New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (Public Affairs, 2021)

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Berlin prepared an SS unit for the Middle East, with Walter Rauf assigned to mass murder Jews in Egypt and Palestine.

Gershom Gorenberg discusses his book about codebreakers, spies, and the effort to drive the Nazis from the Middle East. The conversation starts with the British white paper, which nearly shut down Jewish immigration to Palestine just as many Jews were trying to flee Europe. Gorenberg sets that policy against the low point in British-Jewish relations and explains why the larger Jewish community and its central leadership felt defeating the Nazis had to come first, even if that meant putting conflict with the British off until after the war. Lehi appears as the stark contrast: a tiny group, often called the Stern gang, with such hardline anti-British ideology that it even tried to send an emissary to Vichy-held Beirut to reach the Italians. That episode shows both how extreme the group was and how small it was compared with the wider Jewish community in Palestine. Most of that community sided with the British. Many wanted to join the British army and fight, while the British were not always eager to take them. Leaders in Britain worried that Jewish soldiers would be trained and later turn against the empire after the war. The interview then turns to Jews who secretly worked with British intelligence and to the debate inside the British establishment over how many Jews to recruit from Palestine and what role they should have in the war effort. Near the end, Gorenberg recalls a 91-year-old man who had been 19 in the summer of 1942. He remembered walking convoys of Australian soldiers to El Alamein, only to learn later that other people he never saw had broken codes and uncovered Nazi secrets. Gorenberg calls them forgotten heroes and says he dedicated the book to their memory.

As heard by us

Wartime Palestine, British intelligence, and the people history tends to leave at the margins.

New Books in Military History takes up Gershom Gorenberg’s account of wartime Palestine, where the British white paper, Jewish leadership, Lehi, and cooperation with British intelligence all overlap in uneasy ways.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if wartime intelligence, Jewish politics, and Palestine politics are your kind of quiet drama.

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