Jewish Soldiers and Prisoners of War during World War II

To teach about the participation of Jewish soldiers and the fate of Jewish prisoners-of-war during the Second World War;

To encourage students to undertake individual/group research, interviewing survivors and learning history;

To learn why the mitzvah of Pidyon Shvuim (redemption of captives) is so important and how hard it was to even begin to keep it at all during WWII.

Age Group

Suitable for high-school and college students, as a class assignment, or informal settings with older teenagers.

Rationale and Introduction

"The Second World War was among the most destructive conflicts in human history: more than forty million soldiers and civilians perished, many in circumstances of terrible cruelty. During the 2,174 days of war between the German attack on Poland in September 1939 and the surrender of Japan in August 1945, by far the largest number of those killed, whether in battle or behind the lines, had no name or face except to those who knew or loved them."

Martin Gilbert, Second World War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, p.1 (highlights added (by Serah Beizer)).

When we, as Jews, relate to the Second World War, we mainly relate to the Shoah. It sometimes goes unnoticed that Jews fought as soldiers in many regular armies, in armies established by the governments-in-exile of countries which had been overrun by the Nazis, and as partisans in various occupied countries.

It is estimated that up to 1.4 million Jews fought in Allied armies; 40% of them in the Red Army. [1] When they fell, far from home, many a relative never discovered, up to this very day where, and in what cruel circumstances their beloved one was killed.

As a prisoner-of- war, the soldier lost his identity, was tagged or numbered and had no idea what the future held.

"We feared the very thought of being taken prisoner! We were sure that they would kill us right away…Who needs a prisoner's life, especially when it is not worth a penny." [2]

Very minimal research has been conducted on the fate of Jewish soldiers and POWs in WWII.

We hereby invite the students to take part in research. Through their direct involvement, as they gather information that has not been assembled before, they can act as junior historians. Thereafter, history comes alive and becomes real for today's students.

We encourage you to interview survivors, find information in archives and the local library. Insufficient statistics exist on Jewish participation in the war and on the number of Jews captured as POWs[3] . In most of the Allied armed forces Jews were not counted as Jews, but as soldiers of that particular army. It was also common for Jewish POWs to conceal their Jewish identity, especially when falling in Nazi-German captivity. These facts make the task of the researcher even more complicated than the already difficult task of understanding who fought against whom and when.

Assignments and research questions appear below. These have been constructed to aid the students in their research work.

We will be happy to assist in any research questions, read the assignments and offer other help.

The Jewish POWs during WWII could in most cases neither be redeemed nor ransomed. Today we can learn about them, record their testimonies and tell others their stories.

Points to Ponder

Do International Treaties defend soldiers and civilians captured as POWs in a war situation – the Second World War?

Introduce the subject to the students (Use the introduction, sources, bibliography and links).

Divide the questions between each group. Ask them to read about and discuss the subject (at least half an hour).

Was there then, and is there today, any value in the Geneva Conventions? Note the differences between the two Geneva Conventions.

What can we learn about the differences between how the Germans treated Soviet prisoners of war compared to their treatment of American and British POWs?

Would you consider Jewish soldiers – killed while in captivity- as Holocaust victims? Would you differentiate between Western POWs (Canadian, Australian etc.) as compared to Eastern POWs (Polish, Russian etc)?

You might use the blackboard and columns/tables to present the differences between the German treatment of Soviet POWs and Western POWs or between the treatment of a POW in general versus the treatment of a Jewish POW.

Try to find an answer to the main point posed; Did international treaties defend soldiers and civilians caught as POWs in the Second World War?

Now ask the whole group how the Geneva Conventions apply in the Middle-East today. Do countries adhere to the treaties?

What did the relatives of POWs know about their fate during WWII and in the Middle-East today? Were the lessons of WWII learned?

Sources:

I arrived at the POW-camp in Homel (Gomel) at the end of October, 1941… some 600-800 people died of hunger and disease daily… apart from one bowl of bran porridge (a day) and 100-150 gram of bread a week, we got nothing… things got to the point that they (some other POWs) began cutting loose meat from corpses and eat it. The POWs caught dysentery from eating such meat. They could not cope, screamed from pain and the Germans shot with machine-guns into the lavatories and killed the POWs who were there.

See Yitzhak Arad, History of the Holocaust: Soviet Union, pp. 651-652, translation by Serah Beizer.

We feared the very thought of being taken prisoner! We were sure that they would kill us right away…Who needs a prisoner's life, especially when it is not worth a penny.

Much less lucky was Engineer Vladislav Geiger. He was quietly conversing with A. Epstein in the camp compound. Suddenly shots were fired from the sentries' tower. Geiger was hit in the buttock… The Germans then took him to the hospital but Geiger died shortly afterwards. We buried him on the new Jewish burial ground between Zhenya Kozinsky and Jacob Aruetti. Many of us lost faith in people and turned to the Almighty. We had an oratorio, a sort of mini-synagogue, in room 4 of barrack 16. This was possibly the only working synagogue on the entire territory of the Reich.

(The Jewish soldiers in the Finnish Army also built a synagogue on the Karelian Isthmus during the Continuation War (1941-1944) against the Soviet Union, Serah Beizer.)

The prisoners talked much about escaping. It was just talk – there was no real chance of breaking out… Again I was put in the middle of a parade ground with all the camp ranked around me. I was taken forward again. The sergeant spoke in broken Russian: "You see before you a Kike, a rioter, he wants you to run from the camp. Don't believe him. You have punishment, you forget about escape!"
I was thrown into a cell. And they stuck two extra stripes on my shirt and coat… The stripes were V-shaped from the Finnish word vanki (prisoner).

Once a Ukrainian policeman approached me and told me that the officer in charge of the prisoners of war wants to see me. He was a Red Army officer called Grigori. When I entered his room he immediately asked me: "What is your nationality?" "I'm Russian," I answered. He was surprised, but said: "That's good for you". Seemingly somebody suspected (I was Jewish) and informed on me. Luckily the officer was a very honest man and did not harm me.

See Yitzhak Arad, History of the Holocaust: Soviet Union, p. 657, translation by SB.

Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 27 July 1929:

"The 1949 Convention, like its predecessors, provides a set of rules protecting prisoners of war. Staggered by (what happened in WWII) the representatives of 57 nations met in Geneva to revise the (1929) convention and to hammer out higher standards for POWs":

Convention (III) relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.

"For the Jewish POW, from a country, who benefited from the provisions of the Geneva Convention of 1929, his sufferings, measured against the yardsticks of Jewish martyrology, were (minor)."

(What does Joseph Lador-Lederer mean by his sentence: "measured against the yardsticks of Jewish martyrology?")

"On the other hand, the Jewish POWs who were members of the Polish and Russian armies were killed in order to prevent them benefiting from any protection international law provides for captive combatants…"
"It is a prime premise that politically the Jews were treated as an enemy as of 1933, those of Germany and Austria included. None of them was even given the protection due to enemies."
"Whenever the Germans confronted the Red Army, they saw in it the satanic adversary which it had been indoctrinated to combat: the personification of "Jewish Bolshevism".
"…the Soviet Union was not a party to the Geneva Convention, a fact Germany later used as a pretext, but…the Soviet Union had declared itself bound by the provisions of the Hague Regulations on War and Land, which contain basic provisions regarding POWs and the regime which may be imposed on occupied enemy territory."[4]
"The Germans treated all prisoners of war brutally in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, but their abuse of the Jewish prisoners of war was especially cruel."[5]

"Like other international agreements, (the Geneva convention) is one of the fruits of the civilized world. And if there are wars in which some of the participants have refused to acknowledge this civilization, or seceded from it, prisoners may not derive much benefit from the rules followed by their own side. In the past they may have profited from the reluctance of nations to behave badly towards prisoners in their hands because they are concerned about what happens to their fighting men in the enemy's hands." [6]

The death toll among POWs in general is estimated at between six and ten million.

Jews fought in the armies of the following countries: The Soviet Union, USA, Poland, Great Britain (including the Jewish Brigade), Australia, New-Zealand, Canada, France, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, South-Africa, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Yugoslavia.

· Some 100,000 Jewish soldiers (exact number not known) of the Red Army were taken as POWs and almost no one remained alive.

Rava asked Rabbah b. Mari:
From where is the maxim of the Rabbis derived that the redemption of captives is a religious duty of great importance? - He replied: "from the verse, and it shall come to pass if they ask, "Where shall we go forth:, then you shall tell them, "Thus said the Lord: Such are for death, to death, and such as are for the sword, to the sword, and such as are to the famine, to the famine, and such as are for captivity, to captivity."
(Jeremiah, 15:2)."
R. Yochanan comments on this:
Each punishment mentioned in this verse is more severe than the one before. Captivity is harder than all, because it includes the sufferings of all." (Talmud Baba Batra 8a-8b).

Additional Sources

Sections from "Forgotten Victims, the Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's Camps" can be read, see bibliography.

Roger Cohen: Soldiers and Slaves, American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005.

Ideas for Assignments

Ask your students to conduct a small research in your country exploring the fate of Jewish soldiers and Jewish POWs during WWII. They can work in groups of 3-4 or individually.

When they find information, ask them to present their findings to the class. They might now be able to add testimonies, facts and figures that have not been researched or published before.

If and when reliable statistics, names and numbers on Jewish soldiers and POWs are found, please site the source and add your findings to our list by writing to serahb@jafi.org or to our webmaster.

The commemorative volume on Yugoslavian Jewish POWs prepared by Ms Jennie Lebel can serve as an excellent example, see:

Jennie Lebel, A Memorial of Yugoslavian Prisoners of War, Half a Century after Liberation, Tel-Aviv, 1995.

United Service Organizations, A bridge between the American People and the US military
http://www.uso.org

Soviet prisoners of war and forced laborers held in German captivity in Norway between1941-1945 (about whom information could be obtained). A few Jewish POWs are included among them.

Ask the students:

· to compare Israel's POWs and MIA's– dilemmas and actions, with the dilemmas and actions taken by your Jewish community during the Shoah and/or Second World War –find similarities and differences.

· to find out how Israel sees its prisoners of war, takes actions to free them, highlights their situation.

· Find out about your local history by using links and sources from Assignment I.

· Go to the Jewish Archives, Jewish Museum and/or Jewish community in your hometown and find more about what went on during the Second World War.

When the students have collected enough information to conduct a comparison, prepare a table for comparison and let the pupils fill it in.

Tell them also about the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel. Why are such new prayers added to the Jewish liturgy? Why and how have days such as Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jerusalem Day, Israel Independence Day been added to the Israeli – and Jewish Calendar?

Ask your students to find out (archives, synagogues, Jewish museums) if similar prayers were written, read or printed during World War II in their own communities? How did the religious establishment react?

After gathering the relevant materials, ask them to present them and their findings/conclusions.

Find out, if and how the reactions and actions towards Jewish prisoners of war differ between the Diaspora and Israel. Can you find a different meaning to the concept "Klal Yisrael"? Did Zionism as an ideology influence the State of Israel of today?

Some Links and Sources:

Efraim Zuroff, Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States: The Activities of the Vaad Ha-Hatzala Rescue Committee, 1939-1945, Ktav, 200.

Present the students with Jewish Sources on the Ransom of Prisoners/Captives:

The laws pertaining to ransoming captives are codified in the SHULCHAN ARUCH (Code of Jewish Law) in a chapter all to themselves.

See Yorah De'ah, Chapter 252: The Laws of Ransoming Captives and how the ransom is to be affected:

Ransoming Captives takes precedence over feeding and clothing the poor, and no mitzvah is as great as ransoming captives. Therefore, any money which is collected, even for a religious purpose, may be diverted to ransom captives even if it is raised for the purpose of building a synagogue...
Rava asked Rabbah b. Mari:
From where is the maxim of the Rabbis derived that the redemption of captives is a religious duty of great importance? - He replied: "from the verse, and it shall come to pass if they ask, "Where shall we go forth:, then you shall tell them, "Thus said the Lord: Such are for death, to death, and such as are for the sword, to the sword, and such as are to the famine, to the famine, and such as are for captivity, to captivity."
(Jeremiah, 15:2)."
R. Yochanan comments on this:
Each punishment mentioned in this verse is more severe than the one before. Captivity is harder than all, because it includes the sufferings of all." (Talmud Baba Batra 8a-8b). [7]

Selected Bibliography

Altshuler, Mordechai. Soviet Jewry at the Eve of the Holocaust, a Social and Demographic Profile, The Centre for Research of East European Jewry, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1998.

Arad, Yitzhak: History of the Holocaust, Soviet Union and Annexed Territories, 2 vols, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2004, 1066 pp (in Hebrew).

Bard, Mitchell G. Forgotten Victims; The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler’s Camps, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1994

Brahm, Randolph L. (ed.) The Wartime System of Labor Service in Hungary; Varieties of Experiences, Holocaust Studies Series, Columbia University Press, NY, USA, 1995.

Cecil, Robert. Hitler’s Decision to Invade Russia 1941, Davis-Poynter, London, 1975.

Cohen, Roger.Soldiers and Slaves, American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005.

Cook, Chris & Stevenson, John . The Longman Handbook of Modern European History 1763-1985, Longman, New York and London, 1987. pp. 166-167.

De Lannoy, Francois. La Liberation Des Camps Mai 1945: Un Million De Prisonniers De Guerre Francais

Dobroszyki, Lucjan; Gurock, Jeffrey S.(eds). The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945, M.E.Sharpe, New York, 1993.

Kulka, Erich. Jews in Svoboda's Army in the Soviet Union, Chechoslovak Jewry's Fight against the Nazis during World War II, Institute of Contemporary Jewry and University Press of America, USA, 1987.

Lebel, Jennie. A Memorial of Yugoslavian Prisoners of War, Half a Century after Liberation, Tel-Aviv, 1995.

Moore, Bob; Fedorowich, Kent. (eds) Prisoners of War and Their Captors in World War II, Berg, Oxford, 1996.

Rigg, Bryan Mark. Hitler's Jewish Soldiers, The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, Kansas University Press, September 2004 (paperback).

Stark, Tamas. Hungary's Human Losses in World War II, Upsalla University, Sweden, 1995.

Articles

Arad, Yitzhak. Alfred Rosenberg and the “Final Solution” in the Occupied Territories. Yad Vashem Studies, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1979. pp. 263-286.

Beizer, Serah. The Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War in Finland 1941-1944, Jews in Eastern Europe, 1(26), Jerusalem, Spring 1995, pp. 11-24.

Krakowski, Shmuel. The Fate of Jewish Prisoners of War in the September 1939 Campaign, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1977. pp. 297-333.

Lador-Lederer, Joseph. World War II: Jews as Prisoners of War, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, vol.10, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 1980, pp. 70-89.

Appendices

Here we present statistics on the size of armies take fought on European ground, on the participation of Jews in the various armies on the European war stage, on the total number of prisoners-of-war caught and by which enemy and estimates on Jewish POWs- if available. You are invited to add new information!

Army	Soldiers mobilized Total Number	Jewish Soldiers in local Army		Local soldiers caught as POWs Total Number	Jewish POWs	Captured by
I	II	III	IV	V	VI
Australia	1,000,000	?		8,591[8] 2,065	?	Germany (also moved to Austria, Poland) Italy Greece
Austria		none			none
Belgium	625,000	?		?	?	Germany
Britain (UK)	5,896,000	60,000[9]		185,000 POWs altogether [10]	?	Germany Bulgaria
Bulgaria	340.000-450,000	?		?	?
Canada 1944-	1,086,343	?		9724[11]	?	Germany
Chechoslovakia	150,000	Jews fought in Svoboda's army[12]		?	?
Finland 1939-1940 1941-1944	500,000[13]	~300 Jewish soldiers participated[14]		900[15] 3,400-3,500	No Finnish Jewish soldier caught	Soviet Union
France	5,000,000	?		1,538,000- 1,845,000[16]	?	Germany
Germany 1945-	10,200,000- 20,000,000[17]	See book by BM Rigg[18]		11,000,000 in Allied custody- by end of war[19] 40,000 in Canada[20] 394,000 in Britain in 1945[21] 64,000 in Belgium transferred from Britain to USA[22]	None (?)	Soviet Union, Britain, (Canada) USA, Australia, NZealand S Africa Belgium Etc.
Greece 1941-44 1944-	414,000	?		400[23]	?	Germans
Hungary		Labor Service System, up to 100,000 Jewish servicemen (1939-1945)				Soviet Union (Serbia, France)
Italy -1943 1943-	3,100,000	Probably none		268,000[24] 51,000[25] 100,000 Italian soldiers from Greece to Germany [26]	Probably none	Greece USA Britain Germany
Netherlands	280,000- 410,000	?			?	Germany
New Zealand	194,000	?		?	?	Germany
Poland 1939-1941	1,000,000[27]	8-10% ~ 80,000- 100,000		420,000- 694,000	64,000	Germans
Romania 1941-1944	1,136,000	?		?	?	Soviet Union
South Africa	410,000	?		65,000[28]	?	Germany
Soviet Union Size of army 1939 After 6/1941-	2,107,822 22,000,000[29]	34,525 (1.64%)[30] 525,000[31]		5,400,000- 5,754,000[32] 64,000[33]	80,000-85,000[34] more exact statistics required 400-600 Jews - some 300 accounted for [35]	Germans Romania Finland
USA	16,113,000	?		130,201 POWs altogether[36]	?	Germany
Yugoslavia 1941-1945	3,741,000[37]	?		?	650[38]	Germany

[24] Martin Gilbert, Second World War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, p?

[27] Krakowski, Shmuel. The Fate of Jewish Prisoners of War in the September 1939 Campaign, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1977. pp. 297-333. all figures on Poland from here, pp. ?

"…five thousand former Jewish soldiers of the Polish Army (were murdered at Majdanek in November 1943.) These soldiers had been held in a prisoner of war camp in Lublin for the previous four years – since October 1939. In a mocking imitation of a military operation, this mass killing was given the code name Harvest Festival."

[28] Martin Gilbert, Second World War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, p.473

[29] Chris Cook&John Stevenson. The Longman Handbook of Modern European History 1763-1985, pp. 166-167

[30] Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry at the Eve of the Holocaust, A Social and Demographic Profile, The Hebrew University, 1998, pp. 21 and 223.

[31] Lador-Lederer, Joseph. World War II: Jews as Prisoners of War, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, vol.10, Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 1980, p. 75 footnote 15. An estimate, not proved from sources. Soviet official figures still not available.

[32] Yitzhak Arad: History of the Holocaust, Soviet Union and Annexed Territories, 2 vols., Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 2004, 1066 pp (in Hebrew), vol.2 p. 656.

[33] Serah Beizer, The Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War in Finland 1941-1944, Jews in Eastern Europe, 1(26), Jerusalem, Spring 1995, pp. 11-24.

[34] Yitzhak Arad: History of the Holocaust, Soviet Union and Annexed Territories, p. 656.

[35] Estimate by author and from information gathered by Shimon Yantovsky, see note 3. In

[37] Chris Cook&John Stevenson. The Longman Handbook, op. cit., pp. 166-167.

[38] Lebel, Jennie. A Memorial of Yugoslavian Prisoners of War, Half a Century after Liberation, Tel-Aviv, 1995, p.6.

Aims