http://uk.news.yahoo.com/031030/325/ecmah.html (Reuters) - As many as 150,000 men of Jewish descent served in the German military under Adolf Hitler, 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... 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... Die Welt daily called Rigg's book "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers" "one of the most important Holocaust studies of recent years"...
Dr. Rigg was in the news a bit last year when the book was originally released. Which if I remember correctly was before he was hired by AMU/APUS. Last month the book was published in Germany. "APUS Professor’s Book, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, Released in Germany AMU history Professor Bryan Mark Rigg’s book, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, was published by the University Press of Kansas in May 2002, and has since been translated into French, Portuguese and most recently, German. It was featured on a TV program on "Kulturweltspiegel" in Germany on September 28 to discuss the release of the book in that country. It will be coming out in Bulgarian, Italian and Polish, and possibly Russian and Chinese. The extensively researched book is the untold story of Nazi racial laws and men of Jewish descent in the German military. It is available at http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/righit.html Professor Rigg received his PhD in Historical Studies from Cambridge University and teaches a number of history courses at AMU at both the undergraduate and graduate level, including History of the Wehrmacht, MH380 and LW591." http://www.apus.edu/APU/navigation/visitor_center/newsletter/newsletter.asp
