The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II » (First)

Steven Karras is the co-director of the feature-length documentary About Face: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Soldiers of World War II. He has taped nearly a thousand hours of video and audio oral histories and has amassed a considerable archive of unpublished personal memoirs, photographs, newspaper articles, family memorabilia, and individual war records. Steve, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is a screenwriter and lives with his wife in Los Angeles.

The Enemy I Knew is a collection of twenty-seven first-person accounts from European-born Jewish combat veterans of World War II. All were refugees from the Nazi regime who fled Germany and Austria in humiliation and fear, then faced down their persecutors by joining the Allied military to fight against the country of their birth.

            Serving in North Africa and Europe, these brave men, and a brave woman, gained a sense of dignity and vindication that enabled them to rise above their victimization at the hands of Nazi oppressors. All burned with anger at the Germans who had subjected them to cruelty on the playgrounds and streets of their native towns and to ridicule in radio broadcasts, movies, and newspapers.

Adolf Hitler’s initial intention had been to drive every last Jew out of Germany. He implemented policies so hostile toward Jews that they would have little choice but to emigrate. Starting with a nationwide boycott of all Jewish businesses in 1933, the Nazi persecution of Jews rapidly grew harsher. They were expelled from government jobs, their children forced out of school, their assets confiscated. Enforcement came from the vicious Sturmabteilung—the “stormtroopers” or “brownshirts.” Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled.

            But Hitler was creating his worst enemy. These refugees knew the psychology of the enemy better than anyone else in the Allied armies. They knew Germany deep down—its countryside, its people, its language and dialects, its cities and streets. As Great Britain and the United States entered the war, the refugees were eager to fight. They struggled to overcome their adopted countries’ distrust of Germans and got their chance to strike back against the Third Reich.

Library Journal

This is a collection of 27 first-person combat accounts, sought out by the author, from German and Austrian Jews who served in the Allied Armed Forces in North Africa and Europe. These men (and one woman) had emigrated as children or young adults to the United States or Great Britain between 1937 and 1941. All of them jumped at the chance to fight the Nazis, and all served in combat (the woman was an ambulance driver). One man served in both the European and the Pacific theaters and returned to Germany in 1946 for occupation duty. These accounts, all newly published, are filled with terror and a simple courage, with a feeling of a duty fulfilled. Recommended.

Contents

Prologue

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1         Siegmund Spiegel

Chapter 2         Jerry Bechhofer

Chapter 3         Adelyn Bonin

Chapter 4         Eric Hamberg

Chapter 5         Bernard Fridberg

Chapter 6         Fritz Weinschenk

Chapter 7         Peter Terry

Chapter 8         William Katzenstein

Chapter 9         Karl Goldsmith

Chapter 10       Henry Kissinger

Chapter 11       John Stern

Chapter 12       Ralph Baer

Chapter 13       Bernard Baum

Chapter 14       Harold Baum

Chapter 15       Edmund Schloss

Chapter 16       Walter Reed

Chapter 17       Manfred Steinfeld

Chapter 18       Jack Hochwold

Chapter 19       Norbert Grunwald

Chapter 20       Eric Boehm

Chapter 21       Fred Fields

Chapter 22       Peter Masters

Chapter 23       John Brunswick

Chapter 24       Otto Stern

Chapter 25       Kurt Klein

Chapter 26       Harry Lorch

Chapter 27       Manfred Gans