US/UK Connection

People hear about the Holocaust and only think of the numbers or that it happened to other people. Not many people know that American and British citizens were imprisoned and even murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust.

American citizens during the Holocaust:

1.)    Mary Berg: (October 10, 1924 – April 2013) was an American-Polish Jewish woman who kept a diary of her experiences under German occupation in Europe when she was a teenager from October 1939 until March 5, 1944. It was published in the US in June 1944 and was one of the first personal accounts of the Holocaust in English. Her father was Polish and her mother was born in the US to Polish parents. The family was living in Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939 and even though the United States was neutral from September 1939 until December 1941 her family were treated as Jews and not as American citizens. She was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto with her parents and sister from October 1940 until July 1942. In July 1942 (right before the Grossaktion Warsaw where the Germans deported 265,000 men, women and children from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka Death camp) her family was imprisoned in Pawiak Prison (which bordered the Ghetto so she could see and hear the Germans deport the hundreds of thousands of people every day.) In January 1943 her family was sent to a German internment camp in France (which held American and British citizens.) In March 1944 her family was released and sent to the US. Her wartime diary is still available in stores.

2.)    500 American soldiers that were captured by the Germans (in North Africa in 1942, France and Belgium in 1944) that either had an “H” (for Hebrew) on their dog tags or who “looked Jewish” (many soldiers taken were Hispanics and Italians whose “darker” completion made them “look Jewish’ to the Germans were sent to the Berga Concentration Camp instead of a Prisoner of War camp as stated by the Geneva Convention.

3.)    Thousands of American citizens with dual nationality were imprisoned in Ghettoes, labor, concentration and death camps throughout German-occupied Europe from September 1939-May 1945 where many died. The US State Department did little to nothing to protect or help them (Cordell Hull who was Secretary of State from 1933 until 1944 was very anti-Semitic as were most politicians at the time.)

British citizens during the Holocaust:

1.)    The Germans occupied the British Channel Islands of: Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark from June 30, 1940 until May 9, 1945. The local Governments of each of the islands officially collaborated with the Germans during the occupation including the local police forces. That collaboration included forcing the British and foreign-born Jews on the islands to register their property, having a “J” (for Jude or Jew) on their identity cards, a 23 hour a day curfew and eventually deportation from the islands to the concentration and death camps. 

2.) 16,000 slave laborers were sent to the Channel Islands and kept in concentration camps to build the Atlantic Wall. The slave laborers included: hundreds of French Algerians and French Moroccans; 200 Spaniards who had fled Franco’s Dictatorship; 1,000 French Jews (all of those groups were handed to the Germans by the French Vichy Collaborators); thousands of Soviet POWs. The majority of the slave laborers were Soviet and Polish Jews. Exact numbers of those who died or were killed in the camps is unknown since the Germans destroyed their records right before surrendering, but it is known that 700 prisoners died in the concentration camps in Alderney alone. While the collaborating island governments did little to nothing to help the slave laborers several Channel Islanders did help prisoners escape (like  Louisa Mary Gould (October 7, 1891– February 1945) who sheltered Russian prisoner, Feodor Polycarpovitch Burriy, on Jersey. In June 1944 a neighbor reported her to the Germans and she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp where she died