Jewish Soldiers in WWII Allied and Soviet Armies

[Solomon2]

The Holocaust

Combat and Resistance
Jewish Soldiers in the Allied Armies


Mandatory Palestine, the parachutist Hannah Szenes in uniform.
Photo Gallery

Approximately 1.5 million Jews fought in the regular Allied armies. In many cases the percentage of Jews fighting was greater than the percentage of Jews in the population.

About 500,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army during World War II. Some 120,000 were killed in combat and in the line of duty; the Germans murdered 80,000 as prisoners of war. More than 160,000, at all levels of command, earned citations, with over 150 designated “Heroes of the Soviet Union”— the highest honor awarded to soldiers in the Red Army.

Approximately 550,000 Jewish soldiers fought in the US Armed Forces during World War II. They served on all fronts in Europe and in the Pacific. Some 10,000 were killed in combat, and more than 36,000 received citations. Many Jewish soldiers took part in liberating the camps.

Approximately 100,000 Jews fought in the Polish army against the German invasion. They made up 10% of the Polish army, commensurate with the percentage of Jews within the general population. Approximately 30,000 Jews fell in battle, were taken captive by the Germans, or declared missing during the battles defending Poland, 11,000 in the defense of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews later served in various Polish armies fighting against the Germans in the Allied Forces.

About 30,000 Jews served in the British army in 1939-1946, some in special units of Jews from Palestine, such as the Jewish Brigade.

Shedding light on World War II’s Red Army Soviet Jews
by Tom Teicholz

June 11, 2014 | 9:48 am

“On the Way to the Patriotic War,” artists V. Vinogradov, Y. Nikolaev; postcard. Photos courtesy of the Blavatnik Archive Foundation

At the University of Southern California (USC), in the lobby of the Doheny Library, a giant story of Jewish history has been writ large in a small exhibition titled “Lives of the Great Patriotic War: The Untold Story of Soviet Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army during WWII.” On display through July, it contains just 10 kiosks, including two multimedia displays with snippets of a new video archive.

In Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union, World War II is referred to as “The Great Patriotic War.” More than 30 million Soviet citizens served in the war, and more than 8 million died. Soviet casualties from the war have been estimated at more than 26 million, a deep wound in the Soviet national consciousness that touched every family and every citizen.

Until now, little attention has been paid to the 500,000 Jews who fought the Nazis as part of the Red Army, more than 160,000 of whom received medals for their bravery and their service. Until now, the stories of those Soviet-Jewish soldiers have been absent from Holocaust archives, memorial museums, survivor testimonies and historical accounts. This exhibition is part of an effort by the New York-based Blavatnik Archive Foundation to change all that.

Established in 2005, the Blavatnik Archive Foundation was funded by the Blavatnik Family Foundation of Len Blavatnik and his brother Alex, Jews born in Odessa who immigrated to the United States in 1978 and whose successful company, Access Industries, has investments in oil and petrochemicals, as well as media and real estate, including the 2011 purchase of the Warner Music Group.

Julie Chervinsky, director of the Blavatnik Archive, explained in a recent phone interview that the archive includes a collection of Judaica, historical materials, ephemera and posters. Also in the collection are many letters from the front during the war that gave great insight into the personal dramas of Jewish soldiers fighting in Soviet territory — a chapter of Jewish history that, Chervinsky said, “had not been captured at all.” Collecting the testimonies of Soviet-Jewish participants in World War II became the archive’s mission and its priority. Although by the time its research began, many of the survivors had died or were quite old, yet more than 1,100 survivors currently living in 11 countries have been interviewed. This exhibition is assembled from those testimonies.

Organized both thematically and chronologically, the exhibition describes each phase of the war in both English and Russian texts, through personal photos of the survivors (then and now), as well as propaganda posters and postcards. It tells of the role of Jews in the first Soviet generation, who were also witnesses to and participants in the Russian Revolution. It shows how they felt on the eve of the war against the Germans, and how Russia stoked fear with propaganda films, such as the 1938 “Professor Mamlock,” which is one of the first films to address Nazi anti-Semitism. Boris Tsalik speaks of his “love of the motherland,” which led him to volunteer for the Red Army. Abram Byakher recalls that the longest day of 1941 was June 22, the night of his high-school prom — and the night Germany invaded Russia.

Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa,” the invasion of Russia, was very successful at first. By mid-July 1941, the Germans had moved more than 200 miles inside Russia, and some 4 million Soviets had been captured or killed. It was then that the Soviets made a strategic decision, as shown here, to evacuate, forcing a retreat by some 16 million Soviet citizens. As the Germans advanced farther and farther away from their supply lines, only to find little to no resources on the ground, they became overextended, leaving an opening for the Soviet counteroffensive to launch.

At Stalingrad, Soviets were ordered to cede “not a step back!” Under Stalin’s orders, the Red Army used its infantry and tank units to turn the tide of the war. The exhibition features Alexandra Bochalova, Igor Blinchik and Ida Ferrer, some of the Soviet Jews who fought there. According to the Blavatnik Archive, another 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans also fought the Nazis on Soviet soil, helping to liberate Russian territory, as well as Poland, Hungary and eventually fighting all the way to Berlin.

Mark Altshuller was among the Soviet troops who liberated the Majdanek concentration camp. He recalls seeing barracks full of children’s hair, shoes and other belongings, the corpses barely incinerated. The sight filled the troops with such rage, they began to execute the remaining German officers on the spot and continued to do so until Stalin ordered them to stop.

There is something both heroic and tragic about the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union. For many Jews in that first generation of revolutionaries, the Soviet Union not only afforded greater rights and the social mobility to leave the shtetls and ghettos of provincial life, it also offered opportunities for education and to pursue professions previously denied to Jews. In return, however, those Soviet Jews had to give up religious observance; being Jewish became merely an ethnic nationality. Then, under Stalin, Jews became doubly cursed: They could not practice their religion, and being identified as Jewish on official documents nevertheless led to discrimination and distrust.

It is heartbreaking to read of Jews who fought at Stalingrad and yet whose hope of a transformed Russia were dashed when they returned home to find their patriotism doubted, their homes and possessions looted, and anti-Semitism officially sanctioned.

I know this truth firsthand from my relative Michael Sherwood, born Meyer (“Misha”) Teichholz in Tarnopol, in what was then Poland, who lived this history. When the Germans invaded, he fled to the Soviet Union, and though he was just a teenager, he joined the Red Army and served at Stalingrad. Then he was arrested and sent to the gulag (which probably saved his life) simply for the crime of being a Jew. In 1947, the Soviet officials repealed their decision and released him. He made his way back to Poland, where the Jewish population had been liquidated. He emigrated to Israel, and then to New York, where he lives today. He calls himself a “double survivor,” having survived the Holocaust and the gulag — but because he fled to Russia, he was not considered a Holocaust survivor by the European Holocaust organizations; and the United States’ organizations looked askance at the fact that he’d served in the Red Army before being falsely imprisoned in the gulag. A few years ago, I was able to help him publish his story, “Odyssey,” which is available in print versions and as a free e-book download from lulu.com.

Chervinsky told me one of the most gratifying aspects of the Blavatnik Archive’s work comes from the survivors’ gratitude that “somebody came and listened to them and treated them professionally.” In short, what makes this so meaningful, Chervinsky said, is their “response to not being forgotten.” Which is why after seeing this exhibition, I put Sherwood in touch with the archive, so that my own relative’s knowledge of the Jewish experience during World War II can be expanded to include the experiences of those ignored for so long, those Jewish heroes of “The Great Patriotic War.”

 

[Solomon2]

Slideshow

Jews Who Died Fighting in Red Army
Paul Berger November 11, 201

On May 9, 1995 — 50 years after the end of World War II — I stood among a celebratory crowd in a provincial Russian town and glanced over to see a war veteran pointedly scoop a palmful of water out of a puddle.

The veteran drank as if it were the finest water he had ever tasted. And when he finished, he fixed me with a look that was both joyous and defiant.

It is probably the oddest toast I have ever seen. Yet I had all but forgotten about it until recently, when I was standing in front of an exhibition about Russian-speaking Jewish veterans: “Lives of the Great Patriotic War: The Untold Stories of Soviet Jewish Soldiers in the Red Army During WWII.”

The Great Patriotic War is the name the Soviet Union gave to its bloody encounter with Germany, which began with the Nazi invasion in 1941. Seventy years later, the staggering numbers of dead and wounded are still being revised. According to this exhibition, 30 million Soviet citizens either volunteered or were conscripted into the Red Army. By war’s end, about 26 million people were dead and tens of millions more were wounded. Towns were destroyed, homes obliterated, entire families wiped out.

Of an estimated 500,000 Jews who served in the Red Army, only about 300,000 returned.

“The thing about these soldiers is that while they were fighting at the front, so many of them lost most of their families in the Holocaust,” said Julie Chervinsky, director of theBlavatnik Archive Foundation, which organized the exhibition.

Chervinksy said there has long been a stereotype in Russia that Jews played no role in the war. They were either dismissively said to have “fought the war in Tashkent” — about 1 million Jews spent the war in the relative safety of Central Asia — or were slaughtered in the Holocaust, which claimed about 3 million lives on Soviet territory.

“We realized there is a very important story about Jewish veterans that has not really been addressed by Holocaust studies,” Chervinsky said.

The Blavatnik Archive began collecting oral histories of Jewish veterans in 2006. It has amassed more than 1,000 video interviews from 10 countries and collected and digitally archived photographs and letters.

At first glance, the exhibition, which presents a fraction of these stories, seems overwhelming. About a dozen large frames line the one-room Weill Art Gallery. Most contain photographs of the veterans alongside densely packed text.

The veterans’ stories are well worth the concentration it takes to explore the exhibition. But they are conveyed most accessibly by a 15-minute video of interview snippets that loops on a television screen set up on a table next to a wall.

In the film, Vladimir Ilyich Nemets recalls seeing cotton fly out of the back of the coats of the soldiers running in front of him as the men were gunned down. Dora Motelevna Nemirovskaya recalls the “tchok-tchok-tchok” of sniper fire exploding around her as she struggled to bandage a gruesome stomach wound.

Although anti-Semitism was rare in the trenches, Chervinsky said that many Jewish soldiers felt they had to fight harder and act braver “so no one would say, ‘He’s a Jewish coward.’” She said Jewish veterans also recounted how they had “an extra score to settle with Hitler” after they found out about the Holocaust.

But for the most part, Judaism played a secondary role to the veterans’ identities as Soviet citizens. Often in the exhibition, the most striking elements of their stories are not the Jewish ones but the universal ones — the senselessness and randomness of war.

On a wall panel, Ilan Yakovlevich Palat recalls how, after being wounded in the ankle outside Kharkov, he was dragged off the battlefield. His comrade laid him out in a house and hung Palat’s boot by a window to alert passersby that someone was inside. In the early hours of the morning, Palat heard someone approach.

“I got my pistol ready, two cartridges: One bullet for him, the second for myself,” Palat recalled.

The stranger turned out to be a local woman who put Palat on the back of a cart and took him to the nearest field hospital.

Palat, who came from the Soviet Jewish region of Birobidzhan, said: “Of the 44 [of] us, only three came back. One returned without his left leg, another without his right arm and I came back on crutches.”

And so the exhibition continues, with a succession of gripping, firsthand accounts — of treachery and atrocities, of small acts of kindness and stirring examples of courage, of camaraderie and terror.

Each one deserves mention. But Semeon Grigorevich Shpiegel’s story is the one that reminded me of the veteran and the puddle. He volunteered for the Red Army in May 1942 and, as with all the exhibition’s tales, the small details of Shpiegel’s experience illustrate the widespread hardships of daily life.

At 19, Shpiegel was dispatched to Stalingrad, where he fought as part of a mortar unit in one of the cruelest and bloodiest battles in history.

“We crossed the river on the 27th of September,” Shpiegel recounted. “We had to get our water from the Volga and carry it in mess tins…. We drank water from the puddles. Drank water from the buckets that were standing next to houses, rainwater. The water was covered with mold. But we were thirsty and so we drank it.”

 

[Koovie]

I am sure they did not need much motivation to fight like lions!

 

[Solomon2]

World War II:
No. 3 (Jewish) Troop of the No. 10 Commando
by Martin Sugarman

During the First and Second World Wars, British and Allied nations Jewish Servicemen and Women played a part in those struggles in excess of the proportion to their numbers in the general populations. Many will know of the Zion Mule Corps(1915-16),the Jewish Legion (38th-42nd battalions, Royal Fusiliers - 1917-19) in the First War, and the Jewish Brigade(1944-46), the 51st (mainly Jewish Palestinians) Middle East Commando, the SIG Commando in North Africa, the Jewish members of SOE, and other Jewish groups of World War Two.

One of the best kept secrets of World War II, however, has been the nature of the existence of No. 3 (Miscellaneous or "X" Troop) of the unique No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando/Special Services Brigade. The reason? They were virtually all German speaking Jewish refugees mainly from Germany and Austria (but also some from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other European countries).

The excellent books by Ian Dear – a seminal work on No 10 Commando ("Ten Commando 1942-45", published by Leo Cooper Ltd 1987) – and Peter Masters (see below) are the only thorough, published studies of this amazing group of men of the famous "Jewish” No. 3 Troop . Before this, virtually nothing had been published about them. It is not my aim therefore to repeat what Ian Dear and Peter Masters have so wonderfully and ably already researched.

Suffice to say that there were French, Dutch, Belgian and other "National" Troops (totalling at its largest about 1000 men altogether), and then the Jewish Troop. Even now many of 3 Troop cannot speak for a variety of reasons, of the nature of their exploits, and others have of course died. But X Troop were, even by the standards of No 10 Commando, a particularly extraordinary bunch having, as well as the normal skills of all Commandos, in explosives, parachuting and so on, extremely high intelligence and education, and were indeed by far the most highly trained group in the British Army, especially in fieldcraft, camouflage, compass marching, street fighting, housebreaking and lockpicking ("One Day in York" Michael Arton, Hazelwood Press, 1989) . Many were attached to the SSRF (Small Scale Raiding Force, part of SOE), SBS and SIS and most files on this aspect of the war remain closed.

All together 88 men passed through their ranks, of whom 19 became officers - many commissioned in the field for specific acts of bravery - and the rest sergeants and above. Twenty one (24%) were Killed in Action and at least another 22 wounded (of the 44 men from No 3 Troop who fought in Normandy , 27 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner!). They won one MC, one MM, one Croix de Guerre, one MBE, one BEM, one Certificate of Commendation and three Mentioned in Despatches. The numbers of awards are derisory considering their exploits and the inevitable death sentence they faced if captured - not to mention the danger to any of their suriving relatives in Nazi Europe. Many details of the men were known to the Gestapo and reprisals would have been immediate.

But this paucity of decorations is explained by the fact that the Troop never fought as a unit; they were often detatched to serve with other Special Forces in order that they could use their special skills (in silent reconnaissance, capturing and interrogating prisoners in the most hazardous of situations, often alone behind the lines and usually at night. They also were particularly knowledgable about German military units and training, as well as weapons). For this reason, a Commanding Officer was loath to recommend for awards men who did not belong to HIS unit, and especially as there was probably an unwritten "ration" of awards per raid or per unit (letter from Lt. Peter Masters aka Arany, No 3 troop, to the author 25/1/95).

However, at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire the Hon. Miriam Rothschild planted a grove of trees in the grounds of her beautiful house in memory of those of No 3 Troop who were killed, for her husband, George Lane aka Lanyi, was the first officer and MC of No. 3 Jewish Troop, 10th Inter-Allied Commando.

The 3 Troop CO was a quiet Welsh, Cambridge languages graduate, Capt. Bryan Hilton Jones (later promoted to Major and 2 i/c of the whole of No 10 Commando but tragically killed in a road accident in 1970) and son of a doctor from Caernarvon . All his men came as volunteers from the Alien Companies of the Pioneer Corps from July 24th 1942 , arriving for training at Irvine in Ayrshire (many had been interned in 1940 following the "anti-aliens"/invasion hysteria, but later released to serve in the forces, some in France at Dunkirk ). As Peter Masters wrote, "Getting back at the Nazis was an ever present motivation " in No 3 Troop "...our Jewish Commando was the very antithesis of the 'lambs to the slaughter' allegations".

Volunteers reported to the Grand Central Hotel, Marylebone for selection, and thence to No 10 Pioneer Corps training centre in Bradford . From Autumn 1942 they trained at Aberdovey, Wales , or Achnacarry ( Scotland ) then Eastbourne and Littlehampton, men being detatched as required to go on raids with other Commandos, SOE, SIS, etc.

The men had to take English "Nommes de Guerre" and new identities,false personal histories, regiments, next of kin, and so on (most chose to keep the same initials, though) to at least have a chance of not being found out if captured by the Nazis, as being Jews. The casualty officer at the War Office (Dawkins, a senior Civil Servant) was one of very few who new their real and assumed identities and kept parallel lists of the names of 3 Troop.

They wore the No. 10 Commando shoulder title (or sometimes the No. of the Commando to which they were attached) and the Combined Operations arm flash. On their green berets they could not wear the Pioneer Corps badge as this would have betrayed their origins, so they wore the badges of the Queen's Own Royal West Kents, East Kents (Buffs), Royal Sussex, Hampshire Regiments or the General Service badge (letter to author from Ian Dear 28.10.94).

In "Top Secret" letters from Combined Operations HQ (Defence 2/780 - PRO) Major General R G Sturges, GOC Commandoes and Special Service Group, wrote in April 1944 and February 1945 that No 3 Troop had been "trained for and employed on work of a highly combatant nature and are volunteers ....their behaviour and work has always been most satisfactory....this is a good sub group, well able to look after itself, and has done excellent work".

Writing a Secret report on No 3 Troop after the war from his home at Crug, Caernarvon in April 1946, Bryan Hilton-Jones said that No 3 Troop "were conspicuously successful and earned high praise all round, the best illustration of which is that many were Commissioned as officers into the Commandoes to which they had been attached...... They were the most interesting and worthwhile branch of No 10 Commando". After D-Day, Capt. Griffith (aka Glaser) became the first Jewish CO of the Troop until he was killed at the River Aller crossing on 11.4.45.

In September 1945 the whole Commando was disbanded, but many of No 3 Troop continued in sensitive and secret work in the Occupation Forces, tracking Nazi Resistance groups, war criminals, translating captured documents etc. Perhaps the last word should go to Major Hilton-Jones when he wrote, “Despite many and serious difficulties, this band of ‘enemy alien’ volunteers earnt for itself a not unflattering reputation, the achievement of which was in no small measure due to the sincerity and wholeheartedness put into his service by every member of the troop. For them perhaps more than for any others it was a question of self-respect and self-justification.”

Below, then published for the first time , is the No 3 (Jewish) Troop, No 10 Commando, muster roll. Long may they be remembered...

 

[Dalit]

@Solomon2 Seriously, no one cares about the WWII anymore. Time to move on instead of remaining stuck in the past. Terrible things have happened, but this is part of history. Time to let it go.

 

[Solomon2]

@Solomon2 Seriously, no one cares about the WWII anymore. Time to move on instead of remaining stuck in the past. Terrible things have happened, but this is part of history. Time to let it go.

It's the military history forum and this is the anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. Seems appropriate, yes?

 

[Dalit]

It's the military history forum and this is the anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. Seems appropriate, yes?

Let it go man. Like I said, the young generation doesn't care and know anything about WWII. What happened has happened. Besides, the world history is filled with brutality ever since humans have roamed the earth. The Jewish people are no exception. Time has come to say farewell to the victim role and move on.

 

[Koovie]

Let it go man. Like I said, the young generation doesn't care and know anything about WWII.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana

 

[omega supremme]

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana

And that's why jews remembering their past repeat the same thing with Palestinian. What's the use of remembering something when you who were once the victim are now victimizing someone else who didn't even in the entire history do any ruthless killing of you

 

[Solomon2]

And that's why jews remembering their past repeat the same thing with Palestinian -

You're confusing the ideological indoctrination you've been reared with and are repeating with the facts. Even Pakistan's HEC's position today is that Pakistani opposition is ideology-based, not fact-based. The sooner Pakistanis can have an honest dialogue about Israel and accept its legitimacy the better, since Zionism is so often used as a hammer against political opponents. The parallel I often think of is the American South's prohibition on discussions of Abolition of slavery starting in the 1830s. Soon it became a hammer of political campaigns, each election cycle becoming more and more extreme, culminating in the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Do you really want that to happen to Pakistan? More than it is now, I mean?