Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.

Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., known informally as "Joe", was an American-born volunteer for Nazi Germany's SS military organization. The first son of businessman and politician Joseph P. Kennedy, the younger Kennedy was born into one of the Second Republic's most influential political dynasties. His family would lose their immense wealth and privilege following the Red May Revolution. Aligned with the National Salvation Front, the younger Kennedy moved with his father and most of his immediate family to Cuba in the white exile following the conclusion of the civil war, where Kennedy Sr. sought to reassert his influence within General Douglas MacArthur's inner circle. Prior to the revolution however, Kennedy Jr. had developed deep interests and sympathies with Europe's growing fascist movements.

While MacArthur's short-lived extralegal government in the United States mainland had relied upon close ties with far-right paramilitary groups, tensions soon began to emerge between the MacArthurites and the more ideologically-commited fascists following the Cuban exile. Former fascist presidential candidate William Pelley had been arrested in July 1934 and fired from his military roles after making inflammatory accusations that several members of MacArthur's cabinet had Jewish ancestry or "sympathies", before industrialist and fellow American fascist Henry Ford offered him a key management position in his now German-based company. Likewise, Kennedy blamed the Old American authorities, a major portion of whom made up the ruling class in "Americuba" of weakness and "Jewish sympathies" that lead to their downfall and overthrow by the Reds. Coming into conflict with the local authorities, he would be arrested on November 16, 1934 and briefly held in custody before being released. The final straw, however, would come early the following year. Joe's estranged younger brother, John, had been left by his family at his boarding school on the American mainland during the Cuban exile. Even before the Revolution however, John has grown resentful of his own family and the school they had left him at. During the Revolution, John quickly sided with the Reds, and upon discovering that his family had fled the country, essentially abandoning him, he adopted the Gaelicized name "Sean Cinnéide". He would soon become a cadet in the Workers' and Farmers' Revolutionary Army. Following the Civil War, the UASR was keen to showcase youths from bourgeois backgrounds who had joined the forces of the Revolution for propaganda purposes, and so on the cover of the March 1935 issue Libertine magazine, the seventeen year-old Sean Cinnéide was featured proudly posing in uniform with his fellow comrades. The Kennedy family had not known of Sean's fate until this point, and immediately after seeing it, Joe - himself only nineteen - would pack his bags for Germany, in order to fight communism with the Nazis face-to-face.

Joseph Kennedy arrived in Hamburg and was subsequently given a meeting with Adolf Hitler himself, which only deepened his conviction in Nazism. He denounced both the American Union government and the exile government in Cuba, and pledged himself to the cause of Adolf Hitler. He joined the SS, specifically the newly formed American volunteer legion, 5th SS Panzer Division 'Silberne Legion', and would first see service as an advisor to the volunteer George Washington Brigade, a group of fasicst and  Nationalist sympathizers supporting the forces of Jose Sanjurjo in the Spanish Civil War. After the war entered a standstill in 1938, Kennedy subsequently served in the Czechoslovak War.