As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, it is crucial to remember the central role that Jewish soldiers played in the defeat of the Nazis.
A little-known history is the story of the British commando unit X Troop, which was comprised mostly of Jews who carried out some of the most daring and important missions of the war.
The story of X Troop began in June 1942 when the German war machine seemed unstoppable.
Desperate to change the course of the war, Winston Churchill and his chief of combined operations, Lord Mountbatten, created a commando unit of German speakers that would end up being almost entirely composed of Jewish refugees.
Most had arrived in the UK as teenagers on transit visas or Kindertransport from Germany and Austria.
When the war broke out, they were interned as enemy aliens, often in horrific conditions in Australia and Canada.
After being released, they volunteered for this new hazardous duty. Brought to London and interviewed by MI5, the nascent X Troopers were told that they would be taking the fight directly to the Nazis, and that their work would be extremely dangerous. They understood the risks but felt that they had nothing more to lose.
In order to operate behind enemy lines, the X Troopers had to shed their previous lives and pretend that they were British through and through.
This was necessary because as Jews they would be killed instantly if captured. Once accepted into X Troop, each man was given a few minutes to pick a new, British-sounding name. Next, they had to destroy any connection to their old selves and create a cover story of their British origins. For those killed in battle, this change would often remain permanent: since these Jewish refugees now had fake British names with dog tags that listed the Church of England, many would be buried beneath crosses. Over recent years the Jewish British Ajex archivist Martin Sugarman has worked hard to have X-Troopers that were buried under crosses re-interred under Magen Davids – sadly, with no success.
After their selection, the X Troopers underwent a brutal training in Wales and Scotland where they were instructed in counter-intelligence. Days and nights hiking over mountains with full packs and weapons; live ammo training; cliff scaling; demolition work; parachuting. The plan was that after they had captured the enemy in the heat of battle, they would then interrogate them in German. For the X Troopers, the war was personal – the Nazis had already killed many of their family members and communities.
In the next chapter of the remarkable story of No 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, 3 Troop – better known as X Troop – these men, who until recently had been despised, stateless refugees, emerged as hardened commandos who were placed in a range of existing units in leadership roles, taking on the most dangerous missions.
Their stories include that of Ian Harris (Hans Ludwig Hajos), a German Jewish exile who single-handedly captured an entire German garrison with nothing but a Tommy gun. He also received the British Army’s Military Medal for killing scores of fanatical Hitler Youth SS during the Rhine crossing in 1945. Then there was Peter Masters (Peter Arany), an artistic boy from Vienna who was selected to land at D-Day as part of the “Bicycle Troop”. After being used to successfully draw out a German machine gun nest, Masters was one of the first Allied soldiers to make it to Pegasus Bridge, a key objective in the Normandy campaign.
But perhaps the most remarkable X Troop stories of all is that of Manfred Gans, an Orthodox Jew from Borken, Germany who transformed into a near superman under the nom de guerre Fred Gray. Gans was at the forefront of the D-Day landings, killing and interrogating countless Nazis.
In the waning days of the war, he commandeered a Jeep and drove to Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he rescued his own parents. After the war, the X Troopers would be used to capture Nazis, interrogate high-ranking officials and gather information for the forthcoming Nuremberg trials. Many more remarkable tales of the secret commandos of X Troop will never be known, because of the 87 men who passed through their ranks, more than half were killed, wounded or disappeared without a trace.
Most of the surviving X Troopers kept their noms de guerre and many did not tell their children about their Jewish roots or divulge that they had lost their families in the Holocaust. They often grappled with profound insecurities about whether they could be both British and Jewish. Many were surely motivated by a fear of lingering antisemitism in British society.
I came to write the first full history of X Troop in part because I wanted to push back strongly against antisemitic myths about Jewish passivity in the face of the Holocaust.
Leah Garrett is the Larry A. and Klara Silverstein Chair and Director of Jewish Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Her most recent book is X-Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War Two (Vintage, Penguin UK)
