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British Archives: Nazi SS Agents in Mandatory Palestine Worked Closely with Palestinian Arab Leaders

(Ynet News) Yaakov Lappin - * Documents in Britain's National Archives show that Nazi Germany attempted to ship arms to Palestinian forces in the 1930s. A British Foreign Office report from 1939 reports "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 said 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 held several meetings with leading Arab politicians, telling them "that the Palestine question would be settled to the satisfaction of the Arabs within a few weeks." * "Germany was interested in the settlement of the (Palestine) question on the basis of the Arabs obtaining their full demands," Vollhardt told 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 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." "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. * German records show that the Nazis viewed the establishment of a Jewish state with great concern. A 1937 report from the 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."
2006-05-08 00:00:00
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