El Alamein: Halting an Impending Holocaust In the Middle East

Between July and November 1942 the future of the Middle East lay in the balance as German and Italian soldiers fought against soldiers from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Poland and Free French and other smaller entities.


As the German thrust to the Suez Canal was thwarted outside the small Libyan town of Tobruk in 1941, now Field Marshal Rommel’s new move towards the most coveted piece of real estate in the world was blocked near a small Egyptian location name El Alamein.


There was, however, something much bigger at stake here than a mere military battle - the very survival of over half a million Jewish people, most of whom lived in British Mandated Palestine.


In January 1942 the Nazi leadership declared its intentions to annihilate all eleven million Jewish people in Europe. Nearly a million had already been murdered, mostly by murder squads known as Einsatzgruppen.


Then in July 1942, the Nazi leadership ordered the despatch to the Middle East of a specialised SS murder squad - The Einsatzkommando Egypt - which was to enlist local collaborators to help fulfil their allotted task.


This book looks at the Middle East campaign of 1940-1942 and how the Allied victory which culminated at El Alamein in November 1942 thwarted both the military objectives of the German-led army to capture the Suez Canal, and the possibility of the Holocaust entering into the Middle East.


It also looks at the relationship between the Arab nationalist movement and its main spokesman, Haj Amin el-Husseini (the Mufti of Jerusalem), with Hitler and Nazi Germany.