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At first, the Jews deluded themselves that the hardship would pass; loyal citizens, the community had dwelled in Iraq for 2,600 years
The expulsion that backfired: When Iraq kicked out its Jews
Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered
BY EDWIN BLACK May 31, 2016, 2:39 pm
Barber Rachamim Azar, a new immigrant from Baghdad, carries out his trade in the tent he shares with his wife and two children at a maabara (immigrant camp) in central Israel in summer 1951. He told a Government Press Office photographer that he intended to move to a kibbutz (Teddy Brauner, GPO)
After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world.
Egypt was a prime destination for German Nazi relocation in the Arab world. Dr. Aribert Heim was notoriously known as “Dr. Death” for his grotesque pseudo-medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps. He was fond of surgical procedures including organ removals without anesthesia, injecting gasoline into prisoners to observe the manner of death, and decapitating Jews with healthy teeth so he could cook the skulls clean to make desk decorations. Dr. Heim converted to Islam and became “Uncle Tarek” Hussein Farid in Cairo, Egypt, where he lived a happy life as a medical doctor for the Egyptian police.
Two of Goebbels’s Nazi propagandists, Alfred Zingler and Dr. Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh and Omar Amin respectively, working in the Egyptian Information Department. In 1955, Zingler and von Leers helped establish the virulently anti-Semitic Institute for the Study of Zionism in Cairo. Hans Appler, another Goebbels propagandist, became Saleh Shafar who, in 1955, became an expert for an Egyptian unit specializing in anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hate propaganda. Erich Altern, a Gestapo agent, Himmler coordinator in Poland, and expert in Jewish affairs, became Ali Bella, working as a military instructor in training camps for Palestinian terrorists. A German newspaper estimated there were fully 2,000 Nazis working openly and under state protection in Egypt.
Franz Bartel, an assistant Gestapo chief in Katowice, Poland, became El Hussein and a member of Egypt’s Ministry of Information. Hans Becher, a Gestapo agent in Vienna, became a police instructor in Cairo. Wilhelm Boerner, a brutal Mauthausen guard, became Ali Ben Keshir, working in the Egyptian Interior Ministry and as an instructor for a Palestinian terrorist group.
Egyptian society was so enamored with the Nazi war against the Jews that a young army officer felt compelled to write a postwar letter to Hitler via the Cairo weekly, Al Musawwar, as though Hitler were still alive. “My dear Hitler,” the officer wrote. “I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. Even if you appear to have been defeated, in reality you are the victor. You succeeded in creating dissensions between Churchill, the old man, and his allies, the Sons of Satan … Germany will be reborn in spite of the Western and Eastern powers … The West, as well as the East, will pay for her rehabilitation—whether they like it or not. Both sides will invest a great deal of money and effort in Germany in order to have her on their side, which is of great benefit to Germany … As for the past, I think you made mistakes, like too many battlefronts and the shortsightedness of [Foreign Minister Joachim von] Ribbentrop vis-a vis the experienced British diplomacy … We will not be surprised if you appear again in Germany or if a new Hitler rises up in your wake.” The letter was signed “with affection” by Col. Anwar Sadat, later president of Egypt and the first Arab leader to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
Nazism enraptures Iraq; the Farhud follows
Egypt was hardly alone in reinventing the Nazi war against the Jews. German Nazis also took up postwar positions of influence in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. But Iraq, long a Nazi Arab stronghold, was arguably among the most agitated in the Arab world.
Fritz Grobba (Courtesy)
From the moment Hitler took power in 1933, Iraq had distinguished itself throughout the Arab world as a top Nazi ally. The nexus was continually stoked by resident gestapo agents such as Fritz Grobba. Grobba employed such tactics as dispensing lots of cash among politicians and deploying seductive German women among ranking members of the army. From 1933, Radio Berlin began broadcasting hate messages in Arabic including fallacious reports about non-existent Jewish outrages in Palestine. Grobba, cultivated many Iraqis as surrogate Nazis. Iraqi Arab Hitler-style youth marched in Nuremburg torch light parades hosted by their Berlin counterparts. German was taught in Iraqi schools. When World War II broke out in 1939, Nazism became a fervent cause among many Iraqis.
In May 1941, Iraqi fascists backed by popular support tried to overthrow the pro-Western monarchy and seize British oil fields in Iraq to facilitate the oil-dependent German advance east to Russia. That failed. The Iraqi coup plotters in Baghdad decided to do the next best thing, exterminate its Jews in a single blow. Jews were ordered to stay in their homes, and their doors were marked with a red hamsa. At the last minute, the extermination plot fell apart. But as the coup leaders fled, in that momentarily power vacuum on June 1-2, 1941, dejected swarms of soldiers, in concert with police, common criminals and nondescript mobs rampaged through Baghdad hunting for Jews. They were easily found. Hundreds of Jews were cut down by sword and rifle, some decapitated. Babies were sliced in half and thrown into the Tigris river. Girls were raped in front of their parents. Parents were mercilessly killed in front of their children. Hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses were looted, then burned.
A mass grave of Farhud victims (Wikipedia)
The carnage continued unabated for almost two days until finally the British-backed monarchy was induced to restore order.
This Holocaust-era pogrom became known as the Farhud. In Arabic, it means “violent dispossession.”
Throughout the last years of the war, the murder spree was celebrated across the Arab world and in German ceremonies.
A monument, “Prayer,” in Ramat Gan, in memory of the Jews who were killed in Iraq in the 1941 Farhud pogrom and in the 1960s (Dr. Avishai Teicher / Wikipedia)
At war’s end, in mid-1945, hundreds of thousands of dispossessed European survivors emerged from their ghettos, concentration camps, and forests, desperate to enter Jewish Palestine to restart their lives. However, rather than striking humanitarian chords in Iraq, the European Jewish plight only heightened hatred against Jews, especially in Iraq. Many mainstream Arabs resented and belittled the Holocaust as nothing more than another ploy for expanding Jewish Palestine’s population. This view was little more than a continuation of the virulent wartime preaching of Hitler ally Haj Amin al-Husseini, aka the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Many Iraqis seemed driven more by their obsession with Jewish Palestine and perpetuating Nazi precepts and anti-Jewish campaign than by a desire to rebuild their country or strengthen their democracy. Everything escalated fiercely in February 1947, when the United Nations agreed to vote on the question of Palestine’s partition. The 1937 Peel Commission’s recommendation for partition had now evolved from a white piece of paper into a binding international ballot among the world’s governments. The possibility of a legitimized and recognized Jewish state in the midst of Arab lands in Palestine was more than unthinkable. The Palestine conflict still dominated and defined the Iraqi national agenda, paralyzing action on Iraq’s other vital needs, such as the economy, infrastructure, health services, and education. The country’s newspapers warned that if “the Zionist entity” came into nationhood, no Iraqi government could control the Arab street in Baghdad.
An Iraqi Jewish group, in the early 1900s (Courtesy)
Uniformly, the Arab regimes, including the Baghdad government, officially threatened that if the UN dared vote yes to partition, the Arabs would exact reprisals against the approximate 850,000 Jews who dwelled in countries throughout the extended Middle East and other Arab countries.
Violence against Iraqi Jews intensified in the months leading up to the vote. For example, on May 9, 1947, a Baghdad mob killed a hapless Jewish man after hysterical accusations that he gave poisoned candy to Arab children. In the Jewish quarter of Fallujah, homes were ransacked and local Jews were compelled to move in with friends and relatives in Baghdad. Large Jewish “donations” were regularly extorted and sent to Palestinian Arabs. The names of the “donors” were read on the radio to encourage more of the same.
A 1932 photograph of Ezekiel’s Tomb at Kifel, in southeastern Iraq. The area was inhabited by Iraqi Jews, some of whom appear in the photo. (American Colony, Jerusalem, Photo Dept. / Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection / Wikipedia)
Yet the Jews still deluded themselves that as loyal Iraqis, they belonged in the nation where they had dwelled for 2,600 years. This hardship would pass, they believed. But the Jewish Agency emissary in Iraq, encouraging relocation to the Jewish state, reported back to Jerusalem: “No attention is paid [by the Jews] to the frightful manifestations of hostility around them, which place all Jews on the verge of a volcano about to erupt.”
Kurdish Jews in Rawanduz, northern Iraq, 1905 (Wikipedia)
On November 29, 1947, the UN voted 33 yes, 13 no, with 10 abstentions, to create two states: one Palestinian Arab, the other Jewish.
Once the UN vote registered, a new anti-Jewish campaign exploded in Iraq. This time, it was not just pogroms but systematic pauperization, taking a cue from the confiscatory techniques developed by the Nazis who had now infested the government. Jews were charged with trumped-up offenses and fined exorbitant amounts. All the while, mob chants of “death to the Jews” became ever more commonplace.
