The strange tale of Paul Ernst Fackenheim
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/111208
In the North African desert during the summer of 1942, a pivotal battle of the Second World War took place between the German Afrika Corps under Erwin Rommel and the British and Commonwealth troops under Bernard Montgomery. The site of the battle was an oasis called El Alamein, which lay some 140 miles west of Cairo, Egypt.
The outcome of the battle determined whether the victorious push by Hitler’s vaunted Afrika Corps westwards towards the strategic Suez Canal and the oil fields of the Middle East would succeed or not. If the Afrika Corps won the battle, Britain and the Allies would be dealt a crushing blow from which they would likely not survive and the Third Reich would emerge triumphant. If they were stopped at El Alamein and forced to withdraw westwards, the Hitlerian Empire would begin to unravel.
And so it was that Rommel, starved of supplies, was defeated in late 1942 and forced to begin a long retreat. But before the two armies met on that fateful battlefield, the German High Command was faced with a desperate need to infiltrate British intelligence and learn as much as possible of the military disposition and tactical plans of the Allies.
The German Nazi espionage organization, the Abwehr, thus hatched an incredible and most unlikely plan.
1941 was another catastrophic year for the Jews of German occupied Europe. Death camps, roving killing squads, the einsatzgruppen, gas chambers, ghettos, and every horror invented by mankind was being employed by the Germans and their European allies against the hapless and abandoned Jews. Millions had already been done to death by the German Nazi juggernaut of death.
Death camps dotted the European continent and were the sites where endless transports of Jewish men, women, children and babies daily arrived by cattle trains from all over the European hell. Many of these camps, such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz lay outside of villages and towns in which the civilian populations went about their daily lives, while thousands of hapless Jews were being systematically slaughtered.
One of these camps lay outside the pretty Bavarian village of Dachau and it is to this hell on earth that one Paul Ernst Fackenheim was brought to be worked to death or arbitrarily murdered by any one of the German guards who infested those places of unparalleled horror.
Michael Bar-Zohar’s book about Fackenheim titled, ARROWS OF THE ALMIGHTY — The Most Extraordinary True Spy Story of World War II, included this following and chilling account of the living hell that was the German Nazi death camp of Dachau:
“It is a morning in April 1941. In Dachau 500 prisoners in blue-striped uniforms — the inmates of the ”Jewish block” of Camp Number Three — tensely await the new day’s horrors. Some will be beaten to death, some shot.
“Others will be taken to the Bunker (”the sinister cave used for solitary confinement, where the tortures inflicted . . . were so cruel that they were kept secret even from the regular SS guards”) or sent to a torture table called the Bock (on which one would be bound and then struck with a bullwhip that had been soaked in water).
“The crematorium will receive its share. Groups of others will listlessly head off to do the camp’s soul-destroying, physically punishing work, in the stone quarry or the swamp.”
Fackenheim, like so many other German Jewish men, had been a highly decorated officer who had fought valiantly for the Fatherland in World War One. But his patriotism was to no avail in the insanity that now gripped Germany under its leader; Corporal Adolf Hitler.
But Fackenheim was to be saved by the Abwehr , the German military intelligence service, over the strenuous objections of the Gestapo and SS. What was the reason for his salvation and escape from certain death?
The German High Command’s great fear was what the outcome of the North African campaign would be. Having already launched Operation Barbarossa by invading Russia, the now desperate need by Nazi Germany to succeed in the drive to Egypt and beyond was paramount.
