Meglepo ezek utan?!



'Chivalrous' Rommel wanted to bring Holocaust to Middle East
Independent
25 May 2007

...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.

They reveal how, before embarking on their campaign in the desert, Rommel's Afrika Korps soldiers were schooled with the idea that: "Anyone who fights Jewry can count on the sympathy of the Arab population" and how the greeting "Heil Rommel" became popular in Arab nationalist circles in the Middle East after the general's initial victories.