Nazi Palestine

"It is to the credit of the two authors of this book . . . that they have been assiduous in locating information either inaccessible or overlooked earlier."—Gerhard L. Weinberg The planned extermination of the Jews living in Palestine was only weeks away . . . In 1941-42 Nazi Germany appeared to be invincible in North Africa, and many Arab nationalists looked to a leader, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, for guidance. The Mufti had several meetings with Adolf Hitler. Nazi Germany also pledged to wipe out the Jews who had been living in Palestine since time immemorial as well as the new arrivals from the beginning of the modern Zionist movement in the nineteenth century and following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. A special unit was assembled and trained in Greece in the spring of 1942 by SD officer Walter Rauff, the originator of the gassing van experiments in Poland and the Soviet Union. They were to operate behind the lines with the help of those in the region who were eager to join the task force. After El Alamein, the Einsatzkommando shifted its operations to Tunisia, where it implemented cruel anti-Jewish policies for many months. Over 2,500 Tunisian Jews were to die in the camps set up by the Nazis and their collaborators. The authors have identified the relevant documents and analyzed the racist, ideological, political, and religious implications of the planning of a specific regional extermination program within the context of the Holocaust.