In Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast about the French Revolution, he talks about Napolean leaving his army (probably tens of thousands of people) behind in Egypt after things didn't go well and he departed for France.

The podcast mentioned some scientific advancements introduced to the area by the French, like the printing press, but it didn't go into great detail.

What happened to all these people left behind in Egypt? Were they on their own to find their way back to France? Or did they stay in Egypt permanently and settle a French colony? Was the area radically altered by the huge number of French soldiers that were left behind, and if so are there any signs of this presence today?

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Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.

So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!

• /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and /u/gingerkid1234 discuss the Haavara agreement, emigration of German Jews to Palestine, and the issue of forced emigration in the 1930s from Nazi Germany here

• /u/tayaravaknin also discusses the Haavara agreement and /u/Prufrock451 goes into the economic background of forced emigration here

• /u/tayaravaknin goes into further detail about the Haavara agreement here

• /u/marisacoulter goes into detail why saying Hitler supported Zionism is disingenuous here

• I myself provide some background on the historian on whose work Livingstone based his assertions on here

Summary of the issues

As can be gleaned from the summary above, it can be unequivocally stated that Hitler did not support Zionism.

When the Nazis came to power, their early conception of what they saw as the "solution to the Jewish question" was at first the emigration of Jews from Germany. The background to this was their staunch anti-Semitism, which in its essence saw the presence of Jews as an existential threat to the German racial community.

It is imperative to imagine Nazi policy not as wanting to systematically murder all Jews immediately from the outset of their rule in 1933 as I discuss in our AskHistorians Podcast 057 - Intentionalism and Functionalism in the Holocaust. Rather, in the 1930s -- and the closer the war came, the greater the pressure -- their goal was the emigration of Jews from Germany. This also served as a ways to get money in their coffers since emigration included the "Reich flight tax" that made Jews emigrating from Germany a hefty sum of money for their emigration. The Haavara agreement needs to be seen in that context since its basics were about Jews buying their property back from the Nazis via transferring them to Palestine as export goods thus shoring up German foreign currency accounts (foreign currency as something the German economy was heavily lacking).

The Haavara agreement had nothing to do with supposed sympathies between the Nazis and Zionism. For the Nazi leadership, especially the German financial authorities, it was a way to obtain desperately needed foreign currency. For the German Zionist Federation and the Anglo-Palestine bank it it was a pragmatic decision in order to get Jews out of Germany where they faced discrimination.

The idea that Hitler and the Nazis somehow supported Zionism -- a movement in its essence designed to empower Jews, to give them their own state -- is as has been said in the linked answers above disingenuous. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

... while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.

During the war, this was somewhat followed up when during the Africa campaign, the Nazis planned a Einsatzgruppe for Palestine, most likely with the goal of killing the Jews in Palestine.

Also, in connections to further contacts between Zionist organizations and the Nazis, in 1937 Adolf Eichmann and his then boss, Herbert Hagen, did indeed attempt to travel to Palestine in order to meet representatives from Zionist organizations. Their expedition ended in Egypt when the British authorities refused them visas to Palestine. There they met Feival Polkes, an agent of the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary force from Palestine. Polkes suggested that more Jews should be able to leave under the Haavara agreement but Eichmann and Hagen refused and a deal fell through. Their argument why they refused is pretty clear: According to David Cesarani: Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, 2005 who cites Eichmann's report about the expedition, Hagen refused Polkes because further Jewish emigration to Palestine might lead to a Jewish state there, which would be heavily against Reich policy.

As has been pointed out in one of the linked answers above, the Haavara agreement has been and is used to somehow try and implicate Zionists in the Holocaust, which is, to put in friendly terms, a questionable undertaking.

Livingstone referred to Lenni Brenner as his source. I talk about Brenner in the above linked post but the essence of it is that Brenner has a clear political agenda and he cherrypicks his evidence (concentrating only on the Lehi e.g.) and instead of putting the sources into context crafts a narrative heavily influenced by his own political and moral standards. Brenner's book is a political pamphlet, and not a historical work. Whether you agree with Brenner and Livingstone about Zionism and Israel or not, their allegations do not come from a historically informed and well sourced place but from one of pure politics.

Sources:

• Avraham Barkai: German Interests in the Haavara-Transfer Agreement 1933–1939, 1990

• Yehuda Bauer: Jews for sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945, 1996.

• Tom Segev: The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust, 2000.

• Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers: “Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine”: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942.

• Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1 and 2 by Saul Friedländer.

Hello everyone! While watching a video on the curta pocket calculator, i remembered (vaguely) that the first electro-mechanical or electrical computers were used in the military centers and also in universities. I also remembered (vaguely) that some well known scientists, like von Neumann, used some of those "new" computers to perform some computationally intensive calculations.

Then i realized that i never heard of mechanical calculators used intensively in any universities, scientific centers, R&D departments. The only usage, known to me, was the usage in shops and accounting (indeed the Pascaline was designed after the need of the Pascal's father in accounting).

I also know about the Babbage difference engine, that was designed to solve not only accounting problems, but it was never finished or used as far as i know.

The next thing i know is that humans were involved in long calculations, up to the usage of electrical computers, but still there was no account for usage of mechanical calculators by those people. Hence my question.