The title pretty much sums it up. What did the Nazis do to Jewish POWs from the American (or British) military? Did they just kill them right away? Or did they send them to concentration camps?
From what I understand, it varied. A jewish guy who was captured alone was in much more danger than if he was caught along with a bunch of other GIs. Some of the Germans were inclined to “overlook” the issue either because they were not into the genocide thing or out of convienance and/or they were thinking about the post-war consequences.
Unless I’m mistaken, they treated them exactly the same way they treated non-Jewish American or British (but not Russian) POWs.
It makes sense, actually. If the Americans or the British had found out that the Germans were mistreating their prisoners, for whatever reason, they would have done the same. I doubt they would have accepted “but they were Jewish!” as an excuse.
Prisoners of war were covered by the Geneva Convention, which Germany observed to protect their own soldiers. In general, Jewish POWs were treated like any other captured at the same time and place.
In Maus, there is an incident where Vladek, while serving the the Polish army, is caught by the Germans and is taken prisoner. The Germans treated him and any other Jewish soldiers the same way as any captured POW, but were quick to release them so that the Geneva Convention no longer applied.
There is an excellent book caled Soldiers and Slaves that describes what some US POWs went through near the end of the war. They were being held in Eastern Germany. The Germans wanted to build tunnels and underground shelters to house materiel plants. They had Jews from the concentration camps (mostly Hungarian) and US POWs to dig underground. In choosing which POWs would be used in these camps to dig the tunnels, they first chose Jewish POWs as well as those who were causing trouble. This work was done with little nutrition, resulting in this being a death camp. After the war the leaders of the camp were tried for War Crimes.
I think this is an aberration of how the Germans treated Jewish POWs, but it is an interesting read.
Cite to Amazon:
Wiki says Rommel defied orders to execute jewish POWs, I would assume most of those were not Russian in his case.
This NSA report on signals intercepts during WWII and the holocaust:
http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00044.cfm
points out (footnote 53)
I think that’s also the event to which Outpits is referring.
Quite to the contrary of popular belief, Hitler and NSDAP never had any plans to exterminate every jew around the world. Rather, Hitler had plans to move jews from his “lebensraum” in the first place (like to Madagaskar), and the “final solution” was an act of desperation aimed at jews (and other untermensch) when things didn’t go quite as planned (1942, when the Red Army turned the tide). If one American soldier on the western front (which was of a whole different character than the so called total war on the eastern front) was a jew – it’s hard to see how the German soldier/officer could care much. Not even Hitler himself would care and demand extermination or anything of the kind. That was not the logic of the Hitler brain. As most (pseudo) intellectuals of his time, he saw America as home of the degenerated, and if jews lived there and fought with its army, gotten prisoner – Hitler and the nazis wouldn’t care a bit. The racism of national socialism had its own weird logic, which for instance allowed arabic soldiers in its army, collaboration with asians, and so on and so forth, and didn’t care if the degenerated army with its ugly uniforms (acording to Adolf) hade any jews or “negros” in its army. The “jewish question” was a totally different matter.
Of course, this is generally speaking and there were exceptions; just like POW were generally treated OK, but some were definitely not, on the western front (while none were treated OK on the eastern front.) (Also, slave labour as mentioned above was not exclusive for jewish POWs.)
Actually the myth is that POWs were treated like those in concentration camps. This isn’t true. The Western Allies, even the Jewish prisoners of war were “generally” treated withing the Geneva Convention. I know personally of two POWs in German Camps and they said they were treated “within reason.”
(The said they got food, but it was basically the same day in, day out, they got letters from home and visits from the Red Cross and they we’re not beaten. They said the camps were leaky, full of roaches and rats and not nice, but nothing as bad as concentration camps. Both indicated to me the Jewish POWs were treated the same though the Jews were subjected to scorn and tunts that the other POWs weren’t).
However this did NOT apply to the Eastern Front, where Russians, Poles, etc POWs were NOT treated within the guidlines of the Geneva Convention. The biggest threat to Western POWs I have come in my reasearch of WWII indicates after Dresden which was fire bombed, Hitler was so enraged, he threatend to move all Allied Prisoners to areas that were potential targets and intermix the POWs with civilians.
(this was one of the arguments used against telling the Japanese they were gonna use the A-Bomb in advance, as it was assumed the Japanese would move the prisoners to where the A-Bomb would go off)
The Japanese have a historical record of non-compliance and downright cruelty of their treatment of POWs. In some camps 90% or more of the POWs did not survive. Although you have to take in to consideration there was a lot more tropical disease in the Japanese theatre which killed or weakend prisoners, who were may have survived the abuse otherwise.
The Japanese have not been shown to be particularly anti-Jewish but the did do token amounts of it to appease Hitler a bit.
I never thought there was a prevalent myth that German Allied-POW camps were like concentration camps. If that were the case, there would have been a violent reaction to “Hogan’s Heroes”. Notice that they did not make a sitcom about POW camps in the Pacific.
Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would like to disagree with you. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/21/europe/us-pow-holocaust-hero/index.html
One of my uncles (my aunt’s husband) was a Jewish-American POW in WWII. I don’t know the details, except he somehow wound up in a concentration camp. The fact that he was originally Hungarian - and spoke with a Hungarian accent - may have been a factor. As a small child, I remember being fascinated by the numerical tattoo on his forearm.
In a documentary I can’t remember on about a Jewish summer community in the Catskills, the director, I think, mentions how when he was a kid one of his relatives would always make him laugh by asking “6?..or is it a 9?” and move his forearm up and down each question.
[As a personal note, it sickens me when I see tattoos with numbers, obviously, but even writing used to, but now I’ve gotten used to it. Hungarian survivor background myself.]
Missed this before the thread zombied. No. That’s not how the US works, even back in the dark days of WWII.
Well, the best-laid plans of maus and mein kampf, and all that.
The extermination of every Jew in the Nazi sphere of influence was most certainly expressly the plan as of Janary 20th 1942. Given that even morally corrupt megalomaniacal regimes don’t come up with this stuff overnight, I think it safe to assume that it was the plan at some time before. While early on forced emigration was an acceptable way to Nazis to reduce the size f the Jewish population, even then it was in tandem with murder. As of January 1942, murder was the only plan. This is incompatible with it “never” being the plan. Also, while the Germans had lost a million soldiers by early 1942, at that point they did not believe the tide had turned, and there is no evidence that the state of the Ostfront in January 1942 precipitated the Endloesung
Note, he was in 106 Division, the Division which was annihilated on the first day of the Bulge offensive. Some men of the 106th were separated (as mentioned above 8 years ago, most notably in Captain Amazing’s cite).
However, while awful and inexcusable, this for Western Allied prisoners was an aberration. It was rare, mistreatment did happen, but usually on the initiative of local commanders rather than the Nazi High Command (which must be unique).
Great story!!
Although some sources refer to a German policy of separating out American Jewish POW’s from some time in late 1944, the case in the various links above, Stalag IX, seems to be the main one documented where it was actually done and resulted in materially worse treatment. Although even in that case it’s estimated only around a quarter of 350 or so men sent to Berga concentration camp from there were Jewish; around 70 of the 350 died, representing around 6% of all US POW deaths in the hands of the Germans (for a rate or around 1%, around 40% of Americans captured by the Japanese didn’t survive captivity).
The Germans adopted segregation of Jewish prisoners earlier for some other even western opponents, like the French from 1942. But around 2/3’s of US prisoners of the Germans were airmen prior to D-Day, the responsibility of the Luftwaffe. The Army only gradually built a more significant % in small bunches in the large ground campaign from June-December in NW Europe, then a relatively big bunch in a short period during the Ardennes fighting, around 23,000. The men at Stalag IXB were mostly those recent captives. The first person story from one of them is a man from 106th Division, the only US Army division destroyed by the Germans in WWII (others were mauled but rebuilt, the 106th was never fully rebuilt).
FWIW, when we lived in the notoriously anti-Semitic Soviet Union in the 1970s, we were just Americans, as far as the everyday Russians were concerned. No one thought of us as Jewish, nor treated us like Russian Jews. There was a sort of popularist fad for anything American, and that included American people, so Russians liked us. The kids on the playground wanted to play with us, people we barely knew invited us to their weddings, so they could say they had American guests. My parents gave boxes of Juicy Fruit gum (from the embassy commissary) as wedding presents, and they were huge hits.
My mother bought Marlboros, Hershey bars, and Wrigley’s gum by the box from the embassy (my parents didn’t smoke), and was always giving them out as much treasured gifts, or bargaining with them in the markets. She could get a tchotchke priced at 10 roubles (about $14) for a pack of smokes (70s price) and 2 packs of gum. She’d hail a cab by standing on the curb holding out a pack of American cigarettes or a chocolate bar, and immediately three cabs would pull up. We’d pay the fare in roubles, but tip in American snacks and smokes.
American POWs still got some American things through the mail, and sometimes even US rations, and if they got cigarettes and candy, could probably trade it for better treatment, more food, and such.
I imagine there were a lot of reasons for not killing any American POW, Jewish or not, just like you don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
And that’s aside from the fact that American Jews were probably perceived differently from European Jews. European Jews were the root of Germany’s problems; American Jews were just Americans.
ETA: exception: rabbis. I have heard that military chaplains who were rabbis were dealt with pretty severely, but that might have been part of a general effort to separate chaplains to demoralize people, and rabbis may not have been the only chaplains sent to camps.