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Historians: Nazis Planned Holocaust for Palestine
(Reuters/Boston Globe) Thomas Krumenacker - Nazi Germany planned to expand the extermination of Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine during World War Two, two German historians say. In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe," a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe. The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin historian Martin Cueppers say an Einsatzgruppe was all set to go to Palestine and begin killing the roughly half a million Jews there at the time. In the book Germans, Jews, Genocide: The Holocaust as History and the Present, published last month, they say "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens, ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to General Erwin Rommel's "Afrika Korps." The plan was for the 24 members involved in the death squad to enlist Palestinian collaborators so that the "mass murder would continue under German leadership without interruption." "The history of the Middle East would have been completely different and a Jewish state could never have been established if the Germans and Arabs had joined forces," the historians conclude.