Skip to Main Content

Jewish Troops and Jewish Victims: soldiers encounter the Holocaust

Case 3

The place of Jews in the military forces of the Allied nations occupied an enormous range:

From the laudatory, as in the iconic story of the sinking of the US Dorchester (Feb 1943) when the four chaplains on board – Protestant, Catholic and Jewish – gave away their lifejackets to fellow crew, linked arms and went down with the ship

To the quotidian anti-Semitism of fellow soldiers, as exemplified by the experience of Paul Steinfeld in the 379th Infantry in the Moselle Valley campaign of 1944

To those who, either temporarily or permanently had to hide their Jewish identities in order to survive even in the Allied armed forces