Company mammoth

The Mammut company was a German commando company from 1943 of the Abwehr II (sabotage and disintegration) unit of the Foreign Office / Defense of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War .

purpose

The aim was to instrumentalize the Kurds against British rule. Lieutenant Gottfried Müller , supported by two soldiers with experience of the Orient, Friedrich Wilhelm Hoffmann and Georg Heinrich Adalbert Konieczny , as well as the Iraqi Kurd Ramzi Nafi Agha , was tasked with establishing contact with Mehmûd Berzincî in the Kirkuk area , carrying out acts of sabotage in the oil area and an anti-British uprising in northern Iraq prepare. Two further groups, consisting of specialists in astronomy and desert studies, linguists for Persian, Arabic and Turkish as well as physicians to develop civilian care should follow after the establishment of the first group and, in addition to propaganda and mental recruitment, a kind of nation building should begin. For this reason, German oriental scholars were also involved in the run-up to the project, above all Karl Hadank , the scientific estate administrator of the linguist Oskar Mann (d. 1917), who was quite prominent in the empire , and in particular Werner Caskel , an employee of Max von Oppenheim . Ramzi Nafi Agha, who on his way to Germany across the Bosporus and the Balkans had a number of contacts with anti-English politicians in the nationalist government of Rashid al-Gailani and German agents in Istanbul, met both Hadank and Caskel while preparing the company.

This order was already in Adolf Hitler's directive No. 30 for the conduct of the war of May 23, 1941 : "The Arab freedom movement is our natural ally against England in the Middle East. In this context, the uprising of Iraq is of particular importance Iraqi borders the forces hostile to England in the Middle East, disrupts English connections and binds English troops and English shipping space at the expense of other theaters of war. "

Implementation and consequences

The mission failed on the first day. The weapons and equipment containers were lost during the parachute jump and the group landed 300 km away from the intended target. The British arrested the actors 12 days later. Ramzi and the German officers were taken prisoner by the British and Iraqis, tortured and sentenced to death. The German participants were taken to British military camps in Germany in 1947 and later released. Ramzi received life imprisonment but was released from captivity in 1947 due to mental illness; he died in his hometown of Erbil in 1949 .

Historical meaning

The Mammut company had no outstanding military significance for the Second World War, not least because there was no war front in Iraq at that time. Meanwhile, Ramzi Nafi , whose family still enjoys high social prestige in the capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan ( Erbil ), is significant for the Kurdish self-image in this region. In Erbil was u. a. a street named after him and lectures held at the local Salahaddin University . Even within Ramzi's family, there is still an attitude that is noticeably critical of England.

literature

Werner Brockdorff: Secret Commandos of the Second World War. Wels 1967 ISBN 3-88102-059-4
Gottfried Johannes Müller: In the burning Orient. 3rd edition, Salem, Stadtsteinach 2007 (first 1937; one of the later actors)
Pherset Zuber Mohammed Rosbeiani: The "Mammut" company. A political-military secret service company in South Kurdistan in the years 1942/1943 and its prehistory. Diss. Phil. Humboldt University Berlin, 2012
Bernd Lemke , Phersed Rosbeiani (ed.): Mammut company. A commando operation of the Wehrmacht in Northern Iraq in 1943. Bremen 2018 (source collection)
- Review , Jobst C. Knigge . H-Soz-Kult , December 7, 2018