British Army Jewish Brigade Group

[braveheart562002]

Excerpt found on the Web and submitted by Alan Newark

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British Army Jewish Brigade Group

The Jewish Brigade Group was formed in the Egyptian desert on 28 September 1944 with Brigadier Ernest F. Benjamin, a Canadian-born career officer with 25 years of active duty as a Royal Engineer appointed commander. He was to head an organization:


...whose language was Hebrew, which was almost entirely Palestinian, and whose personnel hailed originally from every country but Britain. Former refugees from Germany; men who had run away from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, for fear of the descending Nazis; early pioneers who had 'gone up' to 'build the land' twenty and thirty years ago from Russia and Poland; romantic-looking, dark-skinned Yemenite Jews, black Falashas from Abyssinia. These were the bulk of the fifty-four countries which were represented in the Brigade, but which were not all welded into the new Palestinian spirit and tradition.


The official British history of the war in Italy describes the activation of the Jewish Brigade Group thusly:


The formation of the Jewish Brigade had been politically and militarily controversial. Churchill supported the idea, which was pressed by the Zionist leader, Doctor Chaim Weizmann, because he felt it would be sort of rough justice to enable the Jews 'to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen.' Neither the War office nor the C.-in-C. [Commander in Chief] Middle East were keen on the proposal From a political angle they thought 'that the Zionists desire to have their men trained at our expense, in active operations'; and militarily they objected to the diversion of effort needed for training and equipment. The War Office fought a long losing battle in which the formation of a Jewish Division was mooted but turned down as impracticable. C.-in-C. Middle East was eventually instructed to form a brigade group although he maintained he could only provide a brigade from Jewish sources. Gaps were filled by British units. The Order of Battle was:

1st. 2nd. and 3rd Battalions Palestine Regiment
* 200th Field Regiment (one battery Jewish), RA [artillery]
643rd (Palestine) Field Company, RE. [engineers]
* Brigade and Field Regiment Signals
178th (Palestine) Company, RA S.C. [service corps]
* 140th Field Ambulance
Jewish Brigade Group Ordnance Field Park and Workshop Sections

* Indicates British units.



As a unit of the British Army, it was entitled to its own unit identification, a flag with a gold Magen David on a background of white-blue-white stripes and bearing the inscription "chayil," the initials of the unit's Hebrew name - Chashivoh Yehudis Lohchemes [Jewish Fighting Brigade], or as it was listed, "Jewish Brigade Group." After a period of training in Egypt, the brigade, 5,000 men strong, including Jews who transferred from other units of the British Army, deployed to Italy to come under the command of the British Eighth Army. It continued its training in Italy until February 1945, when it moved north into the lines on the Alfonsine sector of the front. This area was in northeast Italy, near the Adriatic coast just below where the Italian boot begins to curve towards Venice.



In March, the brigade participated in two attacks against German lines, ant then was moved to another sector on the Senio River facing positions held by enemy troops of an elite parachute division. On 9 April, the brigade's three battalions crossed the river to make and hold a bridgehead on the opposite bank -- a very difficult maneuver in a combat situation -- against strong enemy resistance. In the heavy fighting which ensued, the brigade lost 30 men killed and 70 wounded in action. For their valor and bravery in this engagement, 21 officers and enlisted men were decorated and 78 mentioned in dispatches, a British form of recognition of heroism in battle.

As the Allied drive into northern Italy progressed, the Jewish Brigade moved forward also, entering towns and cities where the Jewish civilian population greeted the troops who had Magen David unit markings on their vehicles and other gear. Bologna was one of the first cities where the Jewish community was reborn with the help of individual soldiers of the brigade who shared their rations with the starving Italian Jews -- starving spiritually as well as physically. In each of the towns in which there was a Jewish population of any size, the Brigade's troops helped clean up and making the local synagogues places of worship once more and the brigade chaplain, Rabbi Casper conducted probably the first Sabbath services held in these towns since the war began. Modena, Ferrara, Venice, and Milan followed Bologna in turn and the reception of the brigade by the Italian Jews in each city was the same -- wonderment and pride in this wholly Jewish outfit whose members spoke Yiddish and Hebrew, and a number of other European languages as well.

V-E Day, 8 May 1945, arrived and members of the Brigade wondered whether they would be sent next to Germany, as many had hoped, or to Eastern Europe, where many of the Brigade carne from. Instead, the Jewish Brigade was moved to Tarvisio on the Italian-Austrian-Yugoslav border in the Julian Alps. It was here that former concentration camp prisoners and displaced persons (DPs) began passing through, all survivors of the Holocaust -- Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Carpatho-Russians, Hungarians, Germans, and all Jewish for the most part. Many of the men in the brigade came from the same places as had some of the DPs and a number found relatives or individuals who knew their families. The Jewish agencies, such as the British Jewish Relief Committee and the American Joint Distribution Committee were in Rome, and both were overwhelmed by the numbers of refugees on the move, most moving south with hopes of reaching Eretz Israel one way or another. The brigade set up its own refugee committee, sharing what supplies of food, bedding, and medicine it could with the DPs. The brigade also established a form of an underground railroad, with the help of individual Israelis who had been sent to Europe to rescue the DPs and to see that they got to a place where they would be passed to yet another rescue group, and so on. At the same time the brigade was doing this, it established secret contact with Zionist authorities, for, as one account relates, it:


...thus became a major factor in the care of the Jewish survivors of the ghettos and concentration camps. Without neglecting their military duties, the Jewish soldiers extended systematic aid to the refugees, provided them with clothes and educational facilities for their children, guided them across the frontiers, and smuggled them into Palestine.


Meanwhile, the reputation of the Brigade as a focal point for Jewish refugees attempting to get to Palestine spread. In a number of cases, American Military Government officers in the American zone in Germany, in whose areas existed DP camps, contacted Brigade authorities asking them to help ease the situation of the Jewish refugees in the camps.

The brigade was moved to Holland and then to Belgium in July 1945, where it continued to assist the DPs. Some members of the Brigade were attached to a tracing service of the occupation authorities searching for survivors as far afield as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Once the Brigade had arrived in Antwerp and set up, it helped to re-establish Jewish activities in the city, but most of all, "...the very presence of the Brigade raised the morale of the Jewish civilians" in not only Belgium but also in all of the other cities it had passed through on its way north. In April 1946, it was later revealed in the report of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine that the Brigade was transferred precisely because of its activities in aiding the refugees while it was in Italy.



In addition to the members of the Brigade who obtained official leave, a number of others took off without authorization to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Carpatho-Russia searching for surviving relatives. When this so-called "French leave" threatened to take on epidemic proportions, the Brigade sought permission from the British Army of the Rhine for permission to send organized teams to search for relatives. Brigadier Benjamin, the Brigade commander, pointed out that it was a matter of unit morale for the some 1,500 solders and officers who had relatives in the countries and territories conquered and occupied by the Nazis.

[Jim O]

Thanks for sharing that Alan.

[Tom Houlihan]

Interesting, I've not seen a lot on the Jewish Brigade.

[Horch]

I was looking up the Jewish Brigade (interesting) and came across this from a University of Kansas site. I never heard of this. It could be of some interest. I guess. Does anyone know anything about them?

[Jim O]

Originally Posted by Horch

I was looking up the Jewish Brigade (interesting) and came across this from a University of Kansas site. I never heard of this. It could be of some interest. I guess. Does anyone know anything about them?

There were more than several Jews who served in the German Army during the war. Most were already in the service before the racial laws were passed and were allowed to stay on appeal, some approved by Hitler himself. Most of them were Mischlinge ("part-Jews") but many were full blooded Jews. One of the most notable was Field Marshall Erhard Milch whose father was Jewish and whose mother, while purportedly Christian, had a Jewish maiden name (Rosenau). Milch was tried and convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and spent several years in Landsberg Prison.

According to Rigg's book, which is fairly well researched (I have it), there were perhaps 150,000 Jews and part-Jews in the German military during the war. There also were many in the armed forces of Hungary during that period. Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel and himself a Holocaust survivor said in his book Swimming Across that his father served in the Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front and was held as a POW by the Soviets for a period after the war. I don't know off hand about Germany's other allies.

[Horch]

Thanks! Pretty interesting. I guess it could have given some mixed feelings in the populace.