Free Arabian Legion
Arab Nazi army
The Free Arabian Legion (German: Legion Freies Arabien; Arabic: جيش بلاد العرب الحرة, romanized: Jaysh bilād al-ʿarab al-ḥurraẗ) was the collective name of several Nazi German units formed from Arab and African volunteers, many of whom were former Allied colonial troops taken as prisoners of war by the Nazis. Additional volunteers were drawn from the Middle East, notably Iraq, and North Africa during World War II.
Operational history
Origins
In April 1941, a group of senior Iraqi officials, including the politician Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and several army officers who were part of the Golden Square nationalist group, launched a coup d'état which overthrew the Kingdom of Iraq's pro-British government. The new regime, which was pro-Axis, soon made contact with German and Italian authorities and requested military support. Iraqi-Axis communications were established with the help of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, who had been living in Iraq since he had fled imprisonment in Mandatory Palestine shortly before the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
In May 1941, the Anglo-Iraqi War began when British forces invaded Iraq. Adolf Hitler had agreed to send Luftwaffe squadrons to support Iraq as well as Special Staff F, a special mission headed by Hellmuth Felmy that was intended to also provide military support to the new Iraqi regime. However, by the end of May the British had defeat the forces of the new regime, with al-Gaylani and al-Husseini fleeing to Iran and then onwards to Germany via Italy. Following the Iraqi defeat, several pro-Axis Arabs were sent to Europe through French Syria, ending up in Sounion, Greece.
Units
Felmy had by June been given command of Army Group Southern Greece and began raising Arab units for German service using Special Staff F, which had now been expanded and was ordered to "be the central field office for all issues of the Arab world which affect the Wehrmacht." Consequently, the two units Sonderverband 287 was created. Initially, the Germans and Italians decided that the actual Free Arabian Legion would only be an Italian unit raised in Italy, with the Germans handing over hundreds of Allied Arab prisoners of war, but in May 1942 Arab collaborators requested an Arab unit be raised for German service too.
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This entry incorporates text from “Free Arabian Legion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.