The Third Reich in the Arab World after 1945

(To Lorenzo Lena)
22/10/24

By the end of 1944, with the German army in retreat and no prospect of a breakthrough, the Middle East had not been directly threatened since the days of the battles of El-Alamein and Stalingrad. The British Mandate of Palestine, however, continued to cause problems for London, of which the Jewish Revolt, a series of increasingly bloody actions that within three years would convince the government to give up control of the territory, was only the latest in a series of chronological order.

It was in this context that Operation was carried out. Atlas, inside which we find characters who would mark the years to come. On the night of October 6, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress flew over Jericho, in the West Bank, a standard bomber of the United States Army Air Force built in several thousand units. The crew belonged to the Kampfgeschwader 200, a special unit of the Nazi Air Force specialized in the use of captured aircraft. Inside, three Germans and two Arabs. Kurt Wieland, Werner Frank and Friedrich Deininger, of the Brandenburg Regiment, raider unit, and exponents of the Templar Society, a German religious community born in the Middle East and involved in the conflicts between Germany and the United Kingdom. Frank and Deininger were born in Jaffa, Wieland had moved there at the age of seven. The two Arabs were Thulkifl Abdul Latif and Hassan Salamah, loyalists of the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husayni, in exile in Berlin since the pro-Nazi coup sponsored in Iraq in 1941 had failed. Salamah was the father of a three-year-old boy, Ali Hassan Salamah, future leader of the terrorist group September Black.

The objectives of the mission they are controversial. The intention was to recruit informants who could carry out sabotage actions. Al-Husayni was very interested in fomenting unrest among the Muslim population and the Jewish community. Some Israeli historians have claimed that the intention was to poison Tel Aviv's water system, but no evidence of this has been found, nor any indication in British or German archives.

Atlas failed from the start. The launch was made on the wrong coordinates, alarming the security forces. The locals, who according to al-Husayni would have given their support, refused to cooperate. Wiedland, Frank and Latif were arrested after a manhunt that lasted several days. Deininger remained a fugitive until 1946 and Salamah, who had broken his ankle when landing, was the only one who could not be found. The interrogations reconstructed the phases of the operation and which organizations were involved (the security, secret service of the SS under the orders of General Walter Schellenberg, who at a dinner organized by the Mufti had declared: “I am thrilled to meet the Mufti personally and I hope that this mission will be concluded successfully and with it the Arabs will be able to realize their desire to free themselves forever from the Jewish danger.”).

Atlas contains elements characteristic of the links between Nazi-fascism and Arab nationalism at the time of the Second World War. It would be historically wrong to maintain an automatism between the Islamic religion and Nazi-fascism.. During the war years, hundreds of thousands of Muslims fought in the British/Indian, French and Soviet armies, despite the Nazi propaganda spread by extremists like al-Husayni. It is true, however, that the ruling class formed after the Great War was imbued with ideologies close to Nazism, when not compromised by direct and deep connections with the Third Reich.

Al-Husseini failed in every one of his initiatives, from the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 to the Iraqi coup d'état of 1941, up to the disastrous Arab-Israeli war of 1948, when his Army of the Holy Jihad (local or European volunteers, veterans of Muslim formations in the German army) was interned by order of King Abdullah I of Jordan. One of the reasons for the clash between Palestinians and Jordanians that led, in 1951, to the assassination of Abdullah himself at the hands of a follower of al-Husseini in front of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem.

Yet, Amin al-Husayni is remembered as a champion of that cause that he helped lead down a path without success, like the Egyptian leader Jamal Abdel Nasser, whose failures range from the United Arab Republic, an Egypt-Syria federation started in 1958 and wrecked in 1961, to the intervention in Yemen, an inter-Arab war that cost about two hundred thousand deaths. Until the defeat of 1967, in a war sought by Nasser against Israel that dealt the final blow to his regime. In the meantime, he had occupied the Gaza area and suppressed every form of Palestinian political autonomy. Throughout the XNUMXs, Nasser welcomed Nazi exiles like Johannes von Leers (Omar Amin, after converting to Islam) Sturmbannfürer of the Waffen SS and an official of Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, which he helped spread throughout the Islamic world The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but also scientists such as Heinz Krug or Wolfgang Pilz, who contributed to the Egyptian missile program.

With the exception of Jordan, not coincidentally the only country in the region to have maintained a reasonable stability until today, the post-1945 leaderships have been torn apart in a chaos in which the ideological and practical imprint of Nazi-fascism has played a significant role. Syria, which from 1949 to 1963 saw four successful coups d'état, founded theArab Liberation Army under the aegis of the Arab League, in opposition to its rival Army of the Holy Jihad which was headed by the Arab Higher Committee, based in Gaza. Both formations included former Nazi soldiers, especially members of the 13. SS Waffen Division handschar who had fought in Bosnia. The Liberation Army was commanded by Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a guest in Berlin during the war and one of the organizers of the Iraqi coup d'état of 1941, and operated mainly in the Upper Galilee against the Israelis and to prevent the Jordanians from taking over that territory. The Jihad Army was commanded by Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, nephew of Amin, and among the commanders stood out that Hassan Salamah had been parachuted by the SS in Jericho. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and Hassan Salamah both fell in combat against the Israelis in 1948, and the two Armies were dissolved without having given the slightest help to the Palestinian cause and indeed contributing to the political fragmentation of the Arab world. From the XNUMXs, Alois Brunner, a close collaborator of Adolf Eichmann who became a consultant to the secret services of the Hafez al-Assad regime, found refuge in Syria.

It can be said that the very first years of the new independent Arab governments were characterized by two major dynamics: the struggle against Israel and the internal one between conservative-monarchical and progressive-revolutionary governments. The latter, in particular Egypt and Syria, aligned with the Soviet Union in the international context, were perhaps not paradoxically the most receptive to Nazi exiles suited to authoritarian contexts with a hierarchical centralization of public life, the figure of the Ra'is replaced by that of the Leader, as a leader distinguished by his activism and not by fortuitous dynastic succession. Even today, those countries that have long and openly encouraged political extremism – counting on the technical and ideological contribution of the survivors of the Third Reich – lack that embryonic modern civil society that instead, with great difficulty, is emerging elsewhere in the region.