Being a gentile I have to say that I feel uncomfortable talking about this very sensitive topic, but perhaps it is comparable with the indigenous Americans who fought for the European colonists, or the various Africans who fought for the Fascist colonists. Collaboration with the enemy has always been a part of imperialism’s history and complexity, and Fascism was no exception, so I feel an obligation to tell you about it.
For some of us this may serve as a reminder that oppressors can and do accept the assistance of their victims (at least until they outlive their utility).
Excerpt:
Many of the men who had served in [the Wehrmacht] were met with fury and ostracism. An officer, hoping to put his past behind him by emigrating to South America, asked a Berlin rabbi for help, but when the rabbi found out about his military service, he turned his back on the “Jew killer.” Another was told by his aunt in Palestine that it would have been better if he’d died in a camp, as millions of their co‐religionists had.
See also:
The Jewish Troops of Adolf Hitler
Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army
It may also be worth mentioning that at least a few upper‐class Jews in the Anglosphere willingly endorsed the Third Reich: the Du Pont family of Delaware and Benjamin Harrison Freedman.
ETA: I never liked how this thread overlooked the Jewish Italian Fascists, which makes the title somewhat misleading. To correct this, here are some quotes from Shira Klein’s Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism, pages 49–50:
[Fascist] Jewish men, already staunch patriots and royalists, happily glorified military service. Some chose the army as their life‐long occupation. Valfredo Segre from Padua became a military pilot at only twenty years old, in 1931. He was promoted to first lieutenant and won six medals, three of them for flying the war planes [that Fascist] Italy sent to aid Franco in the Spanish Civil War.^245^
The Gerbi siblings from Livorno also wanted to join [Fascist] Italy’s armed forces; in the 1920s, Antonello Gerbi dreamed of enlisting in the navy, and only a failed medical examination prevented him from doing so. His brother Giuliano chose the prestigious regiment of horse‐drawn artillery, relishing the cape, spurred boots, and saber that came with the position. “At a parade,” recalled the third brother Claudio, “riding his horse in front of his battery, he was magnificent.”^246^
The number of Jews with military careers grew fivefold from 1901 to 1938. By that year, almost 3 percent of all Italian army officers were Jewish, far more than Jews’ proportion in Italian society.^247^ […] [Fascist] Jews teemed with excitement at the African conquest of 1935.^255^ Some volunteered to fight, like young Mario Pavia from Turin, who was ecstatic at the chance to claim “a place in the sun,” as [Fascists] liked to call Africa.^256^
The Third Reich’s head of state even honored one of these Fascists:
Hitler was evidently unaware that among the martyrs he solemnly saluted at the Sacrario in May 1938 was Gino Bolaffi, Florentine Fascist of Jewish origin.^38^
Because certain Fascists promoted settling in Ethiopia as an alternative to mainstream Zionism, they privileged the Jews there in order to make it more attractive to potential settlers. Some Ethiopian Jews therefore fought for Fascism so as to defend their privileges. Quoting Daniel Summerfield in The Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel: Studies on the Ethiopian Jews, page 56:
Some of the Beta Israel were also given weapons by the [Fascists] in order to help fight the resistance. Many agreed to collaborate with the [Fascist] authorities in this manner as they believed [that] the Italians were beneficial for both Beta Israel and Ethiopia and that their rule was permanent. Some of my informants also told me that they were convinced by the [Fascist] propaganda which claimed that Haile Selassie had not been listening to the people.
They believed that the Italians were going to rectify the situation by 1. listening to the voice of the people 2. easing the life for the population and 3. restructuring the country. Others joined the [Regio Esercito] in order to receive a weapon and to acquire the prestigious status of a soldier with the benefits that accompanied it such as extra food.
Some of the Jews who fought for the Axis were Karaites, a folk of uncertain origin who consider the Talmud noncanonical. Although certain Axis officials and collaborators lethally persecuted them, others considered them to be Judaists who had only a little Jewish ancestry, and therefore the Axis intentionally recruited several hundred of them. Quoting Kiril Feferman’s Nazi Germany and the Karaites in 1938–1944: between racial theory and Realpolitik:
The Wehrmacht pulled out of the Crimea in April 1944; hundreds of Karaites, apparently mainly those who served in the local police and their families, left with the [Axis]. In the summer of 1944, some Lithuanian Karaites joined the retreat of [Axis] troops from Lithuania. Because most of the retreating Karaite men had some police training, the [Axis] chose to place them in a military framework.
By mid‐1944, some 500–600 Karaites served in the ranks of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS (mainly, in its Tatar Legion).^39^ After that, they were handled by the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories^40^ which, as we have seen, was rather positively disposed towards them. Yet, in the course of 1943–1944 this Ministry lost its authority to the SS.
Thus the [Axis] treatment of the Karaite question in 1944 was conducted primarily by the SS. It should be remembered that this agency sometimes acted positively on the Karaite question while in other places and at other times, SS people wrote reports which equated Karaites with Jews, and sometimes killed Karaites outright.