Around one and a half million Jews served in the armed forces of the Allied nations during the Second World War. The largest contingents were in the Soviet Red Army, the United States Army, and the British Empire forces; smaller numbers fought in the Free French, Free Polish, and various exile units. Around 250,000 Jewish soldiers were killed in action. Their service is a part of the history of European Jewry in the war years that sits alongside, rather than separate from, the story of the genocide being carried out against those they had left behind.
The Soviet Red Army
The largest Jewish military contingent in the war served in the Red Army. Around 500,000 Jews served in Soviet forces over the course of the war; around 200,000 were killed in action. The Red Army did not organise its units by ethnicity or religion, so Jewish soldiers fought in mixed formations throughout. The proportion of Jews among Soviet officers, including generals, was disproportionately high relative to the Jewish share of the population.
Soviet Jewish soldiers were among the first to reach the camps and ghettos liberated during the eastern advance of 1944 and 1945. Several were among the soldiers who entered Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. Their reactions, recorded in letters home and in postwar memoirs, are part of the documentary record of liberation.
The United States Army
Around 550,000 Jewish Americans served in the United States armed forces during the war, roughly half of them overseas. Around 11,000 were killed in action. Jewish American soldiers fought in every theatre and every branch. Among the most distinctive contributions was the Military Intelligence Service Language School at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, whose approximately 11,000 graduates included around 2,000 German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had escaped Nazi Europe and enlisted in the American army. Deployed in interrogation, intelligence gathering, and propaganda operations, their German-language ability made them exceptionally effective: around a third of the prisoner-of-war intelligence gathered in the European theatre passed through the Ritchie units. Several became distinguished postwar academics, lawyers, and writers.
Jewish American soldiers of the 6th Armored Division were among those who entered Buchenwald on 11 April 1945. The exchange of Yiddish words between American soldiers and surviving prisoners is a small but documented part of the liberation record.
The British and Commonwealth forces
Around 60,000 Jews served in the British armed forces during the war. The most significant distinct formation was the Jewish Brigade Group, a 5,000-strong all-Jewish unit of the British Army formed in September 1944 from Yishuv volunteers in Palestine. The Brigade fought in Italy in the closing months of the war and, after the German surrender, was among the first organised forces to reach the displaced persons camps in Italy and southern Germany. Brigade members used their position to help establish the Bricha movement, the underground network that moved Jewish survivors out of Eastern Europe toward Palestine in defiance of British immigration restrictions. The British government, recognising what was happening, disbanded the Brigade in 1946.
Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who had reached Britain before the war were initially interned as enemy aliens in 1940 but were progressively permitted to volunteer for service from 1941. Several thousand did. German-speaking Jewish refugees contributed substantially to work at Bletchley Park, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the Special Operations Executive, which recruited some as agents parachuted into occupied Europe. Several were captured and killed.
The Free French and Free Polish forces
Several thousand French Jews who had escaped to Britain or the colonies served in Free French units in North Africa, Italy, and the Liberation of France in 1944. The Free Polish forces, fighting alongside both the British and the Soviets, also included Jewish soldiers, though their numbers were reduced by antisemitism among some Polish unit commanders, particularly in the early years of the war. Some Jewish soldiers left Free Polish units to join Allied formations they found more welcoming.
The Palestinian Jewish contribution
Beyond the Jewish Brigade, around 30,000 men and women from the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine volunteered for the British forces during the war, serving in the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy, and various army formations. The organisational and military experience they accumulated contributed directly to the formation of the Israel Defence Forces after 1948. Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, and other future Israeli military commanders served in British-organised units during the war.
See also
Sources
- Martin Gilbert, The Boys: Triumph Over Adversity, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996
- Howard Blum, The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation and World War II, HarperCollins, 2001
- Steven Karras, The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military, Zenith Press, 2009
- Yohanan Ramati, The Jewish Brigade, in Jewish Virtual Library, jewishvirtuallibrary.org
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jews in the Allied Military, encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Yad Vashem, Jewish Soldiers in the Allied Armies, yadvashem.org