Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (29 page)

The Koran says that they [the Jews] heat the cauldron of war and bring corruption on the earth and God does not like those who corrupt. Such are their ways. Even in this war, they have brought about the clash between different opinions and as [Chaim] Weizmann, said, this war is a Jewish war and in point of fact world Jewry dictates the war as was the case during the days of Mohammed. The Jews have spread their influence over Britain. They dominate America. The Jews are behind destructive and atheist communism. They have brought people against each other and the catastrophes and tragedies which are happening now are caused by the Jews. The first enemies of the Moslems are today the Jews and the British and Americans who support them.208

Along with the British, Americans, and the Jews, the Communists oppressed "forty millions of Moslems, violating their freedom and desecrating their mosques and religious institutes." The present war had been "engineered by the Jews." It offered a"unique occasion for the Moslems to get rid of their enemies" if they were willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Those who instead gave in to injustice were not Muslims. "On this principle I demand from you, Moslems, to put your faith on trial. If you find weakness, fight it and get rid of it. Work for your deliverance from the hands of your enemies for this can never be achieved without sacrifice. God will make you victorious. 209

Husseini's Islamic Institute speech of December 19,1942, is a key document in the history of modern anti-Semitism and its diffusion to the Arab and Islamic exiles in Berlin and to the listening audience in the Middle East and North Africa. He left no doubt that his hatred of the Jews was ineradicably bound to his Muslim faith and to his reading of the Koran. With public statements such as this, the Mufti played a central role in the cultural fusion of European with Islamic traditions of Jew-hatred. He was one of the few who had mastered the ideological themes and nuances of fascism and Nazism, as well as the anti-Jewish elements within the Koran and its subsequent commentaries. In this sense, his ideological accomplishment bears some comparison to Hitler's. Neither were original thinkers, but both were able to synthesize and radicalize already existing currents within their respective traditions. The attitude toward the Jews in Islam was different than it had been in Christianity, but the Mufti had no difficulty finding textual support in the Koran for his hatred of the Jews. Hitler was a more provincial product of German-speaking Europe. Husseini, who experienced exile from the Arab and Islamic Middle East as well as refuge and fame in wartime Berlin, produced an ideological hybrid such as could result only from the interaction and merging of previously distinct religions, cultures, and political traditions. In his view, Nazism and Islam were indeed at war with America, Britain, the Soviet Union, and, above all, the Jews. As Hitler had understood on November 28,1941, theirs was not a clash of civilizations but a meeting of hearts and minds, one that blended distinct cultural traditions.

German diplomats were fully aware of the differences between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam and of the distinctive views coming from Iran. In February 1941, before being driven out of the country by the British and Soviets, the German Embassy in Tehran sent a memo that offered interesting observations about propaganda possibilities. Awareness that "certain religious expectations are still alive in the Iranian people" was "important for our own propaganda work."

The greatest and the highest of these expectations is the belief in the appearance of the twelfth Imam who will come to earth as the redeemer. The worse things are for the broad mass of people, the stronger is the belief in the coming libera tor.... For months, the embassy has heard from various sources, that in the whole country preachers are coming forward to speak to the faithful of old, secret prophecies and dreams which indicate that in the form of Adolf Hitler, God has sent the twelfth Imam to the world.... These assertions make a deep impression on these Mullahs' pious listeners. The Fiihrer appears to them as their idea of a saint who will not only free them from their difficult social worries but will also, despite all Iraqi resistance, return to them the greatest of Shi'ite holy places, the mosque in Karbala.

The director of propaganda in the embassy has collected a comprehensive body of material of these kinds of prophecies and dreams from the clergymen as well as reactions of their listeners to them. Without any effort on the part of the embassy, all of this has more and more developed into a spreading propaganda which sees in the Fiihrer and thus in Germany rescuers from all distress and suf- fering.210

The memo further reported that one publisher in Tehran had produced a photo of Hitler along with "Ali;" the first Imam, showing Hitler as the second. Such material was spread from mosque to mosque. If the Iranian clergy could be influenced by German propaganda, "we would thereby be able to reach the great mass of the people in its full breadth." Tact was essential. The idea of Hitler as the twelfth Imam had emerged in Iran "without any effort on our part." Although such ideas could be encouraged "with astute and careful nourishment;" they could also be "completely destroyed if we hurt the feelings of the believers with tactless propaganda." The memo continued:

One way to encourage this development would be to clearly lay out Mohammed's struggle against the Jews in ancient times and that of Hitler's struggle against them in recent times. In so doing, if we were to equate the British and the Jews, we would bring an extremely effective anti-English propaganda to the Shi'ite, Iranian people. The more these ideas could be developed with documents, the more convincing they would be. So, for example, on the one hand, one could present Adolf Hitler's battle against Jewryin his own words and parallel to that present Mohammed's battle against the Jewish tribes in and around Medina with the words of the Arab historians of the most ancient era of Islam. Moreover, all of those British assertions in verbatim quotations that claim that the British are the lost tribe of Israel should be collected and published. Thereby, the Fiihrer's battle will appear to the Moslems as the renewal of the prophet's battle against the same enemy.

The identical goal of these struggles is especially impressively expressed in the Koran Sura 5.82: "You will meet no greater enemy of the believers than the Jews." This should be juxtaposed to Hitler's words: "I believe that today, I am acting in accord with God's creation. By resisting the Jews everywhere, I am fighting for the Lord's work," Mein Kampf, p. 69.211

The following January, Hans Alexander Winkler, whose leaflets from North Africa we have examined, wrote a memo about Iran for the Foreign Ministry based on his experience as cultural attache in Tehran from 1939 to 1941. He had found much friendship toward Germany due to the Iranians' high regard for German politics, economics, and culture. As Germany was far from Iran, the Iranians did not fear it. They understood that it was the enemy of Iran's enemies, Britain and Russia. Winkler also thought German propaganda in Iran was most likely to succeed if it made connections to "Iranian religious conceptions and expectations." For a thousand years, Iranian Shi'ites had expected the return of the twelfth Imam, who would bring order to a "depraved world." Winkler found that the peasantry as well as the urban intelligentsia entertained "the idea that Adolf Hitler himself is either the pathfinder of or even the Imam himself who has returned. These ideas have been fostered and spread by the clergy, often in the form of dreams of prominent clergy that the glory of the Imam is seen in Adolf Hitler." The Iranians' inclination "to religious fanaticism" was a powerful current that the Nazi regime could use. Such expectations could be "encouraged by bringing Hitler close to the Iranians through his words" and with the "depiction of his inspiring life story. Treatment of the Jewish question forms the immediate connecting link to Shi'ite conceptions. The Muslims view the Jewish question as a religious one and for that very reason [it] brings them close to National Socialism on religious grounds."212

Winkler continued, writing that most Iranians lacked an "understanding of racial knowledge." It existed in the upper classes thanks to European influence "with the result that the Iranians think of themselves as Aryans." He was aware that Allied propaganda claimed that German race theory depicted Orientals as inferior, although Mohammed saw no racial differences before God. These comments about German racial views were "the most dangerous theme of enemy propaganda." German propaganda could counter it by stating that "races are unities created by God" and therefore should be "kept pure" whereas "the Jew brings the races together who otherwise would live alongside one another peacefully. Thereby he is the adversary of God's order." In order to counter Allied propaganda and reach the Iranians, Winkler placed "all emphasis on the religious motivation of our propaganda in the Islamic world. Only this kind of propaganda will win the Orientals over to us. Indeed, only a believing National Socialist can carry out this kind of propaganda." Winkler thought cartoons drawn by "Oriental cartoonists" were more effective than photos. Poetry was preferable to academic-sounding essays. German engineers and business people in Iran made valuable contributions to spreading a favorable view of Nazi Germany, but writings that could be camouflaged as having been produced by Iranians were more convincing than those that obviously came from Ger- mans.213 As we will see, Winkler was not alone in raising the possibility of associating Adolf Hitler with themes of Shi'ite and general Islamic religious belief. Heinrich Himmler and leading officials of the SS and their intellectual advisers also thought this was a point of entry to Muslim sensibilities very much worth exploring.

In the last half of 1942, Nazi Germany's Arabic-language broadcasts, and most likely its Persian-language broadcasts to Iran as well, hammered away at the idea that a victory for the Axis would be a victory for Arabs and Muslims, while a victory for the Allies would be a victory for the Jews and for Zionists. While incitement in Germany amounted to assuring readers and listeners that the government was engaged in exterminating the Jewish enemy, in propaganda aimed at the Middle East, incitement included direct appeals for audience participation. In addition to the usual suspects, who in Nazi Germany were vilified as the leaders of the international Jewish conspiracy, the Arabic (and again presumably Persian) broadcasts added another powerful villain, Chaim Weizmann, to the list of the presumably powerful Jews who had plunged the world into World War II in order to realize Zionist ambitions. Although the regime in its propaganda at times explicitly called for killing the Jews, its Arabic-language programs said not a word about the Jews who were murdered on the killing fields and in the extermination camps of Nazi-dominated Europe in 1942.

CHAPTER 6

"The Jews Kindled This War
in the Interest of Zionism"

Propaganda in 1943 as the Tide Turned
against the Axis

he German surrender to Soviet forces in Stalingrad on February 2,1943, after a horrific six-month-long battle, was a decisive turning point in the war in Europe. From then on, the Red Army and Air Force gradually seized the initiative and began to push the German armed forces into retreat. Defeat at Stalingrad ended Hitler's hopes for an invasion of the Middle East from the north by way of the Caucasus. Rommel's Panzerarmee in the North African theater was now Nazi Germany's only hope of gaining a military victory in the Middle East. In response to the defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels ordered an intensification of anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik propaganda that would stress the genocidal implications of a loss of the war to the Soviet Union. Nazi propaganda asserted that a victory by the Jewish enemy in Europe would mean the extermination of the German people. It interpreted the American and British bombing campaign as confirmation of this dire prediction. In the Arabic-language propaganda, the regime began to emphasize the dire consequences of an Allied victory for Arabs and Muslims. Increasingly, visions of catastrophe should the war be lost replaced confident expressions of the glories that would accompany victory. Their countries and their religion and their very lives were at risk if "Britain and the Jews," "Roosevelt and the Jews," the Jewish Bolsheviks, or all taken together were to win World War II.

This propaganda campaign accompanied a continuing and very large Axis military intervention. The war in North Africa did not end with the Allied victory at El Alamein. Hitler decided to fight on in Tunisia. In November and De cember 1942 alone, the Axis sent 50,000 German and 18,ooo Italian soldiers, along with air force contingents from the Eastern Front, to North Africa. In subsequent months, another 100,000 German and 10,000 Italian troops arrived, and vast quantities of equipment were flown or shipped in. Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca from January 14 to 23 to discuss Allied strategy. From March through May 1943, intense fighting continued in Tunisia between Allied-mostly American and British, but also Australian, New Zealand, and some French-forces and the considerably reinforced German and Italian armies. In the first two weeks of May, the Allies won a decisive victory in Tunisia. About 275,000 German and Italian soldiers surrendered to the Allied forces; only 800 managed to escape. The defeat on Tunisia in May 1943 brought the Axis military effort in North Africa to an end.'