what happened to British, American, Canadian etc. captured Jewish soldiers in Nazi Germany?

Answer 1

You may already have come across this link for Polish Jews who were fighting for the Allies and were captured. http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:gzFYcYDgmGwJ:www.zchor.org/meirtchak/biblio.htm+allied+jewish+prisoners+germany&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1

The following account concerns what happened to American Jewish servicemen who were captured. It is a blurb about Roger Cohen's book entitled "Soldiers and Slaves".

The Battle of the Bulge, as most Americans know, was the name given to the mighty German counterattack in the Ardennes forest in December 1944. In defeating that thrust, many Americans were captured by the Germans. That historical fact is fairly common knowledge. What Roger Cohen, a foreign correspondent based in Europe for the New York Times, relates is an episode of that period which will shock America. Some 350 of those soldiers captured were treated as slaves, because many of them were, or appeared to be, Jewish. This is a story of an otherwise unheralded eddy of that monumental river of death, the Holocaust.


Once the American prisoners were taken after the fighting, they were taken to various Stalags, or German prisoner of war camps. There, treatment was more or less in accordance with the Geneva Convention. It was while sending labourers to the quarries around Berga, Germany, that a selection was made. This selection, as can be clearly seen from the still existing list of prisoners, concentrated on those whose names sounded Jewish or, failing that, on men who looked Semitic.

This is a tale of unmitigated horror. The men were taken to a compound where they were herded together with Jewish prisoners from the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp. There, too, were Russian prisoners who, in the ruthless calculus of the Nazis, were also beings to be used up in work and destroyed. The tale of mindless brutality is common to so many other Holocaust stories, but it strikes so near to home because the men were from places like, well, Brooklyn, N.Y.

We find stories that will cause the reader's heart to break. Men were beaten as they were forced to dig tunnels into living stone, there to hide synthetic fuel factories. They were starved, and their bodies came to resemble those found in other liberated camps. Escapees were murdered. The tale of one murder is particularly painful, because it is given a face. The soldier got as far as a friendly townsman, who took him in. He spoke German, and was treated to a real meal. Then, when he was discovered, the Nazi guard took him a few hundred meters away and simply shot him out of hand.

Life became meaningless because it so cheap. But the bones of these men were not so cheap as not to be driven through the mud of late winter along forest roads so that they would not fall into advancing Allied hands. When these soldiers were finally liberated, they were mere shadows of men.

They were forced by their fellow Americans to sign statements of confidentiality to "protect those still in prison in Japan." In reality, this silence protected the tenuous West German government, which did not bring all the murderers to justice, and also the Soviet zone of control where the camp's significance remained a secret. It is only recently that these men have received some justice, and this book is a part of it. Well worth the time to read, you will find the post-war atrocity investigation an eye-opening event. You will find how the Soviet soldier who confirms that one of the liberated prisoners, who accidentally wore a German Wehrmacht coat, was in reality a Jew, a truly memorable vignette of human goodness. But the silence, both East and West, that then followed, was tragic.

Answer 2

All Allied troops in the European theatre, with the exception of the Russians were supposedly treated as per the Geneva Conventions. The Nazis maintained that the USSR had not signed the Conventions and treated Red Army prisoners appallingly. This included sending Russian Jews and Commissars (Red Army political officers) to extermination camps. The uprising and mass escape at Sobibor was organised and led by a Red Army soldier.

Despite the Germans adhering to the Geneva Conventions it did not stop them committing war crimes against other Allied soldiers. Hitler's notorious Fuhrer Order authorising the execution of British Commandos was one instance. The film the Great Escape, where recaptured Allied escapees were shot, was based on another instance.

Caicos Turkey-That's a damned good response. I should have known that but didn't. Thanks for the information and the link.

Answer 3

For the British, American, and Canadians, most were just sent to POW camps. There were instances, however, during the war where the Germans shot them execution style (mainly the doings of the Waffen-SS) during the Battle of Normandy and during the Battle of the Bulge. Jewish soldiers, when found out to be Jewish, were shot on the spot, along with black soldiers.

Answer 4

The British,American and Canadian soldiers were interred in Prisoner of War camps,,whilst the Jewish people were interred in concentration camps,,a world apart from prison camps

Answer 5

To the best of my knowledge, the soldiers were prisoners of war and therefore were put in different camps from the Jewish people who lived in occupied countries and were deported. Those were sent to concentration camps which were built specifically to destroy them.