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  • Published: 27 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473590359
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

X Troop

The Secret Jewish Commandos Who Helped Defeat the Nazis




This is popular WW2 history at its heart-stopping best, fuelled by an incredible, previously untold story of the Jewish refugees who fought in Britain's most secretive special-forces unit

June 1942. The Third Reich is victorious everywhere. In desperation, Winston Churchill and his chief of staff form an unusual plan: a new commando unit made up of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who escaped to Britain just before the War. Many have lost their families, their homes - their whole worlds. And now, in the crucial final battles against the Nazis, they will stop at nothing to defeat them. Trained in counterintelligence and advanced combat, this top secret unit becomes known as X Troop. Some simply call them a suicide squad.

Drawing on extensive original research, including interviews with the last surviving members, Leah Garrett follows this unique band of brothers from Europe to England and back again, with stops at British internment camps, the beaches of Normandy, the battlefields of Italy and Holland, and the hellscape of Terezin concentration camp - the scene of one of the most dramatic, untold rescues of the war. For the first time, X Troop tells the astonishing story of these secret shock troops and their devastating blows against the Nazis.

  • Published: 27 May 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473590359
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Leah Garrett

Leah Garrett, who directs the Jewish Studies Program at Hunter College and is an Honorary Professor of History at Warwick University, has discovered a trove of materials, including diaries, letters, and pieces of memoirs crafted by X Troopers. She has also interviewed a number of their family members. Most of the men kept the English names they were given as cover, and lived out their lives in the UK after the war.

Praise for X Troop

This is the best kind of history: highly original, deeply researched, beautifully written, with more than a touch of personal pathos. The men of X Troop went from stateless refugees of Nazi oppression to highly trained British special operations soldiers whose courageous actions did much to hasten Hitler's demise. Kudos to Leah Garrett for telling their amazing story with the authority of a scholar and the immediacy of a novelist!

John C. McManus, author of Fire and Fortitude