On the murderous road to ""racial purity"" Hitler encountered unexpected detours, largely due to his own crazed views and inconsistent policies regarding Jewish identity. After centuries of Jewish assimilation and intermarriage in German society, he discovered that eliminating Jews from the rest of the population was more difficult than he'd anticipated. As this study shows, nowhere was that heinous process more fraught with contradition and confusion than in the German military. It reveals a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or ""partial-Jews"", in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. This book documents that many of these men did not consider themselves Jewish, had embraced the military and were patriots eager to serve a revived German nation.