In late November 1941, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem asked Adolf Hitler for an army to drive the British out of the Middle East. Nazi racial law classified Arabs as non-Aryan and barred them from serving in the Wehrmacht. Hitler granted an exception anyway, authorizing an Arab Legion with plans to march on Baghdad. Four years later, the survivors of that force were not in the Middle East at all.
They were fighting a fading war in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Just after 10:00 on the night of March 31, 1941, Iraqi soldiers moved through the streets of Baghdad and seized the telegraph offices, the telephone exchange, and the radio station. By dawn on April 1, the city was under the control of four senior officers who called themselves the Golden Square. The four-year-old King Faisal II was left a king without a government.
His pro-British regent fled to Basra under a Royal Air Force escort, and Baghdad lawyer Rashid Ali al-Gaylani installed himself as prime minister of a national defense government. Al-Gaylani had been waiting for this moment. Iraq had been independent on paper since 1932, but British troops remained on its soil, British advisers shaped its policy, and the country’s oil flowed to the Royal Navy. He had served as prime minister twice before and lost the post each time over British objections.
On April 3, 1941, he opened immediate contact with Berlin through his most important guest, the exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who had been sheltering in Baghdad since 1939 after fleeing a British arrest warrant in Palestine. The British response was immediate. On May 2, the commander of RAF Habbaniyah launched a preemptive airstrike against Iraqi artillery positions overlooking the base, beginning the Anglo-Iraqi War. Three weeks later, on May 23, Hitler issued Führer Directive No.
30, titled “Middle East,” authorizing limited German military support for the Iraqi rebellion. Luftwaffe squadrons were dispatched to the region. On May 20, Hitler appointed Luftwaffe General Hellmuth Felmy, previously dismissed for a security breach, to command a new mission called Sonderstab F based in occupied Greece. Its job was to coordinate German aid to al-Gaylani and raise an Arab Brigade.
The German effort came too late. British forces pushed toward Baghdad through May, and by May 29, al-Gaylani’s government had collapsed. He fled to Iran; al-Husseini followed days later. On May 31, an armistice was signed, and the pro-British Regency was restored on June 1.
Sonderstab F was formally dissolved on June 20. The Iraqi revolt had lasted 58 days. But the men who had launched it did not stop. After British and Soviet forces invaded Iran on August 25, 1941, al-Gaylani and al-Husseini moved again, first to Italy and then to Berlin.
They arrived in a city where Wehrmacht planners were drawing arrows on maps that pointed toward Baku, the Caucasus, and beyond. Amin al-Husseini arrived in Berlin on November 6, 1941. He had been the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 until 1937, when he fled a British arrest warrant. Now he wanted something from Hitler the British had never given him: recognition as the leader of an independent Arab world.
On November 20, he met Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Eight days later, on November 28, 1941, he was received by Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. The meeting lasted 90 minutes. Al-Husseini asked for a public declaration recognizing Arab independence, supporting the removal of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, and authorizing him to raise an Arab Legion under German arms.
Hitler agreed to two of those three requests. The Legion could be raised, but the public declaration would have to wait. Germany was not yet ready to provoke Vichy France or Fascist Italy by promising independence to territories they considered theirs. Al-Husseini accepted the half measure.
He was given a residence in Berlin, a monthly salary of 50,000 reichsmarks—roughly double what a German field marshal earned in a year—and access to Radio Berlin’s Arabic service, where he began broadcasting daily appeals across the Middle East. Nazi racial doctrine made the agreement awkward. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 classified Arabs as non-Aryan and excluded them from the Wehrmacht. Hitler granted an exception.
The decision was pragmatic rather than ideological. The British Empire stretched from Cairo to Calcutta, and any Arab unit that could destabilize it was worth the doctrinal contradiction. The exemption was never published; it was simply applied. Al-Husseini began building.
The Abwehr had already established a small unit at Cape Sounion in occupied Greece, called the Deutsch-Arabische Lehrabteilung, the German-Arab training department. By May 1942, it contained roughly 130 Arab soldiers. With al-Husseini and al-Gaylani actively recruiting from Arab students in Berlin, prisoners taken from French colonial regiments in North Africa, and Iraqi exiles, the numbers slowly grew. On August 4, 1942, the unit was formally enlarged at the Döberitz training ground outside Berlin and redesignated Sonderverband 287, Special Unit 287.
Internal Wehrmacht documents also called it the Deutsch-Arabische Legion. The plan attached to it was vast. The Sixth Army was advancing on Stalingrad. Once the Caucasus fell, an Iraqi government in exile would be installed there, and the legion would march through Persia into Iraq to meet Rommel coming the other way from Egypt—a pincer that would close on the Middle East.
The whole strategy depended on Stalingrad falling. Three months after Sonderverband 287 was formed, the Sixth Army was encircled. Who were these men? The numbers tell part of the story.
Of the soldiers who passed through Sonderverband 287 in late 1942, German records counted 24 Iraqis, 112 Syrians and Palestinians, and 127 Arabs drawn from French North Africa. Across the entire war, the total number of Arabs trained by German military organizations reached approximately 6,300. No more than 1,300 came from Palestine, Syria, and Iraq combined. They arrived in Berlin and at Cape Sounion from different worlds.
Some were Iraqi army officers who had followed al-Gaylani into exile after the failed Baghdad coup. Others were Syrian and Palestinian students who had been studying in Berlin when the war began and chose to remain. The largest single group came from French colonial prisoner of war camps: Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian soldiers captured fighting for France in 1940 were offered release if they switched sides. A handful were ideological volunteers who 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 standing on the right side when it happened. The plan they had been recruited for died at Stalingrad in February 1943. With the Caucasus offensive collapsed and Rommel retreating across Libya, the legion had no destination left.
The decision was made to send the Arab-majority third battalion to Tunisia. In mid-December 1942, the battalion was loaded onto trains and, after a 14-day journey through Italy, arrived in North Africa in January 1943. By mid-February, with German weapons finally available in quantity, the unit was raised to battalion status: two Tunisian battalions, one Algerian, one Moroccan. The Tunisia deployment fell apart almost immediately.
On February 24, 1943, the unit’s commander, Major Schober, and the corps’ chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Meyer-Ricks, were both killed in a low-flying 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 the position.
The battalion was overrun before dawn. Fifth Panzer Army headquarters concluded from the experience that Muslim battalions were not to be used in forward areas again. On May 13, 1943, all Axis forces in Tunisia capitulated. The third 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 the legion was reassembled and sent elsewhere. The remnants of the Arab training unit, combined with new recruits from French North Africa, were reformed in summer 1943 as German Arab Infantry Battalion 845. From November 1943, it was deployed to the Peloponnese in southern Greece, attached to the 41st Fortress Division.
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 primarily for coastal defense and security sweeps. The mostly German first and second battalions of Sonderverband 287 followed a different path. On May 2, 1943, they were redesignated Grenadier Regiment 92 and transferred to Yugoslavia, where they joined Army Group F in operations against Tito’s National Liberation Army.
The regiment suffered heavy losses near Belgrade in October 1944. What remained was rebuilt in January 1945 as Panzergrenadier Brigade 92 under the Second Panzer Army. The army capitulated in disarray in Austria in May 1945. Set against what other powers achieved, 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 Amin al-Husseini, the man who had brokered the legion in Berlin, the war ended in flight. On May 7, 1945, the day before Germany’s unconditional surrender, he crossed into Switzerland and applied for asylum. The Swiss refused him and turned him over to French border authorities. He was placed under house arrest in a villa near Paris while London and Belgrade argued over which government had the better claim to try him.
He used the delay. On the morning of May 29, 1946, carrying a passport in the name of a Syrian politician named Marouf al-Dawalibi, he walked onto a US military transport flight to Cairo. King Farouk granted him refuge on arrival. He spent the rest of his life as a guest of the Arab world, never tried, never extradited, dying in Beirut on July 4, 1974.
The other two architects had quieter exits. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani reached Saudi Arabia in 1945. King Ibn Saud granted him sanctuary despite British protests. 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 at the Hostages Case at Nuremberg, sentenced to 15 years, released after four, and died in Darmstadt in 1965. The legion they had built outlived none of its purposes.