Hitler's Foreign Executioners (53 page)

Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery and the British troops he commanded in North Africa had no idea that the Rauff Kommando existed or that the Grand Mufti saw the German campaign as the opening salvo in a master plan that would engulf the entire Middle East and its Jewish citizens. But it was this ruthless, perhaps mentally unbalanced British egomaniac who scuppered the German Jihad. Field Marshall Rommel had expected merely to pause when he reached El Alamein, a few score kilometres west of Alexandria, before pushing through Egypt towards Suez. In November, at the second Battle of El Alamein, the British 8th Army smashed the Afrikakorps and their Italian allies and drove them back across Libya and into Tunisia. Fleeing alongside the Italians was Rauff’s Kommando.

Once Rommel had crossed the Tunisian border, he dug in behind the old French ‘Mareth Line’. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini would not permit him to abandon North Africa without a fight to the death. Rommel desperately hoped to avoid the shameful fate of his counterpart Field Marshall Paulus who had surrendered at Stalingrad. So the Germans dug in and prepared for a long fight. Rommel’s last stand provided Rauff and his men with a last opportunity to strike at the Jews. On 6 December, Rauff summoned Moïse Borgel, the President of the Jewish community, and Chief Rabbi Haim Bellaïche to his headquarters and read out a decree obliging Jewish men to provide labour service to Axis forces ‘defending’ Tunis. Rauff insisted that Borgel begin making a list of the names of at least 2,000 workers. A few
days later, the Germans demanded 3,000 names – and so it went on. At 8 a.m. on 9 December 1942, just 128 men gathered outside German headquarters on the Avenue de Paris. During the night, thick dark clouds had rolled in from the sea. When Rauff arrived, one witness recalled: ‘he became apoplectic’; ‘he foamed with rage’. His men instinctively raised their weapons. ‘Pigs, dogs, deaf-mutes [sic] … you will be shot within the hour,’ Rauff ranted. By then the skies had opened and a warm rain had begun to fall. But apparently fearing the reaction of local Arabs, Rauff ordered his men to hold fire. Instead he ordered a general round-up. Meanwhile, vengeful German soldiers broke into the Great Synagogue where Jewish families, made homeless by the fighting, had taken refuge. The Germans assaulted some of the women and dragged all the men outside into the drenching rain. Anyone judged too old or sick they locked up in the military prison. The bulk of the captives – some 1,500 men – they marched 40 miles across the desert to an improvised labour camp. One was a young man called Gilbert Mazuz, who was handicapped and wore an orthopaedic brace. When the German SS men ordered a halt for the night, Mazuz collapsed. A German officer strolled up and shot Gilbert Mazuz dead.

By the beginning of 1943, approximately 5,000 Jews had been transferred to forty German labour camps in the region around Tunis. They cleared rubble and built desert fortifications. Work was back breaking and cruel. The German guards did not speak Italian and communicated with beatings and shootings.
¹⁹
The persecution and torture of the Tunisian Jews continued until the beginning of May, when Allied armies at last began a final assault. On 9 May, RSHA Chief Kalten brunner withdrew the Rauff Kommando to Naples. In North Africa, Axis troops surrendered four days later.

The 1943 Allied victory in North Africa saved the lives of half a million Palestinian Jews. Few histories of the Second World War commemorate this miracle – and no post-war prosecutor ever took up the case of the men of the Rauff Kommando. Haj Amin el-Husseini, who would have rejoiced had Rommel’s army ever reached Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, was bitterly disappointed by the rout of Hitler’s African armies. Rauff had the opportunity to pursue his murderous plans on a limited scale in Tunisia and he did so with minimal Arab involvement. The great Arab uprising never materialised.
²⁰
But as the North African theatre of operations shut down, another one opened, on the other side of the Mediterranean. Soon the Mufti would pursue his Jihad in the German puppet state of Croatia.

By spring 1943, the Mufti had become very grand indeed. In March, the NSDAP paper,
Völkischer Beobachter
, devoted its front page to reporting a lecture given by
the Mufti at the Islamische Zentral-Institut to celebrate the birthday of the prophet: ‘Appeal of the Grand Mufti against the deadly enemies of Islam, Arabs will fight for their freedom on the side of the Axis.’
²¹
El-Husseini’s speech had been read and vetted by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The
Beobachter
reporter described the Grand Mufti as ‘one of the great personalities of the Islamic world who had led the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs against onrushing Jewry’. The article makes it abundantly clear that in the two years since he fled Baghdad, el-Husseini had thoroughly absorbed the language of the Third Reich. A pan-Arab nationalist had been moulded into an anti-Semite. From his Berlin pulpit, the Grand Mufti declared: ‘today world Jewry leads the allied enemies into the abyss of depravity and ruin, just as it did in the age of the Prophet … The Muslim’s bitter enemies are the Jews and their allies, the English, the Americans and the Bolsheviks.’
²²
Sitting prominently in the congregation, Propaganda Minister Goebbels nodded and smiled. Himmler’s head of recruitment, the ‘almighty’ Gottlob Berger, followed the exiled Mufti’s rise to prominence with interest. He was convinced that the Mufti could do more for the Reich than spout racist homilies. Early in March 1943, Berger summoned the Grand Mufti to his headquarters. He had a special and perhaps dangerous mission in mind for the little Muslim cleric.

Unlike Himmler, Berger had no interest in understanding the wisdom of the Prophet. He was preoccupied instead with the deteriorating security in the vast swathes of occupied Europe. At the beginning of 1943, as Soviet troops crushed the German 6th Army, a new wave of partisans, galvanised by this stunning turn of events, rose up against Hitler’s armies on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. These new partisan armies were better trained, better equipped, better supported and, most important, better motivated. They scented victory in the cold winds blowing through the ruins of Stalingrad. But all over occupied Europe and the Soviet Union, these resurgent partisan armies were fractured by civil wars – and no more bitterly than in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. By the time Berger summoned the Mufti from his Tiergarten villa, the German south-east flank that guarded the Adriatic against Allied attack had become a running sore. In the aftermath of the German invasion in April 1941, Ante Pavelić’s puppet Ustasha regime had unleashed a ferocious assault on ‘foreign’ Jews and Serbs. In occupied Serbia, ruled by another German quisling, the German army with minimal SS support proved equally as murderous. By early 1942, the majority of Yugoslavian Jews as well as tens of thousands of Serbs had been murdered. A Serbian revolt had exploded even as Hitler was proclaiming victory. But the partisan war against the German occupiers was fractured by an internal battle between royalist Chetniks led by Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović and Soviet backed partisan units commanded by Josip Broz Tito. The
Chetniks made war on fellow Serbs – and sometimes joined forces with the German occupiers. But notwithstanding this lethal bickering, and with Allied backing, by the spring of 1943, Serb partisans relentlessly hammered the German garrison troops and their collaborators. Since July 1941, Himmler and the SS had been charged with managing this Bandenbekämpfung (war on bandits). In the Balkans, Himmler and Berger had set up a large number of Schuma type battalions and formed the SS ‘Prinz Eugen‘ division to quash the partisan revolt. For the Germans, the increasingly irksome Mediterranean flank had become a strategic nightmare apparently without a solution. Berger and Himmler would turn to another beleaguered community in the Balkans to defend the interests of the Reich.

The Bosnian Muslims are not a ‘Semitic’ people, like Jews and Arabs, and had hitherto taken little or no interest in pan-Arabism. They are South Slavs like their Serbian and Croatian neighbours and speak the same language. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meant little to their inward-looking community. At the end of the fifteenth century, Bosnia and Herzegovina became designated frontier provinces, or ‘pashaliks’, of the Ottoman Empire – and many South Slavs were ‘Islamised’. In the sultan’s sprawling domains, conversion to Islam was a no-brainer. In the Islamic world, state and faith were inextricably bonded and the Mosque opened the door to wealth and high status. The Ottoman rulers and their Slavic converts in the Balkans nevertheless tolerated other faiths, as far as the Koran permitted. In Sarajevo and other Ottoman strongholds in the Balkans, Jews, Christians and Muslims rubbed along well enough together for many centuries. Attitudes to Jews in Catholic Croatia were markedly less tolerant.

As the Ottoman Empire weakened in the eighteenth century, Bosnian Muslims retreated into what has been described as ‘mental and cultural separateness’ and reacted with dismay when, in 1878, the Congress of Berlin handed Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Hapsburgs. Bosnian Muslims naturally feared the changes that might be wrought by a Catholic state and many upped and fled to Turkey. But the Austrians, applying – as every imperial power will – a policy of divide and rule, had no desire to upset their new Muslim subjects. What they had gained from conversion centuries before, the Muslims by and large kept, angering the Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs. As a faith community rather than an ethnic one, the Bosnian Muslims showed only moderate interest in the nationalist passions that gripped hearts and minds in Serbia and Croatia. In the Balkans, Muslims benefited from Austrian rule and feared the increasingly belligerent Serbs and frustrated Croatians. When war broke out in 1914, Bosniaks turned on Serbs and formed a militia, the Schutzkorps, to fight the Serbian army, allied with the Entente Powers, on behalf of the Austrians. They had, of course, chosen the losing side. As both the
Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires crumbled, the Bosniaks found themselves friendless. In the new Yugoslavia they felt insecure and marginalised. The older generation resented loss of wealth and privilege.

In the spring of 1941, the Axis powers Germany and Italy imposed the ultra-reactionary Croatian Ante Pavelić as puppet ruler of a new Croatian state. The Axis sanctioned Pavelić’s demands to absorb Bosnia–Herzegovina and quashed feeble Muslim demands for independence. Many Muslims, however, backed the Croatian war on Serbs and some joined Ustasha murder squads. Pavelić went out of his way to woo Muslims, calling them the ‘flower of Croatia’. The Croatian Ustasha squads made sure that their Muslim comrades were highly visible in any attack on a Serbian village and Serbs retaliated by attacking Muslim villages. The German invasion unleashed a bloody cycle of revenge upon revenge, atrocity upon atrocity. By the spring of 1942, Bosnian Muslims’ religious and political leaders had had enough. They perceived themselves as hapless victims not of Nazi aggression but of a civil war. They felt trapped between the grindstones of Serb and Croat aggression. The German garrison, which had been severely depleted when troops were transferred to the Eastern Front, appeared to be bystanders rather than provocateurs. Since Bosniaks looked back fondly to the ‘golden age’ of Austrian rule, many were predisposed to seek ‘German speaking’ assistance. The German authorities sent out favourable signals – especially when these pro-German Muslims helped recruit a Croatian legion for the Russian front. In return, the Germans refused to allow the Italians to station troops in Sarajevo, then as now a Muslim stronghold, to call attention to their pro-Muslim sympathies.
²³

The strategy worked well. On 1 November 1942, a Muslim faction calling itself the ‘People’s [or National] Committee’ sent a memorandum ‘To His Excellency Adolf Hitler’. Although it was unsigned, its main author was probably Muhamed Pandza, a well-known theologian who had translated the Koran into Bosnian (or Bosniak, a Serbo-Croat dialect to be precise) and a leading figure in the Reisul-Ulema, the Muslim religious authority in Sarajevo. Pandza was on good terms with an SS officer called Karl von Krempler who seems to have encouraged him to make an appeal to the Reich.
²⁴
The committee explained that after the German invasion, Bosnian Muslims had expected and indeed hoped to be granted autonomy under German ‘supervision’. Instead, they complained, the ‘insane’ Pavelić regime had grabbed Bosnia–Herzegovina by force and then ignored every Muslim plea for even the most limited autonomy. Ustasha battalions wearing fezzes, they claimed, had carried out raids on Serb villages, deliberately provoking reprisals against Muslims who had no means of fighting back. The 1 November memorandum reflects the immaturity of Bosniak nationalism. The committee demanded not
autonomy but a nostalgic return to the kind of status that Bosnia had enjoyed after 1878 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The committee proposed a new Bosniak administrative body, with its seat in Sarajevo and ruled by a chief appointed ‘solely by you, our Führer’. To guarantee Muslim hegemony in Bosnia–Herzegovina, the committee obsequiously suggested that the ‘Muslim Legion’ formed by Major Muhamed Hadziefendic should be upgraded as a ‘Bosnian Guard’ that would then serve with the Wehrmacht, which would arm, supply and train Bosniak units.