Your assumption is that men who volunteered showed up all patriotic, willing and able to wipe the enemy off the face of the earth, while those who were drafted had to be hauled off kicking and screaming. The reality is much more nuanced than that. Many volunteered reluctantly because they knew they’d be drafted anyway, and many were drafted before they had a chance to volunteer. The dichotomy you’re looking for didn’t exist.
Speaking of mass media, in war movies of the time the ethnically diverse squad being followed always included a character named “Brooklyn,” who I found to be either Jewish or Italian. Therefore, one eighth (12.5%) of an eight-man squad was often Jewish.
They didn’t get into the religious backgrounds of Tex, Shorty, or The Kid, so the percentage may have been higher.
Tex might well have been Jewish, lot of Jewish people where I grew up, in Waco. Some more in Kileen, but mostly in Temple.
No, Brooklyn is either Jewish or has a less specific ethnicity. The Italian is always named Tony.
Reformed?
Worse. Shhh Intermarriage
But I heard she was a very nice girl.
Oy!
If Brooklyn was Jewish, Tex probably wasn’t because that would upset the melting pot’s recipe. And nobody knew what The Kid was because he was always killed in the second reel.
Shiksa!
Oye gevalt!
First, I want to thank the posters that took the time to answer the questions, or try to explain a point of confusion such as Jackmannil and Ibn Warrick, among others.n(my apologies if I’ve spelled your names wrong)
Ok, so one huge point that has been explained is that the extent to which the Jews (and others, let’s not forget… But for the purposes of this discussion, we are focusing on the Jews) were being persecuted was not know. So, concentration camps were known about, but the mass murdering of those in the concentration camps was NOT known. Is that what is being said here?
If thats the case, then yes, the two quotes I pulled are not exactly at odds. If this is indeed true, how possible is it then for people who lived near the death camps actually knew they were death camps? It sounds as if this information may have been known by intelligence operations, but not by the world at large, correct?
So why is it assumed that the German people knew the depths to which the Nazi regime sank? Could someone live near a death camp actually not know what was going on in there?
Finn, I am not avoiding anything. Please don’t say or imply that again.
My questions were trying to ascertain whether or not American Jews were fighting in numbers that were significantly greater than their overall population percentages. And of that number, how many were compelled to fight immediately and enlisted, or waited for the draft.
I don’t think people who were drafted were cowards. Not by a long shot. But I would think that since Jews are there own culture first and their resident country’s culture second (this is the way it has been explained to me. If this is incorrect in any way, please point it out), they would be less likely to enlist immediately. Its been explained to me that jews are jews first, and Americans, canadiens, etc. Second. So, for example, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, did Jewish boys enlist immediately, like perhaps the Italian, Irish or Polish boys did? Or since they felt Jewish first and American second, perhaps they didn’t feel the same anger that their country had been attacked? I don’t know these answers, which is why those questions were asked. As I was asking for tomandebb for a cite or what he meant, I began thinking along the lines of the other questions. What would it tell me? I don’t know. Maybe just what I mentioned before… That they did not feel an attachment to their adopted country as strongly as they felt an attachment to their Jewish community.
As for the “cultural cowardice” quote that you are so hung up on, that was a remark to someone else (maybe it was you, I don’t know) what all this info would mean. My first questions resulted in a number of "why"s… Sort of like what a child does to an adult. Instead of answering the question, I had to explain why I wanted to know. Is that a standard that is held to every question asked on this board? I have never seen anyone else ask “why do you want to know” before answering a question, and I highly doubt that if i asked the question about poles or italians, I’d be asked for my reasons. I threw out the “cultural cowardice” comment as sarcasm, something we could discuss if this was what you (or whoever) thought might be exposed by the answers to my questions.
Thats it. Nothing more. And in case you need it spelled out, no, I don’t believe Jews are cowards. No more or less than any other segment of the population.
There seemed to be some discussion about orthodox Jews the OP mentioned, when the remark “getting a pass” seemed to draw some ire, but that’s not where I was going.
Yes, you have been, as proven by the fact that you are only now beginning to answer any of the questions you have been avoiding.
You should probably not be getting your information from racists.
Also, Jews is capitalized.
This is not only a classical anti-Semitic stereotype but the exact same logic that the Nazis used; Jews were Jews first, Germans second (if at all) and could not be trusted because their loyalty was to Global Jewry.
All the questions which are of a similar sort to yours?
Yes.
IMO, no, they couldn’t.
Just the smell of burning bodies should have been enough. I’ve been near an animal rendering plant, and, even with modern pollution controls, the smell makes t clear what is happening there.
Also, near the work camps (as opposed to extermination ones) encountering lines of obviously starved & abused prisoners marching along should have made it clear.
The details of the atrocious abuse may have been unknown, but I think if you lived near a camp, you would have had to deliberately work hard to “not know”. And certainly, the Nazi heirarchy made no secret of their overall policy toward the Jewish ‘race’.
But note that most of the bigger camps were in Poland, not Germany. The victims were shipped far away from their neighbors.
Basically, yes.
Again, basically correct. More people knew about the death camps than just the intelligence services, but from a mixture of shocked disbelief, distrust over “wartime” information, and, occasionally, disdain for Jews, the information was not passed on to the general public.
Another thing to remember is that the Wannsee Conference (at which the death camps were planned), did not occur until six weeks after the attack at Pearl Harbor, and the actual camps were not built for several months after that, so there was nothing to “know” about them on December 8, 1941. (The Einsatzgruppen, (the mobile death squads), had been employed prior to January, 1942, but they were used against a lot of people, not just Jews and even they were not well known among the general public in the Allies’ countries.
Actually, during the war, there is no assumption that the mass of the German populace knew about the death camps. For one thing, the Nazis built all the death camps outside of Germany, proper, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary(?), so that none of them were on German soil.
What the German people are held accountable for is the general treatment of the Jews between 1932 and 1939, with ever more restrictive laws, imprisonment in work camps, the confiscation of property, the random murder by the state of Jewish leaders, and so on. (That is the sort of thing that a Jewish-American soldier would have feared.) There were concentration camps in Germany, (e.g., Dachau), where people were confined and worked to death, but they were not built as extermination camps.
And, as you have seen, they did fight in numbers relatively commensurate with their population. But, as several posters have asked: why is that knowledge important?
This sort of question is very insulting to anyone, which explains the reaction you have been getting. Not only does it question the loyalty and patriotism of the Jewish people, but it echoes one of the persistent lies that has been told about them for centuries.
Pick any group and ask them a loaded question that repeats a lie that has been told about them and see how happy they are that you are raising that issue.
Similar lies were told about most of the Eastern European ethic immigrants up through WWI and about Catholics right up until the election of JFK. (And a few nuts still go on about it.) When you hear that sort of claim (or any insulting claim) made about a disdained group, the first thing you should do is demand evidence of the claim rather than assuming that it is true.
Respectfully disagree. A common circumstance was for a draft notice to be pending (your number came up, but you haven’t yet received the “Greetings!” notice) and the pending draftee to join the Navy to avoid having to slog through the mud as an infantryman. Not only was this a frequent occurrence (I’d say “an awful lot,” but don’t have a cite handy), I’m far from in a position to judge anyone who served in any circumstance. And it skews the numbers you’re asking for away from any meaningful content.
The Nazis also passed many, many anti-Jewish measures after coming to power and before the start of the war. The mass murder was not known, but their attitude toward Jews and their persecution of Jews and other undesirables was very clear.
You are really having some terrible luck in explaining yourself in this thread. And by luck I mean you keep saying things that sound terrible without apparently realizing it. What you’ve just posted is a very old and very nasty anti-Semitic trope and it’s ridiculous. Bringing it up in a thread about Jewish soldiers in World War II makes it that much more distasteful.
Next time maybe you should start by asking what the evidence says and going from there instead of challenging “cultural cowardice” and making unsupported assertions and demanding people prove you wrong. So far it looks like there were a significant number of Jewish soldiers in Europe, and it appears their proportions were equal to or greater than their representation in the broader U.S. population. So there is nothing to sustain comments about Jews being unmotivated to fight because they’re not that American (seriously, do you not understand that the Nazis said exactly this about German Jews?) and nothing so far to sustain your challenge to the idea that a lot of Jews fought in Europe.
Yes. Americans still didnt trust the British fully due to several huge lies pushed by British WWI propaganda. And, that sort of propaganda continued in WWII, some of which was obviously false.
So yes, there was some reluctance to believe the more outre stories. Even today there are Holocaust Deniers, and not all of them are Neo-Nazis.
There is no evidence at all that the Jewish-Americans during WWII were in any way reluctant to fight. None.
In case you didn’t get it yet, this is incorrect in every way, with the possible exception that it was explained to you that way.
Of the death camps, two of them, Auschwitz and Chelmo, were in Germany (or at least those parts of Poland annexed to Germany). The rest were in the Polish General Gouvernment.
Well, when I think of it, it’s an interesting question. Does the antisemitic nature of Nazism (even though its full extent wasn’t known at the time) led American Jews to volunteer in higher number than usual?
For instance, until WWII, French Jews had been exceedingly patriotic (and actively republican), including and especially in time of war. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 1939 more non draftable Jews had volunteered than in the general population (especially, again, given the nature of the Nazi regime) But I’ve no clue if it’s a correct guess.
Sorry, the question has already been done to death and answered. As usual, I should have read the whole thread before posting.
You don’t want to admit that you personally believe this: it was just the way “it has been explained” to you. Not avoiding anything, indeed.