5 Stories That Prove Everyone Gets WW2 Wrong

5

The United States Turned Away Hundreds Of Jewish Refugees For Fear Of A Few German Spies Slipping In

In May of 1939, the MS St. Louis set off from Germany with Captain Gustav Schroder at the helm and a belly full of Jewish refugees. After being denied entry to Cuba at Havana harbor, the St. Louis set route for Florida, in hopes that the land of the free would be more accommodating. It was not.

National Archives and Records Administration"I said we're at capacity! It's the fire code, nothing we can do!"

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had recently cracked down on immigration, restricting it to those with the financial means to support themselves. (At that point, the average German Jew's checkbook register read simply "Property of der Fuhrer.") As 1940 approached, and with it news that Nazi Germany was invading ... uh, everything, the American public began to regard Jewish refugees as potential threats to national security. FDR, who had previously canceled the expiration of up to 15,000 Germans' visas rather than, y'know, send them straight to Hell, caved to pressure from Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who rallied Southern Democrats and threatened to remove their support for the president if a certain boatful of refugees didn't disappear real sudden-like.

The St. Louis, denied entry at the port of Miami, turned back for Europe. About a third of its passengers ended up in Great Britain, while the rest were sprinkled throughout Western Europe, aka "the place where the Nazis were." By June of 1940, FDR had drunk deep of the Conspiracy Kool-Aid, stating: "Now, of course, the refugee has got to be checked because, unfortunately, among the refugees there are some spies, as has been found in other countries. And not all of them are voluntary spies -- it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies."

Keystone/Getty Images"So get out of our country, and don't look too closely at the base of the Statue of Liberty."

And by golly, he was right: In 1942, the United States convicted Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr of being a Nazi spy posing as a Jewish refugee -- the single known instance of such a thing happening. Of the 937 passengers aboard the St. Louis, 254 died in the Holocaust. In 1945, Cordell Hull was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Karma's a lovely idea, isn't it?

4

The Japanese Did Not Invent Kamikaze

You know what a kamikaze pilot was: A suicide bomber with a really fancy bomb. It was a uniquely Japanese practice, one that could only come out of a culture that already placed death before dishonor. But it's not like they went straight to suicide missions. Why on earth would they? It wasn't until late 1944 that one-way kamikaze missions came into vogue, and that was an act of utter desperation at a time when the Japanese had fewer planes than the Allies had ships. Oh, also there was absolutely nothing "uniquely Japanese" about it. They didn't even invent the practice. That would be the Russians.

German Federal ArchivesWeird, Stalin was normally so conscientious about the value of human life.

3

A Million Russians Fled Stalin To Join The Nazis

While much of the world was willing to overlook the awfulness of Joseph Stalin's Russia until such time as his Red Army was no longer essential in quashing the Nazi hordes, this was not the case for the nearly one million Soviets who enlisted in the German army. An estimated one out of every ten German soldiers captured by the Allies on D-Day was a Soviet citizen.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-N0301-503 / CC-BY-SA 3.0Talk about betting on the wrong horse.

They were largely recruited from POW camps (Stalin's active opposition to providing humanitarian aid for Soviet POWs in Germany came in quite handy for the recruitment effort), and formed the Russian Liberation Army, a force led by former Red Army general Andrei Vlasov. The RLA earned high praise from Heinrich Himmler himself for their fighting vigor in early 1945, but as the year progressed, the inevitable course of the war had become clear. The Soviet turncoats, being turncoats, figured they could turn those coats one more time and took over Prague. They fought their way through the German Wehrmacht in order to surrender to Allied forces, and asked them to pretty pretty please not return them to Russia.

German Federal ArchivesWhen Stalin wants you dead and Himmler loves you, you've ... made some poor life choices.

2

Nazi Foot Soldiers Were Not "Just Following Orders"

While common knowledge regards the Wehrmacht as hapless "in the wrong place at the wrong time" soldiers, history doesn't bear that out. And if the Wehrmacht was largely responsible for carrying out der Fuhrer's grotesque wishes, that begs the question: How can one follow the orders of a monster without himself becoming a monster?

F. HartmannWell, Nazis do love philosophy.

1

Germany And Japan Broke Allied Codes All The Time

In the Pacific theatre, the Battle of Midway hinged on Captain Joseph Rochefort and his codebreakers predicting Japanese naval movements. Over in Europe, Alan Turing became a household name for breaking the Nazis' infamous Enigma Codes. Meanwhile, Wilhelm Tranow of B-Dienst was crackin' codes and takin' names, and those names were also in code, and he probably cracked those suckers, too.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 101II-MW-4222-01A / Dietrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0"I cracked that shit like a sidewalk under your mom's feet."