NAZIS AND ARABS

During his performance at Columbia University in New York City on September 24, 2007, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared: "... assuming this [the Holocaust] happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?"

Actually, quite a lot.

The Nazis could not have annihilated one-third of the Jewish people from the face of the Earth without the enthusiastic collaboration of their local allies among the Swiss, the French, the Italians, the Romanians, the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, the Hungarians, the Slovaks, the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo, the Bulgarians, the Belarusians, the Ukrainians, the Dutch, the Belgians, the Norwegians, the Swedes and, yes, the “Palestinian” Arabs (with a large assist from Great Britain).

In particular, the 1936 - 1939 orgy of terrorism perpetrated by the Arabs of the western portion of Mandatory Palestine (i.e., the Land of Israel between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River) against their Jewish neighbors and British Mandatory authorities was financed by Nazi Germany. The Nazis, in addition to providing clandestine funding and armaments to the leadership of the “Palestinian” Arab jihad, also infiltrated its agents into the western portion of Mandatory Palestine in order to provide tactical advice in aid of the jihad.

The leader of the “Palestinian” Arab jihad was Haj Amin al-Husseini. As the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (also head of the Supreme Muslim Council) and as the Arab-appointed Chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, al-Husseini was the paramount spiritual and political leader of the Arabs of the western portion of Mandatory Palestine. However, in 1937, he fled Mandatory Palestine for Nazi Germany, later helping to establish several Muslim Nazi battalions in Bosnia (which participated in the deportation and transit of Jews to various death camps), assisting in the creation of an Arab Nazi government in Iraq (which, at that time, had a substantial Jewish population), and becoming one of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s personal advisors on the annihilation of the Jewish people during World War II. After the War, he was given asylum in Egypt, and then in Lebanon.

Declassified information from British and German archives reveals the close relationship that developed between Nazi Germany and the “Palestinian” Arabs during the jihad of 1936 - 1939.

Reproduced below is the full text of an article from ynetnews.com, the English-language website of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, published on May 7, 2006, that summarizes and excerpts this information:

Nazis ‘shipped arms to Palestinians’

British National Archives unveil presence of Nazi S.S. agents in Mandatory Palestine, working closely with Palestinian leaders

By: Yaakov Lappin, ynetnew.com, 05.07.06

Historical documents in Britain’s National Archives in London show that Nazi Germany attempted to ship arms to Palestinian forces in the 1930s.

A British Foreign Office report from 1939 reports of “news of a consignment of arms from Germany, sent via Turkey and addressed to Ibn Saud (king of Saudi Arabia), but really intended for the Palestine insurgents.” Britain’s chief military officer in Mandatory Palestine also noted reports “regarding import of German arms at intervals for some years now.”

British documents from the same period, and German records photographed by an American spy and sent to the British government, said that a number of Nazi agents were sent to Mandatory Palestine, in order to forge alliances with Palestinian leaders, and urge them to reject a partition of the land between the Jewish and Arab populations.

One Nazi agent, Adam Vollhardt, arrived in Palestine in July 1938, and was reported to have gained strong influence with Arab leaders, meeting with Palestinian leaders throughout 1938. Vollhardt held several meetings with leading Arab politicians and told them “that the Palestine question would be settled to the satisfaction of the Arabs within a few weeks,” adding that “it would be fatal to their (Palestinians’) cause if at this juncture they showed any signs of weakness or exhaustion.”

“Germany was interested in the settlement of the (Palestine) question on the basis of the Arabs obtaining their full demands,” Vollhardt was reported to say to Palestinian leaders, according to a report by the British War Office. Vollhardt also assured Arab leaders that “the Germans could continue to support the Palestinian Arab cause by means of propaganda.”

German documents photographed and sent to Whitehall by an American spy revealed that in 1937, German officials had calculated that “Palestine under Arab rule would… become one of the few countries where we could count on a strong sympathy for the new Germany.”

‘Arabs admire our Fuhrer’

“The Palestinian Arabs show on all levels a great sympathy for the new Germany and its Fuhrer, a sympathy whose value is particularly high as it is based on a purely ideological foundation,” a Nazi official in Palestine wrote in a letter to Berlin in 1937. He added: “Most important for the sympathies which Arabs now feel towards Germany is their admiration for our Fuhrer; especially during the unrests, I often had an opportunity to see how far these sympathies extend. When faced with a dangerous behaviour of an Arab mass, when one said that one was German, this was already generally a free pass.”

A second Nazi agent, Dr. Franz Reichart, was reported to be actively working with Palestinian Arabs by the British Criminal Investigation Division “to help coordinate Arab and German propaganda.” Reichart was also head of the German Telegraphic Agency in Jerusalem.

German records show that the Nazis viewed the establishment of a Jewish state with great concern. A 1937 report from German General Consulate in Palestine said: “The formation of a Jewish state… is not in Germany’s interest because a (Jewish) Palestinian state would create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counterweight against such possible power growth of the Jews.”

Jewish refugees abandoned

The records also show that the news of increased Nazi-Arab cooperation panicked the British government, and caused it to cancel a plan in 1938 to bring to Palestine 20,000 German Jewish refugees, half of them children, facing danger from the Nazis.

Documents show that after deciding that the move would upset Arab opinion, Britain decided to abandon the Jewish refugees to their fate.

“His Majesty’s Government asked His Majesty’s Representatives in Cairo, Baghdad and Jeddah whether so far as they could judge, feelings in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia against the admission of, say 5,000 Jewish children for adoption… would be so strong as to lead to a refusal to send representatives to the London discussions. All three replies were strongly against the proposal, which was not proceeded with,” a Foreign Office report said.

“If war were to break out, no trouble that the Jews could occasion us, in Palestine or elsewhere, could weigh for a moment against the importance of winning Muslim opinion to our side,” Britain’s Minister for Coordination of Defence, Lord Chatfield, told the British cabinet in 1939, shortly before Britain reversed its decision to partition its mandate, promising instead all of the land to the Palestinian Arabs.

(You may also read the above article by using the link at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3248081,00.html to view it.)

Although Great Britain’s decision to curry favor with the belligerent Arab population of the western portion of Mandatory Palestine, as well as with the larger Arab and (non-Arab) Muslim worlds, by impeding mass Jewish flight from Nazi Germany to the western portion of Mandatory Palestine constituted a serious breach of its Mandatory obligations to the Jewish people under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, such informal ad hoc decision-making did not yet represent a formal and absolute bar to further Jewish immigration.

However, in 1939, as its official response to the sustained Arab hostility and violence towards the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, Great Britain published an infamous manifesto known as the Palestine White Paper. The Palestine White Paper, which the League of Nations refused to approve, was issued and implemented by Great Britain, as Mandatory trustee, in rank violation of its fiduciary obligations to the Jewish people under the Mandate for Palestine, in that it illegally restricted, and subsequently barred, Jews who sought to flee Nazi-occupied Europe from reaching safe haven in the western portion of Mandatory Palestine.

An infamous example of Great Britain's brutal crusade against Holocaust-era Jewish immigration is represented by the Struma Affair which unfolded during Nazi Germany's 1942 Wannsee Conference (convened by Hitler -- in response to the collective refusal, with the exception of the Dominican Republic, of the World's other nations at the 1938 Evian Conference to accept even modest Jewish immigration emanating from the territories then controlled by Nazi Germany -- in order to determine and implement the final tactical mechanisms for the planned annihilation of the Jewish people). In the Winter of 1942, the Struma, a 96 square meter and 100 year old barge, packed with almost 800 Jewish refugees, including over 100 infants and other children, fled Romania for Mandatory Palestine, stopping en route at Istanbul, Turkey. Great Britain, responding to “Palestinian” Arab pressure, not only publicly declared that the Struma would be barred from entering the waters of Mandatory Palestine, but it also prevailed upon Turkey to prohibit the Struma's passengers from disembarking at Istanbul, the result being that the barge was towed out to sea without fuel, heating equipment, food or potable water. The next day, the Struma was destroyed by a torpedo; only one person survived. Great Britain’s illegal policy towards the entry of Jews to Mandatory Palestine during the Holocaust was bluntly articulated in a letter dated March 4, 1943 from British Minister to the United States Ronald Campbell to World Zionist Organization President Chaim Weizmann concerning a proposal to permit approximately 70,000 of Romania’s endangered Jews to flee to Mandatory Palestine, as follows: "His Majesty's Government has no evidence to show whether the Romanian proposal was meant to be taken seriously. But if it was, it was already a piece of blackmail which, if successful, would open up the endless prospect on the part of Germany and her satellites in southeastern Europe of unloading, at a given price, all their unwanted multitudes on overseas countries."

So, I suppose that the title of this essay should really be “NAZIS, ARABS AND GREAT BRITAIN”.

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