Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (17 page)

In fall 1941, Axis radio reported Axis military victories and British and Soviet setbacks. Kirk reported that Axis Arabic-language broadcasts in December 1941 pointed to the British defeats in Hong Kong and American defeats in the Philippines, and to Japan's advance in Malaya, as evidence of the irresistible strength of the "young and powerful Japanese nation" as contrasted with the "weaklings, Britain and America." Berlin radio told the Arabs and the Turks that Britain wanted to drag Turkey and Iran into the war as part of an "Anglo- Judeo-Communist plot" that would also deliver Europe and part of the Near East to the Soviet sphere of influence. Russian atheism stood in contrast to the Germans, who "respect and venerate all religions and are above all friends of the Arabs." Further evidence of that respect and friendship lay in Ribbentrop's willingness to meet again with Kilani. As reported by radio, "The Arabs know that the only way that they can obtain liberty and independence is with German help. The Arab struggle is linked with the German struggle. The aim of both Germans and Arabs is to destroy the common enemy. The final defeat of Britain will also bring about liberty for the Arabs." The broadcasts spoke of New Year's greetings exchanged between Husseini and Kilani, on one hand, with Ribbentrop and Hitler, on the other. Conversely, German radio reported, "Every Arab thinks it is a disgrace to come into contact with the British or the Jewish agents of Roosevelt." While the Nazi leaders and the exiled Arab leaders were exchanging New Year's greetings in Berlin, Winston Churchill, in the United States, was said to have met with Jewish leaders and to have promised "that all Palestine should become a Jewish colony and that the Arabs would be deported elsewhere."94

In the eventful month of December 1941, which included Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler's declaration of war on the United States, and American entry into the war, Radio Berlin intensified the anti-American messages broadcast to the Middle East. According to Alexander Kirk, the following was a "typical" statement: "Acting under Jewish orders and influence, President Roosevelt bears upon his shoulders the responsibility for this war. Churchill is his partner in crime and Japan by her successes in the Pacific is avenging the Arab cause against British tyranny and oppression." The radio also announced that Husseini, always referred to as "the Mufti," had recently met with Hitler and Ribben trop "in the course of which matters of great importance to the future of the Arab world were discussed. The Fuhrer has always supported the Arab cause and deplored the vicissitudes suffered by the Arabs at the hands of the British and the Jews. A further token of the respect of the Fuhrer for the Mufti and the cause he represents was furnished by the Mufti's being given a place of honor on the occasion of the delivery of Hitler's speech of December ii," that is, the speech during which Hitler declared war on the United States. Axis broadcasts accustomed their readers to repeated use of terms of abuse. Roosevelt was a "warmonger" who ordered "his servant Churchill" to Washington, where they met in "the White House which is full of Jews." The Tri-Partite Powers were fighting against "the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, the Jews, and the Bolsheviks" and were "therefore fighting for the Arab cause. 1195

By the end of 1941, American and British officials observing events in the Middle East understood that a major purpose of Nazi Arabic-language propaganda was the same as its propaganda in Germany and around the world, namely, to identify the Allies in every possible way with the Jews. The Arabic broadcasts to the Middle East repeated Nazi propaganda's central charge that World War II as a whole had been launched by the Jews. They added that the Zionist goal of a Jewish national home in Palestine was a no less important goal of the Allied war effort. No matter how much Allied leaders sought to keep their distance from precisely that objective, the accusation of sympathy for Zionism remained a key theme of Axis and especially Nazi propaganda until the end of the war. The Germans believed, with good reason, that anti-Zionism and antiSemitism were crucial points of entry to the hearts and minds of the Arabs and Muslims who decided to support them and oppose the Allies. As their dispatches made clear, Alexander Kirk and Miles Lampson had good reason to be worried. In the face of Germany's stunning victories on the Eastern Front in summer and fall 1941, its submarine war on Allied shipping in the Atlantic, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and on British positions in Asia, and the landing of the Africa Corps in North Africa, Hitler had cause to believe that the diffusion of Nazi propaganda might well contribute to military success in the Middle East as well.

CHAPTER 5

"Kill the Jews before They Kill You"

Propaganda during the Battles
in North Africa in 1942

n winter and spring 1942, the Allies were losing the war. German submarines sank hundreds of merchant ships off the East Coast of the United States, underscoring how difficult it would be for the United States to decisively enter the war in Europe soon. On the Eastern Front, the German armies remained deep inside the Soviet Union and had the city of Leningrad under siege. Behind the lines, the SS Einsatzgruppen were murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews. On January 20, the Wannsee Conference was held to convey plans for the Final Solution. The extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau (January), Belzec (March), Sobibor (May), and Treblinka (July) began to carry out the policy of extermination of the Jews who had been deported to them. Indeed, by late fall 1943,2 to 2.5 million Jews had been murdered in the six Nazi extermination camps in Poland. As was the case within Germany, the Arabic-language radio made no mention of this.' The advances of Rommel's Africa Corps, in particular its defeat of British forces in Tobruk on June 21,1942, was one of the war's lowest points for Britain. At home, Hitler and Goebbels and their vast propaganda machine told the German audience that the Nazi regime was "exterminating" the Jews for the war the latter had supposedly launched through their behind-the-scenes control over power holders in London, Moscow, and Washington. They offered no factual details. The political radio officials in the Foreign Ministry, the intelligence and propaganda unit with the Africa Corps, and the Arab exiles in Berlin flooded the Middle East with radio and print materials that associated Britain and the United States with the evil Jews and their supposed Zionist plots to seize Palestine and even more of the Middle East. Whereas the Nazi regime assured Germans and Europeans that it was in the process of murdering the Jewish enemy, its propaganda aimed at Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East was of a slightly different sort: it urged listeners to take matters into their own hands and kill the Jews in North Africa and the Middle East themselves.

In the years preceding the war, the situation of the Jews in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia had deteriorated under the impact of a combination of factors: right-wing French anti-Semitism, including its colonial form; Arab nationalism and the tensions from the Palestinian conflict; Fascist Italy's attitude toward Tunisian Jews; and German propaganda.2 Algeria had been annexed to France, and Morocco and Tunisia were French protectorates. On October 7, 1940, the Vichy regime of Marshall Philippe Petain passed the Jewish Statute, which was more severe than the Nuremberg race laws in Germany. It abrogated the citizenship rights that the Jews in Algeria had previously held, but its application in Morocco and Tunisia, where Jews were not French citizens, was only partial. Algerian Jews suffered most, but restrictions on work in the professions, seizures of Jewish businesses, and limits on enrollment in schools and universities affected the Jews in all three countries. Not surprisingly, Algerian Jews welcomed the Americans who landed in Operation Torch as an army of liberation. The Jews of Tunisia suffered under the German occupation from November 1942 to May 1943. Approximately 5,000 young Jews were conscripted to do forced labor, and Jewish property was confiscated. When the Allied forces liberated Tunisia from the Germans, the threat of annihilation ended.3

From January 21 to February 5,1942, Rommel's forces, which had been in North Africa for almost a year, went on the offensive against the British. In Berlin, pro-Axis Arab exiles placed their hopes on an Axis victory. Propaganda now had an intimate connection with military operations. In January, in separate meetings with Weizsacker, Husseini and Kilani repeated their request that Germany issue a public declaration of support for Arab independence.4 On January 26, Husseini asserted that such a statement would reinforce the "existing sympathy among Arabs and Muslims for Germany." He was willing to speak on German radio to the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East.5 Although the Germans again put off issuing the declaration, the meeting marked a deeper cooperation in Arabic radio broadcasts that would continue until spring 1945. The accomplishment of Kilani and in particular Husseini lay partly in working with Foreign Ministry officials to adapt general Nazi propaganda themes to the Middle Eastern, North African, and Islamic context.6

The Mufti's contact in the Foreign Ministry was Erwin Ettel (1895-1971), a diplomat with strong Nazi convictions. Ettel came to the Foreign Ministry via his work in the German aviation industry. He had worked for the Junker's firm in Turkey (1927-30) and Colombia (1930-35). He was a member of the nationalist, conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) from 1924 to 1932 and joined the Nazi Party on January 3, 1932, that is, a year before Hitler assumed power. While abroad, Ettel was active in the Nazi Party's foreign branches (Auslandsorganization). From 1933 to 1935 he was head of a local (Ortsgruppen- leiter) and from 1935 to 1936 of the national (Landesgruppenleiter) organization of members of the Nazi Party in Colombia; later (1936-39) he held similar posts in Italy. Ettel joined the Foreign Ministry in 1936 and served in the German Embassy in Rome until 1939. On October 16,1939, he was appointed German ambassador to Iran, remaining in Tehran until the embassy closed on September 17, 1941. There he first met Haj Amin el-Husseini. Later, on June 6,1942, he was assigned to be Husseini's primary contact in the Foreign Ministry. On February 24, 1943, he assumed the directorship of the Foreign Ministry's Informationstelle III, an office involved in political propaganda. Ettel entered the SS in 1937, rose to the rank of SS-Oberfiihrer in 1938 and Brigadenfiihrer in January 1941. On March 18,1944, he entered military service as a Hauptsturmfiihrer in the Waffen SS. As we will see, Husseini's contacts with other SS officials extended to cooperation with Heinrich Himmler himself.' In his conversations and his extensive exchange of memos with Ettel, the Mufti assured Ettel that Arab and German interests were "completely overlapping" and that "the Arabs felt closely bound to the Germans in this struggle against world Jewry," England, and the United States. Whereas a German victory in the war would bring freedom and independence to the Arabs, British victory would bury such aspirations.'

On February 7, 1942, Ernst Woermann, in his position as the director of the Political Department in the Foreign Ministry, sent a memo, approved by Ribbentrop, to German embassies in Ankara, Madrid, Rome, and Paris; to consulates in Bern, Lisbon, Sofia, Helsinki, Budapest, Bucharest, and Stockholm; and to German officials in Athens, Brussels, and Sofia regarding "standard propaganda theses that form the basis for all of propaganda abroad in the near future." He ordered that these arguments should "repeatedly appear in brochures, leaflets, lectures, and whispering campaigns." They were to be "learned by heart like commands and cannot be repeated often enough. The value of effective propaganda lies in constant repetition."9 The "theses" aimed abroad were identical to the core message being conveyed to the Germans at home: Franklin Roosevelt was "the cause and has the primary guilt for this war." Churchill started the war against Germany "from a clear desire to expand British power." But "Roosevelt stands behind Churchill as the exponent of world Jewry. No one any longer doubts that this world war came about as a result of Roosevelt's aggressive stance toward Germany. Italy and Japan, who have always stressed their will for peace and friendship with the American people, have been drawn into it. Roosevelt is the ultimate cause and main culprit in this world war." The memo specified that Roosevelt should be referred to as the "chief war culprit" or "the lunatic in the White House." Whereas England and the United States had "promised Europe to the Bolsheviks;' Germany, Italy, and their allies were protecting Europe from Bolshevism, saving European culture, and thus deserved the gratitude and thanks of all European peoples. By February 1942, Bolshevism had already suffered grave defeats. Conversely, due to Germany's occupation of large parts of European Russia and the Ukraine and its use of the food and raw materials there, the memo continued, Europe's economy was immune to an Anglo-American blockade. Hence Europe could begin to create a peaceful, new order. Five days later, Woermann informed the German Embassy in Rome that Ribbentrop had approved two additional guidelines for propaganda in Egypt. In the Arab-populated areas "west of Egypt," that is, in Libya, which Mussolini intended to keep under Italian control, German propaganda should not include any appeals to nationalism. Second, there should not be "any general Islamic propaganda on religious grounds," nor should there be appeals for a "holy war." Ettel wrote, however, that a "moderate utilization of Islamic thinking" was "desired from propaganda announcements for Arabic countries and for Moslems in the Soviet Union."10 In the next several years in the Middle East proper, appeals to Muslims as Muslims with explicit references to religion became an important feature of Nazism's Arabic-language propaganda.