BBC: Farhud memories: Baghdad's (June 1) Nazi-inspired 1941 slaughter of the Jews

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13610702

On 1 June 1941, a Nazi-inspired pogrom erupted in Baghdad, bringing to an end more than two millennia of peaceful existence for the city's Jewish minority. Some Jewish children witnessed the bloodshed, and retain vivid memories 70 years later. The two days of violence that followed have become known as the Farhud (Arabic for "violent dispossession"). About 800 Jews were killed, spelling the end for a Jewish community that dated from the time of Babylon. ... Some families bribed policemen to stand guard, paying half a dinar for each bullet fired. Others owe their lives to Muslims who took great risks to protect them.

Until the Farhud, Baghdad had been a model of peaceful coexistence for Jews and Arabs. Jews made up about one in three of the city's population in 1941, and most saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second.

So what caused this terrible turn of events? A month earlier, a pro-Nazi lawyer Rashid Ali al-Gilani, had overthrown Iraq's royal family, and started broadcasting Nazi propaganda on the radio. But when an attack on a British Air Force base outside Baghdad ended in humiliating failure, he was forced to flee. The Farhud took place in the power vacuum that followed.

The anti-Semitism that Hitler had successfully exported to Iraq made life unbearable for the Jewish community. There were frequent arrests on false charges of spying and public hangings of prominent Jews. ... In 1950, Jews were finally allowed to leave, on condition they give up all their property and assets, including their bank accounts. By 1952, only 2,000 of 150,000 were left.

I wish I could say this was an especially bad case of persecution, but it is not.