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then a series of policies decreed not implemented, operations planned not
executed, and opportunities sought not seized.
It is astonishing that the SS foreign intelligence service (RSHA VI)
never attempted any covert operations against Iraq during the Second
World War. Though documentary evidence of sustained RSHA VI interest
in the region late in the war is to be found in the German records, it was
never converted into concrete plans.^82 Undoubtedly, as the SS approached
their Götterdämmerung, they had few intelligence resources left. However,
what really impeded them throughout the war and to its bitter end was
their chronic lack of planning expertise. Because of their odious race-based
dogmas, the SS had never been able to attract the kinds of mature regional
specialists who planned the Abwehr’s schemes, nor the widely travelled,
polyglot linguists and locals whom the Abwehr recruited with relative ease
to implement them. Thuggish young SS ideologues at RSHA VI with
blood on their hands from the killing squads, like Kurt Schuback, Heinz
Tunnat, and Martin Kurmis for instance—all responsible for mounting
Near and Middle East operations—had no regional knowledge to com-
pare with that of such pragmatic, deeply knowledgeable Abwehr experts as
Werner Eisenberg, Hans-Otto Wagner, Emil Hurr, and Paul Leverkuehn.^83
As for the Abwehr’s plans themselves, perhaps because of past failures or a
lack of political conviction (or both), tentativeness was to be found where
boldness was called for. Pinpricks like Operation MAMMUT were substi-
tuted for large-scale infiltration schemes like the Bedaux-Felmy raid,
though that initiative was in itself absurdly impractical. The longed-for
place in the desert sun was allowed to slip beyond Germany’s reach in
favour of the frigid Lebensraum of the Soviet steppes. For RSHA VI, the
extensive, multiyear, Russian-front Operation ZEPPELIN and its scores
of associated suboperations^84 eclipsed all other plans, anywhere in the
world, and devoured the branch’s ever-diminishing resources in pursuit of
a fading dream. When that dream proved to be a mere mirage, all sunlight
was finally extinguished, and the Germans were condemned to inhabit
that very dark place in the shade into which they had perversely attempted
to throw their ill-chosen enemies.
Notes
- See Appendix C.
- For more about Wagner, an erudite ethnologist and minorities expert, who
was a good friend of Eisenberg’s, and who also ended the war in American
A PLACE IN THE SHADE