Holocaust In The Middle East: From Morocco To Iraq – HistoryExtra – BBC History Magazine
Posted By admin on November 23, 2021
From the plane, Rauff went to Erwin Rommels battle headquarters, where he presented his orders to the field marshals chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Westphal. As commander of a new mobile killing unit, an Einsatzkommando, Rauff was assigned to carry out executive measures, meaning mass murder of Jews, as soon as Rommel completed his expected conquest of Egypt. Rauff had come from Berlin, where the Nazi leadership was awash with optimism about Rommel pressing forward through Egypt into the Near East, as German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had just told the Japanese ambassador.
After Egypt, Rauffs next target would be the 500,000 or more Jews of Palestine. And if, as Adolf Hitler expected, Rommels tanks drove forward to the oil fields of Iraq, the Jews of that country and of Syria and Lebanon would face mortal danger.
But Rommels chief of staff explained to Rauff that logistical problems, especially lack of fuel, were delaying the Axis forces advance, so the two agreed that Rauff and his team would move from Germany to Athens, Greece. From there, they could deploy to Egypt once Rommel swept forward into Alexandria a mere 60 miles east of El Alamein and Cairo.
It never happened. The desert battlefield would be the site of Rommels most famous defeat, and one of the great turning points of the Second World War.
Yet Rauffs mission to Egypt is fraught with significance. Contrary to popular memory, the Holocaust was not only a European event. Across north Africa and the Middle East, from Morocco to Iraq, the Germans and the regimes collaborating with them systematically persecuted Jews. Hitler had declared his intent to eradicate the Jews of the Middle East, and the SS actively prepared to do so. Allied victories heroic, and at times close to miraculous prevented the Nazis from carrying out the worst of their plans, but any full account of the Holocaust requires a map that extends well beyond Europe.
Listen to this article:
The early months of the Second World War were disturbing but distant thunder for Jews in the Arab world. Three events in June 1940 changed that. First, the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini announced to an obediently cheering crowd of thousands in Rome that Italy was joining Germany and going to war against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west: Britain and France. His immediate goal was seizing a scrap of France as it collapsed before the German onslaught. The larger implication was that war was inevitable in north Africa, since Mussolini dreamed of creating a new Roman empire, using the Italian colony of Libya as a base for expansion.
A week later, First World War hero Philippe Ptain formed a new government in France and sought peace with Germany. The armistice left Ptains government, based in Vichy, in control only of southeastern France, but it ruled most of Frances overseas empire, including the north African colonies of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
The third incident came at the end of June. An Italian anti-aircraft unit at Tobruk in eastern Libya shot down an Italian plane, mistaking it for a British aircraft. On board was Italo Balbo, the governor-general of Libya.
SS officer Walther Rauff, photographed in 1945. After his mission of mass extermination was halted at El Alamein, Rauff was posted to Tunisia. (Photo by ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Balbos death made life go from bad to worse for Libyas 30,000 Jews. Though a prominent Fascist, Balbo had opposed the Nazi-style anti-Semitism that Mussolini had adopted. The Italian campaign against the Jews had begun in 1938 with the Manifesto of Race that defined Italians as Aryans, and Jews as biologically inferior. A series of race laws barred Jews from government jobs, from teaching or studying in Italian schools, from practising professions including medicine and law, and more.
Balbo avoided enforcing the laws strictly in Libya, especially those that locked Jews out of the colonys economy. The Jews are already a dead people; there is no need to oppress them cruelly, Balbo explained to Mussolini in a letter. Il Duce answered: Though the Jews may seem to be dead, they never really are, echoing the Nazi view of Jews as a powerful, clandestine threat. Once Balbo was dead, the official persecution of the Jews in Libya could be escalated.
The Vichy regime in France, meanwhile, showed how fully it had become a German satellite by enacting its own Jewish Statute in October 1940. The move was driven in part by the home-grown anti-Semitism of the French right, but, as Vichy foreign minister Paul Baudouin would write, German pressure played a major role. Modelled on Nazi laws, the French statute defined Jewishness in racial terms, with a Jew being anyone with three Jewish grandparents or with two and a Jewish spouse. Among the measures, Jews were banned from all teaching, judicial and police positions, and most of the civil service. Only 2 per cent of lawyers, doctors and midwives could be Jewish all professions in which Jews were prominent.
The provisions echoed those adopted in other Nazi satellites in Europe, including Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. In the French case, though, their reach extended to Africa. The Vichy statute was applied directly in French Algeria, while the sultan of Morocco and bey of Tunisia, nominal rulers of French protectorates, issued decrees bringing in similar rules.
After enacting the Jewish Statute, Ptain abrogated the 1870 decree that granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews. Vichy authorities gave Jews a month to sell their businesses. The sultan of Morocco decreed that Jews living in European areas of cities had one month to move back to the old, crowded Jewish quarters. There, with more people packed in, disease spread quickly. Step by step, the Jews of French north Africa saw their lives and livelihoods constricted, in a process parallel to what German Jews had endured early in Nazi rule.
Another country at the far end of the Arab world briefly tilted into the Axis orbit when, in April 1941, four Iraqi colonels overthrew the British-aligned government. The coup was planned in the Baghdad home of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and exiled leader of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s. Abd al-Ilh, the regent who ruled in place of Iraqs six-year-old king, Faisal II, fled to Transjordan, while the king was smuggled out of Baghdad by his mother.
Iraqs government radio station broadcast a stream of inflammatory agitation against the Jews and powerful appeals to Nazism, according to a later commission of inquiry. Baghdad was then about one-sixth Jewish. On the streets, members of pro-Nazi paramilitary groups, such as the Youth Phalanxes, seized random Jews and dragged them to police stations, or occasionally murdered them. Meanwhile, Britains codebreakers at Bletchley Park deciphered Axis messages that the German and Italian air forces were sending unmarked warplanes to aid the Iraqi junta and that ships arriving at Rhodes bore ammunition to be airlifted to Iraq.
Commander of the Afrika Korps, Erwin Rommel (right), gives orders during the north African campaign. Often described as the war without hate, the conflict actually witnessed numerous persecutions against Jewish populations. (Photo by Jean DESMARTEAU/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
The British quickly organised an invasion and the Iraqi army had crumbled by June. Husseini and the other plotters fled. When Abd al-Ilh returned to Baghdad, British troops stayed outside the city in the hope that his return would not look like their doing. A crowd of Jews came to greet the regent, but as they returned home Iraqi soldiers attacked them, with teens from the Youth Phalanxes joining in. Only on the next day did the newly returned regent finally order the police to disperse the mobs. A large number of Jewish shops and homes were looted, and several hundred Jews were brutally murdered, the British ambassador reported. The dead of the Baghdad pogrom, the Farhud, may be the least known and least acknowledged victims of Nazism.
Husseini eventually reached Berlin and, in November 1941, met with Hitler. He asked the fhrer to declare publicly his backing for the independence and unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq. While Hitler avoided such a pledge, he promised that once German armies in the Soviet Union pushed south into the Middle East, Germanys objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element in the Arab world.
Axis armies would actually threaten the Middle East from a different direction. In September 1940, Italy launched an invasion of Egypt from Libya. By winter, the British under General Archibald Wavell counterattacked and pushed the Italians out of Cyrenaica, the eastern province of Libya. Afraid the Allies would keep going and threaten Europe from the south, Hitler sent an army to Libya under his favourite general, Rommel.
In the expanse of the desert, the fighting see-sawed wildly. Rommel reconquered most of Cyrenaica, then in late 1941 the British Eighth Army overran the province again, only to be pushed back once more. By early 1942, Benghazi, the largest town in Cyrenaica, had changed hands four times.
Mussolini found a scapegoat for Italian military failures: Libyas Jews. On 7 February 1942, he issued a decree to expel them to a concentration camp in the desert. Colonial authorities started with the Jews of small towns in Cyrenaica, and lists of those to be expelled began appearing in synagogues each fortnight. Survivors would remember that 40 people were packed onto each open truck and that they travelled for five days in the sun to the camp at Giado, south-west of Tripoli. There, men were subjected to forced labour. Inmates received between 100 and 150 grams of bread a day, and when they complained about the lack of food, camp authorities told them: The purpose of bringing you here is not to feed you, but to starve you to death. Of the 2,600 Jews imprisoned at Giado, more than one in five died within a few months of hunger or typhus.
One factor slowed the sfollamento, the clearing, of Jews, according to the German consul in Tripoli: a shortage of trucks. They were needed to supply Rommels new offensive, which began in late May 1942. Thanks to his secret weapon, a superb intelligence source in Cairo, he had taken Tobruk in eastern Libya by 21 June. A message from the Cairo source said that the Eighth Army was decisively beaten and if Rommel intends to take the Nile Delta this is a suitable moment.
Rommel plunged into Egypt. In Berlin and Rome, expectations soared and the SS sped up its preparations to send an Einsatzkommando to the Middle East. Yet during that crucial last week of June 1942, an intelligence breakthrough at Bletchley Park identified and silenced the Axis source. The timing was providential. Rommel was caught by surprise when British commander General Claude Auchinleck made a last-minute decision to move his defensive line to El Alamein. Auchinlecks change, the topography of the area and dogged fighting by British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian and South African troops stopped the Axis advance. Rommel and Rauff would never reach Cairo or Tel Aviv.
Following the battle of El Alamein, in November 1942, the Eighth Army, now commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, shattered Rommels army and forced it to retreat eastward. Days later, the Allies launched Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of Morocco and Algeria. In response, German forces seized Tunisia as a last redoubt in Africa and the SS sent Rauffs team.
As German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cppers have detailed, Rauff carried out a reign of terror against Tunisian Jews that included conscripting 5,000 for forced labour. But with shipping to Europe under constant attack, Rauff could not carry out the larger SS plan to send Tunisias Jews to death camps in Europe.
The Nazis intentions to carry the war against the Jews beyond Europe never wavered. Ultimately, though, defeat at El Alamein turned the tables and kept the SS from carrying out its plans.
Yet leaving north Africa and the Middle East out of Holocaust history has erased the suffering of many of the Nazis victims and obscured the full significance of the victory at El Alamein.
Early in 2021, I received an email from the scientist Michael Bevan, son of Lance Corporal John Bevan of the Second New Zealand Division, who fought and was taken prisoner at El Alamein. My father always thought they were fighting to preserve the British empire, he wrote, which for a colonial was not a high priority. Only in the winter of 1945 in Germany, when as a prisoner of war his father saw female slave labourers building an airfield, did he fully grasp the evils he had fought to contain.
Therefore, the soldiers son went on, understanding how the Eighth Army established the El Alamein line, and thus prevented genocide in the Middle East, has brought new and deserved honour to the brave men of my fathers generation, who fought and suffered in Egypt.
For their sake, too, the story must be told.
As a French protectorate, Morocco was subject to Vichy control after the fall of France. While Jews were not sent to death camps in Europe, Sultan Mohammed V issued a decree enacting Vichys Jewish Statute. Under wartime rationing, Jews received less to eat than Europeans or Muslims, and a 1941 edict gave Jews living in European neighbourhoods one month to move back into the mellahs, or Jewish quarters, where overcrowding accelerated the spread of disease.
The Vichy regimes Jewish Statute was applied directly in Algeria, where at least 110,000 Jews lived. They were stripped of French citizenship, removed from occupations, given one month to sell their businesses, and those of military age sent to internment camps. Even after the Anglo-American liberation of Algeria in November 1942, Vichy officials remained in office and anti-Jewish measures were only overturned late the following year.
Subject to Vichy rule from 1940, Tunisia was then occupied by Germany in November 1942. The SS sent in the Einsatzkommando under the command of Walther Rauff, who had been originally assigned to the mass murder of Egypt and Palestines Jews. Rauff took Jewish leaders hostage in order to round up 5,000 Jews for forced labour, and imposed fines on the pretext that international Jewry was responsible for Allied bombings. As many as 400 Jews died due to the German occupation, but the Allied liberation of Tunisia in May 1943 thwarted Nazi plans to ship Tunisias 66,000 Jews to death camps in Europe.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini enacted anti-Jewish laws that were enforced with increasing strictness in the Italian colony of Libya. In 1942, on Mussolinis orders, 2,600 Jews from eastern Libya were trucked to a desert concentration camp, where more than 500 died of disease and starvation. The British conquest of Libya after El Alamein prevented the imprisonment of the remainder of Libyas estimated 30,000 Jews and resulted in the liberation of the concentration camp at Giado.
The SS created a mobile killing unit to carry out genocide in Egypt and Palestine as the Axis army, under the command of General Erwin Rommel, reached El Alamein in July 1942. Britains Special Operations Executive trained Palestinian Jews for guerrilla warfare after the expected Nazi conquest. But the dogged British defence at El Alamein stopped Rommel and prevented the murder of an estimated 75,000 Jews in Egypt and half a million or more in Palestine.
French mandatory officials declared fealty to Vichy and enacted anti-Jewish statutes. Jews were dismissed from government posts, the press and the railways, but enforcement was otherwise sporadic against the 30,000 or more Jews across the two countries. An Anglo-Free French invasion in June 1941 ended Vichy rule, and Free French general Charles de Gaulle abrogated the anti-Jewish laws.
Four colonels, known as the Golden Square, carried out a pro-Axis coup in April 1941, threatening some 110,000 Jews in the country. Government radio broadcast a stream of Nazi propaganda. In Baghdad, pro-Nazi paramilitary group Youth Phalanxes arrested or sometimes murdered Jews on the streets. The regimes collapse in the face of a British invasion ignited a pogrom in which soldiers and Youth Phalanxes murdered 180 or more Jews. The events shattered Jewish confidence in life in Iraq, setting the stage for a later exodus.
Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli historian and journalist. His latest book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, was published in January by PublicAffairs
This content first appeared in the September 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine
The rest is here:
Holocaust In The Middle East: From Morocco To Iraq - HistoryExtra - BBC History Magazine
- Where It Matters Most, the National Anti-Semitism Strategy Drops the ... - Mosaic - June 6th, 2023
- Anti-Israel Groups Push White House To Weaken Recognized Anti-Semitism Definition - Washington Free Beacon - May 20th, 2023
- Jewish Students at Yale Law School Invited an Israeli Politician To Speak About Anti-Semitism. Then They Caved to Pressure. - Washington Free Beacon - April 22nd, 2023
- History of antisemitism in the United States - Wikipedia - April 16th, 2023
- History of antisemitism - Wikipedia - April 8th, 2023
- Anti-Defamation League reports dramatic rise in antisemitism - PBS NewsHour - March 25th, 2023
- Houston ranked among worst offenders for anti-Semitism - KTRK-TV - March 24th, 2023
- Anti-Semitism - Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust | Britannica - February 7th, 2023
- Anti-Semitism | History, Facts, & Examples | Britannica - February 2nd, 2023
- Antisemitism - Wikipedia - February 2nd, 2023
- Origins and concept of anti-Semitism | Britannica - February 2nd, 2023
- Lizzy Savetsky exits RHONY reboot over anti-Semitism - January 6th, 2023
- Benjamin Netanyahu: Anti-Semitism Is The Oldest Disease, Given Extra ... - December 31st, 2022
- Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Anti-Semitism Protections Bill CS/CS/HB 741 - December 31st, 2022
- Kanye West: I've been 'beat to a pulp' amid anti-Semitism scandal - December 21st, 2022
- Don Lemon Critiques Dave Chappelle Monologue on SNL - December 21st, 2022
- Anti-Semitic incidents in US hit all-time high, according to new ADL ... - December 21st, 2022
- Dave Chappelle Sets Hair Aflame, Now Being Accused of Anti-Semitism ... - November 26th, 2022
- Between Kanye and the Midterms, the Unsettling Stream of Antisemitism - The New York Times - November 6th, 2022
- Kyrie Irving will begin suspension of at least 5 games Friday over antisemitism controversy. The NBA star has since apologized - CNN - November 6th, 2022
- New opinion poll illuminates growing challenges of polarization and ... - October 19th, 2022
- Meng, Fitzpatrick, Manning, Weber, Veasey, Granger, Lieu And Smith Call For Update From State Department On Its Investigation Into Instances Of... - October 19th, 2022
- Anti-Semitism and the Socialist Workers Party - World Socialist Web Site - WSWS - October 19th, 2022
- Where Kanye Wests brand deals stand amid anti-Semitism, WLM controversies - Page Six - October 19th, 2022
- Kanye West reaches out to Donald Trump amid anti-Semitic backlash - The News International - October 19th, 2022
- Partisan bias created a toxic media culture that tolerates anti-Semitism - JNS.org - October 19th, 2022
- CUNY Union President Blames White Christian Nationalism for Anti ... - October 1st, 2022
- Anselm Franke on the Future of documenta: Were witnessing old structures not wanting to die - Notes - E-Flux - October 1st, 2022
- Hill TV Segment on Rashida Tlaib and Israel Is Censored - The Intercept - October 1st, 2022
- The past echoes in the present: A review of Ken Burns' 'The U.S. and the Holocaust - Idaho Capital Sun - October 1st, 2022
- Toronto launches awareness campaign to combat anti-Semitism - September 18th, 2022
- Investigation underway into antisemitism at U of Vermont - The Associated Press - en Espaol - September 18th, 2022
- 'The number 6 million is impenetrable': Burns discusses new film, 'The U.S. and the Holocaust' New Hampshire Bulletin - New Hampshire Bulletin - September 9th, 2022
- Here's why conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein keep flourishing - NPR - September 9th, 2022
- Ben & Jerry's will amend lawsuit against Unilever over Israel ice cream sale - Reuters.com - September 9th, 2022
- Will Viktor Orbn Bring His Racist Rhetoric to the United States this Week? - Center For American Progress - August 4th, 2022
- Macron decries anti-Semitism on 80th anniversary of Jewish deportations - Reuters.com - July 19th, 2022
- Former Oath Keeper reveals racist, antisemitic beliefs of white nationalist group and their plans to start a civil war - The Conversation Indonesia - July 14th, 2022
- What to Stream: The Sorrow and the Pity, a Historical Documentary That Transformed Frances National Identity - The New Yorker - July 14th, 2022
- 53 Percent Blame Fox News for Spread of Extremist Ideologies Like ... - July 8th, 2022
- Was the Patriot Front March in Boston a Sign of the New KKK? - Boston University - July 8th, 2022
- New UK-Led Initiative to Enhance Kentucky K-12 Holocaust Education - UKNow - June 4th, 2022
- No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the 'Great Replacement' Theory - The Atlantic - June 4th, 2022
- Statement from the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland and Lake Catholic High School May 25, 2022 - Catholic Diocese of Cleveland - May 27th, 2022
- Slavery, Anti-Semitism and Harvards Missing Moral Compass - The Wall Street Journal - May 20th, 2022
- The Intersectionality of Hate - The Atlantic - May 20th, 2022
- Philadelphias Jewish history museum reopens after bankruptcy and a 2-year shutdown - The Philadelphia Inquirer - May 20th, 2022
- Israel Observes Holocaust Remembrance Day Amid a Global Rise of Anti ... - May 8th, 2022
- Governor Abbott Appoints Parker, Names Goldberg Chair Of Texas Holocaust, Genocide, And Anti-Semitism Advisory Commission - Office of the Texas... - April 30th, 2022
- University of Maryland's Anti-Semitism Task Force Chief ... - April 27th, 2022
- Rabbi Calls for Education and Leadership to Combat Hate Crimes in New Jersey - wbgo.org - April 18th, 2022
- Are Global Autocracies Here to Stay? - Northeastern University - April 18th, 2022
- The return of the anti-Dreyfusards is possible - The Hindu - April 18th, 2022
- Learning from the past to effectively fight anti-Semitism today - Al Jazeera English - March 16th, 2022
- Russia-Ukraine: Ugly truths in the time of war - Al Jazeera English - March 16th, 2022
- Ukraine's Only Woman Rabbi Among the Many Jews Fleeing War - Voice of America - VOA News - March 16th, 2022
- The law-flouting, truth-denying, science-deriding Trumpian Republican extremists are the real RINOs - Ohio Capital Journal - March 16th, 2022
- Colleyville hostage scene triggers calls for action ... - February 21st, 2022
- Colleyville Neighborhood Wakes Up to Flyers with Hate-filled Messages Tossed onto Lawns - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth - February 21st, 2022
- Envisioning Justice: The Campus Voice This Week With Speakers and Workshops - University of Arkansas Newswire - February 21st, 2022
- Rosen, Texas Senators Lead and Pass Bipartisan Resolution Condemning Antisemitic Attack on Congregation Beth Israel - Jacky Rosen - February 19th, 2022
- 'It's part of a larger pattern': Texas synagogue hostage ... - January 20th, 2022
- Was Luther Anti-Semitic? | Christian History ... - January 20th, 2022
- Why So Many People Still Don't Understand Anti-Semitism - The Atlantic - January 20th, 2022
- Documenta Responds to Allegations of Anti-Semitic Connections to BDS Movement - ARTnews - January 20th, 2022
- Rep. Houlahan: My father survived the Holocaust by a miracle. It shouldnt take a miracle to be Jewish and alive. | Opinion - The Philadelphia Inquirer - January 20th, 2022
- Governor Abbott Appoints Five to the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Anti-Semitism Advisory Commission - Office of the Texas Governor - January 9th, 2022
- Condemning anti-semitism, governor and Jewish leaders ... - January 4th, 2022
- Helena's Jewish community is raising funds to buy the state's oldest synagogue - MTPR - January 4th, 2022
- Jordanian TV rejects German stations anti-Semitism accusation - January 1st, 2022
- Poland is the land of anti-Semitism - January 1st, 2022
- Was Martin Luther Guilty of Anti-Semitism? - December 22nd, 2021
- Is Donald Trump an Anti-Semite? - The New Yorker - December 22nd, 2021
- 'It's trivializing the lives who so greatly suffered': Outrage continues after Holocaust imagery used in anti-mandate rally - CTV News Atlantic - December 22nd, 2021
- Trump Goes Full Anti-Semite, Unloads on American Jews in Wildly Bigoted Rant - Vanity Fair - December 18th, 2021
- Changing How You Spell 'Anti-Semitism' Won't Stop Anti-Semitism - The Atlantic - December 16th, 2021
- Dutch MP found guilty of creating a breeding ground for anti-Semitism - POLITICO Europe - December 16th, 2021
- Danvers High School Dealing With Another Investigation After Swastika Found in Bathroom - NBC10 Boston - December 16th, 2021
- Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions - Renewed... - November 30th, 2021
- An Archive Traces the History of Anti-Semitism Across Europe - Hyperallergic - November 23rd, 2021
Comments