Overview

This 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 radicalisation 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 six million Jews were murdered. In parallel, Germany's POW policies had gone through a radicalisation 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 this, Jewish POWs from western countries were usually not discriminated against and were treated, in most cases, according to the 1929 Geneva Convention. Jewish Soldiers in Nazi Captivity combines memoirs, letters, and oral histories with Red Cross camp visit reports and other archival material to challenge the accepted view of the Holocaust as an indiscriminate murder of all Jews in Europe and will help to reshape our understanding of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany.

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9780198892786

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Reviews

Linenberg's book is cohesively constructed, highly readable, and offers important building blocks for better understanding the paradoxical survival of Jewish prisoners of war. He may be guilty of over-generalizing when he takes what is true of British and American Jews in German captivity and applies it to all other non-Soviet Jewish POWs; however, the sharpness of his arguments results in many different points of connection for future scholarly research. * Janine Doerry, German Historical Institute London *

Author Information

Yorai Linenberg is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. His PhD dissertation, on which this book is based, dealt with the experience of American and British Jewish POWs in German captivity during the Second World War. Linenberg holds an MSc in Physics and an MBA, both from the Tel Aviv University.

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