I’m old enough to remember when the Second World War was relived in the playground, with less popular kids forced to be Germans. Three decades after the conflict ended the Battle of Britain, Dambusters and D-Day lingered in boys’ imagination, as they read jingoistic comics such as Victor and Warlord. The atom bomb, which ended the war in Japan, loomed large in the Cold War between the West and the USSR.
But that was the generation of ‘baby boomers’. The war, as taught to children today, has changed in emphasis from factual detail about battles and strategy to a moral narrative. In the revised history, the main event was the Holocaust, and the perpetrators the most evil racist regime that has ever existed. Undoubtedly, Hitler’s tyranny persecuted the Jews, among other ethnic minorities, and its pursuit of the ‘final solution’ is a stain on humanity.
Whereas my generation saw the war in terms of a desperate fight against German invasion, the Blitz by the Luftwaffe, and Atlantic convoys bringing food and fuel harassed by U-boats. This British perspective was different to that of the Russians, or of any country overrun by the Wehrmacht. Of course, European Jews had a particularly traumatic experience, but for that to become the dominant account suggests ideological motive.
The truth about the relationship between the Third Reich and the Jews is more complicated than the induced horror of a trip to Auschwitz. Robert Oulds, in his masterpiece, World War II: the First Culture War (2023), describes what happened in Palestine, a less-known yet dramatic theatre of the Second World War.
In the 1930s Hitler had supported a Jewish homeland, as was already emerging since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But the Holy Land around Jerusalem was keenly contested. The British had suppressed the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939, but Palestine and the wider Middle East were volatile.. Hitler sought to radicalise Muslims for jihad against the British and French colonial powers, as had the Kaiser in the First World War. As Oulds explains: –
‘Hitler planned to use Crete as a steppingstone to reach Cyprus and from there take Palestine from the British and Zionists who were in the process of colonising the Mandate.’
The Zionist paramilitary organisation, the Stern Gang, sought cooperation with the Nazis, to liberate Palestine from British control, but their overtures were coolly received. Hitler favoured the Arab nationalists. Meanwhile, twelve thousand Palestinians, mostly but not exclusively Christian, had volunteered to serve in the British army.
According to Oulds, ‘the Nazis admired Islam because its adherents were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their cause. Furthermore, as the Nazis were opponents of Judeo-Christian heritage, they thought that Islam could be a useful tool in undermining the traditions which the National Socialists despised.’ Ironically, this was similar to the aim of the Frankfurt School, whose Cultural Marxist professors were predominantly of the Jewish intelligentsia targeted by Hitler.
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