Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#1

Post by David Thompson » 10 Aug 2017, 02:02

Von Schadewald -- You've already had two prior warnings about the source requirement in this forum:

viewtopic.php?p=1950805#p1950805 (sources)
/viewtopic.php?p=1832771#p1832771 (sources)

and you've also been warned about posing questions with insufficient context for our readers:

viewtopic.php?p=1939832#p1939832 (questions)

consequently, your post has been removed.

steve248
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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#2

Post by steve248 » 11 Aug 2017, 09:34

I have no idea what the above posts were about other than the title.

For those interested in this topic and the short-lived role of Einsatzkommando Afrika (stationed in Tunis) I can recommend:

Klaus-Michael Mallmann/Martin Cüppers
"Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina"
publ. WBG Darmstadt, 2006.

It details the various plans made by RSHA for an eventual occupation of the Middle East and North Africa and resultant anti-Jewish measures.

I have not seen the English translation:
https://www.ushmm.org/research/publicat ... -palestine


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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#3

Post by Von Schadewald » 12 Aug 2017, 19:58

After seeing the book "Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine" you refer to, I can see that the historian Gerhard Weinberg is not exaggerating when he states in the lecture "World War II Myths, Misconceptions and Surprises":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KU997m9o4

"A second myth is the separation of the war from the Holocaust. Hitler did not plan the invasion of France because the French did not let him visit Paris. There was purpose to the war Germanuy initiated. That purpose was a demographic revolution on the globe of which killing all Jews was a central point. Erwin Rommel was first sent to North Africa to salvage the killing of the Jews in Egypt, Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, with the murder commando at his headquarters. Hitler did not trust the Italians, who were to get the area, to carry out this most important mission".

If Kasserine in February 1943 had succeeded in delaying the German expulsion from N.Africa by even a few months, the Einsatzkommando Afrika might have had the chance to commence on the 100,000 Jews of Tunisia.

michael mills
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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#4

Post by michael mills » 13 Aug 2017, 16:13

The book by Mallmann and Cueppers consists mainly of speculation based on very little hard evidence, and comes very close to being pro-Israel propaganda with the purpose of delegitimising Palestinian resistance to Zionist expansionism by tarring it with the brush of pro-Nazi collaborationism.

The only hard evidence on which Mallmann and Cueppers base their speculation consists of documents detailing plans to create an "Einsatzkommando Aegypten" based in Athens. The documents state that it was planned to send the Einsatzkommando to Egypt after that country had been occupied by German and Italian forces under the command of Rommel, for the purpose of carrying out unspecified security tasks in relation to the civilian population of the country. The authors of the book appear to assume that any SS-Police formation designated as an "Einsatzkommando" must necessarily have an anti-Jewish function, and proceed to speculate that the intended role of the Einsatzkommando Aegypten was to exterminate the Jewish colonists in Palestine.

The problem with this sort of speculation is that the German forces under Rommel's command in North Africa had no political function, only a military one. Hitler had designated North Africa and the Middle East as an Italian sphere of interest in which Germany was to have no political role. The sole reason why German troops were sent to Libya and later Tunisia was to support the Italian forces which had proved incapable of defeating the British forces stationed in Egypt. Control over the civilian population of Libya and the parts of Egypt temporarily under Axis occupation was exercised solely by the Italian authorities.

The Einsatzkommando Aegypten was of course never sent to Egypt, but a different SS-Police Einsatzkommando under the command of Rauff was indeed sent to Tunisia at the end of 1942, accompanying the German troops sent there to resist the Allied invasion of French North Africa. The Rauff commando did not operate independently, but was under the command of the French authorities in Tunisia, and does not appear to have been very active. The Jewish population of Tunisia was subject to low-level repressive measures, such as males being conscripted for forced labour, but those measures were undertaken by the French authorities acting on their own initiative, not by the Rauff commando.

Claims made by various sources that if the Allied invasion of North Africa had been defeated there would have been an exterminatory campaign against the Jews of that area are highly speculative and are inconsistent with the political realities. As stated, Hitler recognised North Africa as being in the Italian sphere of influence, and hence left it to Mussolini to determine the policies to be applied to the civilian population. Although an ally of Germany, Mussolini had not cooperated with German anti-Jewish measures in any of the territories under Italian occupation, ie in the south of France, in Yugoslavia, Albania or Greece, and there is no reason to believe that if he had remained in power in Italy, as he would have if the Allies had been defeated in North Africa, he would have changed his policy of non-cooperation.

To anybody familiar with the political realities in Axis-controlled North Africa, the quoted passage by Weinberg can only appear as the paranoid ravings of a demented old man. It is sheer nonsense to suggest that Rommel was sent to North Africa to kill the Jews of Egypt.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#5

Post by steve248 » 13 Aug 2017, 20:36

My word, "the paranoid ravings of a demented old man. It is sheer nonsense to suggest that Rommel was sent to North Africa to kill the Jews of Egypt."

I have met Gerhard Weinberg a couple of times and the above personal description does not fit. Why should Rommel be excused? He was the army commander in the field in North Africa aiming at Egypt; army commanders in the Ukraine and Russia faced exactly the same situation, the extermination campaign of the Einsatzgruppen.

Why would Einsatzkommando Tunis act any differently. Although small in number its primary aim was to establish where the Jews in aimed occupied area would be.

North Africa was in the Italian sphere until they could not manage and were in danger of military defeat until Hitler decided they needed reinforcing . If the Afrika Korps had won, do you really think the German army would have withdrawn. The whole idea was a military pincer movement on a grand scale with the Afika Korps as the southern arm to advance across the MIddle East with the German army attacking through the Caucasus to meet up in the Iraqi oilfields. The Jews of the Middle East would all have been exterminated but not by Einsatzkommando Tunis - just a much large version.

Contrary to your view, Mallmann and Cüppers did an extraordinary amount of archival research to reach their conclusions.
Howver, they did not list the captured Einsatzkommando Tunis correspondence available at Imperial War Museum, London.

Michael, if you are so willing to vilify the research of others, where are your publications to rebut them. I do not see anything you have written on amazon or abebooks, unlike the scholarly works of both Mallmann and Cüppers.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#6

Post by Von Schadewald » 13 Aug 2017, 21:58

The Sefardic (or more correctly, "Mizrachi") Jews of N.Africa were a different breed of Jew altogether from the Ashkenazic Jews of Europe. They were as far away as can be imagined from anything to do with the Nazi myth of "an international world Jewish banking conspiracy". Yet the Germans were prepared to invest considerable victory-sapping resources in to killing them all. The 40,000 olive-skinned Sefardic Jews of the Greek coastal paradise of Salonika were all sent on a 1000 mile hellish ride on valuable trains, to be gassed to death immediately on arrival at Auschwitz.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#7

Post by michael mills » 14 Aug 2017, 10:08

With regard to Weinberg, I have read some of his earlier works, and I found them very informative. But it seems to me that he has fallen victim to the condition that often afflicts historians who harbour a deep-seated and bitter antipathy toward the subject of their research. As long as they are able to keep that antipathy under control, they can write balanced, unbiased history, but it often happens that eventually their antipathy overwhelms them and has a deleterious effect on their writing, turning into propaganda rather than sober history.

That is what seems to have happened to Weinberg in this case; the quoted passage is manifestly an expression of a paranoid judeocentrism, with its assertion that the reason for Hitler's invasions of various countries was to get hold of the Jews living there for the purpose of killing them. That judeocentrism reaches an absurd level with the assertion that the reason for sending the Afrika Korps under Rommel to North Africa was to "to salvage the killing of the Jews in Egypt, Palestine and elsewhere in the Middle East, with the murder commando at his headquarters."

The fact is that the Afrika Korps was sent to Libya in early 1941 to prevent its being conquered by the British, after the crushing defeat of the Italian forces that had invaded Egypt in late 1940. The purpose of sending the Afrika Korps had nothing whatever to do with the presence of Jews in the Middle East, and everything to do with preventing the coast of North Africa from falling under British control, which would pose a threat to Italy (as of course eventually happened). It is quite possible that Hitler had little knowledge or concern about the Jews of the Middle East, since for him the essential Jewish threat came from the Bolshevik Jews of the Soviet Union and the capitalist Jews of Western Europe and the United States.

This whole idea of a gigantic pincer movement, with Rommel's Afrika Korps up from the south through Egypt and the German forces in the Soviet Union moving down through the Caucasus, is a total myth, even though it was to a certain extent propagated by Hitler himself. The sole mission given to Rommel was to support the Italian forces to the extent necessary to prevent the fall if Libya to the British, as is shown by the small size of the German force placed at his disposal. In fact, throughout Rommel's period in North Africa the bulk of the forces under his command consisted of Italian troops, and they fought quite well with German support.

Rommel was not given any orders to advance into Egypt, let alone into Palestine or Syria. When he did invade Egypt it was entirely on his own initiative, and Hitler was very angry with him for doing so.

The statement that Rommel was in the same position as the Wehrmacht commanders in the Soviet Union is simply contrary to historical fact. There was no German civilian administration in Libya, as there was in the occupied Soviet Union, and there was no "murder commando" at Rommel's headquarters. There is also no convincing evidence of any plan or intention to carry out an anti-Jewish extermination campaign in the Middle East or North Africa. The documents discovered by Mallmann and Cueppers do reveal a plan to establish an "Einsatzkommando Aegypten", but they do not specify any anti-Jewish role for that envisaged unit. It needs to be borne in mind that there were many SS-Police Einsatzgruppen sent to many of the countries under German occupation, and by no means all of them had a specific anti-Jewish function, for example, there was an Einsatzgruppe sent to occupied France, but it did not roam around the French countryside killing Jews.

With regard to Mallmann and Cueppers, they did make an important contribution in discovering the documents relating to the planned "Einsatzkommando Aegypten", but their failing is that they drew highly prejudicial conclusions from the relatively sparse material they found, conclusions that are more propaganda rather than genuine history, in that they peddle the idea of a conspiracy between the German Government and the Palestinian Arab leadership to cooperate in the extermination of the Jews of the Middle East. Cueppers in particular has become an anti-Muslim propagandist, in cahoots with that notorious paranoid pro-Zionist Matthias Kuenzel; I have seen Cueppers in Kuenzel's visual material, peddling the idea of the Nazi-Arab conspiracy to exterminate the Jews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_K%C3%BCntzel

http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents ... nazi-roots

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_C%C3%BCppers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_qah5zHAoA

As a final comment, it needs to be borne in mind that the comprehensive physical destruction of the Jewish populations under German control really got underway when Germany failed to achieve victory, in particular when Barbarossa failed, which opened the prospect that Germany might eventually be defeated. In many ways, the launching of the Europe-wide killing program was a reaction to the looming prospect of eventual defeat, which meant that all other options for removing the Jews from the German living space, such as exile to some distant territory, would be closed off. Since an Axis conquest of the Middle East could only have occurred in a situation where Barbarossa had been successful and the Soviet Union had been knocked out, the conditions that led to the commencement of a comprehensive massacre of the Jewish populations under German control would not have applied, and there would have been no need to start a massacre of the Jews living in the Middle East.

After all, before the commencement of Barbarossa the German Government had had control over close to four million Jews in Poland, Germany, and Central and Western Europe, but had not begun to kill them en masse. That is because the Germans were confident that they would achieve final victory through the destruction of Soviet power, and therefore would be able to impose a territorial solution to the "Jewish Problem".

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#8

Post by michael mills » 14 Aug 2017, 13:40


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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#9

Post by michael mills » 14 Aug 2017, 13:53

Another example of Cueppers' anti-Palestinian propaganda and agitation:

https://www.a3wsaar.de/aktion/irgendwas ... -cueppers/

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#10

Post by michael mills » 15 Aug 2017, 03:41

This is the book by Mallmann and Cueppers:

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=vj ... rs&f=false

It is enough to read the introduction to realise that the purpose of the book is not to give an unbiased account of the involvement of National Socialist Germany in the Middle East, but rather to instrumentalise that history in the service of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, pro-Israel propaganda in the present day.

It is noteworthy that Mallmann and Cueppers praise the work of the islamophobic extremist Matthias Kuentzel, even though they admit that he writes without consulting archival sources. That praise of a pseudo-academic anti-Muslim activist demonstrates their bias and lack of intellectual integrity.

I note that Stephen Tyas is mentioned as one of the scholars who provided input to the book.

For a truly unbiased account of the relations of National Socialist Germany with the Arab world, I recommend the works of Francis Nicosia and Tom Segev.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#11

Post by steve248 » 15 Aug 2017, 14:02

Michael,

You have posted over 8000 messages, many demeaning the work of other scholars. Those scholars whose research you find do not match your own opinions and beliefs. I find none of your own research published in any format, providing others with the opportunity to criticize, or indeed praise.

I have opined that there developed German military offensives on a grand scale involving a push by Rommel across Egypt into the Iraqi and Iranian oilfields (what the British called Persia to a large extent at the time). The northern arm swinging down the Caucasus into northern Iraq. Despite British and Soviet armies defeating these respective German armies, does not mean that was not the objective. RSHA VI C and the Abwehr sent over a dozen parachute agents into this region to foment trouble and create a fifth column to help invading German armies that never came. The recent publications by Adrian O'Sullivan (available on amazon) give extensive details about this. Back on 28 February 1946, Counter Intelligence War Room in London (staffed by intelligence officers of Britain, USA, France) published a Liquidation Report on RSHA VI C activities and state:
"...it is to be remembered that in the course of 1942 the German armies were already penetrating deep into Russian territory, and Gruppe VI C presumably did not attach too great importance to Persia in the expectation that they would enter the country by military operations. The expected and much-heralded success in the East would make everything else quite simple."
I am not going to quote military references, of which there are many to be found.

That you do not appreciate the research of Mallmann and Cüppers as published - see your own amazon links - does not mean either have a present day agenda regarding the Middle East and the predicament Jews and Arabs find themselves. Both Mallmann and Cüppers may be historians of "Modern German History", their interest is chiefly the National Socialist period. Your attempts to smear them with present-day anti-arab positions is plainly ludicrous.

As you pointed out I am quoted in their book, which I had forgotten, however my supply of British archival documents to them was so scant I had to buy the book myself. These must be documents you suggest are biased. If you have the German edition, "Halbmond und Hakenkreuz" you might look at page 138. On 20 July 1942 Walther Rauff, commander of "Das Einsatzkommando bei der Panzerarmee Afrika" flew to Tobruk and "von Generalfeldmarschall Rommel die notwendigen Instruktionen für den Einsatz". Rauff was not going to Tobruk for military instructions, that was not his job. His job was entirely more sinister. This quote is referenced to a Bundesarchiv Signatur - they type of archival reference you find so difficult to accept.

What else? The idea that the Final Solution of the Jewish Question would begin once a German defeat loomed. I don't think so. The Final Solution was well underway before then. Belzec extermination camp had opened and closed before the defeat at Stalingrad having killed 434,508 Jews (see the Hoefle telegram - yes I co-wrote the article for 'Holocaust and Genocide Studies'). The extermination campaign was well under way at Chelmno (Kulmhof), Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz. All long before defeat loomed, more when victory was at elusive hand and well before the end of 1942.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#12

Post by steve248 » 15 Aug 2017, 14:12

The Francis Nicosia book, "Nazi Germany and the Arab World", looks interesting so I have ordered a copy.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#13

Post by michael mills » 16 Aug 2017, 06:01

An interesting article about Rauff working for Israeli Intelligence:

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/in-t ... e-1.216923

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#14

Post by michael mills » 16 Aug 2017, 06:26

An interesting article about Rauff's time in Tunisia, from December 1942 to March 1943.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 58,00.html

It seems he organised the conscription of Tunisian Jews for labour on defensive fortifications, but there were no killings.

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Re: Holocaust implementation in N.Africa

#15

Post by michael mills » 16 Aug 2017, 08:03

On 20 July 1942 Walther Rauff, commander of "Das Einsatzkommando bei der Panzerarmee Afrika" flew to Tobruk and "von Generalfeldmarschall Rommel die notwendigen Instruktionen für den Einsatz".
What instructions did Rauff receive from Rommel? Are they known? Or are they only guessed at?

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