The disclosure that the Nazis are now using Jews for military service and sending them to the Russian front was made in the Soviet press today on the basis of testimony by the first German-Jewish war prisoner to fall in to the hands of the Russian army. The prisoner surrendered at an advanced post on and undisclosed battlefield.
“Hitler is now taking everybody and anybody,” the Jewish prisoner stated. He reached the Russian positions driving a German staff car. “I am a Jew,” he declared when he spied the Red Armyman, “and I came here to give myself up.”
At first the Russian soldiers were puzzled, since they knew that the Nazis be red Jews from the German army. The prisoner insisted, however, that he be questioned by Jewish soldiers, whom he convinced that he was an Austrian Jew who not only spoke Yiddish fluently, but who also spoke Hebrew. He recited Jewish prayers which, he said, he learned in a Jewish religious school in his childhood, and declared that his aged father is now living in a ghetto, while his mother and two sisters have died in the ghetto from hunger “like thousands of other Jews.”
“Here is a reminder of the horrible days,” he said, pulling from his pocket a yellow badge which he was compelled to wear before he was conscripted by the Nazis. Prior to that he worked as an electrical engineer in a factory in Austria and had to wear the yellow badge even during working hours. “After reaching the front, I tried several times to surrender to the Red Army, but was closely watched all the time,” he related. “My chance came when I was sent with an officer in a car to a provision station at the front lines. The officer got out of the car for a few minutes and I was left alone. Taking this opportunity, I drove straight to the advanced Russian position and surrendered.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
