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"It has been estimated that 150,000 Jews or partial Jews served in Hitler's military. I was one of them." -- Robert Middelmann
Robert Middelmann presents himself in his memoir as a middle man. He claims he lived by wits, as a half-Jew, surviving amid a maze of double standards ever since Hitler came to power. Nobody can prove it was so; nobody can prove it wasn’t so.
The publication of a book by Middelmann could be anathema to most Jews who will question its veracity. If Robert Middlemann is to be believed, he was born in the Ruhr Valley, in Herne, Germany, on July 10, 1927. As a small boy he was taught to say Heil Hitler when he entered stores—a greeting that replaced hello, good morning and good night. His parents risked death by listening to BBC London at night, but a swastika flag was hung on holidays to show conformity. His German parents supported the communists who were outlawed by the Nazis. His earliest memory concerns a local Communist Party leader named Boris who was chased by the SS and took refuge in their home. His quick-thinking mother told Boris to hide under the covers of four-year-old Robert's bed, with Robert in it. "I could feel heartbeat," he has recalled. "It is like it happened yesterday."
In his memoir, Fearless: A Jewish Boy in Nazi Germany (2019), Middelmann recalls overhearing his mother tell one of their neighbors that her husband, Otto Middelmann, was not Robert's biological father. She confided to a neighbour, in her own kitchen, that Robert's father was a likeable Polish salesman in the family business named Leo. With the rise of Hitler, this neighbour would use this terrible secret to blackmail Robert's mother, forcing her to supply meat and chocolates during food shortages in exchange for her silence. Leo was married to a German Protestant woman. His two children classified as German. He would never divulge his paternity for Robert, but he did provide some instructions about Jewish faith and tried to explain why Jews were persecuted.
In Fearless we are told that Leo enacted a plan to get his two legitimate children into Palestine via Poland in 1938. Robert describes Leo dancing with joy when he received a letter confirming their safe arrival, grateful for a photo of 16-year-old Benjamin and 14-year-old Ruth in khaki uniforms, in a kibbutz. Not long afterwards, according to Middelmann, his biological father was killed during Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," when the Nazis destroyed Jewish-owned businesses, homes and synagogues. Leo's wife received his ashes with the explanation that he had committed suicide in the prison at Bochum.
According to Middelmann, in the aftermath of November 9, 1938, when he was age 15, he tried to form his own youth resistance group, hanging posters in the streets declaring 'Down with Hitler'; and he and another half-Jewish friend managed to burn down a Hitler Youth office. He also reports that he gave food and information to Jewish families. Rising poverty in Germany during the 1920s had put an end to the family chocolate business. To make ends meet, the Middelmanns rented out one half of their factory to Jews for a synagogue; the other half was accorded to makeshift housing for communist families. The upstairs was home to eight prostitutes.
"My family was totally opposed to Hitler and the Nazi regime," Middelmann writes. "During the war we risked our lives to help those who were being persecuted by the Nazis. In 1944, Hitler was losing the war and students were forced to join in the fight. Our entire grade ten class of 15- and 16-year-old students were placed in the anti-aircraft units [at Bochum, in the industrial Ruhr district, in northwestern Germany]. Soon I was made to join the tank division and after my training I was being sent on a suicide mission to blow up allied tanks."
Other teenagers who had tried to desert the army were hung from trees along the roadways. Middelmann nonetheless remained desperate to avoid combat. One day he noticed a boulder was exposed in a ditch by their latrine. He got into the ditch, smashed his foot with the boulder and screamed. He reported he'd slipped into the ditch and the boulder had fallen. "I wanted the allies to win as I saw them as our liberators from an evil and brutal regime. I am very thankful that I escaped armed combat and never killed anyone during the war."
Middelmann allegedly spent months in a German field hospital where he befriended three Poles. One night, when the British bombardment was near, Robert limped onto the road where a Nazi truck waited to take away wounded German soldiers. Robert and a friend opted not to get into that truck. Instead, they hung up a bedsheet as a white flag, and went to bed. Next morning, they saw soldiers with red berets. Robert could speak English. With a cane for walking, he approached a British soldier. He asked if he and his friends could surrender. The soldier loaded his gun and escorted Robert back to where his friends are. Robert was worried that his captor is going to kill them all. "How about a spot of tea, eh?" said the British soldier. They had tea, smoked cigarettes, talked about sports and showed one another family photos.
Middelmann and the other captives were taken to a British camp near the Dutch border. As POWs, they were forced to work for the Allies in a Belgium coal mine. It was harsh work. Impulsively, Middelmann hopped a freight train to southern Belgium where war-weary civilians wanted to lynch him until American soldiers intervened. This time there was no spot of tea. Instead, he found himself sharing a prison cell with SS officers picked up on the Russian front. Belgian civilians who had lost loved ones to the Nazis were given free reign to beat the prisoners. Of course, Middelmann's protestations that he was half-Jewish fell on deaf ears. Repeatedly brutalized, tortured and starved, he wanted to commit suicide. By the time he was sent back to the coal mine, he was skin and bone, and by the time he was sent back to Germany at war's end, he had liver damage and hepatitis.
Back in Germany, as a civilian, he started working in the black market, smuggling goods into France. Medications, cigarette papers, Chanel perfume. He claims to have helped many people and he reconnected with some Holocaust survivors, including the Communist Bruno Betanatski, the man who had hidden in his bed. Middelmann married and had a first daughter. "In 1955, my wife, daughter, and I moved to Montreal, Canada. I worked any job I could get, including work as a butcher (even though I was not trained as one), a gas station attendant and a candy maker. In 1958, we moved to Thunder Bay where I worked in a factory, then as a logger. There I had 3 more children. My family and I eventually moved to Thompson, Manitoba so I could work in the mine. We had a good standard of living there (my wife was quite happy). We had a brand new home and plenty of extra income, but I saw no future for my children there. I lied to my wife, saying I had secured a job at the Britannia Beach mine and moved the entire family across Canada to Squamish, B.C. I did end up getting a job in the mine, where I worked for a few months (until they went on strike). After that I worked in a pulp and paper mill (Woodfibre) for 25 years until my retirement. My wife passed away from cancer in 2001."
Middelmann says he also worked as a jewelry salesman and sold home-brewed kombucha. He married his third wife, Dorothy, in 2014, and it was she who encouraged him to self-publish his memoir at age 92. He could still remember the lyrics and melodies for the hate-filled songs he was forced to sing in the Hitler Youth movement. When the Jewish blood runs off our swords / things are going twice as good. "I still feel the cold running down my spine right now. I do. This was a hard thing to swallow. But I had to. I couldn't speak up for safety."
If anyone who wore a Nazi uniform claims he was forced to do so in order to survive, skepticism will be automatic. Middelmann has some paperwork to corroborate his narrative, but few Jews will respond with unbridled sympathy for his alleged plight. "If there were Jews who served in the armed forces to save their own lives, that is one thing," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "If there were others who served knowing what was going on and made no attempt to save [lives], well, then that is unacceptable and dishonorable." Mixed-race Germans were often classified as mischlinge, a derogatory term implying mongrel, hybrid or "half-breed" status. Even though they faced segregation and persecution under Nazi racial laws, exceptions could be made, in some cases by Hitler himself.
As reported in the Los Angeles Times, an American academic named Bryan Rigg has interviewed hundreds of Jews or alleged half-Jews, such as Robert Middelmann, who fought for the Nazis. He lists many high-ranking officers of Jewish descent who were deemed un-expendable. Helmut Schmidt, West Germany's chancellor from 1974 to 1982, told Rigg he successfully hid the fact that he had a Jewish grandfather from fellow officers in the wartime Luftwaffe. "Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called 'full Jews' served in the military with Hitler's knowledge," Rigg writes. "The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families."
Rigg's research has revealed heart-wrenching situations such as a German officer in uniform visiting his Jewish father in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 and mothers begging Nazi officials to accept that the real fathers of their sons were Christian lovers, not their Jewish-classified husbands. Even though the title of Robert Middelmann's memoir is arguably ridiculous, the author of Fearless does acknowledge one part of the Holocaust that neither Jews or Germans have been keen to illuminate. [Much information about Middelmann herein is derived from an interview conducted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson for the Endless Thread program on WBUR, Boston's NPR station, following the release of Middleman’s book.]
BOOKS:
Fearless: A Jewish Boy in Nazi Germany (Self-published 2019).
*
VERSION #2
Robert Middelmann of Squamish presents himself as a middle man.
In his memoir he claims, as a half-Jew, that he was forced to live by his wits ever since Hitler came to power, surviving amid a maze of double standards and deceits. Nobody can prove it was so or not so. He says he can still remember the lyrics and melodies for the hate-filled songs he was forced to sing in the Hitler Youth movement. When the Jewish blood runs off our swords / things are going twice as good.
“I still feel the cold running down my spine right now. I do. This was a hard thing to swallow. But I had to. I couldn’t speak up for safety.”
Some skepticism will be automatic if someone who wore a Nazi uniform claims he was forced to do so in order to survive. An American academic named Bryan Rigg has interviewed hundreds of Jews or alleged half-Jews who fought for the Nazis. He lists many high-ranking officers of Jewish descent who were deemed un-expendable. Helmut Schmidt, for instance, West Germany’s chancellor from 1974 to 1982, told Rigg he successfully concealed the fact that he had a Jewish grandfather from fellow officers in the wartime Luftwaffe.
“Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called ‘full Jews’ served in the military with Hitler’s knowledge,” Rigg writes. “The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families.” Rigg’s research has revealed heart-wrenching situations such as a German officer in uniform visiting his Jewish father in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 and mothers begging Nazi officials to accept that the real fathers of their sons were Christian lovers, not their Jewish-classified husbands.
“If there were Jews who served in the armed forces to save their own lives, that is one thing,” says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “If there were others who served knowing what was going on and made no attempt to save [lives], well, then that is unacceptable and dishonorable.”
Mixed-race Germans were often classified as mischlinge, a derogatory term implying mongrel, hybrid or “half-breed” status. Even though they faced segregation and persecution under the Nazi racial laws, exceptions could be made, in some cases by Hitler himself.
*
If Robert Middlemann is to be believed, he was born in the Ruhr Valley, in Herne, Germany, on July 10, 1927. As a small boy he was taught to say Heil Hitler when he entered stores—a greeting that replaced hello, good morning and good night—but his parents risked death by listening to BBC London at night. A swastika flag was hung on holidays to show conformity but his German parents supported the Communists. His earliest memory concerns a local Communist Party leader named Boris who was chased by the SS and took refuge in their home. Middlemann’s quick-thinking mother told Boris to hide under the covers of her four-year-old Robert’s bed. Robert was in it. “I could feel his heartbeat,” he says. “It is like it happened yesterday.”
In Fearless: A Jewish Boy in Nazi Germany (Self-published 2019), Middelmann recalls overhearing his mother tell one of their neighbors that her husband, Otto Middelmann, was not Robert’s biological father. In her kitchen she confides to a neighbour that Robert’s father was a likeable Polish salesman in the family business. With the rise of Hitler, this neighbour then used this terrible secret to blackmail Robert’s mother, forcing her to supply meat and chocolates during food shortages in exchange for her silence.
Middleman’s birth father, Leo, was married to a German Protestant woman and their two children classified as German. Leo would never divulge his paternity for Robert’s sake, but he did provide some instructions about Jewish faith and tried to explain why Jews were persecuted. In Fearless we learn Leo enacted a plan to get his two legitimate children into Palestine, via Poland, in 1938. Robert describes Leo dancing with joy when he received a letter confirming their safe arrival, grateful for a photo of sixteen-year-old Benjamin and fourteen-year-old Ruth in khaki uniforms, in a kibbutz.
Middelmann relates that his biological father was soon killed thereafter during Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish-owned businesses, homes and synagogues. Leo’s wife apparently received his ashes with the explanation that he had committed suicide in the prison at Bochum. In the aftermath of November 9, 1938, when he was age fifteen, Middlemann claims he tried to form a youth resistance group, hanging posters in the streets declaring ‘Down with Hitler,’ and he managed to burn down a Hitler Youth office with another half-Jewish friend.
Rising poverty in Germany during the 1920s had put an end to the family chocolate business. To make ends meet, the Middelmanns rented out one-half of their factory to Jews for a synagogue; the other half was accorded to makeshift housing for Communist families. The upstairs was home to eight prostitutes. We also learn that Middlemann gave food and information to Jewish families.
“My family was totally opposed to Hitler and the Nazi regime,” Middelmann writes. “During the war we risked our lives to help those who were being persecuted by the Nazis. In 1944, Hitler was losing the war and students were forced to join in the fight. Our entire grade ten class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old students were placed in the anti-aircraft units [at Bochum, in the industrial Ruhr district, in northwestern Germany]. Soon I was made to join the tank division and after my training I was being sent on a suicide mission to blow up Allied tanks.”
Other teenagers who had tried to desert the army were hung from trees along the roadways. Middelmann nonetheless remained desperate to avoid combat. One day he noticed a boulder was exposed in a ditch by their latrine. He got into the ditch, smashed his foot with the boulder and screamed. He reported he’d slipped into the ditch and the boulder had fallen on him. “I wanted the Allies to win as I saw them as our liberators from an evil and brutal regime. I am very thankful that I escaped armed combat and never killed anyone during the war.”
Middelmann allegedly spent months in a German field hospital where he befriended three Poles. One night, when the British bombardment was near, Robert limped onto the road where a Nazi truck waited to take away wounded German soldiers. Robert and a friend opted not to get into that truck. Instead, they hung up a bedsheet as a white flag, and went to bed. Next morning, they saw soldiers with red berets. Robert could speak English. With a cane to help him walk, he approached a British soldier. He asked if he and his friends could surrender. The soldier loaded his gun and escorted Robert back to where his friends were. Robert was worried that his captor was going to kill them all. “How about a spot of tea, eh?” said the British soldier.
They had tea, smoked cigarettes, talked about sports and showed one another family photos. Middelmann and the other captives were taken to a British camp near the Dutch border. As POWs, they were forced to work for the Allies in a Belgium coal mine. It was harsh work. Impulsively, Middelmann hopped a freight train to southern Belgium where war-weary civilians wanted to lynch him until American soldiers intervened. This time there was no spot of tea. He found himself sharing a prison cell with SS officers picked up on the Russian front.
Belgian civilians who had lost loved ones to the Nazis were given free rein to beat the prisoners. Of course, Middelmann’s protestations that he was half-Jewish fell on deaf ears. Repeatedly brutalized, tortured and starved, he wanted to commit suicide. By the time he was sent back to the coal mine, he was skin and bone, and by the time he was sent back to Germany at war’s end, he had liver damage and hepatitis.
Back in Germany, as a civilian, he started working in the black market, smuggling goods into France. Medications, cigarette papers, Chanel perfume. He claims to have helped many people and he reconnected with some Holocaust survivors, including the Communist Bruno Betanatski, the man who had hidden in his bed.
Middelmann married and had a daughter. “In 1955, my wife, daughter, and I moved to Montreal, Canada. I worked any job I could get, including work as a butcher (even though I was not trained as one), a gas station attendant and a candy maker. In 1958, we moved to Thunder Bay where I worked in a factory, then as a logger. There I had 3 more children. My family and I eventually moved to Thompson, Manitoba, so I could work in the mine. We had a good standard of living there (my wife was quite happy). We had a brand new home and plenty of extra income, but I saw no future for my children there.
“I lied to my wife, saying I had secured a job at the Britannia Beach mine and moved the entire family across Canada to Squamish, B.C. I did end up getting a job in the mine, where I worked for a few months (until they went on strike). After that I worked in the pulp and paper mill at Woodfibre for 25 years until my retirement.”
Middelmann claims he has also worked as a jewelry salesman and sold home-brewed kombucha. A second wife died of cancer in 2001. He married his third wife, Dorothy, in 2014, and it was she who encouraged him to self-publish his memoir at age ninety-two. His story is arguably less bizarre as his choice for its title. Middelmann has assembled paperwork (some of which has been displayed on the internet) to corroborate his narrative.
“It has been estimated that 150,000 Jews or partial Jews served in Hitler’s military. I was one of them.”
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Robert Middelmann presents himself in his memoir as a middle man. He claims he lived by wits, as a half-Jew, surviving amid a maze of double standards ever since Hitler came to power. Nobody can prove it was so; nobody can prove it wasn’t so.
The publication of a book by Middelmann could be anathema to most Jews who will question its veracity. If Robert Middlemann is to be believed, he was born in the Ruhr Valley, in Herne, Germany, on July 10, 1927. As a small boy he was taught to say Heil Hitler when he entered stores—a greeting that replaced hello, good morning and good night. His parents risked death by listening to BBC London at night, but a swastika flag was hung on holidays to show conformity. His German parents supported the communists who were outlawed by the Nazis. His earliest memory concerns a local Communist Party leader named Boris who was chased by the SS and took refuge in their home. His quick-thinking mother told Boris to hide under the covers of four-year-old Robert's bed, with Robert in it. "I could feel heartbeat," he has recalled. "It is like it happened yesterday."
In his memoir, Fearless: A Jewish Boy in Nazi Germany (2019), Middelmann recalls overhearing his mother tell one of their neighbors that her husband, Otto Middelmann, was not Robert's biological father. She confided to a neighbour, in her own kitchen, that Robert's father was a likeable Polish salesman in the family business named Leo. With the rise of Hitler, this neighbour would use this terrible secret to blackmail Robert's mother, forcing her to supply meat and chocolates during food shortages in exchange for her silence. Leo was married to a German Protestant woman. His two children classified as German. He would never divulge his paternity for Robert, but he did provide some instructions about Jewish faith and tried to explain why Jews were persecuted.
In Fearless we are told that Leo enacted a plan to get his two legitimate children into Palestine via Poland in 1938. Robert describes Leo dancing with joy when he received a letter confirming their safe arrival, grateful for a photo of 16-year-old Benjamin and 14-year-old Ruth in khaki uniforms, in a kibbutz. Not long afterwards, according to Middelmann, his biological father was killed during Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," when the Nazis destroyed Jewish-owned businesses, homes and synagogues. Leo's wife received his ashes with the explanation that he had committed suicide in the prison at Bochum.
According to Middelmann, in the aftermath of November 9, 1938, when he was age 15, he tried to form his own youth resistance group, hanging posters in the streets declaring 'Down with Hitler'; and he and another half-Jewish friend managed to burn down a Hitler Youth office. He also reports that he gave food and information to Jewish families. Rising poverty in Germany during the 1920s had put an end to the family chocolate business. To make ends meet, the Middelmanns rented out one half of their factory to Jews for a synagogue; the other half was accorded to makeshift housing for communist families. The upstairs was home to eight prostitutes.
"My family was totally opposed to Hitler and the Nazi regime," Middelmann writes. "During the war we risked our lives to help those who were being persecuted by the Nazis. In 1944, Hitler was losing the war and students were forced to join in the fight. Our entire grade ten class of 15- and 16-year-old students were placed in the anti-aircraft units [at Bochum, in the industrial Ruhr district, in northwestern Germany]. Soon I was made to join the tank division and after my training I was being sent on a suicide mission to blow up allied tanks."
Other teenagers who had tried to desert the army were hung from trees along the roadways. Middelmann nonetheless remained desperate to avoid combat. One day he noticed a boulder was exposed in a ditch by their latrine. He got into the ditch, smashed his foot with the boulder and screamed. He reported he'd slipped into the ditch and the boulder had fallen. "I wanted the allies to win as I saw them as our liberators from an evil and brutal regime. I am very thankful that I escaped armed combat and never killed anyone during the war."
Middelmann allegedly spent months in a German field hospital where he befriended three Poles. One night, when the British bombardment was near, Robert limped onto the road where a Nazi truck waited to take away wounded German soldiers. Robert and a friend opted not to get into that truck. Instead, they hung up a bedsheet as a white flag, and went to bed. Next morning, they saw soldiers with red berets. Robert could speak English. With a cane for walking, he approached a British soldier. He asked if he and his friends could surrender. The soldier loaded his gun and escorted Robert back to where his friends are. Robert was worried that his captor is going to kill them all. "How about a spot of tea, eh?" said the British soldier. They had tea, smoked cigarettes, talked about sports and showed one another family photos.
Middelmann and the other captives were taken to a British camp near the Dutch border. As POWs, they were forced to work for the Allies in a Belgium coal mine. It was harsh work. Impulsively, Middelmann hopped a freight train to southern Belgium where war-weary civilians wanted to lynch him until American soldiers intervened. This time there was no spot of tea. Instead, he found himself sharing a prison cell with SS officers picked up on the Russian front. Belgian civilians who had lost loved ones to the Nazis were given free reign to beat the prisoners. Of course, Middelmann's protestations that he was half-Jewish fell on deaf ears. Repeatedly brutalized, tortured and starved, he wanted to commit suicide. By the time he was sent back to the coal mine, he was skin and bone, and by the time he was sent back to Germany at war's end, he had liver damage and hepatitis.
Back in Germany, as a civilian, he started working in the black market, smuggling goods into France. Medications, cigarette papers, Chanel perfume. He claims to have helped many people and he reconnected with some Holocaust survivors, including the Communist Bruno Betanatski, the man who had hidden in his bed. Middelmann married and had a first daughter. "In 1955, my wife, daughter, and I moved to Montreal, Canada. I worked any job I could get, including work as a butcher (even though I was not trained as one), a gas station attendant and a candy maker. In 1958, we moved to Thunder Bay where I worked in a factory, then as a logger. There I had 3 more children. My family and I eventually moved to Thompson, Manitoba so I could work in the mine. We had a good standard of living there (my wife was quite happy). We had a brand new home and plenty of extra income, but I saw no future for my children there. I lied to my wife, saying I had secured a job at the Britannia Beach mine and moved the entire family across Canada to Squamish, B.C. I did end up getting a job in the mine, where I worked for a few months (until they went on strike). After that I worked in a pulp and paper mill (Woodfibre) for 25 years until my retirement. My wife passed away from cancer in 2001."
Middelmann says he also worked as a jewelry salesman and sold home-brewed kombucha. He married his third wife, Dorothy, in 2014, and it was she who encouraged him to self-publish his memoir at age 92. He could still remember the lyrics and melodies for the hate-filled songs he was forced to sing in the Hitler Youth movement. When the Jewish blood runs off our swords / things are going twice as good. "I still feel the cold running down my spine right now. I do. This was a hard thing to swallow. But I had to. I couldn't speak up for safety."
If anyone who wore a Nazi uniform claims he was forced to do so in order to survive, skepticism will be automatic. Middelmann has some paperwork to corroborate his narrative, but few Jews will respond with unbridled sympathy for his alleged plight. "If there were Jews who served in the armed forces to save their own lives, that is one thing," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "If there were others who served knowing what was going on and made no attempt to save [lives], well, then that is unacceptable and dishonorable." Mixed-race Germans were often classified as mischlinge, a derogatory term implying mongrel, hybrid or "half-breed" status. Even though they faced segregation and persecution under Nazi racial laws, exceptions could be made, in some cases by Hitler himself.
As reported in the Los Angeles Times, an American academic named Bryan Rigg has interviewed hundreds of Jews or alleged half-Jews, such as Robert Middelmann, who fought for the Nazis. He lists many high-ranking officers of Jewish descent who were deemed un-expendable. Helmut Schmidt, West Germany's chancellor from 1974 to 1982, told Rigg he successfully hid the fact that he had a Jewish grandfather from fellow officers in the wartime Luftwaffe. "Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called 'full Jews' served in the military with Hitler's knowledge," Rigg writes. "The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families."
Rigg's research has revealed heart-wrenching situations such as a German officer in uniform visiting his Jewish father in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 and mothers begging Nazi officials to accept that the real fathers of their sons were Christian lovers, not their Jewish-classified husbands. Even though the title of Robert Middelmann's memoir is arguably ridiculous, the author of Fearless does acknowledge one part of the Holocaust that neither Jews or Germans have been keen to illuminate. [Much information about Middelmann herein is derived from an interview conducted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson for the Endless Thread program on WBUR, Boston's NPR station, following the release of Middleman’s book.]
BOOKS:
Fearless: A Jewish Boy in Nazi Germany (Self-published 2019).
*
VERSION #2
Robert Middelmann of Squamish presents himself as a middle man.
In his memoir he claims, as a half-Jew, that he was forced to live by his wits ever since Hitler came to power, surviving amid a maze of double standards and deceits. Nobody can prove it was so or not so. He says he can still remember the lyrics and melodies for the hate-filled songs he was forced to sing in the Hitler Youth movement. When the Jewish blood runs off our swords / things are going twice as good.
“I still feel the cold running down my spine right now. I do. This was a hard thing to swallow. But I had to. I couldn’t speak up for safety.”
Some skepticism will be automatic if someone who wore a Nazi uniform claims he was forced to do so in order to survive. An American academic named Bryan Rigg has interviewed hundreds of Jews or alleged half-Jews who fought for the Nazis. He lists many high-ranking officers of Jewish descent who were deemed un-expendable. Helmut Schmidt, for instance, West Germany’s chancellor from 1974 to 1982, told Rigg he successfully concealed the fact that he had a Jewish grandfather from fellow officers in the wartime Luftwaffe.
“Thousands of men of Jewish descent and hundreds of what the Nazis called ‘full Jews’ served in the military with Hitler’s knowledge,” Rigg writes. “The Nazis allowed these men to serve but at the same time exterminated their families.” Rigg’s research has revealed heart-wrenching situations such as a German officer in uniform visiting his Jewish father in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 and mothers begging Nazi officials to accept that the real fathers of their sons were Christian lovers, not their Jewish-classified husbands.
“If there were Jews who served in the armed forces to save their own lives, that is one thing,” says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “If there were others who served knowing what was going on and made no attempt to save [lives], well, then that is unacceptable and dishonorable.”
Mixed-race Germans were often classified as mischlinge, a derogatory term implying mongrel, hybrid or “half-breed” status. Even though they faced segregation and persecution under the Nazi racial laws, exceptions could be made, in some cases by Hitler himself.
*
If Robert Middlemann is to be believed, he was born in the Ruhr Valley, in Herne, Germany, on July 10, 1927. As a small boy he was taught to say Heil Hitler when he entered stores—a greeting that replaced hello, good morning and good night—but his parents risked death by listening to BBC London at night. A swastika flag was hung on holidays to show conformity but his German parents supported the Communists. His earliest memory concerns a local Communist Party leader named Boris who was chased by the SS and took refuge in their home. Middlemann’s quick-thinking mother told Boris to hide under the covers of her four-year-old Robert’s bed. Robert was in it. “I could feel his heartbeat,” he says. “It is like it happened yesterday.”
In Fearless: A Jewish Boy in Nazi Germany (Self-published 2019), Middelmann recalls overhearing his mother tell one of their neighbors that her husband, Otto Middelmann, was not Robert’s biological father. In her kitchen she confides to a neighbour that Robert’s father was a likeable Polish salesman in the family business. With the rise of Hitler, this neighbour then used this terrible secret to blackmail Robert’s mother, forcing her to supply meat and chocolates during food shortages in exchange for her silence.
Middleman’s birth father, Leo, was married to a German Protestant woman and their two children classified as German. Leo would never divulge his paternity for Robert’s sake, but he did provide some instructions about Jewish faith and tried to explain why Jews were persecuted. In Fearless we learn Leo enacted a plan to get his two legitimate children into Palestine, via Poland, in 1938. Robert describes Leo dancing with joy when he received a letter confirming their safe arrival, grateful for a photo of sixteen-year-old Benjamin and fourteen-year-old Ruth in khaki uniforms, in a kibbutz.
Middelmann relates that his biological father was soon killed thereafter during Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish-owned businesses, homes and synagogues. Leo’s wife apparently received his ashes with the explanation that he had committed suicide in the prison at Bochum. In the aftermath of November 9, 1938, when he was age fifteen, Middlemann claims he tried to form a youth resistance group, hanging posters in the streets declaring ‘Down with Hitler,’ and he managed to burn down a Hitler Youth office with another half-Jewish friend.
Rising poverty in Germany during the 1920s had put an end to the family chocolate business. To make ends meet, the Middelmanns rented out one-half of their factory to Jews for a synagogue; the other half was accorded to makeshift housing for Communist families. The upstairs was home to eight prostitutes. We also learn that Middlemann gave food and information to Jewish families.
“My family was totally opposed to Hitler and the Nazi regime,” Middelmann writes. “During the war we risked our lives to help those who were being persecuted by the Nazis. In 1944, Hitler was losing the war and students were forced to join in the fight. Our entire grade ten class of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old students were placed in the anti-aircraft units [at Bochum, in the industrial Ruhr district, in northwestern Germany]. Soon I was made to join the tank division and after my training I was being sent on a suicide mission to blow up Allied tanks.”
Other teenagers who had tried to desert the army were hung from trees along the roadways. Middelmann nonetheless remained desperate to avoid combat. One day he noticed a boulder was exposed in a ditch by their latrine. He got into the ditch, smashed his foot with the boulder and screamed. He reported he’d slipped into the ditch and the boulder had fallen on him. “I wanted the Allies to win as I saw them as our liberators from an evil and brutal regime. I am very thankful that I escaped armed combat and never killed anyone during the war.”
Middelmann allegedly spent months in a German field hospital where he befriended three Poles. One night, when the British bombardment was near, Robert limped onto the road where a Nazi truck waited to take away wounded German soldiers. Robert and a friend opted not to get into that truck. Instead, they hung up a bedsheet as a white flag, and went to bed. Next morning, they saw soldiers with red berets. Robert could speak English. With a cane to help him walk, he approached a British soldier. He asked if he and his friends could surrender. The soldier loaded his gun and escorted Robert back to where his friends were. Robert was worried that his captor was going to kill them all. “How about a spot of tea, eh?” said the British soldier.
They had tea, smoked cigarettes, talked about sports and showed one another family photos. Middelmann and the other captives were taken to a British camp near the Dutch border. As POWs, they were forced to work for the Allies in a Belgium coal mine. It was harsh work. Impulsively, Middelmann hopped a freight train to southern Belgium where war-weary civilians wanted to lynch him until American soldiers intervened. This time there was no spot of tea. He found himself sharing a prison cell with SS officers picked up on the Russian front.
Belgian civilians who had lost loved ones to the Nazis were given free rein to beat the prisoners. Of course, Middelmann’s protestations that he was half-Jewish fell on deaf ears. Repeatedly brutalized, tortured and starved, he wanted to commit suicide. By the time he was sent back to the coal mine, he was skin and bone, and by the time he was sent back to Germany at war’s end, he had liver damage and hepatitis.
Back in Germany, as a civilian, he started working in the black market, smuggling goods into France. Medications, cigarette papers, Chanel perfume. He claims to have helped many people and he reconnected with some Holocaust survivors, including the Communist Bruno Betanatski, the man who had hidden in his bed.
Middelmann married and had a daughter. “In 1955, my wife, daughter, and I moved to Montreal, Canada. I worked any job I could get, including work as a butcher (even though I was not trained as one), a gas station attendant and a candy maker. In 1958, we moved to Thunder Bay where I worked in a factory, then as a logger. There I had 3 more children. My family and I eventually moved to Thompson, Manitoba, so I could work in the mine. We had a good standard of living there (my wife was quite happy). We had a brand new home and plenty of extra income, but I saw no future for my children there.
“I lied to my wife, saying I had secured a job at the Britannia Beach mine and moved the entire family across Canada to Squamish, B.C. I did end up getting a job in the mine, where I worked for a few months (until they went on strike). After that I worked in the pulp and paper mill at Woodfibre for 25 years until my retirement.”
Middelmann claims he has also worked as a jewelry salesman and sold home-brewed kombucha. A second wife died of cancer in 2001. He married his third wife, Dorothy, in 2014, and it was she who encouraged him to self-publish his memoir at age ninety-two. His story is arguably less bizarre as his choice for its title. Middelmann has assembled paperwork (some of which has been displayed on the internet) to corroborate his narrative.
“It has been estimated that 150,000 Jews or partial Jews served in Hitler’s military. I was one of them.”
[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
