Yes, in the early 1930s, there actually were Jews in Germany who supported Adolf Hitler. They begrudgingly accepted his attacks because they liked his economic and nationalist rhetoric (re-arming Germany and expanding its borders), and figured he was just blowing smoke with his raging writings and speeches howling anti-Semitism. Most famous amongst these Jews were the Association of German National Jews, a group which urged total assimilation of German Jews into the national culture, and agreed with calls to banish the Eastern European Jewry upon whom they looked down from settling in Germany. It is no small irony that the Nazi regime, once firmly hooked into power, found this Association to be more objectionable than the Zionist groups which it initially encouraged, in the hopes of getting the Jews to voluntarily flee Germany for the "Holy Land." And so, the Association was quite quickly banned while Zionist organizations were permitted to persist for at least a little while longer.

Eventually, naturally, all Jewish organizations were banned in Germany. Those Jews who did initially support Hitler tended to be amongst the wealthier class of Jews in the nation, and so many had the means to flee when the turning of the tide against their rights and freedoms became undeniable. Not all did so, tho, leaving a number to die in the concentration camps alongside those Jews who had been more accurate in their distaste for Hitler and fear of his intentions.

Even as these camps were being populated, several hundred miles to the North, a separate kind of support briefly unfolded in 1941, where Finnish troops -- including Jewish Finns -- aligned with Germans against a common enemy in the form of the Soviet Union. Though they hardly considered themselves supporters of Hitler (and indeed despised him), some of these Jewish soldiers fought alongside a German army which was itself bereft of Jews (by law). These included one Major Leo Skurnik, a medical officer who organized a critical evacuation of an army hospital under siege, saving the lives of hundreds of German soldiers, for which he became the only Jew to be awarded Germany's Iron Cross during World War II.



IRON NODER: TOKYO DRIFT

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