Einsatzkommando Agypten

When German armies invaded Russia on 22 June 1941 they were followed by four Einsatzgruppen. The mission of these mobile killing units was murder all enemies of the Nazi state. The most infamous example of their crimes was the mass murder of jews at Babi Yar outside of Kiev. The four gruppen that operated in Russia were identified by letters A thru D. All of these units were organized into sub-units known as Einsatzkommandos. While the existence of these four gruppen is generally known, other such units planned for deployment in countries other than Russia are much less known.

Two German historians from the University of Stuttgart, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, have done extensive research in German archives documenting the purpose of the hitherto unknown Einsatzkommando Agypten. These scholars have written a book on this topic titled: Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine. Unfortunately, this work has not yet been translated into English. However, the Journal of Contemporary History has reviewed it. The thesis of the book is that an SS mobile killing unit had been organized and was awaiting deployment to Palestine to commence with the "final solution" there. The Nazis were counting on Arab help for this. As the reviewer, Johannes Due Enstad states:

Despite some weaknesses, the main thesis around which the authors have organized their book - that the Nazis by summer of 1942 had drawn up concrete plans to murder the Jews of the Yishuv and that, recognizing in Arab nationalist opinion an ideologically suitable ally, they expected their genocidal endeavour to be substantially assisted by Arab collaborators - is convincingly argued. [Journal of Contemporary History, 2009; Vol. 44, No. 1]

The Independent also published a short review of Mallmann and Cuppers' work "Hitler's holocaust plan for Jews in Palestine stopped by Desert Rats'" by Allan Hall. The author's documentation of the Arab-Nazi connection is also noted by Hall. He quotes the author's on the notorious Mufti Amin al-Husseini:

"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.

Mallmann and Cuppers wrote a thirty page paper detailing the organization, leaders and the Mufti's collaboration with Einsatzkommando Egypt in 2006. This paper has been translated into English and is available online. "'Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine': The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942" [thirty-one pages in PDF] is a must read for all who are interested in this topic.

Mallmann and Cuppers have a book in English scheduled for publication this September titled "Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine." I suspect it won't be making many reading lists in Middle-East Studies courses.

The evidence on the active collaboration with the Nazis by the Mufti and other Arab leaders documented by Mallmann and Cuppers and many other historians is overwhelming. Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963, couldn't understand why the Israeli prosecutor was so intent on getting the Mufti's record of war crimes placed into the record:

The Grand Mufti's connections with the Nazis during the war were no secret; he had hoped they would help him in the implementation of some "final solution" in the Near East. Hence, newspapers in Damascus and Beirut, in Cairo and Jordan, did not hide their sympathy for Eichmann or their regret that he "had not finished the job...." That Arab nationalists have been in sympathy with Nazism is notorious, their reasons are obvious, and neither Ben-Gurion nor this trial was needed to "ferret them out"; they were never in hiding. [Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York: Penguin Books, 1994, p. 13]

On this Arendt was wrong. In a book published in 2004, Caught in the Middle East: U.S. Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1945-1961, historian Peter L. Hahn applies a coat of forgetfullness to the Mufti's genocidal efforts. While this book's focus is on American foreign policy, there is an introductory chapter that attempts to frame the situation as Truman first encountered it. Here is how Hahn describes the Mufti's agenda:

In exchange for his cooperation, the British allowed the mufti or Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, to govern the Palestinian community. Yet the stability of Palestine was repeatedly broken by Arab-Jewish violence. Hundreds of Jews and Palestinians died in hostilities in 1919-21, 1929 and 1933 ... The exiled Mufti al-Husayni arranged the assassination of his chief Palestinian rival, Fakhri Nashashibi, in Baghdad in 1941, met Adolf Hitler, and offered to collaborate with the Nazis to expel Britain from Palestine. British authorities tolerated al-Husayni but resolved to deny him power in Palestine. [p. 13-4]

As Enstad stated in his review, this moral equivalence is all too common in scholarly works on the topic of inter-war Palestine. Hahn doesn't mention that the purpose of the Mufti's meeting with Hitler was to plot genocide; nevertheless, the German Foreign Office documents makes the Mufti's motives clear. He appears surprised that with the genocidal Mufti in charge that violence escalated. Characterizing the pogrom at Hebron for example as "Arab-Jewish violence" is an example of what Ayn Rand called the Cult of Moral Grayness.

Thanks to the pioneering work of Mallmann and Cuppers, the record has been set straight. There is no longer any room for equivocation on this issue.


Crossposted at The Dougout