During World War II, Berlin backed Islamism and militant Arab nationalism. Al-Husaini was its candidate to lead a revolution, rule the Middle East, assist in destroying the British there, kill the Jews, and help ensure that Adolf Hitler ruled the world supreme. The grand mufti was the Nazis’ most important nonstate ally, and both sides intended that the radical Arab-Muslim forces, once in control of their countries, become a full partner in the Axis alongside Germany, Italy, and Japan. This alliance between al-Husaini and Hitler, militant Arab nationalist-Islamist forces and Nazis, was vital for waging and winning the war on many levels.
First, al-Husaini pledged to provide tens of thousands of Muslim troops to fight for the Axis. While al-Husaini only recruited a few hundred Arabs, he helped raise more than twenty thousand Soviet and Balkan Muslims.
Second, al-Husaini provided valuable intelligence through networks of contacts and agents stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan and India.
Third, al-Husaini promised to organize uprisings to tie down Allied troops, sabotage enemy installations, and block supply lines. While his successes were limited, the Allies did have to take into account the possibility that revolts might break out, and thus al-Husaini’s efforts were somewhat effective.
Fourth, al-Husaini gave good advice on how Axis propaganda could appeal to Arabs and Muslims.
Fifth, al-Husaini and his partners promised to bring Arab countries into the war by either overthrowing or winning over governments. They succeeded in Iraq and came close in Egypt. German forces’ failure to conquer more of the Middle East was the biggest factor determining the radical Arabs’ failure to recruit more rulers.
Finally, al-Husaini planned to extend the mass murder of Jews to Muslim-populated areas, a genocide that the Nazis considered an integral part of the war effort. This was indeed implemented where German rule extended in the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Balkans.
History could easily have turned out differently, and all these goals could have been achieved, with the Third Reich triumphant, al-Husaini dictator over the Middle East, and all Jews outside of the Americas dead. The radical Arab and Muslim forces tried their best to achieve this result.
When al-Husaini left Beirut and arrived in Baghdad on October 15, 1939, the nationalists there received him as a hero.1 Al-Husaini knew many of them from Ottoman army days, and others from his first visit to Baghdad in 1932. As they watched World War II begin, al-Husaini’s Palestine Arabs and the militant Iraqi nationalists were eager to be Germany’s allies. To organize the Arab world as part of the Axis, hardline nationalists and Islamists established the secret Arab Committee for Cooperation among Arabs. Its impressive membership included Palestine Arab, Saudi, and Iraqi leaders along with a strong representation from Syria. Largely thanks to al-Husaini, the committee also had strong contacts among Muslims in Europe, Egypt, Libya, and Lebanon.2
The Iraqi participants included Prime Minister al-Kailani, Justice Minister Shaukat, and as-Sabawi, translator of Mein Kampf into Arabic. From Syria came forty-nine-year-old Shukri al-Quwatli, a future, postwar president who had attended al-Husaini’s 1931 Jerusalem conference, and Zaki al-Khatib, a future prime minister.
Saudi King Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud sent his trusted private secretary, Yasin, and his political adviser al-Hud, who had visited Hitler the previous year to conclude the secret weapons deal for al-Husaini.3 The veteran pro-German Islamist Arslan was European representative, and worked closely with von Oppenheim, who called him the “best political head on Middle Eastern affairs.”4
To cement the alliance, the committee sent Shaukat to Ankara to see von Papen.5 The conversation went well, and as the next step al-Husaini sent his secretary, Kamal Uthman Haddad, to Berlin to meet with the Foreign Ministry’s Ernst von Weizsäcker6 at his office in a confiscated Jewish home.7 Al-Kailani spoke with Italy’s ambassador in Iraq, who assured him of Mussolini’s support for throwing the British and French out of the Middle East.8
The Germans, for their part, were also working on an alliance with the Arabs. By summer 1940, when France collapsed, von Oppenheim was already in Syria, traveling frequently to Baghdad to coordinate with al-Kailani and al-Husaini on their plan for pro-German coups in Iraq and Syria.9 Watching von Oppenheim closely, the then-neutral Americans were impressed with his effectiveness. They wryly claimed that he was so eager to prove his loyalty to the Third Reich that he raised his arm and heiled Hitler even when talking on the telephone. Despite—or more likely because—of his Jewish ancestry, Baron von Oppenheim, as the Americans called him, went out of his way to express his hatred of Jews.10
On July 25, 1940, von Oppenheim presented to his government a detailed “Union Jack” plan on how to stir unrest in British-ruled areas. Theo Habicht, the German under secretary who had previously restructured the Austrian Nazi organization; von Ribbentrop;11 von Papen in Ankara; and von Weizsäcker in Berlin were all consulted. A month later, al-Husaini sent his own proposal to Berlin which was largely a copy of von Oppenheim’s version.12
Thus, when von Weizsäcker again met al-Husaini’s envoy Haddad, on October 18, 1940, the German official said they had a deal. Von Weizsäcker read him the German-Italian declaration of support for the Arabs.13 It was broadcast repeatedly in Arabic by Radio Berlin and Italy’s Radio Bari.14 On January 14, 1941, the Germans and Italians formally issued a declaration supporting Arab independence.15
Six days later, al-Husaini wrote a nine-page letter to Hitler further defining the alliance. The Palestine question, said the grand mufti, united them in their joint hatred against the British and Jews.16 He asked Germany and Italy to support the merger of most Arabs into a single state called the Greater Arab Empire, Greater Arabia, or United Arab State.17 Al-Husaini never mentioned any Palestinian Arab nationalism but instead proposed, faithful to his past Greater Syrian stance, to make Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan a single federated state with a Nazi-style system.18 Later, he added Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf emirates to his projected empire. And later still al-Husaini threw in Egypt, North Africa, and Sudan as well.
The other main demand was Axis help for the Arabs to wipe out all Jews in the Middle East. With Hitler openly declaring that a world war meant the “eradication of the Jewish race in Europe,”19 al-Husaini sought to do the same thing in his region.
The Arab committee offered to aid Germany with oil and other support for Hitler’s war effort. It claimed to have ten thousand men ready for an armed uprising to overthrow Transjordan’s pro-British monarch, seize Palestine, and wipe out the Jews there. The committee promised that its nonexistent army and the Arab masses of Palestine would defeat the forty thousand British troops there. The revolt would be carried on with weapons from French stockpiles in Syria which, after France’s fall, was now a virtual German protectorate.20
Finally, the committee suggested that the pro-German Iraqi regime could block British reinforcements to the Middle East sent from India. And if the British did invade Iraq, the Baghdad government pledged to fight them with help from German advisers.
The Germans completely accepted these claims and saw al-Husaini, according to internal documents, as the legitimate spokesman for the people of Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—the whole Arab east.21
Within the German government, though, there were some, especially in the Foreign Ministry, who were skeptical about the ability of al-Husaini and his colleagues to deliver on their promises. Von Hentig favored quiet cooperation with the Arabs, not a publicly declared alliance.22 German ambassador to France Otto Abetz worried that a pro-Arab policy might push French colonial administrators in Syria and Lebanon into the arms of the Allies. He also warned that toying with Islam could produce Muslim-Christian conflicts in future.23
But the outcome was not in doubt. The region’s oil was vital for Germany, Grobba argued, and must be denied to the British.24 Making Iraq into Germany’s ally was a great opportunity. As for whether jihad might turn against German interests, Grobba cynically claimed, “The Arabs we use currently in our game do not fight for religious but for political goals.”25 Thus, Berlin decided on an Arab policy based on three main principles.
First, al-Husaini was its main partner in the Middle East, followed by Iraq. Given his primacy, funding should go directly to al-Husaini and through him to others.
Second, German intelligence would organize sabotage operations and promote nationalist-Islamist insurrections in Palestine and Jordan.
Third, Berlin should not rush to support independence for Syria and Lebanon publicly so as not to antagonize the Vichy French rulers there who were also German allies.26 Nevertheless, the Germans were ready to use France’s Middle East colonies, which they controlled,27 to provide French weapons to Arab allies and as a base for an Arab army to launch what the grand mufti called his war against “the democracies and international Jewry.”28
Aside from Syria, the pro-Nazi Arabs’ main asset was control over Iraq and its army. Pressed by the Axis offensive in North Africa, the British shifted many soldiers from Iraq to Egypt, weakening their garrison and making Baghdad’s resistance more likely to succeed. Thus, the Germans concluded that al-Kailani’s regime, with relatively little aid, could defeat the reduced British forces in Iraq.
Yet al-Husaini had even more to bring to the bargaining table with Hitler. The kings of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with whom al-Husaini had close secret links, were ready to collaborate the moment they concluded Germany would probably win the war. With German control over Syria and Lebanon, a victory by pro-German forces in Iraq plus an Islamist-nationalist uprising in Palestine and Transjordan could persuade the kings to ally openly with the Axis. In Egypt, al-Husaini also had many assets cultivated for almost two decades: the monarch himself, top politicians, army officers, the Young Egypt Party, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
There was also a third partner to this German-Arab alliance: the French collaborationist Vichy government and its officials in the Middle East. That regime knew of the plots by al-Husaini and von Oppenheim and were ready to cooperate if the Germans respected, despite Arab demands, future French control over Syria and Lebanon.29
Given this situation, al-Husaini seemed the man of the hour, eventually able to deliver the entire Middle East to Hitler. Thus, on March 1, Berlin and Rome decided to work with the Arab Cooperation Committee, as it was now called. At the grand mufti’s request, they specified that the Arabs could treat Jews in their own lands as Germany did in Europe.30
On March 11, von Weizsäcker informed Haddad of Hitler’s personal support for the grand mufti’s leadership of the Arabs and Muslims.31 Within a month, the Germans gave al-Husaini a hundred thousand reichsmarks, with twenty thousand more every month paid equally by Germany and Italy.32 Hitler wrote al-Husaini on April 3 further confirming his personal support, and praising the Arabs as an ancient civilization quite capable of self-government. He recognized full Arab independence and agreed that the British and the Jews were common enemies.33
While it had taken a full year—in retrospect a fatal delay—to confirm the alliance, the partners now moved quickly. Prime Minister al-Kailani made a military pact with the Germans. The plan was for him to be cautious, avoiding confrontation with Britain. The next step was also taken, starting to build a German base in Syria, run by Grobba, to seize control there and then extend the chain of German client regimes to Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. The Germans planned to give Arab revolutionaries lavish funding, oust French officials, and install a pro-German Arab government in Damascus. Grobba and his staff created an Arab Legion of 1000 men as the nucleus—“under the green flag of Arab freedom,” in a German dispatch’s words—for an Arab army.34 Von Oppenheim praised its commander, al-Qawuqji, al-Husaini’s military adviser, as an extraordinary leader.35
In May 1941 Hitler met with Admiral François Darlan, Vichy’s military commander, and made a deal giving the Germans military facilities in the French colonies of Syria and North Africa. Darlan’s commander in Syria, General Henri Dentz, supported the planned insurrections and supplied arms from his depots for the Arab Legion and the Iraqi army.36 When the Turks refused to let the equipment pass through their country to Baghdad, Dentz pretended it was being shipped through Iraq en route to France’s Asian colonies.37 He obtained Turkish transit permits for two trains and fueled German planes headed to Baghdad.38 If Germany helped, Dentz was even ready to send his French troops to fight the British in Palestine and Egypt. For all practical purposes, the French authorities in Syria and Lebanon had themselves joined the Axis side.
In retrospect, one may see all of these schemes as inevitably illusory because in the end they did fail. Yet that result was not preordained. After all, Hitler appeared to be the victor in Europe and was now patron of both Islamism and Arab nationalism. Germany’s anti-Jewish, anti-British message seemed a match falling on dry tinder, and his impressive array of Arab allies gave lavish pledges of support. Germany was already close to controlling Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Given this strong start and apparent widespread Arab support the region could become a battlefield, tying down Allied troops and supplies so that German forces could win the war. A Nazi world seemed within reach.
Von Oppenheim and his colleagues were optimistic. The British, von Oppenheim suggested, might even abandon Iraq to its pro-German regime in order to focus on Egypt’s defense. Once the pro-British government was overthrown in Jordan, the Saudi king would be bribed with that country’s southern part, with the rest going to al-Husaini’s Palestine government.39
A German agent in Syria described the mood there by quoting a common saying among Arabs: “No more monsieur and mister [no French or British colonialism]; Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth.”40 Aside from the Muslim Brotherhood, the Young Egypt Party, the monarchs and military officers in Egypt and Iran; the grand mufti as leader of the Palestine Arabs; Iraq’s government; and the Saudi monarchy, additional pro-German forces were arising in the region. The most durable of these would prove be the Ba’th, a Pan-Arab nationalist party based on the fascist model. One branch would rule Iraq for forty-five years after the war, brought down only by an American-led invasion in 2003; another would rule Syria for a half-century.
The Ba’th’s founders were students who, in the contemporary spirit of radical Arab nationalist thinking, sought a strong leader to achieve for Arabs what Hitler had done for Germans. One of the books that influenced them was an anti-Semitic work by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue who would soon become al-Husaini’s friend and supervisor in Berlin.41 On November 29, 1940, they founded the new party using a word (ba’th means renaissance in Arabic), frequent in Nazi propaganda to the Arabs and with a program paralleling that of the Nazi Party.42 Two decades later, after he had been Syria’s prime minister, one of the founders, Sami al-Jundi, recalled those early days: “We had been racist admirers of Nazism. We . . . were among the first who liked to translate Hitler’s book. In Damascus we felt admiration for Nazism.”43
The movement soon spread to Iraq, where one of its early adherents was a Nazi-sympathizing officer named Khairallah Talfah. When the pro-German regime fell its pro-British replacement court-martialed Talfah and gave him a five-year prison sentence. After his release, Talfah became surrogate father and political mentor to his young nephew, Saddam Husain, who would marry Talfah’s oldest daughter and make his father-in-law Baghdad’s mayor.
With so many assets, what went wrong with the German-Arab-Islamist strategy? The answer is that the British were too fast; the Germans too slow and set counterproductive priorities; and the Arabs did not fulfill their promises to Berlin.
One problem was the priority Hitler gave to conquering the Balkans and USSR, unrealistically assuming that this would happen fast enough to permit a quick transfer of German forces to the Middle East. Until that happened, Germany planned a low-cost policy in the region. Local allies would take the lead in subverting the British presence. The Germans would establish intelligence networks, bribe politicians, and subsidize newspapers, while arming and training client Arab military forces.44
Instead, German forces were tied up in Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring, delaying invasion of the USSR to June. Then, although the Germans advanced in the Soviet Union they did not do so quickly enough to avoid the harsh winter’s effects and growing Soviet resistance. Berlin’s timetable was upset. Instead of marching into Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, German soldiers were bogged down in the snowdrifts of the Eastern Front in Russia. German army chief Franz Halder would later complain that Hitler’s Arab policy was seriously flawed because of his ignorance of the region and shortcomings in German intelligence, as seen in the Iraq failure. Another mistake was that Berlin was too worried about not offending the French and Italians by pushing harder and more openly for Arab independence and unity.45
The second fatal factor was the poor performance of Berlin’s Arab allies. Al-Husaini and his allies had promised a hundred thousand Arab soldiers but in the end recruited only about a thousand outside of Iraq. As for Iraq, the pro-German Egyptian General al-Misri, who had spent years there before the war, was skeptical. “You don’t know Iraqi politicians as well as I do,” he told fellow Egyptian officer as-Sadat; they would mess up.46 Al-Misri was right.
On April 1, as the Nazis began their advance into Yugoslavia and Greece, al-Kailani and the pro-German “Golden Square” military faction made their own move without consulting the Germans. When the British asked to bring new troops through Iraq on their way to Egypt, al-Kailani refused and purged all the remaining pro-British Iraqi officials. Skirmishes broke out between arriving British units and the Iraqi army on April 19. Although nine thousand Iraqi troops surrounded the Royal Air Force base at Habbaniyya for an entire month, they made no decisive attack. Al-Kailani and al-Husaini took two weeks after the confrontation began to request German supplies and air support. In early May, attacking British planes broke the Habbaniyya siege.47
Caught off guard, the Germans scrambled to send aid.48 Al-Husaini’s aide Haddad, alias Max Müller, traveled between Berlin, Ankara, and Baghdad to coordinate operations.49 Disappointing his radical friends’ expectations, the Saudi king shrewdly decided not to get involved and rejected al-Kailani’s request for arms.50
Grobba arrived in Baghdad on May 6. The following day, Hitler agreed to send a squadron of German Messerschmitt 110 fighters and one of Heinkel-111 bombers to Iraq.51 Dubbed the “falcon of Palestine” for his exploits with the Ottomans during World War I, Grobba’s brother-in-law, General Hellmuth Felmy, took command of the military effort.52 By May 16, German planes were battling the British in dogfights over Baghdad. Three trainloads of military equipment were sent from Syria to Iraq on May 12 and 28.
Germany also sought to use a covert asset, the Palestine Germans, Arabic-speaking men who had grown up in German Protestant religious colonies established in Ottoman Palestine during the previous century. Based in Greece and led by Theodor von Hippel, a World War I veteran, about two dozen of them were trained to sabotage Iraqi oil wells and pipelines. But the British moved into Iraq before the team could get there.53 German propaganda claimed that their measures would liberate the Iraqis from British rule.54 Yet the Germans were too slow in reacting to events, too far away, and gave Iraq too low a priority to do so.55
Even more blame can be put on al-Husaini and his Iraqi allies, who had exaggerated their power, acted too soon, and spent more time talking big than organizing for battle. The Abwehr was shocked to discover that al-Husaini had no plan for actually staging insurrections. The mismanaged Iraqi army lacked fuel for its airplanes despite Iraq being one of the world’s main oil producers. Reconnaissance flights and German bombing raids against Habbaniyya failed due to poor coordination with Iraqi ground forces.56 So incompetent was Iraq’s military that on May 12 it mistakenly shot down an arriving German plane, killing Axel von Blomberg, the German military mission’s field commander and son of Hitler’s former war minister. The fiasco was so embarrassing that Grobba—who witnessed the incident personally—insisted the British had shot down von Blomberg’s plane. The pilot said there had been damage in a dogfight but the plane had been brought down by the Iraqis.57
The British were also helped by the fact that Italy’s North African offensive had stalled. They thus did not need to consider abandoning Iraq and shifting all forces from there to Egypt.58 Faced with their Italian ally’s failure, it was the Germans who had to send more troops to North Africa, leaving them fewer resources to throw into the region’s eastern sector.
As a result, the Iraqi revolt became not a triumph but such a disaster for the Germans that it triggered an internal quarrel about who was to blame. Wilhelm Melchers of the Foreign Ministry claimed Grobba had given al-Kailani a green light to rebel without Berlin’s authorization. Melchers’s colleague von Weizsäcker denied this.59 Grobba blamed Germany’s army. Werner Junck, leader of the military mission in Iraq, asked for a court martial to clear himself of this charge. Göring backed him and rejected Grobba’s claim.60
When he met al-Husaini six months later, Hitler made some apology for having been unable to give sufficient help; al-Husaini later rationalized the defeat by attributing the revolt’s failure to sabotage by a Jewish fifth column of infiltrators and spies.61
In contrast to Arab incompetence and German indecision, the British handled the Middle East crisis decisively and reaped total victory.62
First, the British invaded Iraq with help from the British-officered Transjordanian army, which crossed the desert from Amman, easily defeated Iraq’s army, reached the capital’s outskirts on May 30, and installed a pro-British government under as-Said. Al-Kailani and al-Husaini fled. Along with them went al-Qawuqji, on the last train to Tehran full of escaping Iraqi officers. He fought on the Syrian front until he was wounded on a scouting mission and taken to Berlin for treatment.63
Before the British could gain full control of Baghdad, pro-German forces launched a pogrom in its Jewish quarter, killing at least 180 people, injuring 1,000 more, and looting thousands of homes and businesses. In honor of this riot, as-Sabawi later took the name by which the massacre was called, the Farhud, as his personal codename.64
Second, with help from Free French and Zionist volunteers—including a young Moshe Dayan, who lost an eye in the campaign—the British attacked Syria and Lebanon. Despite resistance from Dentz’s much larger force and the German-backed Arab Legion, the British quickly gained control of the country by July 14.65 Al-Husaini’s soldiers fled through Turkey to German-held territory where they joined the Nazi army.
Third, the Soviets, now at war with Germany, and British seized Iran in a three-week operation beginning August 25. The Allies exiled the shah, who had flirted with Germany, and put on the throne his young son, who would rule until overthrown by the 1979 Islamist revolution. With the USSR governing the north and Britain the south, Iran’s oil went to the Allies, not the Axis. Military supplies also flowed into the USSR via this back door. The Germans could only rationalize the defeat by claiming that occupation tied down enemy troops.66
Within weeks, the threat of a German takeover in the Middle East—seemingly inevitable a few weeks earlier—evaporated. The Arab east was in Allied hands. Still, as the duke of Wellington had remarked of his victory at Waterloo 130 years earlier, it was a close thing. Churchill had already written in his history of World War I that if von Falkenhayn hadn’t attacked the srongest enemy at his strongest point, namely Verdun in 1916, but had turned against the softest spots of Germany’s weakest foe in Europe and had marched through Egypt and Mesopotamia to India, he might have earned for the German eagle the credit for future changes among the Asian peoples. German diplomats like Fritz Grobba claimed the same in regard to World War II: enemies of Hitler concealed from him the same great opportunity represented by the British Empire’s weakest spot in the Middle East.67 At any rate, the failures in Iraq, Iran, and Syria did not disillusion the Germans and Italians regarding al-Husaini’s importance or reliability.
Meanwhile, in Iran, the Allied occupiers rounded up pro-German Iraqi officers hiding there and sent them home to be executed or exiled to Rhodesia. Al-Husaini’s own family, including his wife, five daughters, and seventeen-year-old son Salah ad-Din, were permitted to return to Jerusalem.68 The surviving German agents and Arab allies fled to Turkey, where that neutral country’s government interned some of them. The Abwehr subsidized those who weren’t captured and in September 1941 organized a conference of Arab nationalist leaders there. Some pro-German Arabs remained in Istanbul to maintain contacts with underground movements in their home countries, collect intelligence, and await the day German troops arrived on their borders.
The grand mufti eluded capture in Tehran despite a £25,000 British reward offered for his capture. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden called him the British Empire’s number-one enemy in the Middle East. Al-Husaini immediately asked Berlin to grant him refuge in the Nazi capital.69 The Abwehr hid him in Japan’s embassy in Tehran since the British couldn’t touch the property of that still-neutral German ally.70 According to a U.S. intelligence report, al-Husaini was disguised as the Italian ambassador’s footman and left with the rest of the embassy staff when Iran broke relations with Italy. Al-Husaini arrived in Istanbul on September 23, 1941,71 and continued on a three-week journey to Berlin.72 Along the way he reflected on his life and the big political questions facing Arabs and Muslims. Passing through Romania and Hungary, he thought about how these lands had once been, but were no longer, Muslim-ruled, a sign of his civilization’s defeat and retreat. In Bulgaria, the food reminded him of the delicious shishkabab at the al-Hati Restaurant in Cairo. As he entered Italy, he recalled his World War I experiences, the battles of Ottoman Arab units under German command, and further back, the German-Arab alliance’s start with the kaiser’s 1898 trip to Jerusalem.73
Al-Husaini stopped off in Venice to visit Mussolini on November 4, 1941. The grand mufti asked Mussolini to urge Hitler to attack Egypt, then seize Palestine, make al-Husaini ruler, and liquidate the Jews there.74 This was precisely what the Germans planned.
As al-Husaini neared Berlin his ambition grew steadily. Visiting the Vatican set his imagination soaring to imagine himself as ruler of all Muslims. “How mighty is the Catholic bloc of twenty-six states,” al-Husaini thought, dreaming about restoring the caliphate.75 By the time he came to the German capital, al-Husaini believed he would wield equivalent power over the Muslims and probably thought of himself as the next caliph.
Figure 16. Letter of April 28, 1942 from Grand Mufti Amin al-Husaini and Iraqi ex-premier Rashid Ali al-Kailani to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (and his Italian counterpart Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano). They stress that “the Arab people are ready to fight the common enemies until the final victory,” and ask the Axis to support the Arab struggle against British oppression, Arab unification, and the abolition of the Jewish national home in Palestine. By May 14 the two Axis powers had agreed to these requests, thereby making the letter into a pact to liquidate Jews in the Middle East. The four signatories agreed to keep this text top secret and still hoped to gain access to Iraq, Iran and the Middle East via the Caucasus.
Al-Kailani, too, was on the way to Germany from his refuge in Turkey. He had already been put on Germany’s payroll at the rate of fifty-five hundred Turkish pounds a month. The Abwehr considered shipping him to Bulgaria in a packing case left in the consulate’s basement from prewar German archaeological expeditions, but then switched to another plan. When a seven-member German press delegation arrived in Turkey, the Germans informed their hosts that an eighth man, Herr Wackernagel, had come with the delegation to Istanbul but was too ill to accompany the others on their tour. The night before the group was to go home, al-Kailani arrived at the German consulate after sneaking away from a dental appointment. A German doctor wrapped him in bandages like a mumps patient, and the next morning al-Kailani was taken to the airport as Wackernagel. The acuity of the Turkish delegation on hand to say farewell was dimmed by hangovers from the previous evening’s party. They merely wished the sick man a quick recovery. Certain that al-Kailani would be useful in the future, Grobba urged von Ribbentrop and Hitler to receive him personally.76
Back in Iran, about two hundred reliable German residents and agents, led by the intelligence agent Erwin Ettel, waged a rearguard action. The Allies overrated their potential for carrying on subversion there, though even al-Husaini—who often exaggerated—had concluded that the German fifth column in Iran was unimpressive.77 The British-Soviet forces quickly quashed this underground, and Ettel had to leave on September 17.78 Moving to Turkey, he continued to direct German operations in Iran through radio broadcasts and infiltrated Iranian agents. Berlin hoped to keep up such operations until a German army advancing from the USSR might persuade Iranian officers to join up with Hitler’s imminent victory by rebelling.79
Captain Bernhardt Schulze-Holthus, Abwehr chief in Tabriz, went underground, protected by pro-German Iranian nationalists. At one time, he hid in a brothel. One cold night he went out disguised as a mullah, with a henna-dyed beard, dark silk trousers, and Persian clothes, walking along Shapur Street north to the main road and the city’s out-skirts for a meeting with his chief agent. The man told Schulze-Holthus that one of the shah’s top generals, Fazlollah Zahedi, promised, “A large part of Iran’s army is ready to rise at a signal from us.” But there was no way to communicate this news to Berlin. Schulze-Holthus’s wife, the only German available, was sent on the long, dangerous journey across the mountains by donkey and finally reached Istanbul, where she reported to the Abwehr office there. Zahedi, though, did not keep his promise. To avoid capture, Schulze-Holthus had to seek refuge with rebellious tribesman, and in July 1942, four more agents parachuted in to join him. They wore tribal clothes, built landing strips to receive supplies, and told Iranians they were fellow Aryans who wanted to help them rule their own country. Their main mission, never fulfilled, was to destroy oil installations so vital for the Allied war effort.80
The British, fearing Schulze-Holthus might sabotage the railroad carrying military supplies from Persian Gulf ports to the Soviet Union, chased him for several months until the tribesmen tired of the game and sold him to them.81 Thus, the British and Soviets controlled Iran, its oil, and the transport routes to the USSR without German interference. On January 29, 1943, Iran concluded an alliance with the British and Soviets; on September 9 the shah declared war on Germany.
Although Hitler had missed his 1941 chance in the Middle East he would get a second chance in 1942. Since the indirect method of backing Arab and Iranian forces had failed, the 1942 German strategy was to use Arabs and Muslims as auxiliaries awaiting the German armies’ advance through the USSR and North Africa. Hitler explained to al-Husaini and al-Kailani several times between November 1941 and July 1942 this plan of enclosing the region between those two pincers.82
Rather than fomenting insurrections, al-Husaini’s task shifted to providing the Axis with intelligence and propaganda while helping to recruit and train Muslim soldiers for Germany’s army.83 Al-Husaini and al-Kailani were still to be made rulers of their respective domains but only after German armies captured them. Acknowledging his value, the Italians followed Hitler’s example of a year earlier by recognizing al-Husaini as sole leader of all Arabs.84
In preparation, the Germans printed currency and manufactured uniforms for the projected Iraqi regime.85 Von Ribbentrop called the projected turning point the “Tiflis moment,” named after the Georgian capital. When Rommel’s army crossed the Suez Canal and simultaneously German troops reached Tiflis as they advanced through the Soviet Caucasus, the two Arab leaders plus the Indian nationalist Bose would rush to Tiflis, set up governments in exile there, and order revolts.86 As Rommel advanced into Egypt in 1942, al-Husaini cabled “the charming leader” Hitler that the big battle would come soon and the Arab people would prove themselves a worthy ally. If that failed, Grobba had warned, the British might flood all Arab lands with millions of Jewish immigrants who would enslave them forever.87
How, then, could al-Husaini bring German victory? On the North African front he was relatively weak, but he did have some useful agents. Chief among them was the Moroccan Taqi ad-Din al-Hilali.88 Born in Casablanca, al-Hilali became an Islamist while studying in Cairo and living in Saudi Arabia. After six years in India and Iraq, the well-traveled al-Hilali was hired to teach Arabic at Bonn University in 1936.89 Obtaining his doctorate at Berlin University in 1941, the forty-five-year-old al-Hilali became head of the culture section of al-Husaini’s Central Islam Institute and a Radio Berlin broadcaster. In 1942, al-Husaini sent him home to organize covert operations. One of al-Hilali’s ideas was to persuade Vichy France to release some North African Arab nationalists if they agreed to join the Axis. The French did so, one of those let go being Tunisia’s future president, al-Habib Burqiba, though he never actually helped the Germans.90 Those willing to collaborate were sent for training at the German commando base at Nizza, Italy.91
Al-Husaini placed much hope in another prisoner, Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi, an old Algerian rebel and German collaborator in World War I who the French had exiled to the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. But Germany’s friends, Vichy France and Spain, opposed releasing a man so dedicated to overthrowing their colonial rule in Morocco.92 U.S. intelligence considered trying to recruit Abd al-Karim and another veteran German collaborator, Libyan leader Idris as-Sanusi, but rejected the idea, fearing that either an American Islamist strategy might trigger future Christian-Muslim war or these two men would desert to the Germans.93
Regarding political strategy, al-Husaini suggested Germany recognize Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia as a Western Arab Union of States that would become part of the Axis. He predicted this new country would furnish 2.5 million Arab soldiers to fight alongside Germany. Nazi Party leaders were enthusiastic, but the army and Foreign Ministry were less so—Hitler had already double-crossed the Arabs by promising North Africa to Mussolini—so nothing was done.94
In addition to his political efforts, the grand mufti played an important role in shaping German propaganda directed at North Africa. The best way to win over Muslims there and elsewhere, al-Husaini advised, was to combine promises for independence and wiping out the Jews with large measures of flattery. He used these themes in his own broadcasts on Radio Berlin and the Voice of the Free Arabs station in Rome. The latter was guided by two of his aides, Dhu al-Kuffar Abd al-Latif and Salim al-Husaini, a nephew, and operated by fifteen Arab students.95
The single best way to win Arabs’ hearts, al-Husaini advised, was to preach hatred of the Jews, or in his words, “The Jewish attack and the plagues they carry.” Al-Husaini recommended telling Arabs that President Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew and a slave to Jewish masters. In contrast, the Germans should highlight Hitler’s statements dealing with his own religious faith, the certainty of victory, and evil British treatment of the Arabs.96 The Germans followed his advice. One theme was Islamic-oriented, quoting Muhammad, Islam’s founder, to justify Arabs fighting Judeo-Anglo-Bolshevist “infidels” enslaving Muslims. The other focused directly on anti-Jewish propaganda, calling Jews “evil parasites.”97 There was a problem, though, in adapting Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda for Arab audiences. Since unflattering physical descriptions of Jews, including portraying them as having large noses, could also apply to Arabs all of this material had to be dropped.98
Anti-Jewish hatred would not be confined merely to words. By May 14, 1942, Germany and Italy had also both formally agreed to al-Husaini’s request to liquidate the Jews in Palestine as soon as possible. But while the Germans couldn’t murder Jews in areas they didn’t possess, al-Husaini repeatedly pressed for quick action in those parts of North Africa they did control.99 The chance might be short-lived: once America entered the war in December 1941, German military intelligence expected an Allied landing on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.100
Vichy France and Italy, Germany’s allies who ruled North Africa, had already followed Berlin’s lead by instituting anti-Semitic regulations. The Italian government ordered all Jews in Libya under age forty-five to be imprisoned. Of 2,500 internees, 562 died in forced labor camps.101 Jewish properties were systematically plundered by Axis troops, European administrators, and local Arabs.102 In October 1940, the Vichy government revoked Algerian Jews’ citizenship rights. The Arab rulers in Morocco and Tunisia confirmed discriminatory anti-Jewish laws, further tightened in June 1941.103
Anticipating the conquest of Egypt, the thirty-six-year-old Walther Rauff, a naval officer who had helped develop mobile gas vans, went to see Rommel in June 1942, to ask his help in murdering all of Cairo’s Jews by such measures.104 Rommel, a traditional military officer disgusted by Nazi behavior, threw Rauff out.105 But Rauff didn’t need Rommel’s permission to operate behind German lines. He was named head of the Gestapo in Tunis and brought in one hundred Arab soldiers,106 supplemented by local Tunisians, to carry out genocide there.107 He hoped to build a European-style concentration camp108 but began by arrests, property confiscations, stealing valuables, and creating thirty forced labor camps.109
Rauff managed to kill 2,500 Tunisian Jews and sent 350 French, Arab, and Jewish oppositionists to concentration camps in Europe.110 Altogether, about 5,000 Jews in French-ruled Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya were murdered.111 When Rauff was reassigned to Italy in May 1943—where he would kill many Italian partisans and civilians—he received the German Silver Cross medal for his work in Tunisia.112 After the war, he escaped prosecution and went to work for Syrian intelligence.
Al-Husaini’s other priority was getting troops into the field, both to help the Germans and to strengthen his claim to become the Arabs’ ruler. He wrote von Ribbentrop on July 26 asking that Arab and especially Palestinian Arab commandos be sent to North Africa.113 German officials listed the pros and cons of such a step. On the negative side, Arab troops would probably get out of control, loot French settlers, and stage unauthorized pogroms against Jews.114 On the other hand, they could help win over local people and make them willing collaborators with the Nazis.115 In the end, German intelligence supported the idea and Hitler approved.116 Al-Husaini was authorized to establish his own headquarters in North Africa to promote subversion, hunt down anti-German forces, and gather intelligence.117
The agreement established the Arab Freedom Corps as the nucleus of new armies for countries ruled by al-Husaini and his colleagues once Germany’s army conquered them.118 Al-Husaini was appointed commander in chief of Arab military forces.119 In keeping with Hitler’s commitments to Mussolini, however, the actual commander was the Italian naval intelligence officer who headed that country’s own Arab Legion.120 Hitler also asked al-Kailani to raise Arab troops though the Iraqi failed completely at that task.121 Within its first two months of operation in North Africa, al-Husaini’s Freedom Corps recruited two thousand Arabs for separate “Tunisia,” “Algeria,” and “Morocco” units. Some fought at the front but most were used in rear areas for building fortifications.122
Meanwhile, the German army advanced ever closer to Cairo, where Axis supporters included the king and such key politicians as sometime prime minister Ali Mahir, Salih Harb, who had defected to the Germans during the first world war, and Abd ar-Rahman Azzam, a pro-jihad Ottoman officer who now worked closely with al-Husaini.123 Even Egypt’s army commander al-Misri sought German victory. Like al-Husaini, he had defected from the Ottomans to the British and had become a senior officer in the British-sponsored Arab revolt. Such junior officers as as-Sadat, the air force officer Salih Ibrahim, and Abd an-Nasir were also Nazi sympathizers. This trio would later furnish Egypt with two presidents and two of its vice presidents between 1955 and 1981.124
“Great Britain stood alone,” as-Sadat later wrote. “Her weakness in the Middle East was apparent to everyone,” and her military position in the war “had become untenable.”125 On February 3, 1942, as Rommel’s army advanced into Egypt, five thousand students took a petition to King Faruq, demanding that three top pro-Nazi politicians form a new government, an idea that the king favored. Otherwise, they threatened a general strike and sabotage. The crowd shouted, “We are all Axis soldiers! Forward, Rommel! Down with Churchill!”126 Knowing that such a government would deliver Egypt to the Germans, the British surrounded the Abdin Palace with tanks and threatened to unseat Faruq unless he installed a moderate Wafd Party government.127 The king backed down and complied. The tide had turned. The Wafd took office, German agents were rounded up, and al-Misri was thrown into prison. While angering Egyptian nationalist sentiment, this British near-coup held Egypt politically for the Allies.128
But if the Germans actually captured Egypt the issue would be decided otherwise. On June 24, Rommel’s tanks crossed the Libya-Egypt border. The next day, al-Husaini’s Voice of the Free Arabs told Egyptians to make lists of the home addresses and workplaces of every Jew in Cairo so they could be annihilated at the earliest opportunity. The broadcast promised that the Axis was about to liberate Egypt.129 Three days later, al-Husaini said he would start an uprising in Egypt soon and sent sabotage teams into Egypt to prepare.130
The Germans kept in touch with the king and other supporters through Ettel and Egypt’s consul Amin Zaki Bey in Istanbul; the king’s uncle, Husain Said, and his aide, Zu al-Fiqar; and Prince Mansur Daud. The Egyptians also reported through al-Husaini, who briefed von Ribbentrop on developments.131 Meanwhile, pro-German elements in Egypt’s army were making their move to link up with the German advance. They sent an envoy to Rommel promising to recruit an army of Egyptians to join him132 and provide intelligence, including photos of British defensive positions.133
The Germans dispatched Abwehr agent Hans Eppler, alias Husain Jaffar, as liaison with the sympathetic Egyptian officers. After a hard ride through the Libyan Desert to the Nile in May, he arrived in Cairo where he contacted as-Sadat and began sending information to Rommel. But the British captured Eppler and many of his contacts on July 23, precisely ten years to the day before as-Sadat and other former collaborators would take over the country.134
Secretly and simultaneously, Egypt’s king thanked the Axis and al-Husaini for pledging to help Egypt and promised his country would never join the war against Germany. At the end of July, Hitler told Faruq he feared the British might assassinate him, urging the king to flee to Rommel’s forces for protection. Faruq, unwilling to put himself in Germany’s hands, replied that if necessary he would hide in Egypt until Rommel arrived. But to show support for the Axis cause, the king offered to send two planes to German-held territory with maps showing British troop dispositions. The Germans were to signal readiness to receive these emissaries by broadcasting certain suras of al-Qur’an over a three-day period. Mustafa al-Wakil, one of al-Husaini’s secretaries and a leader of the Nazi-imitating Young Egypt Party, chose two suras: al-Ikhlas (Devotion), and al-Falaq (Dawn), and Radio Berlin broadcast them.135
The two pilots set off. One of them, Ahmad Sayyid Husain, became lost and was shot down by the British. The other, Muhammad Radwan, survived an antiaircraft attack by the British and then another by the Germans before they realized that he was defecting to their side. Unknowingly, Radwan landed in the midst of a minefield and, not knowing his peril, walked straight through it unharmed as astonished Germans yelled at him to stop. Radwan told his interrogators that he had come from the pro-German underground, hoped to meet Hitler, and was ready to fight for the Nazis on the Soviet front. He also supplied copies of British military plans. Quickly sent on to Berlin, Radwan gave interviews to newspapers and recorded broadcasts for Radio Berlin urging Egyptian soldiers to desert and join the Nazi side.136
In Cairo, Faruq patiently waited, expecting, like many Egyptians, the German army’s imminent arrival.137 On July 3, Berlin and Rome had officially declared they were invading Egypt “To liberate the Middle East from the British yoke” and give “Egypt to the Egyptians.” Al-Husaini and al-Kailani made radio appeals predicting a glorious Axis victory over the British, Jews, and Communists.138 The loss of Egypt, they declared, would be the British Empire’s end.139 But that very day, Rommel’s offensive stalled at al-Alamain, just three hours from Alexandria. Months of stalemate followed as the British gradually strangled Rommel’s supply lines across the Mediterranean.140
At the time, of course, neither the Germans nor al-Husaini’s supporters knew Rommel would advance no further. On the evening of July 7, the Voice of the Free Arabs broadcast to the Arab world a call to “Kill the Jews before they kill you!” It portrayed this proposed massacre as self-defense, claiming the British had distributed weapons to Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and other minorities in Egypt telling them to kill Muslims—including women and children—and loot their property. The announcer shouted into the microphone:
Kill the Jews who took your valuables. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for? . . . According to Islam it is a duty to defend your lives. This can only be fulfilled by the liquidation of the Jews. This is your best chance to get rid of this dirty race. Kill the Jews! Set their possessions on fire! Demolish their shops! Liquidate those evil helpers of British imperialism! Your only hope for rescue is to annihilate the Jews before they do this to you.141
On the evening of July 17, ten days after his call to kill the Jews of the Middle East, al-Husaini met Canaris at the admiral’s Berlin apartment. Al-Husaini offered to deploy all the Arabs at his and al-Kailani’s disposal in the Middle East for acts of sabotage and subversion under the Abwehr’s auspices.142 After Canaris consulted with his Italian counterpart, Cesare Amé, they accepted that project, to be carried out once Germany’s army broke through into the Nile Valley.143
Everything was thus in place for a triumphant German march through the Middle East and the murder of all Jews there. The only missing element was Rommel’s victory and a breakthrough by German armies deep inside the USSR across the Middle East’s northern frontier. But whereas in September it seemed as if Rommel would win, he was soundly defeated at al-Alamain on October 19. On November 8, furthermore, the U.S. army landed in Morocco and Algeria. Vichy French forces there surrendered.
According to Oscar Reile, a former Nazi intelligence officer close to Canaris, al-Husaini got information about plans for an Allied invasion of North Africa from Morocco’s Sultan Muhammad V in October 1942 and passed it on to the Abwehr, but Hitler didn’t heed his warning. If the story is true, this might have been al-Husaini’s finest moment as an intelligence source for the Germans, but this claim is unconfirmed. At any rate, Hitler expected an Allied attack in Spain instead and Canaris was unable to convince him otherwise.144
Despite al-Husaini’s propaganda and passionate broadcasts, no Arab revolt materialized either in Egypt or North Africa. The worse Rommel did at the front, the less eager were Arabs to join the Axis cause.145 For example, Tunisia’s ruler, Bey al-Munsif, suddenly decided that he did not want to be Germany’s ally, though a few months earlier he had been very friendly to the Nazis. In December 1942, realizing time was running out, al-Husaini made one final attempt to mobilize North African Arabs. He offered to go to Tunis along with Canaris to launch a mighty insurgency through his contacts with the nationalist Islah Party.146 But Hitler decided against the idea. Al-Husaini would have to await a better opportunity. In Morocco, the Germans could only try with little success to subvert the Allied presence through anti-Semitic propaganda and agents trying to instigate demonstrations, looting, and anti-Jewish pogroms.147
The start of 1943 brought no improvement in North Africa for Hitler and al-Husaini. Rommel steadily retreated. Hitler ordered him back to Germany in March, and two months later, on May 13, 1942, all the Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. A quarter-million soldiers became prisoners of war. It was estimated that six thousand men took refuge in Egypt. Faruq let them stay.148
Only the Russian front was left to give the Germans and their Arab allies hope that they might return triumphant to the Middle East.