Sustained by scholarship, peanut butter and a sense of mission, American Bryan Rigg is exploring an eerie and uncharted no man’s land of Holocaust history.
Rigg interviews former German soldiers of Jewish heritage, some of them high-ranking officers, who fought for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in World War II–during the Holocaust, when the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews.
“Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called ‘full Jews’ served in the military with Hitler’s knowledge. The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families,” Rigg said.
On a heady journey of personal and professional discovery, the 25-year-old Texan has talked with more than 300 of these veterans, including a handful in California. Passed along from one old soldier to another, he has crisscrossed Germany over four years, often by bicycle, sometimes sleeping in railroad stations to stretch his budget.
Rigg said he has documented the Jewish ancestry of more than 1,200 of Hitler’s soldiers, including two field marshals and 10 generals, “men commanding up to 100,000 troops.” In about 20 cases, soldiers of Jewish heritage were awarded the Knight’s Cross, Germany’s highest military honor, he said.