Directive No. 30

On 23 May 1941 Adolf Hitler signed Directive No. 30, “Middle East” (Weisung Nr. 30 “Mittlerer Orient”). In it he declared that the “Arab freedom movement” was Germany’s natural ally against England in the Middle East and that the rising in Iraq was of special importance, and he decided to support the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani with air forces, a military mission and deliveries of arms. The directive gave the form of an order to what had been done in haste and by improvisation for the previous three weeks, and at the same time it set the limits of German involvement: Hitler intended to decide whether and how to break the British position between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf only after Operation Barbarossa was over. By the time the directive left headquarters, the war in Iraq was already practically lost for Germany. Six days later the German military mission was fleeing Baghdad.

Three dates are associated with the directive: the creation on 20 May of the German military mission Sonderstab F under General Hellmuth Felmy, the directive itself on 23 May, and the flight of the mission’s members from Iraq on 29 May.

Aid that was late from the start

Rashid Ali’s government, which had taken power at the turn of March and April, had counted on Germany from the outset. Berlin answered cautiously: it promised to recognise the independence of the Arab countries once they had won it for themselves, assured them of its sympathy and held out the prospect of arms, but it had no way of delivering them. The Reich had had no representation in Iraq since September 1939, and the overland route ran either through Turkey, which did not wish to antagonise the British, or through Syria, controlled by Vichy France. Hitler, absorbed by the Balkan campaign and by preparations for the invasion of the USSR, did not want a premature outbreak in Iraq.

The outbreak came all the same. On 2 May aircraft from the British base at Habbaniya struck at the Iraqi troops besieging it, and Rashid Ali demanded that the Germans keep their promises. On 3 May the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, persuaded Hitler to send to Baghdad Fritz Grobba, the Reich’s pre-war minister in Iraq, to direct the whole operation on the spot. On 6 May, during Admiral François Darlan’s talks with the Germans in Paris, Vichy agreed to German aircraft passing through Syrian airfields and to the handing over to the Iraqis of arms from French depots in Syria. That same day Oberst Werner Junck was ordered to lead a small air group to Iraq, which took the name Fliegerführer Irak. On 11 May Grobba was in Baghdad, and on 13 May Junck’s main force – a dozen or so Bf 110 heavy fighters and a few He 111 bombers in Iraqi markings – landed at Mosul. Deliveries of French arms by rail from Syria across Turkish territory also began.

In those days Rashid Ali’s government also gained unexpected diplomatic support: on 12 May it was recognised by the Soviet Union, with Berlin rather than Baghdad in mind. German aid, however, had its price. As early as 14 May the British began bombing the Vichy airfields in Syria through which the German aircraft were passing, and Darlan’s collaboration with the Germans began to lead towards open conflict between Britain and Vichy France.

Sonderstab F

Besides the aircraft, the Germans decided to send a military mission to Iraq. Command was entrusted to General der Flieger Hellmuth Felmy (born 1885), who had experience of the Middle East like few others in the Wehrmacht. In 1916–1918 he had commanded in Palestine a German air unit fighting alongside the Turks, and at the time he was the German airman best known to the British on that front. At the start of the war he commanded Luftflotte 2, but in January 1940 Hitler dismissed him after the Mechelen incident, when an aircraft from his area carrying plans for the attack in the west made a forced landing in Belgium. Now he was recalled to service. The mission was given the code name Sonderstab F, “Special Staff F”, after its commander’s surname. It was subordinate to the chief of the Armed Forces High Command (OKW), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and it had its headquarters not in Baghdad but in Athens.

The creation of Sonderstab F is usually dated to 20 May. This date is supported by English-language literature, which gives the mission’s existence as 20 May – 20 June 1941; German studies state that Felmy headed it from 23 May, the day of the directive that formally established it. The preparations themselves began earlier: in the first half of May a reconnaissance party under Major Axel von Blomberg, son of the former war minister Werner von Blomberg, flew to Iraq with a few soldiers of the Brandenburg special unit. Blomberg was to prepare cooperation between the air force and the Iraqi army, but he was killed when his Heinkel, coming in to land at Baghdad, was fired on by Iraqi soldiers; most sources give the date as 12 May, some a few days later. By the end of May more than forty people were serving on Felmy’s staff.

The content of the directive

Directive No. 30 had seven points. In the first, Hitler wrote that in the Middle East the Arab freedom movement was “our natural ally against England”, and that the rising in Iraq was of special importance because it strengthened the forces hostile to England beyond Iraq’s borders as well, disrupted British communications and tied down English troops and shipping at the expense of other theatres of war. He had therefore decided “to hasten developments in the Middle East by supporting Iraq”. Immediately afterwards, however, he added a reservation that was the most important sentence of the document: whether and how the British position between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf could finally be broken, in connection with an offensive against the Suez Canal, would be decided only after Barbarossa, that is, after the defeat of the USSR planned in Directive No. 21.

The support was to take three forms: air operations, the dispatch of a military mission and deliveries of arms. The mission under Felmy was to advise and support the Iraqi army, to establish contacts where possible with forces hostile to England outside Iraq, and to gather experience and information for the Wehrmacht. All soldiers sent to Iraq, including the liaison officers in Syria, came under it, but orders to the air units could be issued only by the Luftwaffe command, that is, by Hermann Göring and his chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek. For the time being members of the mission were to be regarded as volunteers, “on the model of the Condor Legion”, and were to wear tropical uniforms with Iraqi insignia, while the German aircraft were to carry Iraqi markings. The air force, used “in limited numbers”, was above all to raise the self-confidence and fighting spirit of the Iraqi people and army.

The arms were to come from Syria, under the agreement concluded with the French, and from Germany. Propaganda in the Middle East was to be directed by the Foreign Ministry in cooperation with the OKW. Its leading theme was that an Axis victory would free the countries of the Middle East from the English yoke and give them the right of self-determination, so that all who loved freedom would join the struggle against England. At the same time Hitler forbade any propaganda against the French in Syria, as he needed Vichy’s goodwill. The last point concerned the Italians: if Italian soldiers reached Iraq, the Germans were to seek to place them under the head of the German mission.

The directive made no mention of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who in Baghdad had called on Muslims to wage holy war against Britain and was the chief link between the Iraqi nationalists and Berlin. Nor did it promise what the Arabs had been seeking for months: a public declaration recognising the independence of the Arab countries. Hitler did not want to irritate Italy, which regarded the Middle East as its own sphere, or France, which ruled Syria and Lebanon.

Too little, too late

When Hitler signed the directive, the situation in Iraq was already decided. The Iraqis had withdrawn from Habbaniya as early as 6 May, on 18 May a British column from Palestine reached the base, and on 19 May the British took Fallujah, opening the road to Baghdad; an Iraqi counter-attack on 22 May failed. Fliegerführer Irak was melting away: it lacked spare parts, bombs, sand filters and aviation fuel, and the British were destroying its aircraft in the air and on the airfields. There were no reinforcements, because from 20 May almost all the transport and combat aircraft in southern Europe were taken up by the airborne landing on Crete. Most important of all, though, was the scale: within a few weeks the Wehrmacht was to attack the Soviet Union with three million soldiers, while to Iraq it had sent two squadrons of aircraft and a few dozen officers.

On 27 May a dozen or so Italian Fiat CR.42 fighters arrived at Mosul and operated under German command, in accordance with the seventh point of the directive. That same night two British columns set out from Fallujah for Baghdad. On 28 May Grobba cabled Berlin that more than a hundred British tanks were advancing on the capital (in reality the British had none), while Junck had only two serviceable Heinkels and four bombs left. On 29 May Rashid Ali, the Mufti and most of the leaders of the coup fled Baghdad towards Iran. During the night of 29–30 May the German military mission left the capital, abandoning its unserviceable aircraft, and got out of Iraq by way of Mosul; Grobba left on 30 May. War chronologies record briefly that on 29 May “members of the German military mission flee Iraq”, which roughly corresponds to what happened: for the Germans and Italians it was the end of the operation.

Place in the war

Directive No. 30 did not change the course of the Anglo-Iraqi War, which ended with the armistice of 31 May. It was, however, the first document in which Hitler officially recognised Arab nationalism as an ally of the Reich and announced that once he had dealt with the USSR he would return to the question of the Middle East. He returned to it after only three weeks: Directive No. 32 of 11 June 1941, concerning the period “after Barbarossa”, envisaged a thrust through the Caucasus and Iran, and if necessary through Turkey as well, towards Iraq and the Persian Gulf, combined with an offensive from Libya against Egypt, and once again it was to make use of the “Arab freedom movement”. Sonderstab F survived the defeat: on 21 June Felmy, appointed commander of the forces in southern Greece, received instructions under which his staff was to be the centre within the Wehrmacht for all matters concerning the Arab world. On his initiative units were formed of Germans familiar with the Middle East and of Arab volunteers, and in 1942 Felmy’s staff, converted into a special-purpose corps, waited in the Caucasus for a march on the Persian Gulf that never took place. After the war Felmy was sentenced at Nuremberg, in the trial of the generals who had commanded in south-eastern Europe, known as the Hostages Trial, to 15 years’ imprisonment for war crimes in Greece; he was released in 1951.

The defeat in Iraq also had immediate consequences. The help Vichy had given the Germans in Syria convinced the British that the Levant could not be left in Darlan’s hands, and on 8 June British and Free French forces entered Syria and Lebanon. In August the British and the Red Army occupied Iran, where Rashid Ali had taken refuge. He and the Mufti eventually reached Berlin, where for the rest of the war they vied for the leadership of Hitler’s Arab allies, without ever obtaining the declaration they sought. The directive of 23 May shows clearly what the Middle East meant to Hitler in 1941: a region of great opportunities, the exploitation of which he had decided to put off until victory in the east.