Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (7 page)

A month later, in a memo to State Secretary Ernst von Weizsacker in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, Doehle wrote that Germany should attempt to "hinder" the development of a Jewish state by finding common ground with other European states opposed to it, and by "direct and indirect support of movements working against a Jewish state," which could include "direct support for the Arabs with weapons and money, whether in Palestine itself or via other Arab countries such as Iraq."" On July 15, Haj Amin el-Husseini, then both the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, told Doehle that in the "battle against the Jews," Arabs hoped for sup port "from those great powers," such as Germany and Italy, "whose interests move in the same direction." He stressed "Arab sympathy for the new Germany and hoped that Germany would be sympathetic to the Arab struggle against Jewry and would be prepared to support it." Husseini requested that the Germans take a public role in opposition to formation of a Jewish state. Doehle replied that a public German stance could have negative consequences for the Arabs.62 On July 20, State Secretary von Weizsacker turned down Husseini's request for a meeting with one of his representatives in Berlin as he wanted to avoid possibly antagonizing Britain.63 Nevertheless, in August, Husseini informed the Germans of his "joy and satisfaction" that the German government had rejected the Peel Commission recommendation of 1937, which recommended that Palestine be partitioned to create a Jewish as well as an Arab state.64

The change in German policy in summer 1937 did not immediately put a stop to Jewish immigration to Palestine. On January 14, 1938, Doehle again wrote to Berlin that continued German support for the Transfer Agreement risked turning "existing Arab sympathy" for Nazi Germany into antagonism. Indeed, Doehle sensed that "the hitherto pro-German stance of the Palestinian Arabs had begun to waver" because they had seen no active German support for their struggle against the Jews. "I fear that the hatred of the Arab population against England will soon develop into a hatred against the Europeans in general and that then the Arabs will not make an exception [to this hatred] of the Germans." In order to preserve the past pro-German stance he believed to exist among Palestinian Arabs, Doehle "urgently" called on the Foreign Ministry to end support for Jewish emigration to Palestine.65 With the beginning of the war, emigration slowed and then came to a stop by 1941. Nazi policy had gained Arab sympathies due in part to its pronounced anti-Zionism while exacerbating, in Hirszowicz's terms, "already existing anti-Semitism inside and outside Germany."

The Foreign Ministry was receiving other reports about Arab and Muslim opposition to establishment of a Jewish state. In July 1937, Grobba wrote from Baghdad that in addition to protest from political leaders, Imams in Iraqi mosques were calling opposition to a Jewish state a religious duty of Muslims.66 Grobba's memo was one of the first German diplomatic analyses to suggest that the Nazi regime would find common ground with a politics rooted in militant Islam.67 Although Hitler did not devote much time to Arabs and Muslims in his speeches, he did mention Palestine toward the end of his concluding speech at the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1938. In the midst of a discussion of the Czech crisis, he said that he had no intention of allowing a "second Palestine" to emerge in the heart of Germany. He would not leave the Germans in the Sudetenland like the Arabs, "defenseless and perhaps abandoned ."68 Grobba wrote to the Foreign Ministry on October 4, 1938, to report that Hitler's remarks had met with "enthusiastic applause" in the Arab world. The speech had been broadcast over loudspeakers and heard in coffeehouses, and it aroused enthusiasm and hope among Palestinians. Some Iraqi journalists spoke of "the great Hitler" whose ability to aid the Sudeten Germans only underscored the inability or refusal of their own government to come to the aid of the Palestinians. Grobba wrote that Hitler's diplomatic victory at the Munich conference and Germany's rise to power since 1933 aroused enthusiasm among those Arabs who hoped that "they too would find a leader who would unite them and bring them freedom."69

In December 1937, Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, while on a trip through the Middle East, invited the Iraqi government to send twenty young people to the Reichsparteitag in summer 1938 as guests of the Hitler Youth organization. The Iraqi government accepted the invitation, and a group of young people went to Nuremberg.70 Upon returning to Baghdad in October, some of the travelers published their reactions in the Iraqi press.71 The group learned about the Hitler Youth, visited a military museum, and saw Nazi Party headquarters. One visitor was left with "a memory of ... a strong will, of art, science and scholarship, strength and organization which all taken together had created a strong people."72 Another was struck with the international character of the Nuremberg rally that brought together young people from Iraq, Italy, Spain, Romania, and Japan. The orderly masses patiently waiting to see "the Fiihrer," the searchlights, and flags were evidence to another visitor of "the great taste and refinement which has been developed" in Germany. Hitler delivered a "great speech, one that the world waited for with great impatience." The speech was "a flame from the German heart." Still another pilgrim recalled that after the Iraqi delegation sang the Iraqi national hymn, it received such "loud applause" that the group sang it again.73 The Iraqi Foreign Ministry sent thanks to the German government and to its Baghdad embassy for "the warm welcome and friendship" shown to the Iraqi delegation during its visit.74 The Nuremberg rallies were a spectacular presentation of the Third Reich's ex treme nationalism. Yet for these impressionable young Iraqis, these events instead were a moment of German and European recognition of Iraq. For them, the Nuremberg rally was not a festival celebrating the superiority of the Aryan master race over inferiors. Rather, the message they brought home was that Germans, especially the Hitler Youth, were friendly comrades in a common struggle. In their account, Nazi Germany was the vanguard of an admirable and strikingly inclusive nationalism.

As long as Hitler held out hope that Great Britain would give him free rein in pursuit of his policies of expansion on the European continent, especially for Lebensraum in the east, he limited appeals to the Arab Middle East.75 On the other hand, Nazi anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist policies found favor with Arab radicals led by the Grand Mufti as well as with anti-Zionist officials in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Although Arab affairs were a sideshow to the main events taking place within Europe, the meetings and contacts established by 1937-38 between German diplomats and Arab political figures in Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia were, as Hirszowicz wrote, "a good beginning for German further activities."76 Yet the argument for a change in policy coming from the pro-Arab voices of Doehle in Jerusalem and Grobba in Baghdad in the summer of 1938 would become far more appealing as the British rejected Hitler's hopes for a German-British rapprochement that would leave Nazi Germany as the dominant power in Europe.77 Faced with the possibility that Britain and France would go to war rather than accept Hitler's plan of continental domination, the Germans began to move away from their previous policy of restraint toward the Arab countries. In June 1939, Hans Piekenbrock, the director of military intelligence in the Abwehr, wrote to its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, that "through his middle man, the Grand Mufti has conveyed his sincere thanks for the support given to him so far. It was only as a result of the money we gave to him that it was possible to carry out the revolt in Palestine."78 The Germans sent arms shipments to Palestine by way of Iraq and Saudi Arabia with agreement of these governments. They sent money to finance the Palestine revolt and intensified contacts with anti-British military and circles close to King Farouk in Egypt. After the Munich conference of October 1938, the Nazi Party organization in Palestine aided Arab guerilla bands.79

In spring 1939 another development reflected this shift in policy. German Arabic-language shortwave radio broadcasts to North Africa and the Arab Middle East began. While it was all well and good to invite twenty young people to stare in awe at the light show in Nuremberg, the Foreign Ministry understood that shortwave radio was a far more cost-effective way to spread the word to millions of listeners around the globe, especially in a region where literacy averaged around 20 percent and was even lower among Muslims. In September 1939, the Foreign Ministry in Berlin established the Department of Radio Policy (RundfunkpolitischeAbteilung). Its purpose was both to monitor the radio broadcasts of other countries and to organize and shape the official message on the Nazi regime's shortwave radio broadcasts. By July 1940 it had fourteen divisions broadcasting in many languages in Europe and around the globe. One of its largest and most important divisions handled broadcasts in Arabic aimed at North Africa and the Middle East.80

In July 1939, Christian T. Steger, of the American Consulate in Jerusalem, sent Washington the first American assessment of Nazi Germany's Arabic shortwave radio broadcasts.81 He noted that the Nazi reports about European news were reasonably accurate. "Arabic news, on the other hand, is given without any apparent effort at subtlety or restraint. Offensive terms such as 'barbarous ,"savage,"deceitful,' etc., are freely applied to the British, while with regard to the Jews the epithets are even more venomous. Less regard also is shown for the truth; and news from extremist Arab sources is especially stressed."82 In these months just preceding Hitler's invasion of Poland, the Arabic broadcasts celebrated Germany's growing strength and vilified Great Britain. Steger wrote that when the broadcasts discussed events in Palestine, "practically all restraint is abandoned. Great Britain is pictured as continually discriminating in favor of her Jewish masters." German radio denounced the "insolent," "criminal," or "devilish Jews" who, it claimed, were carrying out "a campaign of indiscriminate murder under the eyes of the British, who supply the necessary arms." The broadcasts extolled Arab "martyrs;" quoted the Grand Mufti, and asserted that the British were suppressing the truth about events in Palestine. "It is intimated that only in Germany is the real truth about the Palestine situation available."83

Yet for the Italians and Germans, there were setbacks in the Middle East in 1939. England and France strengthened their military forces in the region, particularly in Egypt. In 1937, the British had stripped Haj Amin el-Husseini of his offices, and he fled to Lebanon to escape arrest. In 1939, he fled again, this time to Iraq, after the British were able to suppress the revolt in Palestine in 1939.84 In Egypt, the fear of war first deepened, rather than undermined, support for Britain. On May 17,1939, Britain bolstered its position among the Arabs when it issued the White Paper, which promised to stop Jewish immigration in five years, limit the purchase of land by Jews, and form a Palestinian state within ten years. Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland aroused apprehension in Arab government circles because if the will of a national minority with a strong outside protector could be made to prevail in Europe, it was reasoned, then the same thing could come to pass in the Arab world, which had no shortage of aggrieved minorities. Hitler's own racial categorization and contempt for Arabs expressed in Mein Kampf, passages of which the British described in their BBC Arabic radio broadcasts, continued to cause mistrust and offense in the Middle East. Moreover, Germany's close ties with Italy were a mixed blessing. In the Mediterranean Mussolini sought to extend Italian influence, not Arab independence, and Italian aggression in Ethiopia in 1935-36 had left a residue of bitterness in North Africa.85 Ironically, the appeal of Nazi Germany in the region lay partly in the perception that it was less racist toward North Africans than the Italians.

Egypt and Mandate Palestine were linked to Britain by treaty obligations and cultural, educational, and commercial networks. German prospects in Saudi Arabia appeared more promising as it was the only formerly independent state not linked by treaty to England. Following a series of visits in 1938 to Germany by representatives of Saudi King Ibn Saud concerning arms purchases, the Nazi regime established diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in January 1939. In return for German political and economic support, the king and his advisers promised neutrality in the event of war.86 The Germans hoped that their previous absence from the area as colonizers would help them as anticolonial sentiment swept the region. Yet British and French colonialism fostered contacts, familiarity, and trust as well as revolt and opposition.

In April 1939, after a trip to Palestine and Iraq, Hentig agreed with Grobba that relations with Saudi Arabia needed to be strengthened. He concluded that in 1939 there was no possibility of effective German activity in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. On June 8,1939, King Ibn Saud's adviser, Khalid al-Hud al- Qarqani, met with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (he had assumed the position in February 1938) and then with Hitler himself on June 17. Hitler assured him of his long-standing sympathy for the Arabs and his willingness to offer them "active assistance."87 Ibn Saud, aware as he was of British power and influence in the region, sought to keep the meeting secret. When it leaked, he stressed his need to be on good terms with both Germany and Great Britain. While Germany's strength and Hitler's challenge to the British Empire found Arab admirers, "the Germans were far away and the power of Britain and France was close at hand."88 As the date for the invasion of Poland approached, Hitler knew it carried a strong risk of war with England. That, in turn, would mean the end of restraint on German efforts to find supporters and allies in the Middle East. In that effort, the diffusion of anti-Semitism would be an important aspect of the regime's efforts to find Arab and Muslim collaborators. The hair-splitting policy discussions about the meaning of anti-Semitism and German racial legislation, the pro-Arab tilt, and the associated crystallization of anti-Zionism by 1938 all laid the groundwork for the subsequent paradoxical yet intensive wartime propaganda campaign that Nazi ideology at first seemed to preclude. By the beginning of the war, Nazi officials knew that Arab diplomats had expressed no opposition to anti-Semitism in principle so long as it was directed only at the Jews, and Arab and Islamist radicals gave evidence that they shared the Jew-hatred animating Hitler's dictatorship. Nazism's effort to win the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East was about to begin in earnest.