Bryan Mark Rigg

Bryan Mark Rigg (born March 16, 1971) is an American author and speaker who received his B.A with Honors from Yale University and his Masters and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. He studied under professors Paula Hyman, Paul Kennedy, General William Odom, Jeffrey Sammons, and Henry Turner at Yale University and historian Jonathan Steinberg at Cambridge University. He has taught as a lecturer at Southern Methodist University and American Military University. He also has taught at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Rigg discovered a large number of "Mischlinge" (part-Jews) who were members of the National Socialist German Workers Party (or "Nazi" Party) and/or served in the German Armed Forces during World War II. In the 1990's, he traveled throughout the world, primarily Austria and Germany, and interviewed hundreds of these men.

His work has been featured in The New York Times and on programs including NBC Dateline and Fox News. Reared as a Baptist Christian, he discovered he was of Jewish descent in 1992, and embraced his Jewish heritage. He is now an ethical humanist. He served as a volunteer in the Israeli Army and later as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.

His assembled documents, videotapes, and wartime memoirs on the subject are presented as the Bryan Mark Rigg Collection at the Military Archives branch of the Federal German Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Freiburg, Germany.

His book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers earned him the Colby Award (for first books in military history) in 2003. Before his work was published, his research was picked up by several newspapers, most notably the London Telegraph, the New York Times and the LA Times causing much sensation and generating a lot of criticism from some historians. He has been endorsed by such historians like Michael Berenbaum, Robert Citino, Stephen Fritz, James Corum, Paula Hyman, Nathan Stoltzfus, Norman Naimark, Jonathan Steinberg, Geoffrey Megargee, Dennis Showalter and James Tent. He has published several other books since then: Rescued From the Reich with a forward by Paula Hyman (Yale University Press 2004), Lives of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers (Kansas, 2009) and The Rabbi Saved by Hitler's Soldiers with a forward by Michael Berenbaum (Kansas, 2016). He is currently working on his fifth book on Woody Williams, a U.S. Marine Corps NCO veteran and Medal of Honor recipient from the battle of Iwo Jima.

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