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The record · Tunisia, November 1942 – May 1943
The Jews of Tunisia and the SS Einsatzkommando
For the roughly 90,000 Jews of Tunisia, the six months of German occupation that the Kasserine battles were fought to end brought the Holocaust to Africa. This page is about them: the forced labor, the hostages, the levies and the dead, and the SS commander, Walther Rauff, who was never tried.
Illustration A neutral marker made for this site, not a unit emblem.
The Jews of Tunisia in November 1942
About 90,000 Jews lived in Tunisia in 1942, the largest community in Tunis and others across the country, among them the old community on the island of Djerba. Under the Vichy regime they had already been subjected to anti-Jewish statutes from November 1940 and to the confiscation of property. When German forces flew into Tunis after the Allied landings of 8 November 1942, they brought something worse: an Einsatzkommando of the SS Security Police and SD under SS-Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff (Yad Vashem; Chapter 1).
Rauff came from the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin, where he had overseen the development of the gas vans used to murder Jews and others in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. His unit had been formed in the summer of 1942 to follow Rommel’s army into Egypt and Palestine, a mission ended by the defeat at El Alamein; it went to Tunis instead (Mallmann and Cüppers, as cited in Wikipedia). It was a small unit, not a fighting formation, but it had the full power of the occupation behind it (Chapter 1; Chapter 9).
The round-up of 9 December
About two weeks after the first German troops landed, the persecution began with the arrest of leaders of the Jewish community. On 8 December 1942 Rauff summoned those who remained and demanded 3,000 workers, with picks and shovels, for the next morning. When only about a hundred men appeared, the SS seized Jews in the streets and in front of the Great Synagogue of Tunis on 9 December, and held about a hundred prominent Jews as hostages for the community’s obedience. The community was forced to set up a committee to recruit the laborers and to supply them with food and tools (Harif, citing France 24 and the historian Claude Nataf; Montreal Holocaust Museum).
The camps, the levies and the gold
Over the following months about 5,000 Jewish men were sent to forced labor. Yad Vashem counts almost 5,000, mostly from Tunis and the northern communities, held in 32 labor camps; the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates roughly 5,000 men in some forty German labor and detention camps. They dug trenches and built fortifications for the Axis armies near the front, loaded supplies and cleared bomb damage in the ports and at the airfields. They were made to wear a yellow star on their backs so that they could be identified from a distance and shot if they tried to escape. Rabbis, merchants, students and laborers worked side by side, beaten by guards and bombed by Allied aircraft. The largest and deadliest camps were at Bizerte and Mateur (Yad Vashem; USHMM; Chapter 1).
The community was made to pay for its own persecution. The occupiers imposed heavy collective fines on Jewish communities, justified as punishment for the Allied landings, and levies of millions of francs; the community had to feed the laborers and supply the German army. Jewish apartments and shops were confiscated. On the island of Djerba, Rauff’s men took about 43 kilograms of gold from the Jewish community, with silver, jewelry and religious objects (Yad Vashem; Der Spiegel, 2007, as cited in Wikipedia; Chapter 9).
The victims
Conditions varied from camp to camp, but hunger, cold, beatings, disease and Allied bombing of the sites near ports and airfields killed workers. At Bizerte and Mateur dozens died of disease, labor, punishment and bombing. Some men were shot. Gilbert-Mardochée Mazouz, 19 years old, was killed by a German soldier on his way to the Cheylus camp near Tunis (Montreal Holocaust Museum; Yad Vashem). A full count of the dead has not been established in the sources this collection used.
Tunisian Jews living in France were caught in the deportations there. The best known was the boxer Victor “Young” Perez, born in Tunis, a former world flyweight champion, who was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz and died on a death march on 21 January 1945 (Chapter 9).
Not every Tunisian stood by. The American scholar Robert Satloff, in Among the Righteous (2006), documented Arab Tunisians who sheltered Jews during the occupation, among them Khaled Abdul-Wahab, who hid Jewish families on his farm near Mahdia. The record of such acts is still being gathered (Chapter 1).
Liberation
The camps were freed when British and American troops took Tunis and Bizerte on 7 May 1943, and the last Axis forces in Africa surrendered on 13 May. The Germans had not had time to deport the Jews of Tunisia to the death camps of Europe (Yad Vashem). The Montreal Holocaust Museum names three things that limited the Nazis’ plans for Tunisia’s Jews, quoted below. In plain terms, the Allied armies, including the American divisions that fought at Kasserine and came back through the pass in late February, ended the occupation before the SS could go further. Liberation did not end discrimination at once: Vichy’s antisemitic laws, in force before the Germans came, were not fully lifted until well after the Allies arrived (Chapter 9).
“time constraints, lack of resources, and the evolution of the war”
The evidence, and the trial that never came
Much of what is known comes from the community itself: diaries such as those of Clement Hori, the work of historians such as Claude Nataf, and the testimony and documents that historians in France, Israel and Tunisia, Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have gathered since the 2000s. The occupiers left their own evidence too. The German propaganda company photographed the forced laborers in Tunis in December 1942 for publication at home, and those photographs, now in the German Federal Archives, show the round-ups the captions celebrate (Harif; USHMM; Chapter 9).
Rauff was never called to answer for Tunisia. After May 1943 he commanded the Security Police and SD in northwestern Italy, based in Milan. Arrested at the end of the war, he escaped from an American internment camp at Rimini in December 1946, hid in Italian convents, worked for Syrian intelligence in 1948–49, lived in Ecuador from 1949 to 1958 and then settled in Chile, where he also worked for West German intelligence until 1962. Arrested in December 1962 at West Germany’s request, he was freed in 1963 when the Chilean Supreme Court ruled that the crimes were too old to prosecute. Later requests, including one in 1983, were refused. He died in Santiago on 14 May 1984, never extradited and never tried (Wikipedia, “Walter Rauff,” citing the New York Times obituary; Chapter 9).
The memory of the six months was long kept mainly within the Tunisian Jewish community, most of whose members emigrated to France and Israel in the decades after Tunisian independence in 1956. The Holocaust in North Africa now has a place in the general histories it long lacked. For an American reader, it is a reminder that the soldiers who fought their way back through the Kasserine Pass were, whether they knew it or not, also ending a persecution.
Timeline
- Vichy’s anti-Jewish statutes are applied to the Jews of Tunisia.
- German aircraft begin landing at Tunis; the Einsatzkommando follows with the occupation.
- Leaders of the Jewish community are arrested.
- Rauff demands 3,000 Jewish laborers with tools for the next morning.
- Jews are seized in the streets and at the Great Synagogue; about a hundred are held as hostages.
- About 5,000 men are held in 32 to about 40 labor camps; communities pay levies and fines; gold is taken on Djerba.
- Tunis and Bizerte are liberated and the camps freed.
- Rauff escapes from an American internment camp at Rimini.
- The Chilean Supreme Court frees Rauff; West Germany’s extradition request fails.
- Rauff dies in Santiago, never tried.
Read the full story
- Chapter 1: Torch and the Race for Tunis: The Americans Come to North Africa
- Chapter 9: The Cost and the Memory of Kasserine
- The Luftwaffe in Tunisia: The Record
- The Kasserine Pass collection and atlas
By the numbers
The Jews of Tunisia under German occupation by the numbers
The demand of 8 December 1942
Men; Rauff’s demand to the community and what followed (approximate figures in the sources)
Source: Harif (2022), citing France 24 and Claude Nataf; Montreal Holocaust Museum; Yad Vashem, “The Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia”; USHMM, “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa.”
Justice that never came
Years after the liberation of Tunis, 7 May 1943, at each turn in Walther Rauff’s life
Source: “Walter Rauff,” Wikipedia, citing Mallmann and Cüppers and the New York Times obituary.
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
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Sources
- Yad Vashem, Sheryl Silver Ochayon, “The Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.”
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa.”
- Montreal Holocaust Museum, on the Jews of Tunisia under German occupation.
- Harif (Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa), “Eighty years since Tunisian Jews were rounded up by the Nazis” (2022, citing France 24 and Claude Nataf), and articles of 2019 drawing on the diaries of Clement Hori.
- Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (PublicAffairs, 2006).
- Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (2010); Der Spiegel (2007); both as cited in Wikipedia, “Walter Rauff,” which also cites the New York Times obituary.
- Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J20382 and 183-J20384 (German propaganda company photographs, December 1942).