I stood in the Reich Chancellery, and I thought I had finally found the ally who would give my people what the British never had: a promised homeland and a war to win it. I am Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and for years I had been fighting a losing war of words. In 1937, the British had issued an arrest warrant for me in Palestine, and I had fled to Baghdad. I found shelter there, hiding in plain sight with a man who was about to gamble his entire country on the same dream.
In April 1941, my host, the lawyer Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, had finally seized power. He had waited long for this moment. Iraq had been independent on paper since 1932, but British troops stayed on our soil, British advisers shaped our policies, and our oil went to the Royal Navy. We were a colony wearing a crown.
On April 3rd, I opened contact with Berlin on his behalf. The British answer came faster than we expected. On May 2nd, they launched a preemptive airstrike against us, and within weeks, our rebellion collapsed. By May 29th, al-Gaylani and I were fleeing for our lives to Iran.
The revolt had lasted only 58 days. But we did not stop. When the British and Soviets invaded Iran in August 1941, we moved to Italy, then to Berlin. I arrived in the German capital on November 6th, 1941, a man still carrying the fury of a failed coup.
On November 20th, I met the German Foreign Minister. Eight days later, on November 28th, I sat across from Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery. Our meeting lasted 90 minutes. I asked him for recognition of an independent Arab world, support for the removal of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, and permission to raise an Arab Legion under German arms.
Hitler agreed to two of those three. The Legion could be raised. The public declaration would have to wait. Germany was not ready to anger its allies by promising independence to lands they claimed.
I accepted the half measure. They gave me a residence in Berlin and a monthly salary that was roughly double what a German field marshal earned in a year. They gave me access to Radio Berlin’s Arabic service, where I began broadcasting appeals across the Middle East. The Nazis’ racial laws made my recruitment awkward.
The Nuremberg Laws classified Arabs as non-Aryan and excluded them from their military. Hitler granted an exception. The decision was never published, but it was applied. I began building my army.
The Germans had already set up a small training unit for Arabs in Greece. By May 1942, it had 130 soldiers. I recruited from Arab students in Berlin, from Iraqi exiles, from prisoners taken from French colonial regiments in North Africa. By August 1942, the unit was formally enlarged and renamed Sonderverband 287.
The plan was vast. The German army was advancing on Stalingrad. Once the Caucasus fell, we would install an Iraqi government in exile and march across Persia into Iraq, meeting another German force coming from Egypt. A pincer that would close on the entire Middle East.
My people would finally be free from British rule. The plan depended on Stalingrad falling. Three months later, the German army at Stalingrad was encircled. Who were the men who joined me?
Out of the soldiers who passed through Sonderverband 287 in late 1942, German records counted 24 Iraqis, 112 Syrians and Palestinians, and 127 Arabs from French North Africa. Across the entire war, the total number of Arabs trained by German military organizations reached about 6,300. No more than 1,300 came from Palestine, Syria, and Iraq combined. They came from different worlds.
Some were Iraqi army officers who had followed al-Gaylani into exile. Others were students who had been in Berlin when the war began. The largest group came from French colonial prisoner of war camps: Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian soldiers captured fighting for France in 1940, offered release if they switched sides. A handful were ideological volunteers who truly believed Hitler would deliver an independent Arab world.
Most were not. They were men who had calculated that the British and French empires were going to lose and wanted to be on the right side when it happened. The plan they’d been recruited for died at Stalingrad in February 1943. With the Caucasus offensive collapsed and the German army retreating across Libya, my legion had no destination left.
The German command decided to send the Arab-majority battalion to Tunisia. In mid-December 1942, they were loaded onto trains. After a 14-day journey through Italy, they arrived in North Africa in January 1943, where they were raised to full battalion strength. The deployment fell apart almost immediately.
On February 24th, 1943, the unit’s commander and the corps’ chief of staff were both killed in an Allied air attack. In mid-March, one of the Tunisian battalions was deployed in the central sector of the German line. Brought into position at night in cold mountain terrain, the combat outposts lit fires to keep warm. The fires gave away their position.
The battalion was overrun before dawn. The German high command concluded that Muslim battalions were not to be used in forward areas again. On May 13th, 1943, all Axis forces in Tunisia capitulated. The battalion was destroyed or captured.
The legion that had been promised the Middle East had been buried in North Africa six months after it was formed, on ground it was never meant to defend. What survived of my dream was reassembled and sent elsewhere. The remnants were reformed as German Arab Infantry Battalion 845. From November 1943, it was deployed to the Peloponnese in southern Greece.
The men who had been promised the liberation of the Arab world spent the next 18 months conducting anti-partisan operations in occupied Greece. The German command rated the unit’s combat value as low and used it for coastal defense and security sweeps. The mostly German battalions took a different path. They were transferred to Yugoslavia and joined in operations against Tito’s partisans.
They suffered heavy losses near Belgrade in October 1944. What remained was rebuilt in January 1945, and the army capitulated in disarray in Austria in May 1945. The numbers were sobering. Approximately 6,300 Arab soldiers passed through German military organizations across the entire war.
Britain recruited 9,000 from Palestine alone. Roughly 250,000 North Africans served in the French Army of Liberation and made up the majority of its dead and wounded. The legion Hitler had agreed to in November 1941 had been numerically irrelevant to the war it was supposed to decide. For me, the war ended in flight.
On May 7th, 1945, the day before Germany’s unconditional surrender, I crossed into Switzerland and applied for asylum. The Swiss refused me and turned me over to French border authorities. I was placed under house arrest in a villa near Paris while London and Belgrade argued over which government had the better claim to try me. I used the delay.
On the morning of May 29th, 1946, carrying a passport in the name of a Syrian politician, I walked onto a US military transport flight to Cairo. King Farouk granted me refuge on arrival. I spent the rest of my life as a guest of the Arab world, never tried, never extradited. I died in Beirut on July 4th, 1974.
The other two architects had quieter exits. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani reached Saudi Arabia in 1945. He returned to Iraq after the 1958 revolution, attempted a counter-coup, was sentenced to death, pardoned, and died in Beirut in 1965. Hellmuth Felmy was convicted of war crimes in occupied Greece, sentenced to 15 years, released after four, and died in 1965.
The legion they had built outlived none of its purposes.
