Near the end of the US Civil War, the South approved a plan to let slaves fight in exchange for freedom. Near the end of WWII, did Nazi Germany ever consider anything similar for targets of The Holocaust (Jews, Roma etc.)?

by admiraltarkin

Basically, did the Nazis ever consider letting Jews or other peoples serve in the military and in exchange they would be able to live in peace after the war was won?

Grutte_Alk

Not in a widespread way no but the infamous SS Dirlewanger Brigade for example is known to have been bolstered by "antifascists in SS uniforms" towards the end of the war. Basically they recruited former communists or other political prisoners they thought had changed their views from concentration camps and sent them to fight partisans and Soviet troops in the East.

The Dirlewanger Division was a penal unit made up of all kinds of people considered as the dregs of German society : common law criminals, concentration camp Kapos, feeble-minded, psychopaths, pedophiles, deserters, poachers etc...

It is considered the most criminal unit of the whole SS, having massacred entire districts of Warsaw and razed entire villages in Belarussia, torturing, raping, stealing and burning people alive for fun. It was also the only German unit where summary executions of soldiers by their officers were authorized and practiced.

They were led by a cadre of poachers that used their skill as hunters to hunt down partisans in rural areas.

Towards the end of the war their number got greatly bolstered by former political concentration camp inmates (which was considered very dangerous before that for obvious reasons) so they could go fight actual Soviet units in conventional warfare but it was probably more desperation than anything.

Jewish women were known to have been kept around as sex slaves by the Dirlewanger men but I would not really call that "serving".

Source : Christian Ingrao, The SS Dirlewanger Brigade - The History of the Black Hunters.