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“Elimination of the
Jewish National Home in Palestine”: The Einsatzkommando of the
Panzer Army Africa, 1942
The rather obvious
question about what would have happened if the German-Italian Panzer
army under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had not been halted at the
British lines of defense near El Alamein in Egypt has to date been
given relatively little attention. This is precisely the scenario
which the historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers
explore their study. They can show precisely that there was an SS
Einsatzkommando that was on standby in Athens ready to move and was
only awaiting the order for deployment in the Middle East. In
keeping with German strategic plans, after the occupation of Egypt,
the Einsatzkommando would have pressed forward together with
Rommel’s army to Palestine, and would have organized the mass murder
of the then almost 500,000 Jews in the Yishuv there. Numerous
collaborators from the indigenous Arab population who were hostile
to Jews and on friendly terms with the Germans were to be the
executors of the planned crime. The Holocaust in Palestine was thus
almost have become a joint German-Arab project. |
