The Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

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4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

During the Second World War, a special commando unit was formed in Britain from Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and other parts of occupied Europe. Many of the men who joined this unit had lost their families, their homes and, as you'll hear, had relatives imprisoned in concentration camps. Trained in advanced combat and counterintelligence they fought with a special zeal often volunteering for the most dangerous assignments. The risks these men took was enormous. If they were captured by the Nazis and had their true identities been discovered then their fate would certainly have been death. Leah Garrett is a professor at Hunter College and has recently published X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis. She explains how this unusual unit came to be formed, the often oversized impact they had on the battlefield and some of the incredible individual stories of heroism of the men of X Troop.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, buddy. Welcome to Dance Notes History. It's the real life in glorious masters now on the podcast,
0:06.0	with the story of a group of Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, other parts of occupied Europe,
0:13.3	who were recruited in Britain to form a special commando unit. Many of these men had lost their families,
0:20.5	they'd lost their homes, they'd lost everything that they had before the war. And so,
0:25.8	politically enough, they fought with a special edge, a special motivation. Lear Garrett's a
0:30.8	professor at Hunter College. She's the story I'm talking to about this because she's just written
0:34.3	a book about this subject. She has interviewed some of these remarkable people. She has been through
0:39.1	the archives, tell the story of X-Troot and how they landed some very important blows against
0:45.5	the Nazis. In fighting, of course, on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, they took a terrible
0:51.2	risk. If they were captured and found to be Jewish, they'd be sent straight to the death camps.
0:55.5	It's a remarkable tale. If you like Second World War history, history hit is the place for you. We
1:00.6	got lots of it on this podcast. You can listen to episodes of this podcast from, well, back over the
1:05.9	last five years, without the ads on our subscription service. You go to historyhit.tv, you take our
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1:28.6	historyhit.tv. So please go subscribe, join the revolution. In the meantime, everyone,
1:33.6	is Leah Garrett talking about X-Troot.
1:40.3	Leah, thanks so much for going to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very
1:43.8	excited to be here. Okay, now come on. This X-Troot, this sounds like a quentin Tarantino film. I'm
1:48.8	not so sure about this. What's going on there? Okay, so I can just tell you briefly about them,
	...

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