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NAZI MILITARY REJECTION OF A JEW
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NSDAP
LETTER OF
REJECTION
TO A
JEWISH
OFFICER
WHO APPLIED
FOR ACTIVE
WEHRMACHT
DUTY
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| This extremely rare document grouping consists of two items. One is a registered letter dated 16 March 1939 to a Jew, Karl Wertheimer of Wien (Vienna), who had been a Captain in the Imperial Army during World War I and wished to be activated in Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
On 26 February 1939, Wertheimer had sent a certified copy of his World War I Promotion Certificate (the second item in this grouping, shown below) to support his request. The copy shows his advancement from Oberleutnant of Infantry Regiment 83 to Hauptmann as of 14 May 1917, and proves that he had served as an Officer in the army about 20 years earlier.
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| The response is dated 16 March 1939 and came not from the Wehrmacht, but from someone on the staff of the Deputy of the Führer (Rudolf Hess was the Deputy of the Führer) at the Nazi Party headquarters in the Braunes Haus in München (Munich). |
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| He returned Wertheimer’s Promotion Certificate with a brief two paragraph rejection of the request. The last sentence of the second paragraph states specifically that the application had to be denied on the basis of Wertheimer’s lack of a “clean aryan ancestry”. |
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Aside from the rarity of any original signed document from the office of the Deputy of the Führer at the Braunes Haus, this grouping is an extremely rare and clear example of how the matter of Jewish applications for commissions in the Wehrmacht of Adolf Hitler was handled.
This piece belongs in a museum or in a book on the subject.
From the collection of Ray & Josephine Cowdery, authors of the full-color Third Reich identity document guidebook, “Papers Please!”
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USM, Inc. Post Office Box 2600, Rapid City, SD 57709-2600 USA
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