Werner Eisenberg

Werner Goldberg (3 October 1919 – 28 September 2004) was a German of half Jewish ancestry, or a in Nazi terminology, who served as a Heer (land forces) soldier of the Wehrmacht for the first 1.5 years of World War II. After the war he became a West German politician.

Biography Pre-WWII Goldberg's father grew up in Königsberg as a member of the Jewish community but had himself undergone baptism in the local Lutheran church, as he wished to become assimilated and marry a Christian. Goldberg and his brother Martin (born 1920) had been baptized in the Grünewald Lutheran Church at their father's request. After Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the senior Goldberg lost his position under the Nazi law of April 1933, Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which expelled Jews from the German Civil Service under the Aryan Paragraph.

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws classed persons with at least three Jewish grandparents as Jewish; those with two Jewish grandparents would be considered Jewish only if they practised the faith or had a Jewish spouse.

As a child, he went to the Grunewald-Gymnasium in Berlin; and became an apprentice at Schneller und Schmeider, a clothing company jointly owned by a Jew and a non-Jew, where many of his colleagues were Jews or . Goldberg's maternal uncle joined the Nazi Party and refused to be seen with the Goldberg family, even avoiding Goldberg's mother.

In early 1938, Goldberg served a six-month term in the Reich Labour Service whose uniform, as Goldberg stated, "had a swastika on an armband".

Wehrmacht service (December 1938- April 1940) On 1 December 1938, Goldberg joined the German Army. He took part in the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, serving alongside childhood friend Karl Wolf, whose father was now a high-ranking SS officer.

A 1939 photograph of Goldberg in military uniform appeared in Nazi recruitment propaganda with the caption "The ideal German soldier" ("Der ideale deutsche Soldat"). Price's film was inspired by the 2002 book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military by Bryan Mark Rigg.

Goldberg featured in the episode "The Jews Who Fought for Hitler" of the Yesterday TV series Nazi Collaborators, first screened in the UK in December 2010.

In 2015, the photograph was used for the monument to "Protectors of Motherland" in Tobolsk, Russia, as a surrogate for an image of a Red Army soldier, reportedly by mistake. The image on the monument was promptly fixed.