Subsequent Mentions Research Articles

The Nazi Party in Palestine and the Levant 1932–9

D URING the Arab War in I948 news came from the southern outskirts of Jerusalem that Israeli soldiers had picked up swastika flags, Hitler Youth badges, Nazi pamphlets, and German passport forms found in a disused concrete building, situated to the left of the road linking Talpiot with Ramat Rahel. After the fighting had stopped I went there to investigate and found the floor of an empty, spacious hall littered with files, some of which were rotting from exposure to moisture. Examining the files I found that they contained documents of the National Socialist Palestine Headquarters. The condition in which I found the documents clearly indicated not only that some material had been lost during the period of anarchy and exposure but that some documents had been torn out of even well preserved files. The assumption that this was done by the Germans in the autumn of I939 prior to handing over their papers to the Spanish Consulate, which was to act as neutral caretaker, is supported by the similar procedure adopted during the Munich crisis, when all German papers seemed to have been collected by the consulates in anticipation of war. Some screening of material must have taken place in I938, because subsequent correspondence mentions missing documents. For this reason no valid conclusions can be drawn from any argumentum ex silentio. This applies especially to fifth column activities. The files mention, for instance, a mysterious traveller whose mission precluded any personal contact with official German and party branches. The mysterious tourist did, however, call on the District Leader (Landeskreisleiter), who merely recorded, 'Came to see me'. Such observations together with an order (which somehow survived) 'To be burnt after reading' illustrate that the records do not reveal the deepest strata of Nazi activities in the Middle East but only tell the story of daily administrative routine work. With all these reservations, however, this collection of Nazi papers in Palestine throws an interesting light on German activities there before the war. I have tried to supplement the material by assembling additional records from private correspondence and diaries, and by personal interviews with persons mentioned in the files. The recollections of the latter have often shown a marked divergence from the evidence offered by the documents, in which case I have given preference to the documentary evidence. 460