For the Jewish communities of Sevastopol, in Crimea, and Alexandria, in Egypt, the stakes could not have been higher in 1942. Their very survival hung in the balance.
The Red Army and the Eighth Army stood between them and the might of the German war machine as Hitler threw everything he had into subjugating the Russians on the Eastern Front and kicking the British and their allies out of North Africa.
Sevastopol was the home of the Soviet Union’s Black Sea fleet and was reckoned to be the strongest fortress in the world.
The Germans had attempted to take it in November 1941 but were easily seen off, suffering 9,000 casualties. In June 1942 they tried again, having wiped out the Red Army at Kerch and Kharkov (names sadly familiar to us again today as the latest Ukraine war rages on).
This time, as Richard Hargreaves describes in meticulous detail in his new history of Hitler’s 1942 campaigns, the Eleventh Army, seven German and two Romanian divisions led by the able General Erich von Manstein, threw everything into the battle.
Despite overwhelming air superiority, it still took them a month of the most brutal fighting to finally occupy the city, which by then lay in ruins. The Russians defended every inch of ground with a skill and desperation that even elicited the admiration of their German attackers. In the end it was in vain.
Jewish Red Army soldiers were immediately executed while the remnants of the civilian Jewish community were handed over to an SS death squad. It began executing the Jews in groups of up to 300 men while women and children were forced into “gas vans” where they were killed by the fumes.
Their bodies were then dumped in an anti-tank ditch on the edge of the city where the men already lay. As Hargreaves points out, similar atrocities were carried out on eastern European and Russian Jews in territories the length of the front occupied by the German forces, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. The Jews of Alexandria could expect a similar fate if Rommel’s army advancing through the Western Desert broke through the final Allied line between them and Cairo. Having taken Tobruk easily and advanced swiftly through the desert, Rommel himself was confident of victory. At the same time Sevastopol was falling, records Hargreaves, the Desert Fox told one of his commanders: “Drive with your men to Alexandria. The Tommies will have gone anyway. Tomorrow we’ll be drinking coffee in Cairo.”
Hitler was already planning the extermination of Egypt’s 60,000 Jews. An SS officer, Walter Rauff, accompanied by two dozen men, arrived at Rommel’s headquarters to plot their mass murder, although they hoped the Arabs would do the job for them, encouraged by broadcasts from Berlin radio urging them to “rise as one man to kill the Jews before they have the chance of betraying the Egyptian people”.
The Germans never got that far, stopped in their tracks by unexpectedly strong Allied resistance at the first battle of El Alamein in July 1942 and then routed and forced to retreat in disarray by the Eighth Army at the second battle a few months later. The Jews of Egypt were safe, for the time being at least. Churchill, as usual, put it best: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Hargreaves’s account of the two fronts where Hitler unsuccessfully gambled everything in his bid for world domination is a great achievement, the product of 15 years’ research. Its great strength is its use of sources such as the letters and diaries of the soldiers and airmen involved, which give a graphic description of the realities of war at the front line.
The war on the Eastern Front, in particular, was one of the most savage conflicts in human history and Hargreaves leaves nothing out. The fact that much of his material comes from German, Italian, Romanian and Russian servicemen provides an interesting perspective to battles that we usually see through Allied eyes.
Hargreaves confines himself to the events of 1942, but it is worth adding that the Germans retained control of Sevastopol for just under two years before the Russians recaptured it. And the Jews of Egypt were to suffer greatly under Egyptian rule after the war. Most of them left for Israel and elsewhere and there are few left there today.
1942: Hitler’s Gamble for Victory, by Richard Hargreaves, is published by Osprey Publishing
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.