Reply
Fri 14 Apr, 2006 02:09 am
Quote:'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".
Source
Jürgen Matthäus / Klaus-Michael Mallmann (ed.): Deutsche, Juden, Völkermord. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt 2006. 340 p., 59.90 [for members of the 'Scientific Book Association' like me: 39.90 :wink: ).
Actually, the above qoted is just one essay in this book - but obviously the most significant for the English speaking world today.
Authors are Hans Mommsen, Reinhard Rürup, Christopher Browning, Wolfgang Benz et. al., and they describe the relations betwenn Germans and Jews under the omen "holocaust", in a historic review before it actually happened over the times of the Third Reich to the situation in today's Germany.
Well that's amazing.
Thanks, Walter.
Muslims welcomed Jews to their lands when they were expelled from Spain so they were not anti-Jews. It is the situation of the state of Israel being established without any agreement from Arabs. The buying up of Arab lands surreptitiously doesn't in any help with public relations. It is like a guest inyourhopuse who steals from you.
Outside of your highly dubious claim that all "Muslims welcomed Jews to their lands when they were expelled from Spain so they were not anti-Jews", it is clear that the Arab's rabid anti-Semite stance, not the "state of Israel being established without any agreement from Arabs" is the pivotal consideration to this thread. Witness the below:
Quote: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.
During the 1930's the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an admirer of Hitler's pogroms against the Jews. The Grand Mufti was eager to do whatever necessary to eliminate Jews ... especially those who had settled in Palestine after WWI. The Islamic nations of the region even then were anti-Jewish (can't say anti-semetic, because both groups are ethnically Semites). Before the State of Israel was even born in 1948, the local Muslims were violating the British Protectorate to attack Jewish settlements. The British were hardly on their homeward bound ships before all of Israel's neighbors banded together and tried to wipe Israel out by military force. They lost, and that really must have hurt. Israel was virtually unarmed, still trying to assimilate survivors from the holocaust, and still Israel beat the pants off of the combined
Arabic forces. Since that time, its been one attack after another on Israel. Israel has not been shy about launching first strikes to protect themselves against terrible odds.
I'm not a fan of Israel, but you have to admire their toughness, both physical and mental. Israeli's, I think, are a lot like the American stereotype. Brash, over confident, willing to innovate and take the hard choices. They've generally been good allies, and they are usually dependable allies, because they no what a terrible price one pays for failure.
Oh, I should have said anti-Jewish not anti-Semitic.
Arabs had been fighting against Western colonialism and imperialism since the end of the First World War, after the victorious allied powers usurped control over the region from the Ottoman Empire, and granted themselves power over the region, slicing it up among themselves, as they saw fit towards their ends. In Iraq the Arabs revolted against the British Mandate in 1920. Shia and Sunni, who's antagonistic history is as old as Islam itself, put their differences aside to organize political rallies and strikes that turned violent after the British arrested several of their leaders. A jihad was called against the British, and open rebellion ensued until the British subdued the Iraqi Arabs by carpet bombing Arab villages, and bringing in military reinforcements from India and Iran.
In Palestine, in that same year the first of many Arab riots were organized against the Western colonizers, Ashkenazi Jews who, inspired by their strident 19th century nationalism, Zionism, sought to establish a nation-state along ethnocentric ideals. These Zionists were assisted in their aims by the British Empire, under whose control Palestine also fell under the mandate granted them by themselves and the other winning allied forces of WWI.
It is grossly simplistic to say that "The Islamic nations of the region even then were anti-Jewish." The Arabs treated Jews differently throughout the different regions of Arabia. Yemeni Jews suffered perhaps the worst discrimination by Yemeni Arabs. By and large, the Arab Jews of Palestine lived peacefully among the Arab Goyim there. The riots there were aimed first specifically against the Western colonialist, the Ashkenazim, and later also against their accomplice, the imperialist British.
For all of the propaganda, the Zionist forces were roughly equal in size to the combined Arab forces. As soon as the male Ashkenazi refugees disembarked the ships to Palestine, they were given arms and incorporated into the Hagana, which eventually became the Israel Defense Forces. The one critical advantage that the Zionists had over their Arab counterparts was Western military know-how.
Thanks, much to learn for me!
Deception by statisticians is done by focusing on a narrow view such as with the Dow Jones Averages over a few months whereas a ten-year span would be more accurate as to how the Dow Jones was doing. Similar arguments that the Muslims since the the 1920s have been anti-Jewish ignore 300 years of tolerance towards Jews from the Spanish Expulsion. Chumly be a little more neutral. I don't care for either religions but I am being more of a neutral observer.
I don't understand what the Spanish Expulsion has to do with "Hitler's holocaust plan for Jews in Palestine". Could you explain please?
As directly to your point, I don't know how to quantify/qualify the amount of anti-Jewish attitudes for the time period and circumstances you refer to, but I was under the distinct impression that anti-Jewish attitudes have been part of the fabric of the Middle East for many centuries.
Coming back to the book, where the essay quoted in the first response here is published: another interesting aspect is that about German Jewish youth in the communist party (by Arnold Pauker: "Hoffnung und Enttäuschung. Jüdische Jugendliche und Kommunismus. Ein Zeugnis"´/' Hope and disappointment. Jewish youth and communism.')
Chumly
Quote: As directly to your point, I don't know how to quantify/qualify the amount of anti-Jewish attitudes for the time period and circumstances you refer to, but I was under the distinct impression that anti-Jewish attitudes have been part of the fabric of the Middle East for many centuries.
Far less so than those of Christian Europe. Which lasted 1000 years plus. In fact they ebbed and flowed in the Moslem world but were more or less constant in Christian Europe.
Hmmm?
talk72000 wrote:Muslims welcomed Jews to their lands when they were expelled from Spain so they were not anti-Jews. It is the situation of the state of Israel being established without any agreement from Arabs. The buying up of Arab lands surreptitiously doesn't in any help with public relations. It is like a guest inyourhopuse who steals from you.
Surreptitious? The Jews bought land from Ottomans or absentee Arabs; how is that secretive? Different configurations were offered for a state, including a binational state. What is frustrating for me is that we could have not had this bloodshed had the situation been figured out in 1947.
Even by 1947 the situation was well beyond salvation.
What I know of the region strongly suggests that with three highly dogmatic competing religions, lots of prejudice, lots of bad history, lots of ignorance, lots of myopic traditions, lots of wars, etc. any long term permanent peace is not a high likelihood.
They cannot separate religion from politics. If they could maybe there is a chance for peace.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace