Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2 page)

Thanks are due as well to the comments of the anonymous reviewers of my article "Nazi Germany's Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims during World War II and the Holocaust: Old Themes, New Archival Findings," forthcoming in the journal Central European History (spring 2010).

At Yale University Press, thanks are due to the comments of outside reviewers on the initial proposal and to Norman Goda for his subsequent very conscientious, insightful, and helpful review of the completed manuscript; to my editors, Jonathan Brent (for his strong support for this project), and Chris Rogers (for his attentiveness in its final stages); and to Sarah Miller and Jack Borrebach for expertly guiding the manuscript through the production process. I am particularly grateful to Eliza Childs for her excellent copyediting, which addressed matters of form and presentation.

Arthur Eckstein and Jeannie Rutenberg shared friendship and acute insights about past and present while this book was in progress. As she has done for many years and projects, my wife, Sonya Michel, offered her customary scholarly insight, probing questions, and support. It's a very special pleasure to dedicate this book to her.

A Note on Terminology and Spelling

The Nazi regime claimed its policies were "anti-Jewish" but not "anti-Semitic." As the term "anti-Semitism" is now understood to refer to hostility to Jews but not to non-Jewish "Semites" understood as peoples who live in the Middle East, I adopt the conventional understanding of anti-Semitism as meaning hostility of varying degrees aimed only at Jews. The word "Axis" as in "Axis Broadcasts in Arabic" refers to the wartime coalition of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and their assorted less powerful allies.

During World War II, American and British government officials used the spelling "Moslem" for believers in Islam. In citing the original documents, I have left the spelling intact. When referring to believers in Islam in the text, I have used the accepted English-language contemporary spelling, "Muslim."

During World War II and since, the issue of how best to spell Arabic names in English has not been settled. In the interim, scholarly texts have arrived at different conclusions. When referring to such figures as Haj Amin el-Husseini, Rashid Ali Kilani, and Hassan al-Banna-all of whose names have been rendered differently by different observers and scholars-I have left the spelling found in the original American and British reports intact. When referring to them myself, I use the above spellings, which, though they do not command unanimous approval, appear to have been accepted by knowledgeable Englishlanguage scholars.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

his book documents and interprets Nazi Germany's propaganda efforts aimed at Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa. It pushes the history of Nazism beyond its customary Eurocentric limits and draws attention to the European dimensions of Arabic and Islamic radicalism of the mid-twentieth century. On shortwave radio and in printed items distributed in the millions, the Third Reich's Arabic-language propaganda leapt over the seemingly insurmountable barriers created by its own ideology of Aryan racial superiority. From fall 1939 to March 1945, the Nazi regime broadcast shortwave Arabic programs to the Middle East and North Africa seven days and nights a week. The broadcasts were well known at the time, and fragments have received some scholarly attention since. Although a significant scholarly literature exists concerning Nazi Germany's efforts to influence events and sentiments in the Middle East, the preponderance of its print and radio propaganda has not yet been documented and examined. These materials remain far less examined than the propaganda aimed at German and European audiences and have not been previously interpreted by a historian of the cultural and intellectual themes of Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust.

This book is a sequel to, and draws on the arguments of, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and Holocaust. In that work I examined the translation of radical anti-Semitic ideology into a narrative of ongoing events presented within Germany, mostly in print and images. By"radical antiSemitism," I referred to the Nazis' blend of hatred and interpretation according to which an actual political actor called "international Jewry" was held responsible for World War II and the resulting death and devastation. At its core, radical anti-Semitism was fundamentally a political accusation that attributed enormous power and enormous evil to the Jews. Hitler claimed that the Jews were intending to exterminate the Germans, and he thus decided to exterminate them first. Projection and paranoia were the handmaidens of mass murder. This book explores the results of a fateful cooperation between officials of the Nazi regime and Arab and Islamic collaborators. It extended the paranoid political accusations of radical anti-Semitism of a German and European provenance to encompass the political and religious controversies roiling North Africa and the Middle East before and during World War II. The collaboration, though short-lived, left behind traces and lineages outside Europe that persisted long after the Nazi regime was destroyed and Nazi ideology discredited in Europe. In particular, the central political accusations of radical antiSemitism were diffused beyond their European origins into an Arabic and radical Islamic context. As with the propaganda directed at Germany and Europe, Nazi propaganda aimed at the Middle East was simultaneously the expression of deep-seated convictions held by Hitler and the Nazi leadership and an instrument of war and diplomacy. It drew on already existing elements of German and European political, intellectual, and cultural traditions, including religious traditions, and drove them to extremist conclusions. The same was true of the radical nationalism and radical Islamism that made common cause with the Third Reich. No less than Nazism in the German and European context, it too was inconceivable without its own civilizational and cultural background. Neither of the resulting ideologies and their shared deep hatred of the Jews were simply the result of these past traditions, nor could their emergence in the mid-twentieth century be explained simply by the pressures of the moment. They both built on and broke with elements of their respective civilizations.

This history of Nazi propaganda for the Arab lands during World War II reminds us that ideologies can simultaneously be instruments serving political aims as well as the expression of beliefs held to be true beyond any ulterior purpose they may serve. On May 23,1941, Adolf Hitler issued his Directive No. 30 to the German military leaders, dealing with policy toward the Middle East. He declared that the "Arab freedom movement [Freiheitsbewegung] in the Middle East is our natural ally against England." At the time, Hitler's efforts to strengthen "forces hostile to England" were focused on Iraq, where a pro-Axis coup had taken place in Baghdad several months earlier. Directive No. 30 called for sending military missions, assistance from the Luftwaffe, and weapons deliveries to pro-Axis forces. Hitler assigned responsibility for propaganda in the Middle East to the German Foreign Ministry in cooperation with the High Command of the Military (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht). The core idea of the propaganda campaign was as follows: "A victory for the Axis [that is, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and their allies] will bring about the liberation of the countries of the Middle East from the English yoke and thus realize their right to self-determination. Whoever loves freedom will, therefore, join the front against England."' In fact, as we will see, the German Foreign Ministry had been broadcasting Arabic-language propaganda over shortwave radio since September 1939. Directive No. 30 would intensify those efforts and integrate them into Hitler's hopes for military success in the Middle East.

In this book I draw extensively on previously unused and underused archival sources that make it possible for the first time to present a full picture of Nazi wartime propaganda. In so doing, I analyze the Nazi regime's adaptation of its general propaganda themes, aimed at its German and European audiences, to the religious traditions of Islam and the regional and local political realities of the Middle East and North Africa. This adaptation was the product of a political and ideological collaboration between officials of the Nazi regimeespecially in its Foreign Ministry but also of its intelligence services, the Propaganda Ministry, and the SS and its Reich Security Main Office (Reichssichher- heitsshauptamt)-and pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin. It drew on a confluence of perceived shared political interests and ideological passions as well as on a cultural fusion, borrowing, and interaction between Nazi ideology and certain strains of Arab nationalism and Islamic religious traditions. The following chapters document and examine the results of a meeting of hearts and minds, not a clash of civilizations.

In wartime Berlin, radical anti-Semitism of European and German-speaking provenance found common ground with radical anti-Semitism rooted in Koranic verses and the commentaries on them in the traditions of Islam. Just as Nazi anti-Semitism was inseparable from a radicalization of already existing elements within European culture, so the anti-Semitism of the pro-Nazi Arab exiles was inseparable from a radicalization of already existing elements within the traditions of Islam. In both cases, these twentieth-century extremists engaged in "the work of selective tradition"; that is, they actively reworked re ceived traditions, emphasizing some elements and diminishing others.' As a result of their shared passions and interests, they produced texts and broadcasts that each group could not have produced on its own. Through this active labor of conserving and reworking their own traditions while also drawing on foreign beliefs, the Nazis and their Arab collaborators created the possibility for a cultural connection in the midst of migration from the periphery to the center and the, albeit short-lived, expansion of the Nazi center to the Middle Eastern periphery.3 Cultural and intellectual historians of Nazism have long demonstrated that it can neither be separated from nor reduced to its European, German, and Christian predecessors. These were but one condition necessary for its emergence. The same is true of the radical nationalism and Islamism of the Arab exiles who joined forces with Hitler's regime. Their political outlook could neither be separated from nor reduced to its Arabic or Islamic background. These groups came together during World War II in the shared project of radicalizing their past traditions. In contemporary academic language, their meeting in wartime Berlin was a chapter in the history of transnationalism and cultural fusion. It was one that brought out the most destructive elements of the respective civilizations.'

The Nazis taught the Arab exiles the finer points of twentieth-century antiSemitic conspiracy thinking and how to apply it to ongoing events in the Middle East. From the Arabs in Berlin, the Nazis learned that their hatred of the Jews was not unique and that they had at least some soul mates and allies in North Africa and the Middle East. For Hitler and his associates, it came as a welcome discovery that a non-European tradition could foster radical anti-Semitism. In the process, Nazism became less Eurocentric while Arab and Islamic radicalism drew on modern, European totalitarian ideology. The Nazi leadership sought ways to burst the bounds of nationalist particularism and even of the doctrine of the Aryan master race in order to appeal to Arabs and Muslims. The Arabs and Muslims in Berlin engaged in a variant of what I have called "reactionary modernism" as they demonstrated a mastery of modern propaganda techniques in the interest of advocating a revival of a fundamentalist version of Islam.5 Radical anti-Semitism did not enter Arab and Islamic politics because of the cleverness of Nazi propagandists; on the contrary, their cleverness lay partly in understanding that some currents in Arab politics and the religion of Islam offered points of entry for a positive reception of Nazism's message. Nazi officials working with the Arab exiles in Berlin and the Orientalists working for the SS and the Foreign Ministry believed that the Koran, as well as commentaries and oral folk wisdom, offered powerful points of connection with modern European anti-Semitism. Thus their propaganda combined appeals to secular Arab nationalists with distinctly religious appeals to Muslims. Neither the Nazis nor the Arab exiles could have achieved alone what they achieved together. Hitler's dictatorship had few native speakers of Arabic who also were familiar with the details of local politics in the Middle East. The Arab exiles in Berlin made up for these deficiencies. In return, the exiles from Palestine and Iraq now had a way of reaching a mass audience in their home countries. Fascist Italy's and Nazi Germany's shortwave radio transmitters, their printing presses, and, from 1940s to 1943, their armies fighting in North Africa made that possible.

Nazi Germany's Arabic-language propaganda was not primarily the result of the translation of Nazi ideology and canonical texts into Arabic. Although Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been translated into Arabic before 1939, neither, in contrast to the propaganda campaigns in Germany and Europe, figured prominently in Arabic propaganda. Rather, it was a selective reading of the Koran and a focus on the anti-Jewish currents within Islam, combined with Nazi denunciations of Western imperialism and Soviet Communism, that offered Nazi propaganda its points of entry to Arabs in North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and to Muslims in the Middle East in general. At times, German diplomats limited appeals to Arab nationalism and radical Islam in order not to undermine Fascist Italy's imperial ambitions in North Africa. Yet in most of the Middle East and in North Africa as well, especially following Axis setbacks in 1942, the distinction between secular and religious dimensions became insignificant. In the same texts and broadcasts in which they spoke the secular language of attack on American, British, and "Jewish" imperialism, Nazis also appealed to what they depicted as the ancient tradition of hatred of the Jews within Islam itself. Nazi Germany presented itself both as an ally of Arab anti-imperialism and as a soul mate of the religion of Islam as it understood it. Before and during the war, Nazi Germany stressed that it was as an uncompromising enemy of Zionism, a stance that resonated in circles well beyond those of active sympathizers with Nazism and fascism.