Jewish Soldiers in Nazi Captivity

Abstract The book explores the extraordinary story of Jewish POWs in German captivity during the Second World War—extraordinary because of the contrast between Germany’s genocidal policy towards Jews on one hand, and its relatively non-discriminatory treatment of Jewish POWs from western countries on the other. The radicalization of Germany’s anti-Semitic policies entered its last phase in June 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union; during the following four years, nearly 6 million Jews were murdered. In parallel, Germany’s POW policies had gone through a radicalization process of their own, resulting in the murder of millions of Soviet POWs, of Allied commando soldiers, and of POW escapees, with Adolf Hitler eventually transferring in July 1944 the responsibility for POWs from the Wehrmacht to Heinrich Himmler, in his role as head of the Replacement Army. And yet, despite all that, Jewish POWs from western countries were usually not discriminated against and were treated, in most cases, according to the 1929 Geneva Convention. Focusing on the experience of American and British Jewish POWs, the book analyses their story from two points of view: bottom-up—from the Jewish POW’s personal experience; and top-down—from the German High Command and the German POW Office’s—and addresses the following questions: what was it like to be an American or British Jewish POW in Nazi captivity; how were these POWs treated by their captors; and why were they treated in that way? Its conclusions will help to reshape our understanding of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany.