WI: The Nazi's occupy Jeruselum?

Julian, I know that, this was just a hypothetical thread, ignoring how Germany could do it, and focusing on what might happen afterwards.

If Germany has Africa and part of the Middle East under their thumb by 1941 the policy might not change to deporting them someplace there as they could do it by having them go overland through Turkey.

There was also an Einsatzgruppe standing by in Athens, ready to go to Egypt once Cairo fell, according to the Wikipedia article on those creeps. Rommel reportedly pledged full cooperation, but his chief of staff, Bayerlein, probably informed Rommel that he had no choice in the matter. Bayerlein had been Guderian's Operations Officer in the early weeks of Barbarossa, and no doubt knew what these....squads were up to.

That is a joke. Rommel's plan for the two front war against the British and Americans was to try to take Egypt and the Port of Alexandra and defend it from attacks from the West by the Americans and East by the British 8th Army.

He didn't even know the policy towards the Jews had changed from deportation to genocide until late 1943 which led to an interesting talk with Hitler when he got home from Africa about bringing Jews into the German government.

rom1.jpg
 
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I knew about his son wanting to join the Waffen-SS and Rommel saying No, No, and NO!

Check the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen

Again, Rommel was probably told by Bayerlein (then Col. Fritz Bayerlein, who commanded the Panzer Lehr Division in Normandy and the Bulge) what these creeps were tasked to do, and that Rommel's cooperation was "expected." Even if he was personally disgusted with them and their activities....
 
Again, Rommel was probably told by Bayerlein (then Col. Fritz Bayerlein, who commanded the Panzer Lehr Division in Normandy and the Bulge) what these creeps were tasked to do, and that Rommel's cooperation was "expected." Even if he was personally disgusted with them and their activities....

Keep in mind the Port of Alexandria was the biggest port in North Africa and Rommel was certainly not going to make make a lunge for Jeruselum if he took Egypt with the Americans preparing to land to his West because if he lost the port to the Americans he would be screwed. His plan with the U.S. in the war was effectively to take Egypt and get every Egyptian he could to join his forces... and then he planned to fortify the hell out of Egypt for a very tough two front war.

Given Rommel wrote nearly a dozen letters from 1937-1944 protesting the treatment of the Jews and refused orders to kill Jewish POWs or allow Jews in France in 1944 to be deported to Poland I really do not like the revisionist history crap of late. Your wiki link refers to info which comes from a German documentary that tried to make Rommel into a Himmler like figure obsessed with killing the Jews in Palestine. Needless to say the documentary was crap and it conviently ignored the reality of what Rommel actually did for the Jews while he was alive (burning orders to kill them as well as burning orders to deport Jews in France to Poland) and what he tried to do for the Jews (letters protesting their treatment and talking to Hitler about bringing them into the government) and ignored the fact Rommel himself by that point didn't at all believe he could reach Palestine or even intended to do so by that point.

During Rommel's time in France, Hitler ordered him to deport the country's Jewish population; Rommel disobeyed.

Several times he wrote letters protesting against the treatment of the Jews. He also refused to comply with Hitler's order to execute Jewish POWs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel

The reality is he considered murdering people based on their heritage or faith abominable.

jews2.jpg


There is a reason why Israel after the war gave his son the honorary title of Guardian of Jerusalem. It was because there were tens of thousands of Jews in North Africa and France that lived and made it to Israel after the war because of Rommel's disobeying orders to kill them in Africa, keeping the SS out of his area of operations in Libya and refusing orders to deport Jews in France to Poland.

Rommelson.png


Manfred Rommel has been none too happy about the attempt of late by some of his countrymen to try to turn his father into a genocidal monster and has been fighting it hard even as he is close to death. Its mainly been pushed by hard core anti-military folks who believe Germany should have no positive military symbols and a few of them have openly said they don't believe Germany should have a military period.
 
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Yonatan

Banned
OK, it makes a bit more sense before Auschwitz, but still. No wonder Likud couldn't get a foot on the ground until 30 years later.

I've read an autobiography by an Irgun member, and as far as he tells it, at the time the offer was made:
1) there was little to no knowladge of the Shoah.
2) The Lehi hated the British with a passion. the British were limiting Jewish immigration and the interests of the Irgun and the Nazis intersected:
The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany and the Irgun wanted Jews in Mandate Palestine. its actualy a pretty natural alliance when you think about it if the whole mass-slaughter of Jews hadent happened.
 
However, I would expect the Jewish quarter to be utterly ravaged - executions, looting, tearing buildings down - it would not be a pleasant sight to see.

Yeah. I imagine that the Nazi would make a point of defiling the Temple Mount in the most offensive and obscene way they can think of, like tearing down the Wailing Wall, or turning the Holy of Holies into a latrine or something....
 
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I've read an autobiography by an Irgun member, and as far as he tells it, at the time the offer was made:
1) there was little to no knowladge of the Shoah.
2) The Lehi hated the British with a passion. the British were limiting Jewish immigration and the interests of the Irgun and the Nazis intersected:

The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany and the Irgun wanted Jews in Mandate Palestine. its actualy a pretty natural alliance when you think about it if the whole mass-slaughter of Jews hadent happened.

That is the important thing to remember with that. The offical German policy at the time they were supporting such an alliance was deportation not genocide. News out of Poland was like a black hole even when the Final Solution started in 1942. I read the newspapers from back then online and the first reports you could see in the NY Times from December 1942 and early 1943 with Churchill asking British intelligence to look further into the veracity of reports he recieved from Poland that Jews were being mass murdered there with electricity. It shows much control over information one could have back then in a Totalitarian state.
 
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Again, Rommel was probably told by Bayerlein (then Col. Fritz Bayerlein, who commanded the Panzer Lehr Division in Normandy and the Bulge) what these creeps were tasked to do, and that Rommel's cooperation was "expected." Even if he was personally disgusted with them and their activities....

By the way here is an article on the documentary I was talking about which is where the info from the wiki page you linked to came from.

'Chivalrous' Rommel wanted to bring Holocaust to Middle East

Erwin Rommel's reputation as one of Nazi Germany's few chivalrous generals has been blackened by a new documentary film which depicts the legendary "Desert Fox" as an unscrupulous commander who spearheaded Hitler's attempts to take the Holocaust to the Middle East.

Rommel, the head of the German Afrika Korps who won fame for his initial successes against the British in North Africa in 1942, was widely respected during and after the Second World War. Churchill once referred to him in parliament as a "great general".

Defeated by General Bernard Montgomery's "Desert Rats" at the battle of El Alamein in Egypt the same year, Field Marshal Rommel once claimed that his military campaign against the British was a chivalrous affair and the nearest thing to "war without hate".

However, a new two-part documentary series being broadcast on Germany's ZDF television channel provides evidence that Rommel played a key role in the Nazis' drive to invade Palestine and exterminate the Jews of the Middle East.

The historian Jörg Müllner, who made the film Rommel's War with co-author Jean-Christoph Caron, yesterday dismissed as a "myth" the notion that Rommel fought a clean war in the desert. "With his victories, he was simply preparing the way for the Nazi extermination machine," he added.

Müllner and Caron's film relies on the work of recent findings by German historians to explain how in the run up to the Second World War, the Nazis, as part of their long-term aim to export the Holocaust to the Middle East, actively courted Arab nationalists who were determined to drive the Jews from the region.

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24686

Its like taking a bit of fact... that if Rommel somehow managed to plow through all of Africa and into the Middle East which in anything like OTL was impossible that it would have been terrible for the Jews (which it would have been) and they use that fact to leap to their predesigned conclusion that Rommel's goal was to kill all the Jews in the region and by the way the documentary ignores every other piece of history about Rommel and his views and actions toward Jews.

Its why I have come to ignore modern German historians take on their history and rely on the sources at the time and from other countries. Way too many in Germany see it as their duty to minipulate history to make people think a certain way. While historians the world over do this to different degrees, I haven't found any other democracies more blatent then Germany is right now in ignoring and minipulating historical facts in order to minipulate the views of their population to believe something they want them to believe.

Not all German historians are like this by any means and I know some that aren't, but the ones that are happen to be the ones that are given the funding to make movies and documentaries like this and if a historian is attached to a film and doesn't agree with the party line they are out on their asses.
 
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I've read an autobiography by an Irgun member, and as far as he tells it, at the time the offer was made:
1) there was little to no knowladge of the Shoah.
2) The Lehi hated the British with a passion. the British were limiting Jewish immigration and the interests of the Irgun and the Nazis intersected:
The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany and the Irgun wanted Jews in Mandate Palestine. its actualy a pretty natural alliance when you think about it if the whole mass-slaughter of Jews hadent happened.
But what about kristlenaught and all the rules the Germans had put on Jews (ex. not allowed to walk on sidewalks, kike out of public office) plus taking their property? I have trouble beleiving any Jews would have wanted to work with them after that.
 
The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany and the Irgun wanted Jews in Mandate Palestine. its actualy a pretty natural alliance when you think about it if the whole mass-slaughter of Jews hadent happened.

Yes, but if you consider what the nazis did with the Jews before 1941 - wasn't that bad enough?

Otherwise: So the mufti wanted to enslave the Jews there. And I had thought I had made this up for the "Hitler's Mediterranean Strategy" TL...
 
Yes, but if you consider what the nazis did with the Jews before 1941 - wasn't that bad enough?

Otherwise: So the mufti wanted to enslave the Jews there. And I had thought I had made this up for the "Hitler's Mediterranean Strategy" TL...

Yes, if events occured so that Jeruselum fell in 1941 using at least some of the Jewish population as workers or forced laborers would have been the policy. Given that the offical German policy was the Madagascar plan at the time and such a thing would be possible by moving them by land through Turkey to somewhere in North Africa or the Middle East I wonder if that would happen.
 
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