Morocco was part of Vichy France, and technically speaking, Vichy was only occupied by the Germans after Morocco fell to the allies. Until then, it was more of an unwilling ally.
Edit - simulpost!
And then tried each other for it after the war, when they claimed to have been in the Maquis.
Except the Vichy were quite pro-active in their collaboration with the holocaust.
Unwilling allies, but willing anti-semites.
That is fair, and willing genocidaires. Unlike us.
in any case we can expect ralph to come and ask this question again in five years… maybe dissanance can come back and make the same reply even.
Yeah and the King of Morocco actively opposed them:
And he was ruler, technically, as Morocco was a French protectorate at the time. On paper at least it was not ruled by France.
Yes, I said this already… But it was sultan, not king in this time. the point made was the vichy were perhaps reluctant in alliance with the Germans but they had not much reluctance in the genocide against the jews.
This is a fiction, the French occupation, excepting the spanish occupation zone, was the law.
the only force the Sultan had was the moral and the risk of the popular revolt.
the risk taken in opposing was not trivial, to be deposed. Even assasinated.
Pretty nutty statement but at one time mass deportation of Jews to someplace like Madagascar was considered. It wasn’t put into effect because of logistics and because Hitler feared that Jews would ultimately undermine Aryans from anywhere (that’s how his sick mind saw it). I doubt if any Moslem/Muslim person had anything to do with it. Albert Speer told “Playboy” in 1971 that he didn’t think Hitler contemplated destroying Jews until Kristallnacht in November, 1938. Others disagree with Speer’s date
I wonder why he didn’t conquer the area of the Kingdom of Israel, deport Jews and militarily support them, giving him an ally in the Middle East.
Bizarre question. Actually, IIRC, the adherents of Islam were spelled Muslim, then Moslem, and back to Muslim again, in the US, since the 60s.
The Royal Navy and the British Army would have had something so say about that?
Well, the immediate answer is obvious. The German advance in that direction was stopped at El Alamein in 1942, and never resumed. They didn’t take (what was then) Palestine because they lacked the capacity to do so.
Your assumption that if European Jews had been forcibly deported to Palestine , they would then have been an ally for Hitler in the region is a bizarre one. I’d expect they’d feel quite resentful towards him.
Informative thread.
Not that I agree with the assumption but it should be pointed out by the radical Israeli Zionist groupthe Stern Gang (which many future Israeli politicias with part of, including a future PM) did indeed attempt to ally with Hitler during WW2:
When WW2 broke out, the leaders of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in the Mandate) had to decide whether to continue with their conflict with the British, or to put it aside and focus on defeating Nazi Germany. Ben Gurion’s Hagganah, by far the largest faction, decided to join the Allied struggle, as did the smaller right-wing organization, the IZL (“the Irgun”). The Stern Gang was a tiny faction that broke off from the Irgun as a result of this decision, choosing to focus on fighting the Brits.
Their attempted deal with the Nazis was not popular, to say the least.
These two cases (the Stern Gang, the Indian National Army and the Free India Legion) exemplify the old adage “politics makes strange bedfellows”.
Both are cases where colonies were seeking independence from Britain, and looked at the war as a means to achieving that independence. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Which is why the majority of the Zionists worked with the British - they considered the Nazis to be the bigger enemy.
All fascist ideologies are racist, but that is not primary. Fascism’s primarily ideology is anticommunism. Nazi ideology identified Jews with communism and the communists opposition to the First World War, which undermined the German war effort and led to defeat and the Treaty of Versailles.
And similarly why the majority of Indians worked with the British; the INA and the Indian Legion were very much in the minority and not much more than footnotes in the course of the war. Notably in both cases they were formed from POWs in the hands of Germany (the Free Indian Legion) and Japan (the Indian National Army). The sizes of them, 2,600 in the Free Indian Legion and ~43,000 in the INA pales in comparison to the size of the Indian Army which numbered just under 200,000 at the outbreak of war in 1939 and expanded to a size of 2.5 million by wars end in 1945, and much more importantly to the point was composed entirely of volunteers, there was no conscription.
Just to note it, there was also a British Free Corps in the SS formed from British POWs. There were only ever 54 members and its leader, a British fascist named John Amery was tried for treason, made sudden and surprising plea of guilty on the first day of trial after preliminary attempts to avoid trial on various grounds, and was hung.
Saw this article on Netanyahu, attempting to explain his story as justifiable spin.
Regarding India’s contribution to WWII, I ran across this documentary (in five parts). It discusses how Indians volunteered for the British army, how they were treated, how they went on to be successful in Burma, and how the INA was founded. It interviews participants, and discusses the political contentiousness of the situation. The Indians who remained loyal to the Allies are looked down on while the INA are lauded as fighting for free India.