Part III: A War of Words: Recruiting Arabs to the Nazi Cause | The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com | Alex Grobman PhD. | 9 Tammuz 5784 – Sunday, July 14, 2024

Image credit: Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons.

Editor’s note: Part 3 of a new series by Dr. Alex Grobman, online contributor to the Jewish Press.

Between 1941 and 1945, according to estimates by historian Antonio J. Muñoz, about 5,000 Arab and Indian Muslims volunteered to serve in the German armed forces, barely enough to form a liberation army. Their military value was insignificant compared to the units formed from Muslims in the Balkans and the USSR. Although the Germans failed to conquer the region, the units had propaganda value that the Nazis exploited.

Joseph Schechtman credited the Mufti with helping to set up spy networks that provided information on British troop movements. His news broadcasts to the Middle East reported acts of sabotage that would normally have been censored. His agents, infiltrating the Middle East by land and air, cut pipes and telephone lines in Palestine and Transjordan and destroyed bridges and railways in Iraq.

He also organized an Axis Arab Legion called the Arab Freedom Corps, which wore German uniforms with “Free Arabia” patches, Schechtman said. As part of the German army, the unit guarded communications facilities in Macedonia and hunted down American and British paratroopers who parachuted into Yugoslavia and hid among the local population. The Legion also fought on the Russian front. Another major success was el-Husseini’s recruitment of tens of thousands of Balkan Muslims into the Wehrmacht. Moshe Shertok (Sharett), chief of the Jewish Agency’s political department, reported that during a visit to Bosnia in 1943, the mufti called on local Muslims to join the Muslim Waffen-SS units and met with the units already ready for action.

In addition, Middle East expert Robert Satloff said that Haj Amin used his contacts with Muslim leaders in North Africa to urge them to hinder the Allied advance in any way possible. After Allied troops invaded North Africa in November 1942, Vichy officers in Tunisia formed the Phalange Africaine, also called the Légion des Volontaires Française de Tunisie. The unit consisted of 400 men, about a third of whom were Arabs and the rest a mix of European pro-fascists. The German army took command of the Phalange in February 1943, and it fought against the British and the Free French for most of 1944. In 1944, a French military court convicted the unit’s commander, Pierre Simon Cristofini, of treason and had him executed.

A second all-Arab unit under German command, known as the Brigade Nord Africaine, was founded, according to Satloff, by Mohamed el-Maadi, a former French officer and anti-Semite whose nickname was “SS Mohamed.” They fought against the partisans, a group of resistance fighters, in the Dordogne region of southwestern France.

In March 1944, Schechtman says, the Mufti urged the Arabs, “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” In accordance with this religious commandment, on May 13, 1943, the Mufti urged the German foreign minister to “do everything possible” to prevent further departures of Jews from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to Palestine, according to historian Raul Hilberg. Four thousand Jewish children had recently arrived in Palestine accompanied by 500 adults, prompting the Mufti to demand the closure of escape routes. When the International Red Cross asked Romanian Prime Minister Marshal Antonescu two weeks later to allow Jewish emigration to Palestine on Red Cross ships, the German Foreign Ministry refused, arguing that Palestine was an Arab country.

Historian Yehuda Bauer stated that in 1943, when Himmler proposed releasing 20,000 German prisoners held by the Allies if 5,000 Jewish children were allowed to leave the Third Reich, the Mufti reportedly told him he would prefer that all Jews be killed. When the plan was not carried out, the Mufti’s wish was granted.

On July 27, 1944, Jeffry Herf noted that the Mufti had written to Himmler to request that Jews not come to Palestine. By complying with the Mufti’s request, Himmler demonstrated Germany’s “friendly attitude” toward Arabs and Muslims.

Had Rommel been victorious in the Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October – 1 November 1942), the Germans would have reached Palestine and enabled Hitler to exterminate the Jewish population. German historians Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers found that Nazi intelligence informed his superiors in Berlin that once Rommel entered Cairo and Palestine, he could count on the help of some Egyptian officers and the Muslim Brotherhood. An SS division had been ordered to fly to Egypt to oversee the extermination of the Jewish population.

Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler

Gideon Hausner, who as Israeli Attorney General led a team of prosecutors in the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, described the Mufti’s “longstanding” relationship with Adolf Eichmann, who played a crucial role in the destruction of European Jewry. In early 1942, the Mufti and his entourage met with Eichmann’s office in Berlin to explain the nature of the Final Solution.

The Mufti was “so deeply impressed” by what he heard that he asked Heinrich Himmler, the “architect of the genocide,” to appoint someone from Eichmann’s staff as his “personal advisor” to “finally solve” the Jewish problem in Palestine as soon as the Mufti was reinstated in office by the victorious Nazis. Eichmann appreciated the offer. “A priceless jewel… The greatest friend of the Arabs,” is how the Mufti described Eichmann in his diary.

The German Islamic scholar Gerhard Höpp noted that the Mufti had a friendly relationship with Himmler and that they often met for tea. In his memoirs, the Mufti reports that Himmler told him in the summer of 1943 that “we have so far exterminated (abadna) about three million of them.”

The Mufti worked tirelessly to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Jeffry Herf notes that he even urged the Germans to bomb Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Historian David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann, lecturer and consultant on politics and foreign policy, add that in 1943 the Mufti began calling on the German air force command to bomb the Jewish Agency headquarters in Jerusalem and to launch an air raid on Tel Aviv on November 2, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. This appeal was rejected, as was his appeal of April 1, 1944.

At the post-war Nuremberg trials, Dieter Wisliceny, an associate of Adolf Eichmann, claimed that the Mufti was an “initiator” of the policy of exterminating the Jews. Eichmann and the Mufti denied these allegations at the Eichmann trial in 1961. Historian Bernard Lewis found no corroborating witness testimony for either statement, but the Germans hardly needed any encouragement from anyone to destroy the Jewish people.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24310

Overview of Arab and Jewish contributions to the efforts in World War II

12,000 Palestinian Arabs and 30,000 Palestinian Jews volunteered for the British army.