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Nazi-Arab Alliance in World War II
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers’ Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das "Dritte Reich", die Araber und Palästina, (Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine) was published in September, 2006 and has yet to appear in English translation. It documents the Arab sympathies for Nazism, particularly in Palestine and German attempts to mobilize and encourage the Arabs with their ideology, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, and the forces around the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini,in Palestine.
Nazi radio broadcasts to the Arabs between 1939 and 1945 constantly proclaimed the natural German sympathy for the Arab cause against Zionism and the Jews. German Middle East experts stressed "the natural alliance" between National Socialism and Islam. And such experts as the former German Ambassador in Cairo, Eberhard von Stohrer, reported to Hitler in 1941 that "the Fuhrer already held an outstanding position among the Arabs because of his fight against the Jews."
Cüppers and Mallmann quote many original documents from the Nazi archives on this. From the late 1930s, the planning staffs dealing with the external affairs of the Reich in the Head Office of Reich Security (RSHA, Reichssecuritathauptamt: originally under the monstrous Gestapo-chief Reinhard Heydrich) sought to engulf the Arabian Peninsula and win control of the region‘s oil reserves. They dreamt of a pincer movement from the north via a defeated Soviet Union, and from the south via the Near East and Persia, in order to separate Great Britain from India.
Thanks to the counteroffensive of the Red Army before Moscow in 1941/1942 and at Stalingrad in 1942/1943, and the defeat of the German Africa Corps with El Alamein, the Germans never managed to actively intervene in the Middle East militarily although they helped spark a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad in 1941. At about the same time, Palestinian-Jewish volunteers, Free French Forces and the Australians helped rid Syria and Lebanon of the pro-Vichy Fascist regimes there.
The refusal to place the blame and ultimate responsibility for Arab flight from Palestine during 1947-48 squarely on the divided and corrupt Arab leadership itself should also be held up to scrutiny in the light of what the world has witnessed during the last five years of insurrection and guerilla war in Iraq, the fifteen year long civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990), atrocities against civilians by the Sudanese Muslim forces in Darfur, and the rival factions fighting for control in Algeria, Yemen, and Syria (“Black September“, The Muslim Brotherhood“),and similar conflicts between rival factions; mass atrocities, mutilations, indiscriminate killing, blackmail, arson, looting, and mass flight were and remain the norm in inter-Arab conflicts. The Arab civil population of Haifa and Jaffa realized long before April 1948 that their lives and property were in jeopardy from the poorly disciplined, irregular, and corrupt Arab forces as much as from the prospect of a Jewish military victory.
Dr. Herbert Pritzke was an escaped German prisoner of war who served as Chief Medical Officer for the Arab forces in Jaffa. His eyewitness account, Bedouin Doctor (Dutton, 1957) is the objective reporting of a foreign volunteer:
There was no discipline, no military police. no muster rolls, no list of personnel. No one ever knew who belonged to which unit or where the different units were. This incurable disorder was shamelessly exploited. Things happened as they were bound to happen under such leader-ship. By the end of April, the Jaffa front was completely disintegrated. The town was almost deserted. Less than a tenth of the 80,000 inhabitants remained in their homes, and even this remnant was trying by all means possible to get out of the town. Fear of their own bullying and cruel compatriots spurred them to leave home and property, not less than the imminent occupation of the town by the Jewish besiegers. Moreover, bandits, more dangerous than the occupying force, were roaming through the town singly and in groups robbing and murdering. It was clear that the depopulated and demoralized town must soon be overrun by the Jews.
We Germans, who met almost daily in my room in the hospital, found ourselves in a very precarious situation. As representatives of law and order, we could to some extent check the depredations of the bandits and looters, which did not make us popular with them. At the same time, we felt that we were hated by the embittered citizens because we could not save their town. If we managed to survive the final chaos, we could look forward to no prospect of future but captivity. The Arabs themselves no longer showed any keenness to fight for their country.
Dr. Pritzke makes no mention whatsover regarding Deir Yassin but bears out that from the beginning that it was a dirty, nasty little war fought at close quarters by intertwined populations and that at the outset of the war the Arab side possessed a clear superiority in fire power.
