[Klaus]

It is a long read, but sure worth it. Do you think it would turned out like that?


Desert Fox or Hitler's poodle?
ALLAN HALL

IN BERLIN
The gentleman-warrior image of Desert Fox general Erwin Rommel has been shattered in a new German documentary, which paints him as a lickspittle of Adolf Hitler whose victories were meant to pave the way for the export of the Holocaust to the Middle East.

The controversial two-part programme, aired this week, claims that if Rommel had succeeded in driving the Eighth Army, under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, out of North Africa, he would have led his troops into Palestine to begin the round-up, deportation and executions of Jews living there - many of them Germans who had managed to escape Nazism.

The programme - Rommel's War, Rommel's Treasure - claims the plans for the widening of the Holocaust out of Europe were far advanced.

Much of the material for the programme was based on what was found within the last three years in archives in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Rommel lived. The makers also accessed hitherto sealed foreign ministry files in Berlin.

Jörg Müllner, a historian and co-producer of the programme, said: "The Allied defeat of Rommel at the end of 1942 had prevented the extension of the Holocaust to Palestine. If Rommel had beaten the Allies in the desert and invaded Egypt, a push into Palestine would have followed and the unit would have deployed there.

"The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab antisemite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. He was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out of a hatred of Jews."

Rommel was widely respected during and after the Second World War. Field Marshal Montgomery kept a picture of him in his headquarters, while Sir Winston Churchill once referred to him in parliament as a "great general".

His reputation was secured in 1944 when he was forced to kill himself by the Gestapo because of his alleged involvement with the bomb plot against Hitler.

In Germany, too, he achieved hero status, supposedly because he was devoid of the murderous traits which marked out the regime's higher echelons.

However, the documentary depicts him as nothing but a willing tool of his Führer, who became disillusioned only as the war dragged on and German losses mounted.

Mr Müllner said it was a "lingering myth" that Rommel fought a clean war in the desert, adding: "He may not have been a racial fanatic himself, but with his victories, he was simply preparing the way for the Nazi extermination machine."

The programme chronicled how the Jews in Palestine "quaked in terror" at the blitzkrieg successes of Rommel's Afrika Korps.

Most sinisterly, the programme alleges that a secret department within the Afrika Korps - a "special command" - busied itself with the planning for the murder of Palestine's Jews if and when Rommel's forces succeeded in kicking the British out of North Africa.

The plans included sending mobile gas wagons to murder Jews. This SS unit was designed to function like the Einsatzgruppen, or "action squads", that followed the German army into Russia, shooting close to a million Jews and political enemies before the killing centres, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, were established in Poland.

Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's chief architect of the Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter.

The programme drew on documents from the Reich Main Security Office, showing "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942.

The Middle East death squad was to be led by SS Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff, who was involved in the development of mobile gas chambers. After escaping from a US internment camp in Italy after capture, he hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudel, the notorious German cleric at the Vatican who is credited with providing fake papers allowing high-ranking Nazis to escape to South America.

Rauff settled in Chile, where he fought off extradition proceedings to stand trial in Germany and died in 1984. He hinted at plans to kill the Jews in Palestine in an interview in 1979, in which he was unrepentant about his wartime "service to my Fatherland".

The historians claim that it was only the defeat of Rommel at El-Alamein in 1942, which effectively halted the desert campaign, that secured his reputation as a noble officer. But the programme also claimed that, until May 1943, when Rommel's forces finally left the continent, several thousand Jews were murdered or worked to death in Tunisia, in labour camps guarded by his Afrika Korps.

• MOHAMMAD Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a Muslim religious leader. Known for his anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Husseini collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War and helped to recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS.

In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Husseini sent a telegram to Berlin addressed to the German consul-general in the British Mandate of Palestine, saying he looked forward to spreading their ideology in the Middle East, especially in Palestine.

Until the end of the war, Husseini worked for Nazi Germany as a propagandist and a recruiter of Muslim volunteers for the German armed forces. Beginning in 1943, Husseini was involved in the organisation and recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th Handschar division of 21,065 men, which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944.