honorary Aryan. After the war, Maurice was tried, convicted and sentenced to four years in a labor camp. He died in 1972.

https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-high-ranking-Nazis-with-Jewish-ancestry

Hermann Goering was of partial Jewish ancestry. Goering was related to a Swiss-German banking family. That family had converted to Christianity in the 1400's, and Goering was never classified as a "Mischling" (mixed-race) as Milch was, but still, Hitler's designated successor[1] was of partial Jewish ancestry. Also worth noting is that Goering's brother Albert detested the Nazi Party, actively sabotaged its activities and helped rescue Jews.

From here, we start getting into conjecture. Heinrich Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, was rumored to be of partial Jewish descent. Heydrich was the prime mover behind Kristallnacht, the Einsatzgruppen and the Wannsee Conference. Few did as much as he did to engineer the Holocaust. However, the rumors were never substantiated and they were very likely merely lies told in the midst of a power struggle.

Also in the realm of rumor, nobody is quite clear as to who Adolf Hitler's paternal grandfather was. Genetic studies have shown that Hitler's family genome contained certain markers slightly more common among Jews than of gentile Germans, but this is very, very far from conclusive evidence that Hitler had any Jewish ancestry.

https://www.quora.com/Were-there-any-high-ranking-Nazis-with-Jewish-ancestry

Werner Goldberg

Werner Goldberg (October 3, 1919 – September 28, 2004) was a German who was of half Jewish ancestry, or Mischling in Nazi terminology, who served briefly as a soldier during World War II. His image appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt as "The Ideal German Soldier", and was later used in recruitment posters for the Wehrmacht.

Goldberg’s father grew up in Königsberg as a member of the Jewish community

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Goldberg

After the Nazi German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Jews of Warsaw, including Nossig, were forced to move to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Nossig reportedly collaborated with the Abwehr and Gestapo, drawing up plans for Jewish emigration and submitting memoranda to the German authorities. Nossig was accused of providing regular reports to the Nazis during the deportation of Jewish residents to Nazi extermination camps, and an underground resistance group, the Jewish Combat Organization, sentenced him to death; he was executed on 22 February 1943

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nossig

As many as 150 000 Jews served in Hitlers military, some with the Nazi leader’s explicit consent, according to a U.S. historian who has interviewed hundreds of former soldiers.

Bryan Mark Rigg, history professor at the American Military University in Virginia, told Reuters on Thursday that the issue of soldiers of partial Jewish descent was long a somewhat taboo subject, overlooked by most academics as it threw up thorny questions.

“Not everybody who wore a uniform was a Nazi and not every person of Jewish descent was persecuted,” he said. “Where do they belong? They served in the military but lost mum at Auschwitz.”

According to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Jews or those of partial Jewish descent were unfit for military service, but Rigg tracked down and interviewed more than 400 former soldiers of partial Jewish descent — labelled “Mischlinge” (“half-caste”) by the Nazis.

He estimates there were about 60,000 soldiers with one Jewish parent and 90,000 with a Jewish grandparent in the Wehrmacht, the regular army as distinct from the Nazi SS.

“They thought ‘if I serve well they’re not going to hurt me and not going to hurt my family’,” he said.

However, on returning home from the campaign in Poland at the start of the war to find persecution of their families worsening, many soldiers classified as half-Jewish started to complain, prompting Hitler to order their dismissal in 1940.

But many of these so-called half-Jewish soldiers continued to serve, sometimes due to delays in the discharge order reaching the front, because they concealed their background or because they applied and won clemency for good service.

Many senior officers with Jewish ancestry won special permission to serve from Hitler himself.

“History is not so black and white. History about Mischlinge shows how bankrupt the Nazi racial laws were,” said Rigg.

SENSITIVE SUBJECT

While Germany has long been aware of men serving as soldiers who Nazi race laws should have classified as Jewish, most notably former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Rigg’s large estimate has surprised many.

Die Welt daily called Rigg’s book “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” “one of the most important Holocaust studies of recent years”. The author was in Berlin to launch the German language version.

“The Mischlinge suffered the same fate in academic life as they did in real life. There was nobody to speak for them,” Rigg said. “People thought it could be misinterpreted, it would be like saying: ‘look they did it to themselves’.”

Rigg, who has served in the U.S. Marines and as a volunteer in the Israeli army, was moved to research the subject after he discovered his own Jewish ancestry while probing his family tree and after a chance meeting with a Jewish Wehrmacht veteran.

Many of his subjects were telling their story for the first time and in some cases their families knew nothing of their Jewish heritage. “They would talk their hearts out, telling me all about this schizophrenic story they went through,” he said.

He is convinced that most of the soldiers of Jewish decent were not aware of the Nazis’ systematic murder of Jews, noting that most half-Jews reported to deportation stations in 1944.

“Most say they do not feel guilty about serving in the military, they feel guilty about what they didn’t do to save their relatives,” he said.

Source Rense/Reuters