ABSTRACT
American Jewish soldiers faced the added danger of being mistreated because of their religion and faced the ultimate threat of being deported to a concentration camp. The mistreatment of captured soldiers should have come as no surprise to the US government given what it knew of Nazi atrocities committed against civilians. The fears of Jewish soldiers stemmed from the knowledge of what was happening to Jewish civilians and what had happened to other Prisoners of war (POWs), notably Soviet Jewish POWs. In his 1941 "Commissar Order," Hitler ordered the elimination of political representatives and commissars whom the Führer considered the "driving forces of Bolshevism." There were indeed distinctions between the types of camps, but many POWs were sent to concentration camps—including those visited by the committee— where the prisoners were tortured and killed.
