When Toy Soldiers Became Hostages

By Steve Rodan

Eighty years ago, a group of Jews were released by Germany in a prisoner exchange with the Allies. These Jews had lived in Palestine until they were drafted into the British Army as part of a contract with the Zionist leadership.

Many of the Jews were not returned to Palestine, rather kept in a camp in Britain. Their isolation was not coincidental: They had endured a harrowing experience in occupied Europe, abandoned by the British and ignored by the Zionist leadership, who saw them as little more than cannon fodder that brought them lucrative contracts.

"There are political benefits," said Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, chairman of the unelected Vaad Leumi, or National Committee. "More than anything else, 8,000 Jewish soldiers give us status." [1]

Jews abducted

That number soared as the Zionist leadership, in the guise of the Jewish Agency, forced tens of thousands of young Jews to join the British military. The Jews were fired from their jobs unless they registered with the draft. They were denounced in public forums and expelled from professional groups. And finally, Haganah squads roamed the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities where they abducted Jews and carted them to the nearest British conscription center.

Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion and his cohorts promised that the Jews would protect the community in Palestine. Or, they would be trained, armed and sent to fight Hitler in Europe. Instead, they were used as diggers, stevedores, cleaners, drivers and guards. Women conscripts were reserved to entertain the gentile soldiers of the empire.

By the spring of 1941, the empire found a new role for the Jewish soldiers. Britain sent more than 62,000 troops to Greece to repel the invasion by Italy and Bulgaria -- soon joined by Germany. The soldiers came from Australia, New Zealand and Cyprus, trained and equipped for what would turn out to be fierce fighting in the battle for control of Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean.

Fetch and carry

The British also sent nearly 1,500 soldiers from Palestine, most of them Jews. The Jews were not trained for combat or given weapons to protect themselves. Their job was to fetch and carry for their units, ridiculed and often abused by the gentiles.

Within weeks, calamity loomed. The Hellenic Army surrendered and the British began to flee Greece. The flight by the British left most of the Jewish soldiers stranded along the coast in hope of a ship. Before they left, the senior officers urged the Jews to run.

In contrast, the Zionist commanders ordered the Jews to surrender to the Wehrmacht. Some of the officers had been told to trust the Germans, and now argued that the easier the Jews made it for their German captors, they better they might be treated. Still, many Jews fled to the mountains. Those who stayed huddled around their commanders, hysterical from fright. Some attempted suicide. They knew what a German could do to a helpless Jew.

"I ordered the men to prepare for the coming surrender," Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, a 2nd lieutenant and rising Zionist activist, recalled. "We shaved, cleaned up and destroyed our arms...I saluted the German commander, reported precisely on our numbers and informed him that henceforth the responsibility for these people was in his hands." [2]

In all, 8,000 British-aligned troops were captured. Even in a prisoner of war camp, Jew and gentile were not equal. The gentiles distanced themselves from the Jews and the Arab volunteers, who didn't look Aryan either. The Jews and Arabs were relegated to second class regarding food and privileges. Their British commanders did not intervene.

Different from other Jews

Soon, came the interrogations. The Germans asked why the Jews had volunteered for the British Army. Many of them replied that they had been forcibly conscripted. The prisoners tried to convince the Germans that they were Zionists, different from the Jews in Europe. One German journalist was briefed on the White Paper, the British directive to stop Jews from immigrating to Palestine. [3]

In June 1941, the captured Jews were taken to camps in Germany. They were interned in Marburg and Wolfsberg and no longer treated as POWs, rather Jews. The German and Austrian Jews were separated from the others, regarded as traitors to the Reich. The Germans stopped parcels to the Jews. The International Committee of the Red Cross ignored the soldiers.

In Palestine, forced conscription continued unabated. At least 30,000 Jews were sent to the British Army. This had been a major goal of London, to remove the young people who had protested the White Paper to remote locations where they could not make trouble. The Zionist leadership was rewarded by millions of pounds worth of military contracts. Anything they could find was offered -- food, clothing, transportation, industry and even women. The children of the leadership -- whether that of Ben-Gurion or Chaim Weizmann -- received prominent or cushy jobs in the military. The Jewish POWs from Greece, however, were virtually forgotten. Many of them were tortured and shot. Those who escaped were soon captured and sent to Auschwitz. The families pressed the Jewish Agency for help to ensure that their loved ones were treated as well as the gentile captives. The agency played down the issue. It insisted that only 400 Jews were POWs.

"We are doing all that in power to ease the bitter fate of our POWs," [4] By 1943, some of the POWs managed to write letters to Zionist leaders. Other correspondence reached the Jewish Agency's delegations in Istanbul, which maintained contact throughout the war with the German consulate in that Turkish city. The Zionist leadership was urged to warn the Germans of the consequences of mistreating the Jewish soldiers. The families wanted the cruel Nazi jailers to be added to a growing list of war criminals. No reply Moshe Shertok was in charge of the conscription of Jews and traveled twice a month to British military headquarters in Cairo. He had directed the false campaign to persuade the Jews to volunteer -- either through the guise of fighting Hitler or making money. Now, Shertok refused to reply to the POWs, leaving that distasteful task to his aides. [5] By late 1943, Germany agreed to include a small number of Jews in a POW exchange with the Allies. The first release of the Jews was in late October, followed by those in May and September of 1944 as well as in January 1945. Most of those released were sent to Britain or Switzerland. By this time, the British military asserted that 1,514 Palestinian Jews had been captured by the Germans. Of this number, 169 were reported missing and 12 died in captivity. After World War II, the British encountered a different problem: What to do with the Palestine Jews some of whom by late 1944 had fought the Germans and now gained combat experience. London was determined to keep them from returning to Palestine, where they could foment a revolt. For more than a year, the British kept the Jews busy in Europe or Egypt until mutinies began to brew. Many of the Jewish soldiers who survived eventually returned to Palestine and joined the new Israeli military in 1948. But they did not forget the betrayal by the Zionist leadership. Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, the Zionist commander in Greece, rose to become a leading politician, head of the Mapam movement and a Cabinet minister. He kept working for the British and loved Stalin. But until his death at age 99, he remained hateful of Ben-Gurion.

Notes 1. Ben-Zvi to Jewish Agency Executive. April 6, 1941. Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem 2. Letters to My Son. Yitzhak Ben-Aharon. Page 20. Ein Harod. 1946 3. Palestinan POWs In German Captivity. Yoav Gelber. Yad Vashem. ww.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206565.pdf 4. Michael Simon, Jewish Agency, to Dr. Kelner. Feb. 3, 1943. CZA 5. Letters from POWs Bergman and Komfort, to Shertok and his aide, Michael Simon. April 25, 1954 and September 1943. S-25-4753. CZA

Below: Raphael Reiss, a Jewish soldier from Palestine, in Egypt in 1944. [Bitmuna Collection]