Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (4 page)

During the war, the Germans, Americans, and British all tried to assess the impact and reception of Nazi propaganda in the Middle East. The Germans' intelligence networks provided a reasonably accurate grasp of which political and religious groups were most sympathetic to their cause. That said, Germany's wartime abilities to assess the impact of its foreign-language propaganda were not impressive. The works of Richard Breitman and Shlomo Aronson have drawn our attention to the efforts of U.S. and British intelligence agencies to monitor Nazi communications and plans, both in general and, in Aronson's case, in the Middle East.25 This book also draws on reports by American and British diplomats, intelligence agents working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), for branches of the U.S. military, and for the Office of War Information as the United States and Britain tried to assess what impact fascist and Nazi propaganda was having in the region. They did so without the benefit of modern methods of research on mass audiences in a region with very high rates of illiteracy. Nevertheless, with a mixture of anecdotes, reading of the local press, and contacts with informed local observers, Allied intelligence reports are important sources for any history of the Arab and Muslim reception to the Axis powers. A fully adequate account must be done by historians who read Arabic and/or Persian. I hope that the documentation and interpretation of Nazi propaganda that this book offers will contribute to such efforts and to the opening of the relevant archives of Arab governments and of relevant Arab and Islamic organizations and institutions.26 American and British intelligence reports generally avoided broad claims about what most Arabs and Muslims were thinking about the events of the day. Instead their focus was on specific groups, institutions, and individuals known to have pro-Axis sympathies. Moreover, American and British officials were fully aware of and, indeed, were working with Arab political leaders who supported the Allied cause. Furthermore, all of the leading officials of the Axis and the Allied powers believed that the issue of propaganda's success or failure was inseparable from the stark facts of victory or defeat between the Allies and the Axis in the battles in North Africa. The outcome of these battles, that is, the military history of these years, was decisive both for the course of the war and for the intellectual and cultural history of the region.27

As a student of the intersection of ideas and politics in modern German history, I share with my fellow intellectual and cultural historians a preoccupation with the reading and interpretation of texts, their contexts, and their audience and reception. Though the question of the reception of Nazism's Arabic propaganda is of great importance, it cannot be adequately done before we look at the texts themselves. As I worked on Nazi propaganda aimed at a German audience, I observed a tendency in some historical scholarship to draw the mistaken conclusion that the regime's propaganda was so familiar, well understood, and documented that the most interesting questions primarily concerned its reception and impact on intended audiences. Yet I found that a close reading of even the most famous texts of Hitler, Goebbels, and their associates formed the basis for a fresh interpretation of Nazi propaganda. This is even more the case when examining the vastly less well known texts of the regime's Arabic-language propaganda.

Some Arabic-language printed materials distributed in North Africa and the Middle East did find their way into the German Foreign Ministry archives, especially from the files of the embassies in Paris and Rome.28 English-language translations-those done by Kirk's staff in Cairo and more recent ones of print matter done for this book-are now the most comprehensive documentation available of Nazi Germany's wartime Arabic propaganda. Where possible, I have compared original German-language policy guidelines and texts of leaflets and speeches with the English-language translations of the Arabic broadcasts produced by the Americans in Cairo. I've concluded that the American translations reflect the letter and spirit of the originals. Moreover, the translations done in the American Embassy in wartime Cairo render texts that are very much in accord with everything else we know about the themes and even word choice of Nazi propaganda. I hope that one result of my work will be to bring the "Axis in Arabic" documents to the attention not only of historians of the Nazi regime but also of those working on the history of the Middle East during and after World War II. Now that these documents have, albeit belatedly, entered into historical scholarship, readers can judge what to make of the propaganda campaign documented in the pages that follow.

The material in this work demonstrates that the Nazi leadership viewed radical anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as indispensable points of entry into Arab and Muslim hearts and minds.29 Throughout the war, Nazi Arabic radio repeated the charge that World War II was a Jewish war whose purpose in the region was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine that would expand into and dominate the entire Arab and Muslim world. Moreover, the broadcasts asserted that the Jews in the mid-twentieth century were attempting to destroy Islam just as their ancestors had been attempting to do for thirteen centuries. They claimed that an Allied victory would be a victory for the Jews, whereas an Axis victory would bring liberation from first British and then American and also "Jewish" imperialism. An Axis victory would prevent the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine and create a Europe dominated by powers that respected and had much in common with the traditions of Islam. Throughout the war, the Americans, the British, and the Germans concluded that the association with the Jews and Zionism was a drag on Arab support for the Allies while the antiZionist policies of the Nazi regime fit well into a broad current of political sentiment in the Middle East. In their Arabic-language materials, Nazi propagandists moved seamlessly between references to the secular conspiracy theories of modern anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and quotations from the Koran and other religious texts and authorities, on the other. In this propaganda, there was no distinction between hatred of the Jews and opposition to Zionism.

The issue of the impact of fascism and Nazism on the Middle East and its aftereffects has become inseparable from contemporary political controversies about anti-Semitism, radical Islam, "Islamo-fascism;" and international terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001.30 Indeed, my own scholarly interest in these issues emerges partly from reflections on the blend of modern and reactionary elements in both Nazism and fascism in the 194os and radical Islamism of recent decades.31 Yet this work is first and foremost a work of history. It presents previously unknown or little-known material that adds greatly to our understanding of Nazi Germany's effort to gain allies, supporters, and collaborators among Arabs and Muslims during World War II and the Holocaust. It is a study of the diffusion of ideology and of a meeting of hearts and minds that began from very different civilizational starting points.

CHAPTER 2

Defining Anti-Semitism
1933-1939

azi ideology posed two seemingly insurmountable barriers to successful appeals to Arabs, as a national, regional, and ethnic group, and Muslims, as a religious grouping. First, Hitler had written that an Aryan master race existed at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of other, clearly inferior races. How, then, could the Nazis find allies and collaborators among nonEuropean "races"? Second, the Nazis made anti-Semitism a core element of their program. For Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, anti-Semitism could be interpreted as applying also to non-Jewish Semites, such as themselves. Before the Nazi regime could engage in a propaganda campaign with any hope of success, its leaders needed to clarify these two issues. Officials in the German Foreign Ministry bore the primary responsibility for finding allies and collabo - rators. They had thought most about how to appeal to "non-Aryans" and nonJewish Semites, including Arabs, Persians, and the Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa. These officials also understood that the perception that Nazi Germany was racist toward Arabs and Muslims constituted a serious drawback compared with the universalist appeals of liberal democrats to all individuals and with the Communists' appeals to workers of all countries.

Nazism's most famous book, Mein Kampf, clearly presented Hitler's views on Aryan racial superiority. Any reader could discern that he did not believe in the equality of all human beings and saw this inequality as rooted in racial biology. Hitler also left no doubt about his disdain for Arabs. In contrast to hopes in Imperial Germany for aid from the Arabs in World War I, he harbored no hopes for "any mythical uprising in Egypt" or that others were "ready to shed their blood for us." English machine guns and fragmentation bombs would bring such a holy war "to an infernal end." It was, he continued, "impossible to overwhelm with a coalition of cripples a powerful state that is determined to stake, if necessary, its last drop of blood for its existence. As a volkish man, who appraises the value of men on a racial basis, I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called `oppressed nations' from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs."' The reader of Mein Kampf would correctly conclude that Hitler's contempt for the Egyptians was consistent with his belief in the superiority of an "Aryan race." Further, such a reader might also plausibly conclude that Hitler's anti-Semitism had a broad meaning. Although they applied first and foremost to the Jews, his comments about the Egyptians suggested that his contempt for Semites extended to Arabs and Muslims.

Yet one Arab reader who shared Hitler's hatreds drew other conclusions. On March 31,1933, two months after Hitler came to power, Haj Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, called on Heinrich Wolff, head of the German Consulate in Jerusalem.2 In his report to the Auswartiges Amt (Foreign Ministry), Wolff wrote that Husseini said, "Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, antidemocratic state leadership to other countries." In his view, "current Jewish influence on economy and politics" was "damaging everywhere and needed to be fought." In the hope of doing economic damage to the Jews, Husseini opined that "Muslims hope for a boycott of the Jews in Germany because it would then be adopted with enthusiasm in the whole of the Muslim world." Further, he was willing to spread the boycott message among Muslims traveling through Palestine and to "all Muslims." He also looked forward to trade with "non-Jewish merchants" dealing in German products.3 Husseini's remarks on March 1933 demonstrated his early enthusiasm for the Nazi regime based on his ideological support for its antidemocratic and anti-Jewish policies. Wolff reported that though anti-Jewish sentiment was not widespread in the Arab population, it was more prevalent in the upper strata and among the intellectuals, who together protested against "Jewish immigration, Jewish land purchases, and Jewish capital."4 The clear implication of Wolff's memo was that if the Nazi regime made appeals to Arabs and Muslims, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and perhaps others might become potential allies and collaborators.

In these same months, Hitler's ideological pronouncements and those of the Nazi Party were translated into government policy in the form of the racial legislation. On April 7, 1933, the government announced the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service." Paragraph 3, which came to be known as the "Aryan paragraph;" read: "(1) Civil servants who are not of Aryan descent are to retire." Article 2 of the "First Decree for Implementation of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service," issued on April 11, 1933, stated, "A person is to be regarded as non-Aryan if he is descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparent is non-Aryan."' In spring 1933, a purge of Jews from positions in government and the universities began. On September 15, 1935, the by then purged and Nazified Reichstag unanimously promulgated the Reich Citizenship Law. Article 2 stated, "A citizen of the Reich is only that subject, who is of German or kindred blood and who, through his conduct, shows that he is both desirous and fit to serve faithfully the German people and Reich."6 In November 1935, the Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor forbad marriages between Jews and Germans.

Some Nazi officials interpreted the laws broadly as applying to "nonAryans" who also were not Jewish. In 1935, one Johannes Ruppert, the son of the Turkish officer and a German woman, was forced to leave the Hitler Youth, a group to which he had belonged since 1933.' His expulsion stemmed from his comrades' belief that as the son of a Turkish man he was not a full Aryan as required by the Reich Citizenship Law. Ruppert sought assistance from the Turkish Embassy in Berlin to clarify how "the Aryan question" affected his case. The Turkish Embassy brought the matter to the attention of the Foreign Ministry. In a note of December 20,1935, a Foreign Ministry official wrote that "opening up the Aryan question in relation to Turkey is extraordinarily undesirable as well as dangerous for our relations with Turkey." Moreover, it was "absolutely essential that the question of whether or not the Turkish people are to be viewed as Aryan in accord with German legislation should be decided in the affirmative as soon as possible." In the international context of 1935, it was imperative to avoid "placing a cloud" over Germany's relations with Turkey, a likely development if the Turks were to be characterized as non-Aryan. It was important that Ruppert be reinstated in the Hitler Youth and given assistance in finding employment as soon as possible so that he would not make further inquires at the Turkish Embassy.8