Hitler's holocaust plan for Jews in Palestine stopped by Desert Rats'
By Allan Hall in Berlin
Published: 14 April 2006
Adolf Hitler made plans to conduct a holocaust of Jews living in Palestine
during the Second World War, according to German historians who have
examined government archives for a new book that examines the extension of
the extermination programme outside of Europe and Russia.
It was the victory of the famed Desert Rats of Britain's Eighth Army at El
Alamein under the leadership of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery that saved
the Jews in Palestine from annihilation. The turning point in the desert war
signalled a reprieve from a planned German invasion of what was then the
British Mandate of Palestine.
If Arabs had joined Nazis in genocide, the map of the Middle East could be
totally different to present day and the historians speculate whether the
state of Israel would ever have been founded if such an unholy alliance had
been achieved.
The Nazis stationed a unit of SS troops in Athens, tasked with following
invading frontline troops in Palestine and then rounding up and murdering
about 500,000 European Jews who had taken refuge there, according to
historians at the University of Stuttgart.
But the unit, answerable to the Afrika Corps under Field Marshal Erwin "The
Desert Fox" Rommel, never deployed.
It was designed to function like the Einsatzgruppen or "action squads" of
the SS that followed the German army into Russia, shooting close to a
million Jews and political enemies before the static killing centres such as
Treblinka and Auschwitz were established in Poland.
Klaus-Michael Mallmann of the University's Ludwigsburg research team and his
assistant Martin Cüppers said they had spent three years studying German
wartime archives, including those at the foreign office in Berlin which had
hitherto remained sealed.
"The Allied defeat of Rommel at the end of 1942 had prevented the extension
of the Holocaust to Palestine," they said. If Rommel had beaten the Allies
in the desert and invaded Egypt, a push into Palestine would have followed
and the unit would have deployed there.
The researchers, whose findings appear in a new book entitled Germans, Jews,
Genocide: The Holocaust as history and the present, said the Athens unit
would follow the blueprint drawn by Nazi units that hunted for Jews in
eastern Europe, massacring them on the spot or shipping them off to death
camps. In Palestine, they say, it would have been more of the former than
the latter due to the greater distances involved.
Mr Mallmann and Mr Cüppers said the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab
friendship for their plans.
"The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab
anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem," they say in
the book. He was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out
of a hatred of Jews.
Al-Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler's chief architect of the
Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter. In the academic
work they draw on documents from the Reich Main Security Office showing
"Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark
for Palestine in the summer of 1942.
The Middle East death squad was to be led by the SS Obersturmbannführer
Walther Rauff.
Rauff was involved in the development of "gassing vans": mobile gas chambers
used to fatally poison Jews, persons with disabilities, and communists, who
were considered by the SS as enemies of the German state.
After escaping from an American internment camp in Italy after capture, he
hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of
Bishop Alois Hudel, the notorious German cleric at the Vatican credited with
providing fake papers for high-ranking Nazis to escape to South America.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, where a million people were murdered,
was among his "clients." In 1948 he was recruited by Syrian intelligence and
went to Damascus, only to fall out of favour after a coup there a year
later. He settled in Chile, where he fought off extradition proceedings to
stand trial in Germany and died peacefully in 1984. He hinted at plans to
kill the Jews in Palestine in an interview in 1979, in which he was
unrepentant about his wartime "service to my Fatherland".
Adolf Hitler made plans to conduct a holocaust of Jews living in Palestine
during the Second World War, according to German historians who have
examined government archives for a new book that examines the extension of
the extermination programme outside of Europe and Russia.
It was the victory of the famed Desert Rats of Britain's Eighth Army at El
Alamein under the leadership of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery that saved
the Jews in Palestine from annihilation. The turning point in the desert war
signalled a reprieve from a planned German invasion of what was then the
British Mandate of Palestine.
If Arabs had joined Nazis in genocide, the map of the Middle East could be
totally different to present day and the historians speculate whether the
state of Israel would ever have been founded if such an unholy alliance had
been achieved.
The Nazis stationed a unit of SS troops in Athens, tasked with following
invading frontline troops in Palestine and then rounding up and murdering
about 500,000 European Jews who had taken refuge there, according to
historians at the University of Stuttgart.
But the unit, answerable to the Afrika Corps under Field Marshal Erwin "The
Desert Fox" Rommel, never deployed.
It was designed to function like the Einsatzgruppen or "action squads" of
the SS that followed the German army into Russia, shooting close to a
million Jews and political enemies before the static killing centres such as
Treblinka and Auschwitz were established in Poland.
Klaus-Michael Mallmann of the University's Ludwigsburg research team and his
assistant Martin Cüppers said they had spent three years studying German
wartime archives, including those at the foreign office in Berlin which had
hitherto remained sealed.
"The Allied defeat of Rommel at the end of 1942 had prevented the extension
of the Holocaust to Palestine," they said. If Rommel had beaten the Allies
in the desert and invaded Egypt, a push into Palestine would have followed
and the unit would have deployed there.
The researchers, whose findings appear in a new book entitled Germans, Jews,
Genocide: The Holocaust as history and the present, said the Athens unit
would follow the blueprint drawn by Nazi units that hunted for Jews in
eastern Europe, massacring them on the spot or shipping them off to death
camps. In Palestine, they say, it would have been more of the former than
the latter due to the greater distances involved.
Mr Mallmann and Mr Cüppers said the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab
friendship for their plans.
"The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab
anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem," they say in
the book. He was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out
of a hatred of Jews.
Al-Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Adolf Hitler's chief architect of the
Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter. In the academic
work they draw on documents from the Reich Main Security Office showing
"Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark
for Palestine in the summer of 1942.
The Middle East death squad was to be led by the SS Obersturmbannführer
Walther Rauff.
Rauff was involved in the development of "gassing vans": mobile gas chambers
used to fatally poison Jews, persons with disabilities, and communists, who
were considered by the SS as enemies of the German state.
After escaping from an American internment camp in Italy after capture, he
hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of
Bishop Alois Hudel, the notorious German cleric at the Vatican credited with
providing fake papers for high-ranking Nazis to escape to South America.
Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, where a million people were murdered,
was among his "clients." In 1948 he was recruited by Syrian intelligence and
went to Damascus, only to fall out of favour after a coup there a year
later. He settled in Chile, where he fought off extradition proceedings to
stand trial in Germany and died peacefully in 1984. He hinted at plans to
kill the Jews in Palestine in an interview in 1979, in which he was
unrepentant about his wartime "service to my Fatherland".
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article357644.ece
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