(Mirror.)

Not only was the Third Reich’s treatment of Western Jewish prisoners of war relatively moderate, but they had a higher chance at survival than other Jews!

While little detail is known about their lives in captivity, it is known that this group of prisoners did not suffer the lethal force applied to Jews elsewhere in Germany and [Axis]‐occupied territories. This is a surprising fact. As Yves Durand (1999: 73) puts it in respect of French Jewish POWs:

It is most astonishing that French Jewish POWs, who were during the entire length of their imprisonment put up in the heart of the Third Reich, escaped the Holocaust, while their families remaining in France lost their lives. […] This is certainly one of the most surprising paradoxes in the way [Fascism] functioned and in the behaviour patterns of the population or the decision makers that were subjected to this régime.²

[…]

Within a sea of anti‐Semitic persecution, POW camps represented islands of protection for Western Jewish soldiers, making them ‘de facto the safest place for a Jew in the [Third Reich’s] sphere of influence’ (Overmans, 2005: 872).

That is certainly not to say that conditions for these POWs was good. Indeed, Reich officials not only tried to enforce a policy of segregation in the POW camps but sometimes also discriminated against these Jews through other means: corporal punishments, forcing them to perform dirty work such as cleaning latrines, forcing them to clear unexploded bombs, and denial of representative positions in their camps, among other worries.

Jewish POWs were also, quite understandingly, always afraid of suffering an early death. Indeed, there is some evidence that the Greater German Reich was probably planning to exterminate Jewish‐American POWs near the war’s disastrous end. Nevertheless, confirmations of discriminatory killings of these POWs are difficult to find:

At its worst, some newly captured Jewish combatants appear to have been executed on capture or transferred to concentration camps, although such accounts, often told by [gentile] prisoners who watched their Jewish comrades being taken away, may be speculative (Bard, 1994: 37–39; Foy, 1984: 130; Winograd, 1976: 17).

Mitchell Bard (1994: 77ff) details one definite instance in which 80 American Jews were sent to a hard‐labour camp at Berga, in which civilian Jews (who were victims of the Holocaust) also worked (also see Cohen, 2005). This constituted an action specifically aimed at Jewish POWs, even if once there, they did not receive treatment that was substantively different from that of [gentile] American POWs who had also been sent there for punishment.

Morris and Sugarman (2011: 336) mention the deaths of 12 Palestinian Jewish POWs in retaliatory action by [Axis] soldiers, although it is not clear whether this action was linked to the POWs’ faith. Direct retaliations, carried out after [Axis] soldiers were ambushed by POWs or civilians, were a common feature of the war.

Notice the uncertainty. While there is no doubt that some Western Jews perished in Axis POW camps, the discriminatory aspect is not always clear.

Let us compare this with how the Third Reich treated Soviet POWs, Jewish or otherwise:

In contrast, [the Third Reich] did not apply the laws of war at all to POWs from the Eastern front. Captured soldiers from the Soviet Union, who often arrived in captivity in an ill and under‐nourished state (Streim, 1982: 14), were either specifically targeted and killed because of their political or religious status, maltreated, or simply left to die until the spring of 1942, at which point more than two million prisoners had already died.

When it dawned on [the bourgeoisie] that no quick victory would be achieved on the Eastern front and that therefore the men deployed there were unlikely to return to their civilian jobs in the foreseeable future (Speckner, 2003: 177), the economic need for the labour of Soviet POWs took precedence over military aims, and it was determined to keep Soviet prisoners at least alive (Herbert, 1997: 141). However, this did not substantially change the nature of their fate.

Living and working conditions for Soviet POWs were dismal, and in the mining industry so bad that Ulrich Herbert (1997: 391) writes of ‘a continuation of the war of extermination by other means’. Beaumont (1996: 279) estimates that in total ‘probably over three million Soviet POWs were executed or died of starvation or overwork at the hands of the ideologically and racially obsessed [Fascist] régime’.

The author, Johanna Jacques, explored the commonest explanations for the stark differences in (mis)treatment, though he found none of them very convincing. Instead, he proposes something that is nearly worth quoting at length:

An alternative explanation emerges when one considers the fact that the war to the West remained ‘a political struggle’ (MacKenzie, 1995: 97), while to the East it was all‐out war. From the beginning, Hitler had regarded the war to the East not as ‘a formal battle between two states, to be waged in accordance with the rules of International Law, but as a conflict between two philosophies’ (Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel’s Nuremberg testimony, quoted in MacKenzie, 1994: 505). Accordingly, [Fascist] propaganda described the conflict with the Soviet Union as one between two mutually exclusive worldviews, the Soviet one being branded ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ (Schulte, 1988: 228).

For Hitler (quoted in Streim, 1982: 27), this meant specifically that the army had to distance itself from the traditional point of view that still held fast in the West, according to which enemy soldiers were comrades‐in‐arms united by a shared set of values and a sense of professional solidarity: ‘The communist is before [the war] not a comrade‐in‐arms and after [the war] not a comrade‐in‐arms’. With nothing uniting the actors in this conflict, there was also nothing that called for restraint, as it was not the aim of the war in the East ‘to conserve the enemy’ (Hitler, quoted in Hartmann, 2009: 309, footnote omitted).

Schulte (1988: 150) in this respect writes that ‘documents from the highest level impressed on the [Axis] troops [on the Eastern front] that they were engaged in an ideologically based racial war of extermination […] that was by its very nature qualitatively different from the conventional war […] conducted in the West’. According to Hitler, the point in this war was not to win against the enemy, but to eradicate him once and for all (Streim, 1982: 27).

[The Third Reich] thus approached its relation to its Eastern and Western enemies in two fundamentally different ways: To the East, local populations as separate entities were to disappear through eradication or assimilation, with [the Third Reich] expanding into their territory, while to the West, relations between the enemies as separate entities were expected to outlast the war, hatred being understood merely as a symptom of current hostilities that should not replace mutual respect as the fundamental characteristic of relations.¹⁸

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

There is more, of course (including an explanation for why the mistreatment of Western Jewish POWs was not harsher), but for the sake of brevity I would prefer to end this excerpt here. Suffice to say, do not let anybody mislead you into believing that the Fascists opposed communism and (liberal) capitalism with equal ferocity (or—G‐d forbid—that the Fascists somehow opposed capitalism more than communism).

ETA: In case somebody needs it, here is a WWII museum corroborating the author’s conclusions, and here is the Sydney Jewish Museum doing likewise.

Events that happened today (August 12):

1916: Ioan Dicezare, Axis fighter pilot, was born.
1944: Waffen‐SS troops massacred 560 people in Sant’Anna di Stazzema. Coincidentally, other Reich troops finished the week‐long Wola massacre, during which time they massacred at least 40,000 people indiscriminately or in mass executions… on the other hand, the Axis did lose Alençon to General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque’s army (the first city in France to be liberated by French forces), but knowing that is not enough to make me feel better.
1973: Karl Ziegler, scientific Patron Member of the SS, perished.
1983: Theodor Burchardi, Axis Admiral, left the world.
2013: Hans‐Ekkehard Bob, Luftwaffe pilot, finally expired.