Air Force men with their standards marching through the streets of Cologne, March 8, 1936.
Adolf Hitler personally intervened to protect a Jewish man
who had been his commanding officer during World War One, according to a
letter unearthed by the Jewish Voice from Germany newspaper.
The letter, composed in August
1940 by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazis' feared paramilitary SS,
said Ernst Hess, a judge, should be spared persecution or deportation
"as per the Fuehrer's wishes."
Hess, a decorated World War One
hero who briefly commanded Hitler's company in Flanders, worked as a
judge until Nazi racial laws forced him to resign in 1936. The same year
he was beaten up by Nazi thugs outside his house, the paper said.
In a petition to Hitler at that
time, Hess wrote: "For us it is a kind of spiritual death to now be
branded as Jews and exposed to general contempt."
Hess and his family moved for a
time to a German-speaking area of northern Italy but were then forced to
return to Germany where he discovered Hitler's protection order had
been revoked.
He spent the rest of World War
Two doing slave labor but he escaped death partly thanks to the fact
that his wife was a Gentile. Hess's sister died in the Auschwitz death
camp but his mother managed to escape to Switzerland.
Hess remained in Germany after the war, becoming head of the Federal Railway Authority based in Frankfurt. He died in 1983.
Hess's daughter Ursula, now 86
and still living in Germany, told the paper in an interview her father
had benefited from a chance encounter with another World War One
comrade, Fritz Wiedemann. He became Hitler's adjutant and used his
influence to win concessions for Hess, she was quoted as saying.
Ursula Hess also recalled her
father saying that as a young corporal in World War One, Hitler had had
no friends in their regiment and had kept himself very much to himself.
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