I’ve been thinking about history lately, primarily because I saw a comment online that made me think. The comment itself was thought-provoking, though I wasn’t sure if it was true or not. Here’s what it was, right below:

“Many Jews in Germany were politicians, and they worked with the Nazis. They were complicit in their own demise, refusing to resist until it was too late. Had politicians truly resisted to their fullest power, historians agree that the Holocaust would have had far fewer victims.”

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. It was written by a rando on the net. It could have been anyone. The truth is that we don’t know what could have been. More importantly, there were plenty of Jews (and others) who had both armed and unarmed resistance to Hitler’s rise to power.

Even so, that remark got me thinking.

The idea that Jews didn’t resist is total bunk. They did. And so did many of their allies. But, it wasn’t enough to actually curb the rise of fascism until it was too late. However, there were many, many Jews who actually advocated for Nazism in the beginning.

I decided to take another look at what happened to the Jews who ended up being pro-Hitler.

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As I have said before, there was a real organization known as “Jews for Hitler” colloquially. It was officially known as the Association of German National Jews.

The organization was vocal about Nazi beliefs, but they assumed that Hitler was “just joking” about the Jewish question. For a while, they seemed to get preferential treatment.

However, this didn’t stay for long. In 1935, the group was banned under the Reich rules. The organization’s top leaders were sent to death camps, with most of them being killed after they sold out their own people.

This is a surprise to no one. However, most people don’t realize that the “Jews for Hitler” organization wasn’t the only group of Jews that fought for Hitler, nor was it the only one that involved Jews supporting Nazism.

As the ghettofication of the Jews was implemented, Nazis realized they would need law enforcement within the ghettos. Thus, the Judenrate (or Judenrat) was formed: a Jewish-run institution of law enforcement that worked inside the ghettos of Germany. They were picked from the most corrupt groups the Nazis could get—for the very reasons you’d expect.

The Judenrate were often the people who prepared lists for “deportation,” making them reviled and hated people among the Jews. Once there were enough Jews exterminated, the Judenrat ended up sharing their fate.

The only difference? The Judenrat didn’t often have the same camaraderie that other inmates had in the camps. One can presume that at least some of them were recognized.

Here’s the wildest thing about being a German Jew: there’s a good chance you were drafted in the war, to kill the very people trying to save your life. As many as 150,000 “half-Jews” and “quarter Jews” fought on the side of Nazis.

One source notes: “Among the Wehrmacht personnel of World War II of Jewish ancestry were Generalfeldmarschalls, admirals, and generals.^[1] Around 20 soldiers of Jewish ancestry received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.^[4”

So uh, these were not always low-ranking grunts. One could truly liken them to the minorities currently serving ICE. Many of these people were highly skilled and even revered for their abilities in war, fighting, and yes, even propaganda.

Hitler and his crew were aware. By 1940, Hitler issued out a secret directive to quietly purge the entirety of Jews from the Wehrmacht, with only quarter-Jews married to non-Jews allowed to remain.

Moreover, there was a sizable portion of Jewish informants who sided with Hitler under the belief that they would be spared from the mass execution. Some say it was dozens, others say the number was higher.

Regardless, most of the Jews who sided with Hitler all faced the same situation: they were stripped of ranks, died, or were imprisoned after they were caught. Those who survived the fall of the Third Reich were often tried for their crimes and cast out from Jewish society.

Even among academics, the topic of Jewish Wehrmact soldiers remains taboo.

I think it would have, but I’m not sure how much of a difference it would have made. Without a doubt, the sheer onslaught of propaganda would have likely made the Holocaust (or even fascism) a temporary inevitability unless it would have been slapped down HARD, REPEATEDLY.

That’s the weird thing I’ve noticed about genocides, the more I’ve studied them.

Genocides seemingly have this weird trait where they almost seem to be inevitable to happen when things reach a fever pitch due to propaganda, then they tend to peter out when bystanders start to get vocal about it.

Once a genocide starts, it’s very hard to actually stop the mass murders without outside intervention or social change. I might be wrong, but I’ve started to think that how hard the global resistance is basically dictates how long the genocide occurs.

Think about what happened to Native Americans. In theory, America absolutely could have wiped out every Indigenous tribe. I mean, quite a few are deemed to be extinct already and it would have continued even longer if Americans didn’t have the Civil Rights movement.

People rarely think about it, but America was still committing acts of genocide against Indigenous folks for far longer than the 1800s. It was growing calls to stop and a growing awareness of genocide that helped stifle it—and forced sterilizations were still going on as late as the 1980s or 1990s.

Of course, how vocal the victims are about their plight makes a world of difference. So yeah. Every voice counts. Even if it doesn’t feel like that at the moment, people are listening.