Bryan Mark Rigg

BRYAN MARK RIGG received his B.A. with honors in history from Yale University in 1996. Yale awarded him the Henry Fellowship for graduate study at Cambridge University, where he received his M.A. in 1997 and Ph.D. in 2002. Currently Professor of History at American Military University, he has served as a volunteer in the Israeli Army and as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. His research for this book has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and London Daily Telegraph. The thousands of pages of documents and oral testimonies the author collected for this study have been purchased by the National Military Archive of Germany. The Bryan Mark Rigg Collection is housed in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg,Germany. What sparked Bryan's interest in this subject? Raised as a Protestant in the Texas Bible Belt, Bryan Mark Rigg was surprised to learn of his own Jewish ancestry while researching his family tree in Germany. This revelation, as well as a chance encounter with a Jewish veteran of the Wehrmacht at a Berlin screening of Europa Europa, roused him to embark on a decade of research while a student first at Yale University and later at Cambridge University. Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military is the result of his efforts.

How did he conduct his research? Crisscrossing Germany by bicycle, and carrying his own supplies including backpack, video-camera, tripod, laptop, books, and documents--Bryan located and interviewed more than four hundred Mischlinge (partial Jews as labeled under Hitler's racial laws) and their relatives and friends. His quest also took him to Sweden, Canada, Israel, and Turkey. In addition, he scrupulously labored to provide documentary evidence to support the findings from each oral history. His interviewees have included former chancellor of Germany Helmut Schmidt, Adenauer's Secretary of State Hans von Herwarth, Bundesgeschäftsführer of the Social Democratic Party of Germany Egon Bahr, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein's adjutant Alexander Stahlberg, and Colonel Claus Schenk Graf van Stauffenberg's adjutant Horst von Oppenfeld.

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