By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — In Quentin Tarantino’s World War II revenge film the Inglourious Basterds, a team of Jewish American soldiers wreaks panic and havoc on the Third Reich in German-occupied France by killing as many Nazi soldiers as possible. They do so with relish, one nicknamed “The Bear Jew,” with a baseball bat, after which they scalp their victims. No one would view this history-altering movie as anything other than fiction. In reality, there was a group of Inglourious Basterds, Jewish escapees from Nazi controlled Europe who returned to fight as a secret unit of British commandos. They were “3 Troop, 10 Commando”.
The exploits of 3 Troop are all but forgotten, just a few old men with fading memories and a stone monument in mute testimony to their heroism standing atop a hillock in Aberdovey, Wales where they trained.
Peter Arany was born in Vienna, Austria in 1922. There he led a sheltered life as a fairly assimilated Jewish middle-class boy. That is until the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 when he found himself dodging anti-Semitic hooligans, his mother’s millinery business confiscated and living in fear of being rounded up by the Gestapo. Six months later, he was able to escape to England where almost destitute he found work as a farmhand.
After the outbreak of the war, Britain fearing that there might be Nazi spies posing as refugees, classified Peter, like all other escapees from Europe, as an enemy alien and placed him in an interment camp. Distrust eventually eased and six months later Peter was released, whereupon he made his way to London and enlisted in the British army. The only service available to refugees at that time was manual labor and Peter ended up with other immigrants in the “Pioneer Corps” an unarmed work battalion.
One day a notice was posted seeking volunteers who spoke fluent German, for “special and hazardous duty” and inviting interested soldiers to be interviewed in a seedy London hotel. Peter went. During the interrogation Peter was asked why he wished to volunteer and replied, “I think this war belongs to me, sir”. Only the brightest, bravest and best were selected. Peter was one of them.
On April 17, 1943, Peter and other Jewish volunteers boarded a train for Wales to begin their training. As they approached their destination, they were advised that they were now members of a secret, elite, German speaking, commando unit, 3 Troop, 10 Commando and were handed their new 10 Commando shoulder flashes.
To protect the secret of a German-speaking unit within the British army and the identity and origin of the commandos in the event of capture, each trainee was required to take on a British name and identity. Austrian Jew, Peter Arany became Peter Masters, born in London, a member of the Church of England and received new dog tags accordingly. He also had to develop an explanation for his strong accent, which was that his parents were traveling salespeople who left him as a child in a boarding school in Vienna.
Ernst Freytag became Tommy Farr; Konrad Goldschmitt became Brian Groves; Kurt Glaser became Keith Griffith; Stephan Hirsch became Steven Hudson; Julius Loewenstein became James Kingsley. Each fled occupied Europe. Each left family and friends behind probably dead. Each had cause to strike back.
In Wales, the men of 3 Troop trained to use weapons, to kill with bare hands, to handle explosives, to rappel, to parachute, the fieldcraft of stealth, camouflage and concealment, the techniques of intelligence, reconnaissance and interrogation. All together 86 men passed through the ranks of 3 Troop, 95% of them Jewish refugees.
In the run-up to the D-Day landings, the commandos of 3 Troop were sent on numerous missions into occupied France to identify enemy coastal defenses. Just weeks before the scheduled invasion, they slipped ashore from rubber dinghies to check out a rumored new type of hair-trigger mine but found only the conventional type. Not satisfied, command sent them back three more times to confirm their findings. On the last occasion, George Lane, really Hungarian Jew Georg Lanyi, who went inland to photograph a German fortification, was captured. Captured commandos had been ordered to be executed by Hitler and it was only due to the personal intervention of Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was curious to meet a British commando, that Lane’s life was spared. Lane sat out the rest of the war as a POW, his Jewish identity never discovered.
On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Jewish warriors of 3 Troop returned to European soil. Individually or in small groups, seconded to other commando units, they fought and carried out specialized intelligence, interrogation and reconnaissance tasks.
During the D-Day landings and in the days following, the men of 3 Troop took heavy casualties. Max Laddy (Lewinsky) and Ernest Webster (Weinberger) never made it onto the beach, their landing craft taking a direct hit; George Franklyn (Max Frank) was felled by a mortar as he waded ashore; Richard Arlen (Abramowitz) was killed in a blast of machine-gun fire while charging the enemy; Ernest Lawrence (Ernst Lenel) was captured and never heard from again; Harry Andrews (Hans Arnstein) who escaped Germany on a kindertransport, died when he stepped on a mine. Many graves had crosses in error because the dog tags of the troopers listed their religious affiliation as “Church of England”. It would be several decades before the mistake was rectified.
Peter Masters (Arany) landed in France on D-Day and fought in Normandy for three long months. On one occasion, his courage was tested when he was foolhardily ordered by his superior to walk down the main street of a village occupied by the enemy to identify where they were hiding by drawing fire. The only thing he could think of was to shout in German, “Surrender all of you. Come out. You are completely surrounded. Throw away your weapons and come out with your hands up if you want to go on living. The war is over for you.” No one came out but the Germans held their fire. Finally one shot at him. Masters dropped to the ground and returned fire. Both missed.
Masters continued to see action in the Netherlands and participated in the invasion of Germany. Performing bravely he went on numerous reconnaissance missions to test enemy lines and he elicited valuable intelligence through the interrogation of captured German soldiers.
Freddy Gray (Manfred Gans) was the son of a proud and patriotic German Jewish family. His privileged life ended when he was 10. Hitler had taken power and his friends and classmates no longer talked to him. For his safety, Manfred’s father sent him to school in England.
As soon as he was able, Gray enlisted in the army and became a member of 3 Troop. Wounded during the Normandy invasion, hit five times, he refused to be evacuated. He received a battlefield commission for outstanding leadership in combat and held the rank of Captain.
During the dying days of the war, fighting in Germany, Gray heard that his parents might still be alive in the Theresienstadt concentration camp that had been liberated by the Russians. Immediately, commandeering a jeep, he set off for the camp some 450 miles away, some of those miles still held by German troops. During the trip, the German high command surrendered to the Allies and the war was over. Gray, arriving at the camp, saw the familiar faces of Jews of all ages, emaciated from overwork and malnutrition, some with typhus. Miraculously, Freddy found his parents, his father a starved wreck of a man, his clothes too large for his gaunt body. His parents were in quarantine and Freddy had to leave to report back to his unit. His last self-imposed duty while on German soil was to arrange with Dutch government officials for transport of a group of Terezin survivors including his parents to Holland and from there hopefully to Palestine.
In September 1945, 3 Troop was disbanded but many members continued in sensitive and secret work for the Occupying Forces, tracking Nazi resistance groups and war criminals and translating captured documents.
Of the 86 men of 3 Troop, 10 Commando, 20 were killed in action and another 22 were wounded, among the highest casualty rates of any allied fighting group in World War II. The survivors lived to see the defeat of their tormentors.
Each of the Jewish refugees who became British commandos in 3 Troop has a harrowing story to tell, of escape, return and retribution, those of Peter Masters (Arany) and Freddy Gray (Gans) are but two of them.
Ironically, the men of 3 Troop upon being discharged from the service were still classified as aliens and for a time had to report monthly to the police. Peter Masters became a graphic designer and Freddy Gray who took back the name Gans, became a chemical engineer.
Of 3 Troop, 10 Commando, their skipper Major Bryan Hilton-Jones would write, “Despite many and serious difficulties, this band of ‘enemy alien’ volunteers earned for itself a not unflattering reputation, the achievement of which was in no small measure due to the sincerity and wholeheartedness put into his service by every member of the troop. For them perhaps more than for any others it was a question of self-respect and self-justification.”
(A group of Jewish immigrants also fought as American soldiers and performed similar duties to 3 Troop. They were known as the “Ritchie Boys,” named after Camp Ritchie, Maryland where they trained.)
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Spier is an attorney and freelance writer who focuses on Jewish history. He may be contacted via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)