Being a gentile I have to say that I feel uncomfortable talking about this very sensitive topic, but perhaps it is comparable with the indigenous Americans who fought for the European colonists, or the various Africans who fought for the Fascist colonists. Collaboration with the enemy has always been a part of imperialism’s history and complexity, and Fascism was no exception, so I feel an obligation to tell you about it.

For some of us this may serve as a reminder that oppressors can and do accept the assistance of their victims (at least until they outlive their utility).

[Excerpt]

Many of the men who had served in [the Wehrmacht] were met with fury and ostracism. An officer, hoping to put his past behind him by emigrating to South America, asked a Berlin rabbi for help, but when the rabbi found out about his military service, he turned his back on the “Jew killer.” Another was told by his aunt in Palestine that it would have been better if he’d died in a camp, as millions of their co-religionists had.


See also:

The Jewish Troops of Adolf Hitler

The Jews in Hitler’s Military

It may also be worth mentioning that at least a few upper‐class Jews in the Anglosphere willingly endorsed the Third Reich: the Du Pont family of Delaware and Benjamin Harrison Freedman.

ETA: I never liked how this thread overlooked the Jewish Italian Fascists, which makes the title somewhat misleading. To correct this, here are some quotes from Shira Klein’s Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism, pages 49–50:

[Fascist] Jewish men, already staunch patriots and royalists, happily glorified military service. Some chose the army as their life‐long occupation. Valfredo Segre from Padua became a military pilot at only twenty years old, in 1931. He was promoted to first lieutenant and won six medals, three of them for flying the war planes [that Fascist] Italy sent to aid Franco in the Spanish Civil War.245

The Gerbi siblings from Livorno also wanted to join [Fascist] Italy’s armed forces; in the 1920s, Antonello Gerbi dreamed of enlisting in the navy, and only a failed medical examination prevented him from doing so. His brother Giuliano chose the prestigious regiment of horse‐drawn artillery, relishing the cape, spurred boots, and saber that came with the position. “At a parade,” recalled the third brother Claudio, “riding his horse in front of his battery, he was magnificent.”246

The number of Jews with military careers grew fivefold from 1901 to 1938. By that year, almost 3 percent of all Italian army officers were Jewish, far more than Jews’ proportion in Italian society.247 […] [Fascist] Jews teemed with excitement at the African conquest of 1935.255 Some volunteered to fight, like young Mario Pavia from Turin, who was ecstatic at the chance to claim “a place in the sun,” as [Fascists] liked to call Africa.256

    • lemmygrabber
      link
      English
      101 year ago

      Buffalo soldiers were a regiment made of black folks who fought on the frontiers against the native Americans in the 19th century.