Nazi trained [Fawzi] Fauzi al-Qutb - his prepared truck bomb: February 22, 1948 - 'Ben Yehuda Street bombing'

Submitted by Charles (United States), Dec 6, 2022 at 17:35

Nazi trained [Fawzi] Fauzi al-Qutb [فوزي نامق القطب] - his prepared truck bomb: February 22, 1948 - 'Ben Yehuda Street bombing'

Friedman, Matti. Spies of No Country: Israel's Secret Agents at the Birth of the Mossad. United States: Algonquin Books, 2020, pp.138-9.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=Fqa4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA138]

Evidence of Nazi fingerprints on the Arab side always drew special attention from the Jewish intelligence services. One file from July 1948, for example, includes a sighting of German Tiger tanks in the service of the Egyptian army in Gaza...

There really were German advisers working with Arab troops, and the best explosives expert among the Palestinian Arabs, the one responsible for the deadliest truck bombs of 1948, had been trained in Nazi Germany.

The Palestinian Arab leader himself, the Mufti of Jerusalem, had been a prominent accomplice of Hitler's regime throughout the Second World War, broadcasting propaganda aimed at the Arab world and enlisting Muslim soldiers in the Nazi cause.

All of this supported the Jews' suspicion that links existed between the powerful forces arrayed against them. It is in this context that Israeli intelligence understood a letter intercepted that fall, written by a German who was now serving the Arab cause. According to this letter, there were twenty escaped German POWs in Beirut, and most of them were "working on the Grille, the Führer's private yacht."

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Rubin, Barry., Schwanitz, Wolfgang G.. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East. United Kingdom: Yale University Press, 2014. Chapter 9 A Bid for Partnership in the Axis.
[https://books.google.com/books?id=qCXBAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT244]

Al-Husaini's immediate entourage, financed by the German
government, included about sixty officials. His monthly payroll for the most important aides totaled 11,450 marks paid to twenty-three people, each receiving 200 to 700 marks a month.
To put this amount in perspective, al-Husaini's German liaison Grobba, a high-ranking official earned 1,000 marks a month. Among the entourage were at least three nephews: Musa, the intelligence and security chief; Salim; and Safwat, the liaison with students. Others were senior members of al-Husaini's Higher Arab Committee who had fled to Berlin. Some were involved in military activities, like Fauzi al-Qutb, his explosives expert. Dhu al-Kuffar Abd al-Latif was trained in sabotage and parachuted into Palestine with an elite German-Arab military unit...

A good example of one of the many Arab collaborators independent of al-Husaini or other groups was Yunus Bahri, the most popular Arab broadcaster. In 1931 he had traveled to Berlin and met Goebbels, and in 1939 he began radio work for the Germans. His opening line, "This is Berlin" (Huna Barlin) became famous in the Arabic-speaking world, as did his oftrepeated slogan, "Hayy, ja aiyuha al Arab!" urging the Arabs to "get ready" to launch a revolt. Aside from on-air activity, Bahri worked for the SS to build spy rings.

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Uri Milstein, The truth about the War of Independence: The Arab Liberation Army Invasion - Chapter 7. News1, 06/05/2016.

[https://www.news1.co.il/Archive/002-D-111433-00.html].

Car bombs in Jerusalem

The detonation of two car bombs by Arabs and British defectors in Jerusalem, near the building of the English-language newspaper, Jerusalem Post, and on Ben Yehuda Street...

Though the Jews did not imagine that local Arabs were capable of being experts in sabotage, the saboteur in Abdel-Kader al-Husseini's headquarters was a native of Jerusalem: Fawzi al-Kutub, thirty-one years old... who studied sabotage in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, and went through a commando course of the SS in the Netherlands. In this course, al-Kutub refused to obey an order and was imprisoned in a concentration camp, with Jews, near Breslau, but was released through the mufti's intercession. After the war, he returned to Israel, and when the War of Independence broke out, he was the chief sabotage officer at the Abdel-Kader al-Husseini headquarters stationed in Bir-Zeit.

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