Jews Fight Back (Part I)

I’ve noticed a substantial movement of blatantly anti-Semitic propaganda on Facebook.   Mostly these cowards tend to whine that they’re “simply against Israel and not Jews” but then post the same big-nosed caricatures we recognize from Nazi propaganda.   This brings me to my topic for this week.

Fighting Back, by Harold Werner.  My colleague Mr. Campbell got me this book for Christmas last year and I finally finished reading it.  It chronicles the struggle to survive in the forests of Poland from 1939 to 1944, wherein a Jewish partisan group had to arm itself and fight back to avoid being wiped out.  Fortunately the author survived to tell the story, but many of his friends, family and comrades did not.

Defiance.  This movie covers almost the same territory even if the characters are different (though also true), taking place in Byelorussia as opposed to Poland.  But the same issues arise:  to survive, young Jewish badasses have to get weapons, extract friends, family and loved ones from local villages and larger ghettoes, somehow find food, avoid anti-Semitic locals eager to sell them out to the Nazis, and of course, fight back against the German Police and SS units sent into the forest, heavily armed, to wipe them out.  The main fighters are played by Daniel “007” Craig and Liev Shreiber (Ray Donovan and other roles).  [No famous people on the German side here.]

Since that book and this movie tend to reinforce and complement each other, I’ll combine the analysis of the two.

Themes:   Hostile locals.  When an entire nation defended its Jews against the Nazis – as the Danes and Bulgarians did – the Holocaust was stopped dead in its tracks.  The Final Solution was impossible without substantial cooperation and assistance by locals.  However, Werner noted an interesting dynamic.  If the Germans were armed and violent, but the Jews were not, the locals would cooperate fully with the Nazis.  However, if the Jews showed up with weapons and the inclination to use them, that now put the locals in a spot.  Faced with two sides willing to kill them, they generally picked the Jews to side with.  This was pushed further in the Jews’ favor after Stalingrad (February 1943) and Kursk (July 1943) when it became more apparent that the Nazis weren’t going to win the war.  Showing up with guns, the Jews turned the locals’ contempt into fear and respect, though whichever locals had pre-existing anti-Semitic tendencies tended to remain pro-Nazi longer than the others.  When the Red Army came close by, even the nastiest bastards began thinking twice about supporting the Fritzes. 

Useless mouths.  Unfortunately, most of the Jewish refugees were women, children, elderly, disabled, etc.  Many of the men were urban intellectuals with limited combat skills or outdoors knowhow.  Only a minority were young, able-bodied men capable of fighting.  In rare but valuable occasions the fighters had Polish Army experience.  Most of the fighting had to be done by the small fraction of willing and able men – with a few women scattered here and there.  

Russians.  While not particularly enamored of Jews, and fairly brutal thanks to Comrade Stalin, the Russians are mainly good guys in this story.   Once the Jews convinced the Soviets that they were willing, able, and competent fighters, that they were willing to fight alongside the Russians and risk their own lives defending themselves, the Soviets began supplying them with weapons, ammunition, supplies, and even a few advisors.  As the front moved westwards, so did much larger Russian partisan forces.  These forces were so large, well-equipped, and well-organized as to qualify as armies in their own right. 

Two Polish Armies.  Werner describes not one but TWO Polish resistance armies (actually he mentions others, but these are the main two): The Army Ludowa and the Army Krajowa.  The latter is the larger, more famous Home Army which shows up in the 1944 Warsaw uprising.  According to Werner, the Ludowa group was Communist and allied closely with the Soviets, and almost always highly favorable to the Jews.  On the other hand, the Army Krajowa, while not explicitly anti-Semitic, was no better than neutral and did betray them to the Nazis on multiple occasions. 

After the war, the Jews faced reprisals from Army Krajowa forces – who even killed many Jewish partisans who had managed to survive the war.  The author had to flee Poland and found his way to the USA. 

My father once spoke with a genuine French resistance fighter.  He said that during the war, the Resistance never mustered more than a few hundred men and women at tops.  However, after the war, somehow that number expanded exponentially, after the fact: thousands of people emerged from the woodwork claiming to have helped out the Resistance in various ways.  The truth is that most of these people might not have been outright collaborators or Milice, but they certainly weren’t Resistance.  Probably they were minding their own business, just trying to stay alive. 

Likewise it seems that the Polish resistance armies – particularly the Army Krajowa – claimed to have supported the Jews and opposed the Nazis.   I believe in some cases this is probably true – but clearly not all.  As for resolving discrepancies between what surviving Jews claim vs. what the Polish resistance armies claim, I’m more inclined to believe the former.  While there is little reason for Jews to attribute collaboration or hostility to Poles who weren’t actually so, there is ample incentive for embarrassed anti-Semites, after the fact, to claim to have been more supportive of the Jews than they actually were.    

Uprising.  This is a recent film with an all-star cast.  NOTE: there were TWO Warsaw uprisings.  The 1943 “Ghetto” uprising was the Jewish uprising.   The later 1944 uprising was the Polish Home Army uprising.  This movie focuses on the former.

            This story has an all-star cast: Hank Azaria (best known from the Simpsons and as Gargamel in the live action Smurfs movies), David Schwimmer (Ross Geller on “Friends”), Leelee Sobieski, Donald Sutherland (a hero here, not the vile President Snow), and even the German side has some star power:  Jon Voigt as Jurgen Stroop, the SS commander who put down the uprising, and Carey Elwes as the Nazis’ chief propagandist.  Instead of forests, the locale is the Warsaw Ghetto, i.e. street fighting which eventually led to many Jews escaping through the sewers.  Here again, you have Jews fighting back and trying to stay alive, but it’s in a demolished city and its sewer complex rather than the wild forests. 

Both “Defiance” and “Uprising” are long movies, but they complement each other.  Naturally, however, “Schindler’s List” remains the definitive Holocaust movie to date.  

SS vs. VC

I finished a fascinating book, The Devil’s Guard.  It had been out of print for ages, so I had to buy it used from someone selling it for less than $200.

 SS.  This was the elite organization of Nazi Germany.  No Holocaust film is complete without SS guards, guarding the concentration camps and rounding up hapless Jews; brutal guards and cynical officers – even the charismatic and articulate Hans Landa from Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds”.  With their black uniforms and dramatic symbols, the SS runes and Totenkopf (Death’s Head), the SS is certainly a fascinating incarnation of evil.  Although the SS was a vast organization with its tentacles in all walks of German life, most of what the SS is infamous for nowadays is its role in the Holocaust.  The Totenkopfverbande (Death’s Head Detachment) manned the concentration and extermination camps.  The Einsatzgruppen were special squads operating in the forests of Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics mowing down Jews in vast open pits dug by the victims themselves.  After the war, the SS was seen as Nazi Germany’s primary organization responsible for the atrocities associated with the regime. Its leader, Heinrich Himmler, escaped justice by swallowing a cyanide capsule upon capture by the British; Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped from Argentina by Mossad agents and brought to justice in Jerusalem.  

Part of the SS, but not part of the Holocaust operations, was an elite army known as the Waffen SS (Armed SS).  This was originally designed partly as Hitler’s personal bodyguard (Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler), which became the First SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LAH), and a modest group of special disposal troops, the Vefugungstruppe (SS-VT), which later developed into the Second SS Panzer Division Das Reich. They were intended both as an elite fighting force loyal directly to Adolf Hitler, but also as a militarized police force after the war which would have gained credibility and respect on the battlefield.  Complicating the “we had nothing to do with the camps” argument, however, is the Third SS Division, Totenkopf, which was raised from concentration camp guards and led by Theodore Eicke, who was responsible for developing the camp system and establishing its rules.  The two major stains on the Waffen SS were the massacre of French civilians in Oradour, perpetrated by a unit from the Das Reich division, and the massacre of US prisoners at Malmedy, in Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge, by the Leibstandarte Division.

 The majority of Waffen SS units, however, were concerned with fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front.  They formed ad hoc kampfgruppes (battle groups) which combined for specific operations as necessary, a flexibility unique to that army.  SS units were the scourge of the Reds and later the Allies, always feared and underestimated at their enemies’ peril.  Fortunately for their enemies, the SS was limited in number, never more than 10% of the size of the Wehrmacht, a few core German divisions and many more foreign units (see below).

 The Waffen SS attracted some German Army mavericks who had unconventional ideas for training which were frowned upon by the traditional German Army.  The Waffen SS trained with live ammunition and upgraded the exercise, fitness and calisthenics of the soldiers, plus a healthy dose of Nazi propaganda training.  Its soldiers received the first camouflage uniforms, a distinctive dot cammo (green or brown, depending on spring or fall) and also received the best weapons and equipment, and its panzer divisions received the newest tanks.  Waffen SS soldiers are the ones seen in the last third of “Saving Private Ryan” almost overrunning Tom Hanks’ small group of soldiers and paratroopers. 

 Another fascinating aspect of the Waffen SS was its multinational composition.  It initially accepted “Aryan”/Nordic volunteers from Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Flemish Belgium, plus “Reichdeutsche” (foreign nationals of German ethnicity).  Later, the SS lowered its racial standards and allowed French, Walloons (French speaking Belgians), Hungarians, Estonians, Latvians, and even Russians, Ukrainians, and other Slavs.  Leon Degrelle, commander of the SS Walloon Division, was the highest decorated non-German in the Waffen SS.  There was a Yugoslav unit, the Handschar Division, of Muslim Croatians.  However, the infamous “Britisches Freikorps” was little more than a 30 man unarmed unit which never saw combat.

 After the war, some of the Waffen SS veterans, fleeing what they perceived to be indiscriminate justice at the hands of the victorious Allies who labeled all SS personnel “war criminals”, wound up in France and received sanctuary in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion, which has a reputation for accepting disreputable characters from all over the world.  By this point the French were involved in a costly guerilla war in the mountains and forests of North Vietnam, against Ho Chi Minh’s US-trained and Chinese-supplied guerilla force, the Viet Minh.  The Foreign Legion allowed the Germans to form their own self-contained, independently operating unit.

 Viet Minh.  The precursor to the infamous Viet Cong (VC) was the Viet Minh, essentially the same organization under a slightly different name.  Without a sovereign state, North Vietnam, yet in existence, the army was purely guerilla but had substantial support from China and the USSR.

 The German unit operated behind Viet Minh lines and caused considerable problems for them.  Many of them were sharpshooters, carrying silenced rifles.  They learned fluent French and some Vietnamese, and were assisted by a Viet Minh turncoat, whose whole family had been wiped out by the Viet Minh.  Realizing that the Chinese were supporting the Viet Minh, the German unit went into China proper, dressed in black pajamas, tire sandals, the conical hats, and blew up several staging camps.  They also rescued several units of captured Legionnaires, and avenged others who were not so fortunate. 

 The Germans ruthlessly repaid Viet Minh atrocities in kind; on the rare occasion in which VM officers were lenient with French prisoners, the Germans acted likewise.  On one convoy, the Germans rounded up the wives and children of the local guerillas and used them as human shields to guarantee the safety of the convoy.  At another camp, besieged by a ruthless VM officer murdering captive Legionnaires outside the stockade of the camp, the Germans captured the VM unit’s local family and brought them to the camp, threatening to kill them if the VM officer didn’t back off.  This resulted in a mutiny in the VM ranks, who turned on their own officers.

On one remarkable occasion, one of the Germans challenged a VM officer to an open debate in front of the local villagers.  This German was well versed in Marxist ideology and ripped apart the VM’s arguments one by one; he was clearly excited and amused to engage in this battle of wits, words and ideas instead of bullets. 

  The Germans had also studied Mao’s guerilla warfare tactics and the writings of Spencer Chapman, a British officer who had been part of the UK advisors who remained in Malaysia after the Japanese took over, advising and organizing local guerillas to fight the Japanese; his book The Jungle is Neutral served as much as a primer in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency as Mao’s own teachings.  It turns out the French had done no prep work training the Legion for fighting in jungles (their training bases were in North Africa) nor had they bothered to study the tactics of the Viet Minh or of Mao himself, who literally wrote the book which Communist guerilla movements followed. 

 Unable to defeat the Germans in the forest, the Viet Minh used its political connections among the world’s Communist movement, particularly in France, to embarrass the French into disbanding the German unit.  Its men, unwilling to be parceled out piecemeal to the other Foreign Legion units, and having satisfied their enlistments, resigned from the Legion and found homes around the world.  In 1971, the leader of the unit, Hans Wagemueller (not his real name), met with the author of The Devil’s Guard and dictated his fascinating story. 

Skorzeny Speaks

"The Most Dangerous Man in Europe", Otto Skorzeny, actually wrote memoirs, Skorzeny’s Special Missions. He’s best known for being behind the paratrooper rescue of Mussolini in September 1943, as well as "Operation Greif", the famous Battle of the Bulge operation wherein German soldiers, dressed as American troops, infiltrated behind US lines causing all sorts of confusion and trouble. I’m not sure why he was called "dangerous", as he didn’t seem personally dangerous to anyone, and his own operations had limited scope and effect. But his story is certainly interesting. Here are the high points:

 1. Born in 1908, died in 1975, from Vienna, Austria. His name is pronounced "Skor-Tseny", which I had figured out without ever having heard it pronounced; yet he notes that some Germans could not pronounce it properly.

 2. He was rejected by the Luftwaffe for his age, not his size. So he joined the Waffen SS, eventually winding up in the Das Reich (2^nd SS) Division. SS men tended to make up a sizable portion of his commando units, but he recruited from the Army, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine as well. Their unofficial motto (not the official motto, Mein Ehre Heisst Treue (My Honor is Loyalty)) was "take it easy". Surfer/stoners in the SS? Amazing.

 3. Midway through the war, before the Mussolini rescue operation, Skorzeny was summoned to the Wolf’s Den (the HQ in the forests of East Prussia) to meet with Adolf Hitler and the other top brass of the Nazis. It was a real "we’re not worthy! we’re not worthy!" moment. At one point, Hitler had a group of German officers around him, and he solicited their opinion on Italy. Most gave various different responses, Germany’s ally, fascism, etc. Skorzeny simply said, "mein Fuhrer, I am an Austrian", and Hitler understood immediately.

 The situation in Italy was getting confused and dangerous, what with Mussolini captured by the Italian military and some of the top Italians making noises about making peace with the Allies (negotiating in Lisbon, Portugual) and switching sides. Reichfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, briefed Skorzeny, rattling off a long list of names and saying "loyal" or "disloyal". Skorzeny, said, "whoa, maybe I should write some of this down," and Himmler replied, "you fool! Nothing is to be written down, you have to memorize this!" So Skorzeny was thinking to himself, hey, I met the Fuhrer and Himmler today, amidst all this excitement I’d be lucky to remember one name, let alone dozens, and he wants me not to write this down?? Come on.

 4. Hitler on Mussolini. As an Austrian, Hitler had a particular contempt for the Italians in general. In Mein Kampf, he scoffed at the Kaiser for including Italy in the Triple Alliance: "what moron combined Italy and Austria-Hungary in the same alliance?" Sure enough, Italy opted out in 1914 and switched sides in 1915.

But despite this opinion of the Italians, he had warm and sincere feelings for Mussolini, who he considered his personal friend. He asked Skorzeny to rescue him, "because I owe it to him as a friend." The German-Italian alliance was motivated by ideological compatibility; Mussolini had taken power in 1922, and literally wrote the book on fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were kindred souls, even if the Italian war machine wasn’t quite up to the demanding standards of the Wehrmacht, or if their hapless exploits continually required German rescue (Greece and North Africa).

 5. At some point during the battle for the Eastern Front, Himmler got the firm idea to destroy the Soviet blast furnaces at Magnitogorsk. A quick analysis showed the operation to be completely impractical – no information existed on the facility, and even if they knew something about it, it would have been impossible to get a team there and then back. From this, Skorzeny learned "to display immense enthusiasm for any plan, however idiotic, which they put forward, and keep on reporting progress." "St Bureaucracy", as he later described it.

 6. During the 1938 Anschluss, he was responsible for defusing the situation and ensuring the takeover was bloodless. Later on, in 1944 when the Hungarians threatened to defect to the Soviets, Skorzeny planned and carried out the operation that shut that down immediately.

 7. Himmler, considering the new V1 rockets, asked Skorzeny if it would be possible to launch one from a U-boat against NYC. Himmler's take on this was: these Americans have had it so easy, the war hasn't hit them at home. If we smack them in NYC they will back off. Skorzeny started by speculating that this U-boat/V1 thing may be possible. But then he cautioned Himmler: attacking NYC would be counterproductive. FDR had been trying to convince Americans that Germany is a threat to them. Shoot a V1 into NYC and you'd simply confirm what FDR had been saying. Don't underestimate the Anglo-Saxon strain in the Americans. Like the British, their morale jumps sky-high when directly threatened – note the contemporary parallels with 9/11.

 8. He studied the Allied commandos extensively and admired Bill Donovan (OSS commander and founder of the CIA) – and was ultimately interrogated by him after the war. He saw that the Germans had their work cut out for them; while the British wouldn’t have any trouble finding French, Belgians or Dutch willing to fight against the Germans, even to risk their lives doing so, the pool of available British and Americans around Europe willing to betray the Allies was somewhat small – as was the supply of Frenchmen willing to work against the Allies who had just liberated their country.

 9. Skorzeny was briefly involved in counterintelligence in Holland, against British operatives. He loved the Sten gun, particularly the silenced variant. He met Admiral Canaris, head of the German Abwehr (military intelligence) – who he found to be VERY obtuse and inscrutable.

 10. He worked with frogmen and helped develop German midget submarines. In a way he was a German SEAL. This was in addition to jumping out of planes as a paratrooper.

 11. For Operation Greif, he had to round up Germans who spoke English. He actually only found TEN who could speak English with an American accent and pass themselves off as Americans. 30-40 spoke English fluently but with an accent (imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger in a US uniform trying to convince someone he’s not German – "no, I’m Austrian!") and the rest could say "yes" and "no" but otherwise had to keep their mouths shut. Skorzeny fails to describe his own English fluency, if any, but in any case the Fuhrer specifically forbid him from personally leading the mission, saying he was too valuable to risk losing.

 They had a difficult time getting enough Allied uniforms and equipment; one supply center sent them greatcoats, which GIs never wore, and another sent sent field jackets labelled "P.O.W.". The German soldiers wore German uniforms under the American ones: the theory was that international law only forbids enemy uniforms if you actually use your weapon, so they were instructed, if going into combat, to take the American uniform off first.

 Another problem: when it came time to find these Germans who spoke English, the brainiacs at the German High Command decided to distribute a memo throughout the entire German armed forces. "D’oh!" And of course, the Allies got wind of the plan within 8 days – yet somehow they never acted on this knowledge. The commandos caused all sorts of confusion and problems. There were rumors that Eisenhower was marked for assassination, and several US officers and men were mistakenly arrested as German spies. Skorzeny mentions that during his post-war interrogations by various Allied officers, they were convinced he was either involved in some plot to kill Eisenhower or to whisk Hitler off to some hidden location outside Berlin, possibly even outside Germany.

 When they used captured Jeeps, they aroused suspicion by carrying the full 4 men per Jeep; US practice was to only carry 3 at a time.

 He got into more trouble for this than for anything else. Yet he got the idea from the Americans, who had run operations dressed as German soldiers. And sure enough, during his war crimes trial, a British Commando officer, Yeo Thomas, testified on his behalf that the Allies had done the same thing, so he was acquitted.

 12. There is, however, a disturbing element to this book, which was written well after the war: absolutely NO mention of the Holocaust. From his own activities, Skorzeny probably had no personal involvement with the various elements of the Holocaust. But being in the SS, associated with various top level SS leaders, it’s impossible to believe that Skorzeny was unaware of what was going on. He must have known. Yet he doesn’t offer any apology, even insincere, such as "regrettably, mistakes were made."

 The closest clue, and a bad one, comes from his comments on the Nuremburg trials. He remarks that his fellow defendants – high ranking Wehrmacht officers, Nazi leaders, and SS officers – cravenly pleaded for their lives and whined that they were only following orders, instead of defending their actions. Granted that Skorzeny himself had nothing to apologize for – he was acquitted – but certainly the architects of the Final Solution had much to answer for. His comments, and complete lack of reference to the Holocaust, suggests that he personally approved of it but decided to be discreet and not offer this controversial opinion in the book.

 This spoils and stains an otherwise impressive book about an impressive figure. He was probably the most versatile and capable special ops officer the Germans had during the war. I found his own story, in his own words, to be impossible to put down.