Real Reason Why Hitler Was Scared of X Troops

"All y’all will get me one hundred Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of one hundred dead Nazis. Or you will die trying." These are the words of Lt. Aldo Raine, one of the main characters of "Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino's bloodsoaked, action-packed film about Jewish commandos battling the Nazis during World War II. But did you know it's based on a true story? During World War II, the Allies put together teams of Jewish soldiers tasked with helping bring down Nazi Germany with a combination of espionage, interrogation, and raw skill on the battlefield. But it wasn't all scalps and Brad Pitt. These brave men stormed the beaches at Normandy, survived Nazi torture without breaking, and rescued their own families from concentration camps. These are the stories of the real Inglourious Basterds.

Who, as it turns out, weren't inglorious or bastards at all. It seems wild to think about, but some of the men who inspired Quentin Tarantino's film lived long enough to hear about the movie's take on their lived experiences. Like the men of "Inglourious Basterds," the soldiers of the Third Troop, ten commandos of the British Army during World War II, were almost all German-speaking Jewish refugees, and they were frequently sent on secret missions behind enemy lines. One soldier in the ten commandos was Max Dobriner, who was born in 1926 in Germany. At age 13, Max was brought to England as part of the Kindertransport - a mission to rescue vulnerable children from Nazi territory. He was separated from his family in the process and would never see his parents again.

When he joined the British Army, he took on the name Max Dickson and participated in reconnaissance missions in France, where Inglourious Basterds is set. When asked about his thoughts on the movie, he was not impressed. He told the Independent: "I wouldn't like to glorify anything that has to do with killing, and that's what it always ends up with, but when you're in it, and you see the blood and the gore and the mud, it's quite a different thing." Another soldier, Colin Anson (born Claus Ascher), called the plot of the film "ridiculous." He said, "It wasn't all violent gore and stabbing people and scalping them – certainly not. I don't know how to scalp somebody." So if it wasn't like a Tarantino movie, which most things outside of Tarantino's imagination aren't, what was it like? That brings us to the story of a young man named Peter Arany. In 1938, the Jewish Peter and his family began to experience Nazi violence and threats at their home in Vienna.

Hitler Youth attacked him on the street. Nazis and their sympathizers would pound on the door of the family home at all hours of the night and threaten to destroy their family business. Peter's Aunt Ida left for London and made arrangements for the rest of the family to follow. Peter, his mother, and his sister took the night train through Germany to Paris, then made their way to England. There, he found himself in the crosshairs of the British police, who targeted him for being an "enemy alien." At one point, he was arrested and thrown in an internment camp. But when he was old enough to enlist at eighteen, he volunteered for the British army just the same, eager for a chance to fight the Nazis. But the only position open to him was manual labor. It seemed that he would never be able to take an active part in the fight until one day, a notice went up looking for volunteers for a "special and hazardous duty." Peter reported for an interview and, when asked why he was interested in serving, said, "I think part of this war belongs to me, sir."

He was accepted and became part of what Winston Churchill christened, "X Troop," a commando unit of European Jewish refugees. Why was it called X Troop? As Churchill put it, "Because they will be unknown warriors… they must perforce be considered an unknown quantity. Since the algebraic symbol for the unknown is X, let us call them X Troop.” All of the men in the unit were given new fictional British identities. Peter Arany became Private Peter Masters, London-born, a volunteer from the Royal West Kent Regiment. The members of X Troop had to go to great lengths to assume their new identities.

They were ordered to burn anything that might blow their cover and told not to associate with obvious foreigners. They practiced their new signatures until they could write them as easily as the names they'd been born with. Then, it was time for the real training to begin. In Wales, the men trained in the use of guns, bayonets, and knives, hand-to-hand combat, rappelling, and parachuting. They were trained in reconnaissance and would be able to use their fluency in German to interrogate any captured Nazi troops. During the war, there were 88 members of the X Troop, and they didn't fight as one unit. They were split up across a variety of missions, often fighting alone and at night, deep behind enemy lines.

Peter eventually got his chance to experience battle firsthand on D-Day when he crossed the English Channel with his unit. Several of the men were killed before they even set foot on shore, but the survivors pressed inland on collapsible bicycles with scant weaponry. The man at the lead was shot in the head, and the rest of the troops took cover. The Captain ordered Peter to walk toward the village up ahead, straight down the wide open road in order to draw German fire, allowing the Captain to see where it was coming from. In short, he would be bait. For a moment, Peter believed he was done for. But then he thought of a scene from the movie Gunga Din, where Cary Grant told enemy forces that had him surrounded that they were all "under arrest." Rather than go quietly into danger, Peter shouted in German: "Surrender, all of you! Come out! You are completely surrounded and don’t have a chance!” A German soldier emerged to shoot at him, but he was able to avoid the shot in time, dropping to his knees to return fire. His gun jammed, and he was unable to hit the enemy soldier. Just then, the rest of his troop arrived to take out the German forces there.

Other X Troopers played a crucial part in the lead-up to D-Day rather than the combat on the ground. George Lane, born Lanyi Gyorgi, had once been an alternate for the Hungarian Olympic water polo team. But in X Troop, he was sent behind enemy lines in France during the weeks before D-Day, where he was responsible for gathering intelligence that helped the Allies plan their landings at Normandy. At one point, while conducting espionage, he was captured and interrogated by the infamous Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, but he maintained his cover well. He claimed to be a Welsh man who didn't understand German in order to explain why he spoke in strangely accented English. Rommel never realized that this British Soldier was, in fact, a Jewish refugee from Hungary, and Lane spent the remainder of the war in a British POW camp, living to tell the tale. One of the most incredible stories from X Troop comes from Manfred Ganz, who went by the name Freddy Gray during the war. He was hit five times during the invasion of Normandy and wounded but was not evacuated. In the closing days of the war, he heard a rumor that his parents were in the Terezin concentration camp- still alive.

So, on May 7, 1945, he took a jeep and driver and headed toward the possibility of his family. He traveled 450 miles, through German territory and Soviet territory along the way. During the trip, he passed through his hometown and learned that his family's home had been used as Gestapo headquarters. When he eventually reached the Terezin camp, one of the inmates led him to his parents. They were starving and sick, but they were alive. Remarkably, he was able to rescue them from the camp, not even knowing that the Germans had surrendered during his long trek. These are only a handful of the stories of heroism that X Troop took part in. Many of the rest are lost to history. Many of the X Troop members lived under their assumed identities for the rest of their lives, never disclosing their refugee status or their Jewish roots.

They died with their stories left untold, truly the Unknown Warriors that Churchill had intended. The United Kingdom wasn't the only Allied Nation that recruited German-speaking Jewish refugees to take on Nazi Germany. The Office of Strategic Servies, the US intelligence agency that came before the CIA, recruited young Jewish men whose families had escaped Germany before the war and put together Operation Greenup. Two of the earliest members of this Operation were Frederick Mayer and Hans Wijinberg, 23 and 22 years old, respectively, a pair of Jewish refugees living in Brooklyn. Another member of the Operation was Franz Weber, who had previously served as a Wehrmacht lieutenant but had deserted the German army after serving on several bloody fronts, including occupied Yugoslavia.

Looking at Hitler's Germany with a clearer vision, Weber was horrified. He reached out to the OSS after deserting and agreed to join the team and lend his particular set of skills to their mission: the defeat of Hitler's forces and the fall of Nazi Germany. Mayer, Wijinberg, and Weber parachuted behind German lines in February of 1945, landing in the Austrian province of Tyrol. They struggled to find a drop point that would work without exposing them to enemy forces. A pilot named John Billings volunteered to drop them off on a glacier outside of Innsbruck, Austria. The three managed to land safely there. Billings later said of Mayer, who led the Operation, "I was in awe of him. He was born without the fear gene. He feared nothing, and he was able to be whatever he needed to be." After the team landed safely, Weber smuggled the two OSS agents into his home village of Oberperfuss, which would serve as their base of operations.

They stayed with Weber's family and friends in a setup made possible by the women in Weber's life: his sisters Eva, Luise, and Margarete, his neighbor Maria Hortnagl, his fiancé Anni Niederkirher, and her mother Anna Niederkircher, who owned the village's Hotel Zur Krone. These women aided Operation Greenup's men even while knowing they were risking their lives to do so. Operation Greenup's mission in Tyrol was to put together reports on German rail traffic over the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria in order to give the Allies an indication of how the German Army planned to fight during these crucial closing legs of the war. The Operation provided the Allies with a great deal of valuable intelligence, transmitting dozens of radio messages with accounts of traffic through the Brenner Pass to the OSS listening station in Bari, Italy.

During their time in Austria, Mayer learned about a convoy of German military trains headed for Italy with troops and munitions and was able to get that information to American commanders in time for Allied warplanes to bomb the trains. He navigated the area in a stolen German military uniform, posing as a German soldier so that he could collect information on Nazi movements. He also worked to organize hundreds of resistance fighters in the area, helping them in their fight against the Nazis. One of these connections was Rober Moser, a radio dealer from Innsbruck who employed Mayer for a time in order to justify his presence in the city. The operation was going well, and Mayer was commanded to get information on a facility producing ME-262 jet fighters. Mayer was able to get work there as an electrician, where he learned that, due to supply problems, no fighter jets were actually being produced there. While he was conducting his investigation, local authorities realized that something about Mayer didn't add up and captured him. He was identified as a spy and taken prisoner by the Gestapo. Weber, who risked execution for desertion if caught, and Wijinberg were forced to flee.

Meanwhile, in custody, Mayer was tortured by the Gestapo. First, the Gestapo officers beat him with their hands and fists, but when he didn't break, they escalated to more violent techniques. They stripped his clothes off and whipped him with a bullwhip. Historian Tom Moon described the brutality: “In the dark room, the Gestapo officers slapped and punched the spy in the face. His cover wasn't holding water, and so the tall one stripped him from head to toe. Despite the agent's bullish strength, the SS men brutally manhandled him, shoving him to the floor. Cuffing his hands in front of him and pulling his arms over his bent knees, they forced him into a constricting fetal position, then shoved the barrel of a long rifle into the tiny gap behind his knees and his cuffed hands.

With a man on each side of the rifle, they lifted his naked, rolled-up body and suspended the human ball between two tables, like a piece of meat on a skewer. Uncoiling a rawhide whip, the tall one put his full weight behind each swing, mercilessly thrashing the agent's body like a side of beef.” Still, Mayer refused to give up any information on his teammates or his mission. So, they brought out a pail of water and began to waterboard him. Even this could not break Mayer, and he would not give the other Operation members up. Next, the Gestapo brought Mayer to the home of the local Nazi boss, Franz Hofer. At this point in the war, Hofer realized that the Nazis were losing and wanted to surrender to the Western Allies instead of the Soviets. After speaking with Mayer, Hofer allowed him to send a message back to the OSS in order to negotiate the surrender of Innsbruck.

When US troops reached the city, Hofer met them and told them Innsbruck would peacefully surrender. After the war, Mayer returned home and worked in a power plant until his retirement in 1977. Then, he settled in Charles Town, West Virginia, where he was a volunteer driver for Meals on Wheels for 38 years. Hans Wijinberg became a chemistry professor who supervised dozens of PhD students. After he retired from teaching, he founded a chemical compounds company. Franz Weber became the police chief of Innsbruck after the city surrendered to the Allies and the war ended, and then pivoted to the head of Tyrol's farmer union, then became a politician who was elected on a local and national level. Wijinberg died in 2011, and Weber died in 2001. Mayer lived until 2016.

During his life after the war, the OSS nominated Mayer for the Medal of Honor, but the Army denied him the recognition. Wisconsin Senator Jay Rockefeller attempted to make up for this, presenting Mayer with ten different medals in 2013, including the Prisoner of War Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the Parachutist Badge, the Good Conduct Medal, and the Legion of Merit Medal. When he died, he was remembered as a hero. From the X Troopers landing at Normandy or embarking on recon missions alone in the dark, to the three courageous young men who risked their lives collecting information in Nazi-occupied territory, the real-life men who inspired Inglourious Basterds were nothing like the Hollywood version of their story. In this case, truth was much more impressive than fiction.