Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World

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Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World

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Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World JEFFREY HERF

YA L E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S N E W H AV E N & L O N D O N

Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey Herf. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Minion Roman types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc., Grand Rapids, Michigan. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Herf, Jeffrey, 1947– Nazi propaganda for the Arab world / Jeffrey Herf. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-14579-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)

1. World War, 1939–1945—Propaganda—

Arab countries. 2. Nazi propaganda—Arab countries—History—20th century. 3. Antisemitism—Arab countries—History—20th century. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945). 5. Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945.

I. Title.

D810.P7A654 2009 940.54⬘8874309174927—dc22 2009019345

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For

Sonya and In memory of

Jeannie Rutenburg, 1950–2009

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

A Note on Terminology and Spelling

xv

1.

Introduction

1

2. Deﬁning Anti-Semitism: 1933–1939

15

3. Growing Contacts, First Broadcasts: 1939–1941

36

4. Propaganda and Warﬁghting in North Africa and the Middle East in 1941

57

5. “Kill the Jews before They Kill You”: Propaganda during the Battles in North Africa in 1942

88

6. “The Jews Kindled This War in the Interest of Zionism”: Propaganda in 1943 as the Tide Turned against the Axis

158

7. “The Americans, the British, and the Jews Are All Conspiring against Arab Interests”: Propaganda from 1944 to Spring 1945

194

8. Postwar Aftereffects

233

Conclusion

261

Notes

267

Bibliography

311

Index

323

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Preface

During World War II, the Nazi regime distributed, in Arabic, millions of printed leaﬂets and broadcast thousands of hours of shortwave radio programs to diffuse its ideology throughout North Africa and the Middle East. This book is a history of the ideas, individuals, and institutions involved in that effort. It draws on underutilized and unused archival sources to shed new light on the nature and scope of Nazism’s ideological extension beyond Europe and the adaptation of its messages to the local politics and Islamic religious idioms of the region. It is a sequel to my previous work on Nazi propaganda aimed at a domestic audience. It adds to a historical scholarship that draws attention to the connections between World War II and the Holocaust in Europe and the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dimensions of the war, and in particular to the failed attempt to extend the Holocaust to encompass the Jews in the countries of that region. As Alexander Kirk, the American ambassador to Egypt, put it in one of his many important wartime dispatches from Cairo about “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” Nazi shortwave radio poured forth hatred of the Jews “ad nauseam.” The fate of 700,000 Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa depended on the outcome of the ﬁghting between the Allies and Axis forces in North Africa. The propaganda barrage was an instrument used simultaneously to try to win the war against the Allies as well as to extend Nazism’s genocide of the Jews. The diffusion of anti-Semitism was at the center of this effort. Although this book is ﬁrst and foremost a work of history about a distinct set of events in the past, it also documents a chapter in the history of the lineages and origins of ideas that emerged in Arab radicalism and Islamist politics

x

Preface

after World War II. Radical anti-Semitism and the ideas of Nazism and fascism ceased to play a major role in European politics after 1945, but traces of the mélange of Nazi ideology, radical Arab nationalism, and fundamentalist Islam that emerged in wartime Berlin did persist in the Middle East. Though they were often on the political margins, these ideologies were not discredited as extensively as they were in Europe. The political and ideological collaboration between ofﬁcials of the Nazi regime and pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin introduced the ideas of twentieth-century European totalitarianism into an Arab and Islamic context. They did so both by secular denunciations of Zionism, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union and by asserting that there was an elective afﬁnity between Nazism and what the Nazis claimed Islam to be. In this sense, the propaganda campaign was a chapter in the history of what I earlier called “reactionary modernism,” namely, the use of the most modern technology of the time to advance a political and cultural revolt against the West’s liberal political traditions. In postwar Europe, on the whole, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and equally absurd hatreds rooted in ancient religious texts became a disgraced and dead relic buried in the ruins of the Third Reich. But in the postwar Middle East, these notions persisted in elements of radical nationalist and Islamist politics. The ideas and events examined in this book are one piece of the explanatory puzzle that accounts for this tragic afterlife in another context. An adequate history of the reception of this propaganda offensive awaits the efforts of scholars who work primarily on North Africa and the Middle East. Here I offer readers the most extensive record to date of what Nazi Germany was communicating to Arabs and the Muslims of North Africa and the Middle East during World War II. As a work of intellectual and cultural history, this book also documents and interprets an important chapter in what one could call the dark history of globalization and cultural interaction. A simple-minded optimism seeks to convince us that contact and communication between people from different cultures will invariably foster international understanding, peace, and goodwill. Sometimes it has. In this case, the collaboration of ofﬁcials of the Nazi regime with Arab allies in wartime Berlin demonstrated that the opposite was also possible. The more these political allies exchanged ideas, the more they reinforced, renewed, and accentuated some of the worst elements of their respective civilizations, namely, hatred of Jews and of Western political modernity. This direct gaze at the results of their collaboration during World War II will, I hope, contribute to the contemporary criticism that the aftereffects so richly deserve.

Acknowledgments

With pleasure, I acknowledge the people and institutions that supported the research and writing of this book. Thanks are due to archivists at the United States National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, for their assistance in locating relevant ﬁles of the United States Department of State. Lawrence MacDonald, in particular, helped unravel some of the complexities of the World War II–era American intelligence ﬁles. My fellow historian Richard Breitman, himself a pioneer in the scholarly use of American intelligence and diplomatic ﬁles in the United States National Archives regarding the Holocaust, shared both his deep knowledge of them as well as encouragement for this project. His assertion that our National Archives contain a great deal of material of interest to historians of modern European history has turned out to be even more accurate than I anticipated. A fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in fall 2007 and the support of its director Gary Smith and his excellent staff facilitated research in German archives. Yolanda Korb’s assistance with library acquisitions was particularly helpful for the research. Archivists Martin Hanselmann, Mareike Fossenberg, and Dr. Martin Kröger at the Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry (PAAA) in Berlin; Elfriede Frischmuth at the German Federal Military Archive in Freiburg (BA-MA); and staff at the German Federal Archive (BAB) and at the Zentrum für Moderner Orient (ZMO), both in Berlin, facilitated my work in their collections. A sabbatical leave from the University of Maryland, College Park, for spring semester 2008 gave me the time needed to complete the research and much of the writing.

xii

Acknowledgments

I am particularly grateful to Martin Cüppers and Klaus-Michael Mallmann. The importance of their research and writing on Nazi Germany and the Middle East is evident in the text and notes of this book. Dr. Cuppers graciously shared his knowledge of the relevant ﬁles and offered comments on the manuscript. Thanks to David and Dawn Cesarani for their kind hospitality during my research in Britain’s National Archives (NA) in Kew Gardens. Both the informative Web site of Britain’s National Archives and the professional staff helped in locating ﬁles quickly. I beneﬁted greatly from the computerized ordering of ﬁles at the Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry, the National Archives in Britain, the German Federal Archives in Berlin and Freiburg. Thanks are due to the archive administrators of the PAAA, NA, ZMO, and the United States National Archives for permitting the use of digital cameras in the archives. In so doing they are facilitating a minor revolution in the speed and reliability with which researchers can make copies of needed ﬁles at dramatically reduced costs. My special thanks to Andrew Masloski of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., for his translations of Arabic-language printed materials distributed by Nazi Germany in North Africa and the Middle East. Gudrun Krämer of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the Free University in Berlin shared her insights and informed me of the work of her student Munir Hamida on Arab exiles in wartime Berlin. I have also gained much from conversations and correspondence with and from the published work of Yehuda Bauer, Paul Berman, Russell Berman, Saul Friedlander, Israel Gershoni, Susannah Heschel, Bernard Lewis, Peter Longerich, Tuvia Friling, Mathias Kuentzel, Meir Litvak, Benny Morris, Laurent Murawiec, Francis R. Nicosia, Wolfgang Schwanitz, Bassam Tibi, and Robert Wistrich. Comments and questions in response to lectures about the work in progress offered much food for thought as the book evolved. Thanks to colleagues and participants at the American Academy in Berlin; to colleagues and students at the departments of history at the Free University of Berlin; the University of Bielefeld; Royal Holloway University in England; the University of Munich; Georgetown University; and Trinity College, Dublin. I also presented the work in progress to the Center for European Integration Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Bonn; the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the 2008 Summer Institute on Studying Antisemitism in the Twentieth Cen-

Acknowledgments

xiii

tury at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich; the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism at Yale University; to the panelists and audience for the session on “Anti-Semitism: European Roots and International Diffusion in the Twentieth Century” at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., in January 2008; and to the session on “Germany’s Efforts to Inﬂuence the Arab and Muslim World before and during the Nazi Period,” at the German Studies Association annual meeting, October 2008. 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.

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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.

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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

T

2

Introduction

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

Introduction

3

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.”1 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 regime— especially in its Foreign Ministry but also of its intelligence services, the Propaganda Ministry, and the SS and its Reich Security Main Ofﬁce (Reichssichherheitsshauptamt)—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-

4

Introduction

ceived traditions, emphasizing some elements and diminishing others.2 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.4 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

Introduction

5

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. “Jihad made in Germany” and the appeal to Arabs to revolt against British and French colonialism had been a component of German policy during World

6

Introduction

War I. Although the majority of Muslims ignored appeals to revolt against British, French, and Russian interests, the German Foreign Ministry gained experience in the use of politicized Islam in its efforts to undermine the other European powers in the Middle East. Some of the veterans of German Middle East diplomacy in World War I, such as Werner Otto von Hentig, would play a role in the far more extensive efforts that developed during World War II.6 Nazi propagandists built on previous experience yet added the components of radical anti-Semitism and conspiratorial theories as incitement to mass killing of the Jews. Germany’s efforts in the Middle East during World War II were limited by the resources available and by priorities of the war in Europe. Nevertheless, as we will see, Nazi Germany’s military and propaganda exertions were extensive and were defeated only as a result of major military engagements by the Allies in North Africa.7 After the war, Fritz Grobba (1886–1973), who had been the German ambassador to Iraq from 1937 to 1941 and then played an important role in Berlin in Germany’s Middle East policies during World War II, claimed that “Hitler and [Foreign Minister Joachim von] Ribbentrop displayed total disinterest for Arab aspirations” and that “the Arab movement made more concerted attempts to exploit Germany than did Germany to exploit the Arab movement.”8 In fact, Hitler, Ribbentrop, and a host of high-ranking ofﬁcials in the Foreign Ministry as well as Heinrich Himmler and ofﬁcials in the SS’s Reich Security Main Ofﬁce (RSHA) showed strong and continuing interest in making appeals to Arabs and Muslims. Their failure was not due to lack of effort but to its inadequacy in the face of the Allied military and political counteroffensive. During the 1930s, Britain’s commitment to the establishment of a homeland for the Jews made in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 came under increasing pressure in the face of Arab opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1934, Fascist Italy pioneered Arabic-language radio broadcasts on its Radio Bari station. Along with print materials distributed from its consulates in the region, the Italians seized on the opportunity created by Arab opposition to Zionism and to British and French colonialism and by the growth of pan-Arab and pan-Islamic ideology in the 1930s. The result, as one historian has noted, was an “unlikely partnership between an aspiring colonial power [Fascist Italy] and an anti-colonial movement [Arab nationalism].”9 Not surprisingly, the Axis powers’ search for allies among Arabs and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East during World War II and the interaction of the war in the region with the war in Europe have long preoccupied military and diplomatic

Introduction

7

historians.10 In 1965, the East German historian Heinz Tillmann published the ﬁrst comprehensive history of Nazi Germany’s policy in the Middle East up to 1943.11 In 1966, Lukasz Hirszowicz’s The Third Reich and the Arab East presented an enduring synthesis of military, diplomatic, and political history that covered the entire period of the war.12 He established the chronology and key causal arguments concerning the prospects for victory by and the causes of defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the region, especially in Iraq and Egypt. In subsequent years, historians in West and East Germany further elaborated on the military and diplomatic dimensions of Nazi Germany’s policies toward the Arab countries during the war.13 Recently, Norman Goda’s important work on German strategy in North Africa has underscored its importance both for the outcome of the war in Europe and for Hitler’s aspirations to attack the United States.14 In 2006, two German historians, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, broke new ground with Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Crescent and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine). In addition to working in the diplomatic archives that Hirszowicz and others had examined, Mallmann and Cüppers drew on German diplomatic as well as military and SS archives that had been opened and declassiﬁed in the interim to bring the issue of the possible extension of the Holocaust from Europe to the Middle East to the center of scholarly discussion. Mallmann and Cüppers discovered that the SS had an Einsatzgruppe Afrika, a paramilitary task force, under the leadership of SS Obersturmbannführer (Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, had the same SS rank) Walter Rauff, ready to work behind the lines of Rommel’s Africa Corps to extend the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe to the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East.15 The question of whether or not they would be able to do so depended on the outcome of the battles at El Alamein and later in Tunisia between Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee (Armored Forces) and the Allied armed forces. As the Israeli historian Tuvia Friling has pointed out, in 1942, given the proximity of Rommel’s Africa Corps, the fear of a German invasion of Palestine was “indeed real” among its Jewish population. In light of the tensions between the British and the Jews in Palestine, it is ironic to note that the British and Australian victory at El Alamein was a decisive turning point both in the history of World War II and in the successful effort to prevent the extension of the Holocaust to the 700,000 Jews of the Middle East.16 The following chapters offer

8

Introduction

abundant evidence of the anti-Semitic propaganda barrage that, as had been the case in Europe, would have accompanied any Middle Eastern mass killing operations. A signiﬁcant historical scholarship has documented the actions and beliefs of the most important public face and voice of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda, Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was born in Jerusalem in 1895 or 1897 to a family long active in Jerusalem’s politics. Following World War I, he led opposition to the Balfour Declaration and to Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1921, Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, appointed Husseini to the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a post that came with lifetime tenure. As Mufti, his primary task was to serve as an Islamic scholar who interpreted and expounded Islamic law. Husseini saw no boundary between religion and politics and played a major role integrating Palestinian and Arab nationalism with Islamic themes. He was a leader of the Arab revolt of 1936– 39 and established contacts with Italian and German ofﬁcials during that time. Fearing arrest by the British, he ﬂed to Lebanon in 1937 and then in 1939 to Iraq, where, in 1941, he participated in a pro-Axis coup with Rashid Ali Kilani. When the British deposed that government, he ﬂed again—to Tehran, Ankara, and then to Rome and Berlin, where he participated in the propaganda campaign explored in this work. He met Hitler, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, and other high-ranking diplomats and military ofﬁcials. The mutual admiration between Husseini and Hitler, based in part on their shared hatred of the Jews, has long been a matter of public record. Details about his collaboration with Heinrich Himmler and his knowledge about the Holocaust came to light after the war. Husseini was a key ﬁgure in ﬁnding common ideological ground between National Socialism, on the one hand, and the doctrines of Arab nationalism and militant Islam, on the other.17 Yet the history of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda to the Middle East was far more than another interesting chapter in one man’s biography. Rather, it was a program that involved a large number of high-ranking German government ofﬁcials along with pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin. The Germans who were part of this effort include intelligence ofﬁcers, diplomats, military ofﬁcers, various staff members of the German Foreign Ministry’s Department of Radio Policy, announcers, writers, and editors along with the prominent Arabic-language announcer Yunis Bahri as well as other generally

Introduction

9

anonymous native Arabic-speaking announcers and writers. The broadcasts were the result of a cooperative effort. The Department of Radio Policy worked closely with the Foreign Ministry’s Political Department, and in both it was Ofﬁce VII that dealt with Orient matters. In October 1941, Hitler resolved a dispute between Ribbentrop and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels by assigning primary responsibility for foreign-language propaganda to the Foreign Ministry. In the Foreign Ministry’s Political Department, Wilhelm Melchers directed policy toward the Middle East, and Kurt Munzel led the ofﬁce in the Department of Radio Policy that worked on Arabic radio broadcasts. Erwin Ettel served as the German contact with Haj Amin el-Husseini, while Fritz Grobba worked closely with ex-Iraqi prime minister Rashid Ali Kilani. In Erwin Rommel’s Africa Corps, Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath, son of the former German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, and Hans Alexander Winkler wrote Arabic leaﬂets for distribution in North Africa and the Middle East. Experts on the Orient working for and with Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Security Main Ofﬁce, the headquarters of the SS, also participated.18 These and other ofﬁcials and some university scholars worked together with pro-Nazi Arab exiles who could translate Nazism’s message into ﬂuent, colloquial Arabic. The Arabic propaganda campaign, especially with shortwave radio, was far more extensive than a focus on the Mufti alone would suggest. Fascist Italy broadcast Arabic programs from 1934 to 1943. Nazi shortwave Arabic broadcasting began in October 1939 and continued until February or March 1945. Berlin in Arabic and the Voice of Free Arabism (VFA) broadcast a mixture of music, news, and commentary seven days and nights a week. Information about the size of the listening audience remains scarce. In August 1941, a United States Ofﬁce of War Information (OWI) report estimated that there were about 90,000 shortwave radios in the region: 150 in Aden, 55,000 in Egypt, 4,000 in Iraq, 24,000 in Palestine, 6,000 in Syria, and 25 in Saudi Arabia.19 An OWI report of January 1942 estimated that the numbers had increased to 60,000 in Egypt, 10,000 in Iraq, 20,000 in Syria, 500 in Saudi Arabia, and 40,000 (mostly Jewish) listeners in Palestine. The numbers in Algeria (70,000) and in Morocco (45,770) included many Europeans.20 These radios were often heard in cafés and other public places and were crucial to propaganda efforts in the Middle East because rates of illiteracy in the region were so signiﬁcant. In Palestine, the British mandatory government census of 1931 put the overall literacy rates among Arabs seven years and older at

10

Introduction

about 20 percent. Among Muslims, it was 14 percent (25 percent among men and only 3 percent among women). Government surveys conducted after World War II found illiteracy rates to be almost 80 percent in Egypt and 85 percent in Libya. By 1947, another observer assessed the literacy rate among Palestine’s Arab community to be 27 percent for Christians and 21 percent for Muslims (35 percent for men and 7 percent for women).21 Shortwave radio reached a far larger audience than did print materials. Nevertheless, throughout the war, Axis propaganda aimed at the Middle East also included the distribution of millions of Arabic-language leaﬂets and brochures. Some were dropped from the air by the German air force, the Luftwaffe. Others were distributed on the ground by propaganda units accompanying Rommel’s Panzerarmee, by German diplomats in Tunisia, and by networks of German secret agents and Arab collaborators moving about on railways and on small boats in the Mediterranean. Only a small fragment of this barrage survived the Allied bombing raids on Berlin, the chaos of the last years of war, and the probable intentional document theft and destruction by the persons who produced them. Although transcripts of a great many of Nazi Germany’s German-language radio broadcasts are to be found in German archives, the same cannot be said of the regime’s Arabic-language wartime broadcasts. But what was lost to posterity in Berlin was being transcribed and translated into English in the American Embassy in wartime Cairo under the direction of Alexander C. Kirk, ﬁrst head of the legation and then U.S. ambassador to Egypt from March 29, 1941, until March 29, 1944. Kirk came to Cairo from Berlin, where in 1939 and 1940 he served as chargé d’affaires of the United States Embassy. In that capacity, he sent Washington important reports on the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policies and developed contacts with the German anti-Nazi Resistance. During his tenure, the U.S. and British embassies in Cairo became the nerve center for Allied military and intelligence operations in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Kirk’s staff became the most important recorder anywhere of the Axis Arabic-language propaganda offensive. Although American diplomats in Cairo had been paying attention to German Arabic shortwave broadcasts since they began in 1939, Kirk expanded such efforts. He began to send regular summaries of the broadcasts to the ofﬁce of Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington on September 13, 1941.22 By April 1942, he had organized a staff of native Arabic speakers, stenographers, and

Introduction

11

translators whose task was to produce verbatim English transcripts of “Axis,” that is, Nazi Germany’s and Fascist Italy’s, Arabic-language radio broadcasts to the Middle East. He sent these dispatches of between ten and thirty pages every week to the State Department in Washington until March 1944. An interim ofﬁcial, John Jacobs, and then Kirk’s successor as ambassador, Pinkney Tuck, continued to do so until the broadcasts ceased in the last months of the war in spring 1945. The reports circulated among high-ranking ofﬁcials in the United States government.23 The resulting several thousand pages of verbatim, English-language texts, called “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” constitute the most complete record of Arabic-language shortwave radio broadcasts by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during World War II. In 1977, the State Department ﬁles of the American Embassy in Cairo in the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, were declassiﬁed. As far as I have been able to determine, this book is the ﬁrst work to use them, or certainly to use them extensively. The Cairo transcripts demonstrate that the Arabic-language radio barrage was far more extensive than a focus on the Mufti alone would suggest.24 Very importantly, the “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” transcripts also document the intersection of broadcast propaganda with German military strategy—both in periods of euphoria over prospects of imminent victory and in times of rage and despair in the face of setbacks from 1943 on. Radical anti-Semitism was a central component throughout the broadcasts. Where Nazi propagandists in Europe informed audiences that the Nazi regime was then in the process of exterminating Europe’s Jews, the Arabicspeaking announcers on Berlin in Arabic and the VFA would on a number of occasions urge listeners to take matters into their own hands, to, as they put it, “kill the Jews.” The Cairo transcripts offer unprecedented documentation of the merging of National Socialist with radical Islamist anti-Semitism and its diffusion to the Middle East, as well as of the incitement to violence and murder purveyed in the Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany. 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

12

Introduction

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

Introduction

13

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

14

Introduction

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 1940s 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 collaborators. 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

N

16

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

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 völkish 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.”1 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 Auswärtiges 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

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

17

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.”5 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 1933.7 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 The Ruppert case led diplomats in Turkey, in the Arabs states, in Iran, in

18

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

French North Africa, and in India to wonder if the term “anti-Semitism” referred to non-Jewish “Semites.” Did the Aryan paragraph mean that they too did not meet the racial criteria for German citizenship and would be subject to similar discrimination under Nazi Germany’s race laws? In 1935 and 1936, Turkish, Egyptian, Iranian, and Iraqi diplomats, both those in their home countries and those posted to embassies in Berlin, raised these issues with their German counterparts. These inquiries and the German responses were placed in a most interesting ﬁle—entitled “Membership of the Egyptians, Iraqis, Iranians, Persians and Turks in the Aryan Race”—now in the archives of the German Foreign Ministry.9 German diplomats, in particular career civil servants, recalled that Imperial Germany had presented itself as an anticolonial power before and during World War I. They recognized that the Nazi regime’s racial ideology and racial legislation could undermine its effort to present itself as a power sympathetic to Arab and Muslim opposition to British and French colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East. A memo from the Foreign Ministry to the Nazi Party’s Rassenpolitisches Amt (Ofﬁce of Racial Politics) of January 14, 1936, indicated that there had been “individual cases,” that is, others in addition to Ruppert, in which “German citizens with Turkish mixed-blood had run into difﬁculties with the state and the [Nazi] Party due to their origins.” Hence the Foreign Ministry thought it was “essential that determination of whether the Turks are Aryan be decided as soon as possible” so that the Foreign Ministry could give “a satisfactory answer” to the Turkish Embassy’s repeated questions about the issue.10 On February 2, 1936, Walter Gross, the director of the Rassenpolitisches Amt, wrote to I. A. Richards, in the Foreign Ministry, and observed that the language of the Nuremberg race laws of September 15, 1935, no longer distinguished “between Aryans and non-Aryans, but rather between persons of German and kindred [artverwandt] blood, on the one hand, and Jews as well as other aliens [Artfremden], on the other. Blood that is kindred to German blood is the blood of those peoples whose racial composition is related to that of the Germans.” According to the ofﬁcial commentaries on the Nuremberg race laws by Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, this was the case for Europeans and their relatives living outside Europe “who have preserved their racial purity.” The Turks lived in Europe, thought of themselves as Europeans, and supported Germany in World War I.11 Therefore, German diplomats should reply to inquiries from the Turks that “in Germany the Turkish people are seen as a European people

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

19

and that therefore the individual Turkish citizen receives the same treatment by German race law as the members of other European states.”12 Labeling Turks as Europeans left unanswered the question of how to think about the obviously non-European Arabs, Persians, and Muslims. By March 30 the Foreign Ministry, Interior Ministry, Ofﬁce of Racial Politics, Propaganda Ministry, and SS agreed on the preceding policy regarding the Turks. But they also cautioned that “states such as Egypt, Iran, or other countries in the Middle East cannot point to this inclusion of Turkey in the circle of European peoples as a precedent because these states have not yet raised a claim to belong to Europe.” Further, Turkish Jews or Turks of a “colored origin” were still considered as racially alien no less than such persons from European countries would be.13 Following approval from these ofﬁces, the text was sent to all ministries of the Nazi regime as well as to Hitler’s Reich Chancellery on April 30.14 By June, the still unresolved issue of the racial categorization of Arabs, Persians, and Muslims surfaced in newspapers in the Middle East. The resulting furor unleashed a ﬂurry of cables and memos between the Foreign Ministry and German embassies in Cairo and Tehran. On June 15, the German ambassador in Cairo, Eberhard von Stohrer, wrote to the Foreign Ministry that the Cairo-based, French-language “Jewish newspaper, La Bourse Egyptienne” reported that German ofﬁcials had decided that “the inhabitants of Iran, Iraq, and Egypt were non-Aryans” and that therefore the Nuremberg race laws did in fact apply to Egyptians. This had caused “great unhappiness” in Egypt.15 Stohrer and other German diplomats began a concerted effort to undo the damage. On June 18, Vicco von Bülow-Schwante in the Foreign Ministry informed the German Embassy in Cairo that, contrary to reports in the foreign press, “the Nuremberg race laws are aimed only at the Jews (without regard to their citizenship).” While the Egyptian ambassador in Berlin understood that this was the case, “he declared that the Egyptians regarded their blood to be kindred with the German blood.” Although this view was not shared by German ofﬁcials, the ambassador stressed that “discrimination against peoples of other races was completely excluded by German racial legislation.”16 BülowSchwante assured Egyptian diplomats in Berlin that the German race laws did permit marriages between Egyptian women and German men, and that children of such marriages were legitimate and had full citizenship rights. Upon marrying a German man, an Egyptian woman received German citizenship; their children would receive German citizenship at birth.17 In a telegram to the

20

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

German Embassy in Tehran on the same day, Bülow-Schwante described “reports abroad from certain sides” to be “completely wrong” in asserting that the “Nuremberg laws labeled inhabitants of Egypt, Iran, and Iraq to be nonAryans.” The law did not use the “Aryan concept. . . . As everybody knows, these laws are aimed against Jews, without regard to their country of citizenship.” The Iranian Ambassador in Berlin had expressed the view that “the Iranian people are racially kindred to the German people.” Bülow-Schwante cautiously wrote that this view would be the subject of “fundamental interpretation” in department discussions.18 These issues moved further into the spotlight of public attention when they became intertwined with preparations for the Berlin Olympic games of summer 1936. On June 17, 1936, Stohrer penned an extensive memo on “The Jewish Campaign against the Olympic Games.” He claimed that the “Jewish press” in Egypt was continuing its “campaign against Germany” by claiming that the Nuremberg race laws applied to Egyptians.19 Because he believed that the Nuremberg race laws discriminated against Egyptians, an Egyptian member of the International Olympic Committee and president of Egypt’s national Olympic committee “expressed grave concerns about the impact on [Egypt’s] participation in the Olympic games.”20 On June 23, Mohamed Taher Pasha, an Egyptian member of the International Olympic Committee, telegraphed Olympics ofﬁcials in Berlin that Egypt’s participation in the Olympic games was now in question. He was immediately informed that the Nuremberg laws did not apply to Egyptians. Further, “it was certain that Egyptian participation was heartily welcomed by all Germans.”21 On June 22, Stohrer informed Berlin that Egyptian diplomats were now reassured that “German laws unconditionally permitted non-Jewish Egyptians to marry German women under the same conditions that would apply to nonGerman Europeans,” and “non-Jewish Egyptian women” could marry German men under the same legal standards as applied to “non-Jewish European women.” He was also pleased to send a copy of a statement by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry conﬁrming that Egyptian ofﬁcials now understood that the Nuremberg race laws did not apply to Egyptians.22 In a 2,000-word memo of June 24, he attacked “the agitation against Egyptian participation in the Olympic games” by “Jewish or Jewish inﬂuenced newspapers,” such as La Bourse Egyptienne.23 The Egyptians rejected “any effort to place them on the same level as the Jewry.” Stohrer was “especially worried” about the impact of the reports on the

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

21

Egyptian Olympic Committee, whose president, Prince Abdel Moneim, announced that Egypt would not participate in the games. In the absence of an effective German response, Egyptians were returning tickets on German ships as well as tickets to the Olympic games. He was doing his best to counter the campaign of “the Jewish press” and the “Jewish wirepullers.” In Berlin on July 4, 1936, the Foreign Ministry again assured Egyptian diplomats that “there are no barriers to a marriage between a non-Jewish Egyptian man and a non-Jewish German woman. In marriages between a German citizen with German blood and a non-Jewish foreign woman, the same legal limitations in German law apply to Egyptians as to citizens of any other state. Hence a non-Jewish Egyptian is not worse off than the citizen of any other state.”24 Finally convinced that the Nuremberg race laws did not apply to them, the Egyptians decided to participate in the Berlin Olympics. In mid-June, the Iranian ambassador to Berlin assured German ofﬁcials that “there was no doubt that the Iranian, as an Aryan,” was “racially kindred” (artverwandt) with the Germans. Assertions suggesting that the Nuremberg laws applied to Iranians were simply “a Jewish propaganda maneuver.”25 On June 22, the Foreign Ministry assured the Iranian Embassy in Berlin that the correct distinction in the Nuremberg race laws was one between “persons of German and related blood on the one hand and Jews as well as racially alien on the other” rather than one between “Aryans and non-Aryans.” The importance of the matter was evident in the number of high-ranking government ofﬁces involved. The Foreign Ministry sent copies of its note to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party; the Prussian Interior Ministry and its Ministry for Scholarship and Education; the Reich Propaganda Ministry; the Reich Justice Ministry; the Reich and Prussian labor ministries; and the Nazi Party’s Ofﬁce of Racial Politics, its Ofﬁce for Foreign Policy, and its Foreign Organization (Auslandsorganization).26 On the same day, the Foreign Ministry informed the above-mentioned ofﬁces in Berlin that the Iranian ambassador now understood that “in place of the contrast between Aryan and non-Aryan,” the Nuremberg race laws referred to the “distinction between persons of German and kindred blood, on the one hand, and Jews as well as related alien blood, on the other.”27 Thus reassured, the Iranians, like the Egyptians, also agreed to participate in the Olympic games. This blizzard of memos was not only evidence of German efforts to convince Arabs that the Nuremberg race laws were not aimed at those Semites. Ger-

22

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

man ofﬁcials were also trying to clarify for themselves how an ofﬁcially racist government could appeal to Arabs and Muslims. On July 1, 1936, more than twenty high-ranking ofﬁcials gathered in the Foreign Ministry to discuss a response to Egyptian and Iranian inquiries regarding the meaning of the concept artverwandt, “racially kindred.”28 Attendees included Walter Gross, the director of the Nazi Party’s Ofﬁce of Racial Politics; State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart of the Reich and Prussian Interior Ministry; and ofﬁcials from the ministries of Propaganda and Justice, the Prussian and Education ministries, and the Nazi Party’s foreign policy and foreign membership organizations.29 Foreign Ministry ofﬁcials observed that the Egyptians were concerned about protecting the legality of marriages between Germans and Egyptians, while the Iranians wanted assurance that they were considered to be Aryans under the terms of the Nuremberg race laws. Gross stressed that the Iranian issue “absolutely” needed to be addressed but that it was best to do so in conversations with the Iranian ambassador. The Iranians, however, “could not at all expect” that they “could be declared to be Aryans lock, stock and barrel.” The Egyptian ambassador would have to make do with the statement that “the Egyptians are no worse off than members of other nations.”30 State Secretary Stuckart was chairman of the government’s Committee for the Protection of German Blood and coauthor with Hans Globke of commentaries on the Nuremberg race laws.31 Regarding the question of who was artverwandt or artfremd or racially kindred or alien, Stuckart pointed to the deﬁnitions he had offered in the famous commentaries. “All those peoples are [artverwandt] kindred who have the same type of blood [blutarten] as the German people.” He counseled, however, against publicly presenting the deﬁnition “in an ofﬁcial declaration of the German government because doing so must immediately lead to a conﬂict, above all with Japan.” Foreigners did not understand that the German idea of distinctions among the races “does not amount to discrimination [of one race over others].”32 The distinctions were not easy to follow. German racial legislation distinguished between “bearers of German [deutschblütigen] and racially kindred [artverandten] blood on the one hand, and bearers of [artfremden] alien blood [fremblütigen] on the other.” The legislation rested on the conviction that mixing German and “racially alien” (artfremden) blood was damaging for both “the bearers of German as well as for bearers of racially alien blood” and would be “disadvantageous for the individual” as well as “for the whole people to whom he belongs.” Therefore, German

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

23

race law forbad marriage between a “man with German blood and citizenship, on the one hand, with a woman of alien blood, whether or not she has German or foreign citizenship.” On the other hand, “the marriage of a man of alien blood [fremdblütigen] with foreign citizenship with a women with German blood and German citizenship is, however, not forbidden,” although “from a German standpoint this is not desired.” Stuckart asserted that the German government “would welcome the passage of laws by a foreign state that would forbid marriage of one of its citizens with a German citizen on the ground of a difference in blood [Blutverschiedenheit ].” In fact, German race laws did “not regard foreign peoples as of less value than the German people.” On the contrary, they respected “the peculiarities of alien peoples to the same extent as they place value on the preservation of German distinctiveness.”33 These ﬁne and abstruse distinctions had practical implications for who could marry whom. German race laws permitted marriages between a “nonJewish Egyptian, like a non-Jewish member of a European peoples” and “a nonJewish German woman.” They also permitted marriage “of a German blooded German citizen with a non-Jewish Egyptian . . . if the loved one” was “not of alien blood [fremdblütig].” The question of whether a non-Jewish person is deﬁned as being of “racially alien blood” was “not determined by their citizenship but by their race.” Therefore a general statement about the race of citizens of foreign states could not be made as they could have both “German or kindred blood” as well as “racially alien blood.” If it was determined that the partner was of “alien blood,” the Reich minister of the interior could “allow the German citizen to marry an alien blood Egyptian woman as well as the alien blood member of another state.”34 The diplomats understood that Stuckart’s hair-splitting distinctions would be difﬁcult to explain outside Germany, but nevertheless they convinced the Egyptian ambassador that the regime would not forbid marriages between Germans and Egyptians, provided that they did not involve Jews and that the persons involved passed racial scrutiny. The Iranians were harder to mollify as they regarded themselves as “the ancestors of the Aryan races” and thus not comparable to Turks or Egyptians.35 As a result of the discussions of spring and summer 1936, Nazi ofﬁcials had reassured Arab diplomats that Nazi ideology and policy were directed against the Jews, not non-Jewish Semites. Nazism viewed Arabs and Muslims as different but, in clear contrast to the racial hierarchy presented in Mein Kampf, not as racially inferior. German racial legislation permitted marriage between Ger-

24

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mans and non-Jewish Arabs and Muslims. But as it was best that races not mix, non-Jewish Germans should marry other non-Jewish Germans. These abstruse discussions of the meaning of blood and race in summer 1936 offered a legal and conceptual foundation for reconciling German racial ideology and legislation with close and ongoing work with non-Jewish Semites, that is, Arabs and Muslims, before and during World War II. As a consequence of the exchanges of spring and summer 1936 and the Egyptian and Iranian decisions to attend the summer Olympics, German ofﬁcials learned that they could reconcile Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies with efforts to ﬁnd allies among non-Jewish Semites. They also learned that at least some Arab and Persian diplomats had no principled opposition to anti-Semitism so long as it was aimed only at Jews and even had become accustomed to thinking about peoples and nations in the racist categories emerging from the National Socialist regime. The dilemma of how a racist regime could appeal to Arabs and Muslims surfaced in the Nazi regime’s efforts to produce an Arabic-language edition of Mein Kampf.36 Sections of the work ﬁrst appeared in spring 1934 in newspapers in Baghdad and Beirut.37 Fritz Grobba played a key role in urging publication. One of the Foreign Ministry’s leading experts on the Arab world, he had served in the German legation in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1923 and retained his interest in the region when back in the Berlin ofﬁce. Grobba was the German ambassador to Iraq from 1932 until the break of diplomatic relations at the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939. From Berlin, he was involved in German policy toward Iraq during the attempted pro-Axis coup of spring 1941. Then he met Rashid Ali Kilani, one of the leaders of the coup who was brieﬂy the Iraqi prime minister. Grobba served as Kilani’s primary contact in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. In 1942 he was working in the Ofﬁce VII/Orient of the Political Department.38 From Baghdad in 1934, Grobba initiated discussions in the Foreign Ministry, in the Propaganda Ministry, and with Hitler himself about whether an Arabic translation should be allowed. Grobba thought that a translation would be met by Arab readers “with great interest” but suggested that those parts of the book dealing with the race question should be modiﬁed “in ways that correspond to the sensitivities of the race conscious Arabs.”Grobba’s modiﬁcations included replacing the term “anti-Semitic” with “anti-Jewish,” and “anti-Semitism” with “anti-Judaism.”39 Hitler’s chapter “Nation and Race” posed a seemingly insoluble problem, for in it Hitler clearly asserted that there was such a thing as an “Aryan race,” standing at the top of a racial hierarchy.40

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25

Grobba suggested inserting the following sentence at the head of the chapter: “German racial legislation does not want to pass judgment on the quality and worth of other peoples and other races.” In July 1934, Grobba sent the Arabic newspaper installments to Berlin and requested ofﬁcial government agreement for the publication as a book. Two years later the Propaganda Ministry informed the Foreign Ministry that Hitler had agreed to a translation with Grobba’s edits. While his core racial ideology could not be expunged, Hitler agreed to modify his racist arguments and delete the passages bound to offend Arabs and Muslims. Bernard Moritz, an Arabist consulted by the Foreign Ministry, declared the Arabic translation sent by Grobba to be “a collection of fragments from the original, taken out of context and incorrectly rendered, often to the point of incomprehensibility.”41 This edition was not published. The Nazi Propaganda Ministry then tried its hand at its own translation. Despite Moritz’s negative evaluation, this translation was published in 1937 in an edition of about 200 pages. In response to this edition, the Arab weekly published in Cairo, Rose El Youssef, drawing on a 1930 German original edition, cited relevant passages to conﬁrm that Hitler thought the Egyptians were a “decadent people composed of cripples.”42 One of the German diplomats in Cairo wrote that deleting the offending passage would be noticed in the Arab world. He suggested including an introduction with the statement that the Egyptian people “were differentially developed and that the Egyptians standing at a higher level themselves do not want to be placed on the same level with their numerous backward fellow Egyptians.”43 For most Egyptians, that would only add insult to injury. At this point the Foreign Ministry demanded that it be consulted. On December 29, 1937, Otto von Hentig, the head of Ofﬁce VII, which dealt with the Near and Middle East in the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, recounted Moritz’s criticism of the Arabic translation from Cairo. Rendering a text for “educated circles of the Arabic-speaking peoples” required a German who knew both classical and modern Arabic yet was able to create new Arabic expressions for Hitler’s political terminology. Existing Arabic dictionaries were often “no help in this regard.” Hence assistance of “a learned Arab who has sufﬁcient command of German but must have also thoroughly studied his own language” was essential. Hentig did not know “if a man of such cultivation and education is now in Berlin.” He thought that “a truly good Arabic translation of the Führer’s work would have great propagandistic value”

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and “would meet with extensive sympathy in the whole Arabic-speaking world from Morocco to India.”44 On March 28, 1938, Hentig offered additional thoughts about the project. He doubted that any one individual had the political and linguistic ability in both German and Arabic to “create a new political vocabulary” in Arabic that had “the tone of the book that every Muslim understands: the Koran. If that could be accomplished, the Arabic translation of the Führer’s book would ﬁnd roots and response from Morocco to India.” Hentig called on Shakib Arslan, a Geneva-based advocate of Muslim activism and Arab nationalism, conﬁdant of Haj Amin el-Husseini, and editor of La Nation arabe, an inﬂuential journal of Arab nationalist opinion, to do the translation.45 Hentig insisted that the completed text be read by “a scholar of the Koran who will give it the sacred tone which will be understood and valued in the whole Islamic world, a world that reads the Koran.”46 By November 1938, Arslan’s translation of Mein Kampf was almost done. Its 960 pages were to be published in an edition of between 10,000 and 40,000 copies. Galley proofs were set but other priorities prevailed in the budget of the Propaganda Ministry. On December 21, 1938, the project of an Arabic-language edition of Mein Kampf published by the Nazi regime ended.47 Although the work was not published, Hentig’s view that Mein Kampf in Arabic should and could appeal to readers of the Koran was an early expression of the view among German ofﬁcials that efforts should be undertaken to make connections between National Socialism and the traditions of Islam. During this period, the Foreign Ministry clariﬁed the anti-Zionist implications of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies.48 As Lukasz Hirszowicz wrote, the “Palestine question was as if made to order for the needs and aims of Nazi propaganda.”Anti-Jewish persecution in Germany and elsewhere in Europe “compelled the Jews to demand Palestinian visas and stimulated the efforts of the Zionists for larger immigration quotas. On the other hand, Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda coincided with the thesis of the Arab nationalists regarding the alleged control by ‘international Jewry’ over world ﬁnance and politics and about the ‘British-Jewish conspiracy’ to take over Palestine from its inhabitants.” The willingness of the Nazi regime to allow legal and illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine up to the ﬁrst years of World War II reﬂected “two tendencies of Nazi anti-Semitism” of the prewar years, according to Hirszowicz: “One was the tendency to drive the Jews out of Germany”; the other was to exacerbate already existing anti-Semitism inside and outside Germany.49 German Jews consti-

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27

tuted 52,600 of the 178,300 Jews from Europe who emigrated to Palestine between 1933 and 1940. Yet the annual numbers of German Jews emigrating to Palestine—3,700 in 1937, 4,800 in 1938, 8,500 in 1939, and only 900 in 1940— however much the inﬂux infuriated some Arab leaders, were modest.50 The Transfer Agreement of August 27, 1933, between the German Economics Ministry and Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine allowed Jewish emigrants to transfer some property and about one hundred million reichsmarks to Palestine. The funds provided a modest basis of support for the emigrants. The purpose of the Transfer Agreement was to facilitate the exit of Jews from Germany, not to fulﬁll Zionist ambitions in Palestine. Jews were coming to Palestine from other parts of Europe as well. Jews increased from 11 percent (83,790) in 1922 to 17 percent (175,135) in 1931 and, despite the restrictions on immigration established by Britain’s White Paper of 1939, by 1945 reached 30 percent (553,600) of the population of Palestine. In the same period, the Muslim population declined from 78 percent to 60 percent.51 This inﬂux and the resulting demographic change were met with Arab hostility and armed revolt between 1936 and 1939. In March 1937, the German counsel general in Jerusalem, Walter Doehle, wrote to the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry to argue in favor of changing German policy toward Palestine. As a consequence of the previous four years of Jewish immigration facilitated by the Transfer Agreement, “we have done little to strengthen and preserve the sympathy that the Arabs have for the new Germany” and “have neglected the danger that the Arabs could become our adversaries as a result of our assistance to the construction of a Jewish national home and Jewish economy.” The existing policy, mistakenly in his view, subordinated all of the considerations that had been decisive for preserving German interests in the Middle East to the goal of supporting Jewish immigration to Palestine.52 Doehle made the case that German interests called for supporting the Arabs. If the Jews attained a Jewish state, “normal conditions of life” would no longer be attainable for Arabs or Germans living in Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs and other Arab states would cease to be sympathetic to Germany. German colonists and institutions in Palestine would then have to leave, and German trade with a Jewish-dominated Palestine would cease. Indeed, a Jewish economy in Palestine would be a serious competitor with German industry on the world markets.53 In contrast, an Arab-dominated Palestine would become “one of the few countries in which we could count on strong sympathy for the new

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[Nazi] Germany” and export markets for German goods. Hence, Jewish immigration from Germany to Palestine needed to be curbed and subordinated to Germany’s “overall interests.”54 The German Jews in Palestine would gradually adapt to the mentality of their “Polish racial comrades” and assume the “militant,” that is, hostile, spirit of the Ostjuden (Jews of Eastern Europe) toward Germany.55 Conversely, “among Palestinian Arabs sympathy for the new Germany and her Führer is widespread” because they saw themselves as “in a [common] front with the Germans” against the Jews.56 German policy “must be aimed at preserving and encouraging the existing Arab sympathy for the new Germany and its Führer.” Doehle feared that this sympathy would turn to enmity if Germany remained “passive” toward Arab efforts to prevent more Jewish immigration. The German interest lay in “moving closer to Arab wishes” but doing so cautiously so as not to come into conﬂict with the British.57 During this period of Arab revolt, contacts between Doehle and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and other Arab leaders intensiﬁed. The Arabs requested arms and ﬁnancial support and in return promised to spread National Socialist ideas in the Arab and Islamic world and to ﬁght against the formation of a Jewish state with all means necessary. For these Arab radicals of the 1930s, Nazi Germany’s antiJewish policies were a source of attraction, not repulsion.58 A memo of June 1, 1937, from Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath to German diplomats in London, Baghdad, and Jerusalem indicates that the change suggested by Doehle was being implemented. The creation of a Jewish state or a Jewish-led state under British Mandate was “not in the German interest.” Such a state would “not absorb world Jewry.” Rather, “it would create an additional power for international Jewry, one recognized by international law as the Vatican State does for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Comintern.” Germany’s interest lay instead in “strengthening the Arabs as a counterweight to any such expansion of the power of Jewry.” Although Germany had encouraged the immigration of Jews to Palestine, “it would be mistaken to assume that Germany would welcome the formation of a state more or less under Jewish leadership.” A reconsideration of past German support for the Transfer Agreement was also a possibility.59 Three weeks later, Vicco Bülow-Schwante in the Foreign Ministry sent a memo on the “German position on the question of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine” to every German embassy; to the German general consulates in Batavia, Beirut, Danzig, Jerusalem, Calcutta, Meml, Ottawa, Singapore, Sydney;

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

29

and to the German consulates in Hong Kong, Tetuan (Morocco), and Geneva. Indicative of the extent to which anti-Semitic arguments had entered into thinking in the Foreign Ministry, he wrote that “world Jewry” was a political force to be reckoned with. “In clever ways” it had “banged the drum in the Jewish-friendly press abroad for formation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” Yet the Arabs, in particular in Iraq and Egypt, had begun to mobilize and “to focus attention on the danger of a Jewish state in Palestine.” Britain’s desire to preserve its empire precluded full support for Jewish aspirations. Italy was worried that a Jewish state would strengthen Britain’s position in the Mediterranean, and Mussolini had expressed his friendship toward the Arabs. The situation thus called for a “revision of the German standpoint regarding the problem of a Jewish state in Palestine.” The primary goal of Jewish policy had been to foster emigration of Jews from Germany, if necessary with the ﬁnancial assistance of the Transfer Agreement. That had led to the practical “consolidation of Jewry in Palestine, . . . hastened the formation of a Jewish state, and could contribute to the view that Germany supported the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” A clariﬁcation was in order. “In reality, however, the greater German interest lies in preserving Jewry’s division and splintering.” Germany’s Jewish question would “not be solved when there are no more members of the Jewish race left on German soil.” Recent developments indicated that “international Jewry inevitably will always be the ideological and thus political adversary of National Socialist Germany. The Jewish Question is thus one of the most important problems of German foreign policy.” Germany thus had great interest in developments in Palestine because, just as the Vatican was a power basis for Catholics, so a Jewish state in Palestine would “create an additional power basis” for the Jews “rooted in international law which could have a fateful impact on German foreign policy.”60 A month later, in a memo to State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker 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.”61 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-

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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 Weizsäcker 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

Deﬁning Anti-Semitism

31

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 Führer,” 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-

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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

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33

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 (Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung). 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

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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 alQarqani, 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

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35

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.

chapter 3

Growing Contacts, First Broadcasts 1939–1941

rom the beginning of World War II, the Nazi message conveyed to the Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East, and to Muslims as a religious population more broadly, was a counterintuitive one. The Nazi regime was infamous around the world due, in part, to its loud and frequent assertions of the superiority of “the Aryan race.” Yet its early radio broadcasts asserted that the leaders of the Third Reich were well informed about Arab politics and the religion of Islam, supported Arab aspirations for an end to British and French inﬂuence, and had a deep respect for and knowledge of the religious and cultural traditions of Islam. Nazi propaganda went even further, claiming that there were parallels and welcome afﬁnities between National Socialism and Arab radical nationalism and the religion of Islam as the Nazis chose to interpret it. Yet by the time Hitler’s government decided to intensify its effort to court Arab and Muslim support, it was not in a strong position to affect events on the ground in the Middle East. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which was in force during World War II, required the United Kingdom to withdraw all troops from Egypt except those necessary to protect the Suez Canal. But it also ratiﬁed an alliance that in the event of war allowed the British to use Egyptian territory and to supply, train, and assist Egypt’s army. Britain remained the Mandate power in Palestine, controlled the waters of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and had air bases in Iraq, Egypt, and Aden. French inﬂuence encompassed French Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Syria. While the Arab governments had

F

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little desire to enter the war on either side, they understood the realities of British and French armed forces in the region. In each country, there were Arab political leaders who supported the democracies against Nazi Germany. Despite some sympathy for Germany in parts of the Egyptian ofﬁcer corps, the Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Italian sentiment from King Farouk and his circles, and broad support for neutrality, the Egyptian government broke off diplomatic relations with Germany on September 3, 1939, closed the German Embassy (and its intelligence operations), and interned German citizens. The government of Iraq also severed diplomatic and economic ties to the Third Reich. In October 1939, Haj Amin el-Husseini and his entourage (Jamal Huseini, Amin Tamimi, Fawzi el-Qawuqji,Aref Abd er-Razeq, and Sheikh Hasan Salama) had to leave French-controlled Beirut. They went to Baghdad, where Husseini played a key role in the pro-Axis coup of March 1941. Of the Arab states, only Saudi Arabia and Yemen retained diplomatic and economic ties to the Third Reich. Despite their unhappiness about restrictions on immigration set by the British White Paper, the Jews in Palestine overwhelmingly supported England, as did moderate Palestinians associated with the Nashashibi clan. In fall 1939, due to British and French wartime censorship of the pro-Axis sentiment in the local press and media, and the closing of German and Italian embassies and consulates, Nazi Germany had fewer possibilities to exert political inﬂuence, engage in espionage, or support Arab sympathizers in the battle against “Britain and the Jews” than it had before it began the war in Europe.1 In this situation of Allied presence and Axis absence, shortwave radio broadcasts from Germany (in conjunction with older Italian broadcasts) moved to the center of Nazi Germany’s propaganda efforts aimed at North Africa and the Middle East.2 Given the high rates of illiteracy, radio would have been central even if Germany had a greater presence on the ground. On April 25, 1939, in the town of Zeesen south of Berlin, the Nazi regime began broadcasting in Arabic with powerful shortwave transmitters. At the beginning of 1940, the Zeesen stations transmitted two Arabic broadcasts daily. By summer 1940, they were sending three broadcasts daily, 95 minutes in all.3 By October 1939, the Zeesen stations were on air for 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, in 113 daily broadcasts. The number of daily hours on air increased to 22 by January 1940, 31 by summer 1940, and 53 by 1943.4 National Socialist radio transmitted literally around the globe in Arabic, Afrikaans, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish. In the

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year following September 1939, the Nazis produced 89,500 foreign-language broadcasts that took up 30,500 hours of radio time. By the end of 1940, about 500 people were working in the various ofﬁces of German foreign-language radio broadcasting. The broadcasts went to Europe, North America, Central America, South America, Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. The most frequently used foreign languages were English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Afrikaans, Russian, and Arabic. By February 1941, German shortwave radio was broadcasting every day 740 minutes to “Asia”and 400 minutes to Africa. Prominent exiled politicians, such as Subhas Chandra Bose from India, Rashid Ali Kilani from Iraq, and Haj Amin el-Husseini, were frequent speakers.5 German journalists working on the Arabic broadcasts did not speak Arabic and often knew little about Arab and Muslim societies.6 Hence the native Arabic speakers working on the stations provided a linguistic resource in short supply in Berlin. German Orientalists worked with Arab native speakers to ﬁnd Arabic terms for the vocabulary of twentieth-century warfare, economics, science, culture, and technology. Though the number of Arabic speakers among the Germans was small, it was sufﬁcient to ascertain that the on-air broadcasts corresponded to the prepared German texts. Comparison of the fraction of German originals that survived the war with English translations of the Arabic broadcasts done by Allied diplomats and intelligence agents conﬁrms that they closely follow Foreign Ministry guidelines.7 One historian of the regime’s foreign-language radio ofﬁces has written that within the broader program of foreign-language shortwave broadcasts, “the Orient Zone had absolute priority.” Its staff of 80 persons broadcast programs to Arabs, Turks, Persians (Iranians), and Indians.8 Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry competed for several years for control over the programs. In October 1941, Hitler resolved the dispute for most of the remaining war years when he gave primary responsibility to Ribbentrop and the Foreign Ministry.9 Within the Foreign Ministry, policy toward the Middle East was developed in the Political Department’s Orient Ofﬁce, also called Ofﬁce VII. Throughout the war its director was Wilhelm Melchers. On December 16, 1939, Melchers (1900–1971) replaced Otto von Hentig as the director of the Orient Ofﬁce, remaining in that post until the end of the war. In that position he worked closely with the Orient Ofﬁce in the Department of Radio Policy. He had served in the German army in 1918 and studied at the universities of Göttingen, Freiburg, Kiel, and Jena, where he received a law degree in 1923. He joined the Foreign

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Ministry in 1923 with a focus on international economic issues. In the 1930s, he served in German embassies in Addis Ababa (1927–31) and Tokyo (1934–35). In the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, he worked in Division III dealing with Britain, the United States, and the Orient. He served in Germany’s legation in Tehran from 1935 to 1937, and in Haifa from 1937 to 1939. He joined the Nazi Party on September 1, 1939.10 In coordination with Ribbentrop’s ofﬁce, the Orient Ofﬁce established guidelines for propaganda and political strategy toward Egypt, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, India, Iran, Sudan, and Ceylon.11 The production of the radio broadcasts themselves was the responsibility of Ofﬁce VII within the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Radio Policy (Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung). Kurt Munzel was the preeminent German ofﬁcial in that ofﬁce from the beginning of the war. He became its director from 1942 onward. The budget for the entire Department of Radio Policy for 1942– 43, the only year for which ﬁgures are available, was 6,653,000 reichmarks,12 which paid for a staff that, as of September 1, 1943, had 226 employees.13 Kurt Georg Kiesinger, later chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1966 – 69), was director of the entire Department of Radio Policy from 1943 to 1945.14 The staff of the Orient Ofﬁce within the Department of Radio Policy wrote and discussed German texts for broadcast primarily in Arabic, but also in Persian or Hindi, and intended for audiences in North Africa, the Middle East (Egypt to Iraq), Afghanistan, Sudan, Ceylon, Turkey, Iran, and India. The Orient Ofﬁce in the Radio Department met regularly with the Orient Ofﬁce in the Political Department, one that included experts on the region and ofﬁcials responsible for contact with prominent Arab exiles, such as Haj Amin el-Husseini (the Germans referred to him simply as the Mufti) and Rashid Ali Kilani.15 Among the various divisions of the Foreign Ministry working on foreign-language broadcasts to Europe and indeed all over the globe, only the Russian division’s staff of 51 was larger.16 Kurt Munzel (1905–82) lived in Egypt from 1929 to 1939, where he worked at the German Orient Bank (1929– 31) and the Dresdner Bank (1931–39) and studied at the American University in Cairo. While living abroad, he joined the Nazi Party on April 1, 1933. In 1941, he served on the advisory board of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin. Beginning in 1942, he taught Arabic at the University of Berlin. He began to work as a scholarly adviser in the Foreign Ministry in September 1939, and on December 7, 1939, he joined the radio sec-

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tion of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Radio Policy, where he was responsible for Arabic broadcasts. On January 1, 1942, he was appointed director of Ofﬁce VII, the Orient Ofﬁce in the Department of Radio Policy, and remained in that position until the end of the war.17 In 1942 he led a staff of nineteen, which included (judging from the names) seven native Arabic speakers, and four “scholarly assistants,” that is, Germans with knowledge of Arabic, the Arab world, and Islam. The ofﬁce also published Barid as-Sarq (Orient Post), an Arabic-language magazine, and worked closely with the Arab Committee in the Foreign Ministry.18 Dr. Joachim Senff, who received his doctorate in 1938 from the University of Erlangen in Arabic and Islamic studies, was a staff member. The staff included writers and translators who, again judging from their names, were both native German and native Arabic speakers. Other members of the staff included: Hans Queling, Abdel Hakim El Nagger, Dr. Rosemarie Heyd, Dr. Juan Murad, Hade Najib Quanas, Nuralidin Abdul-Hadi, Necati Akcan, Saidduddin Swallhay, Felix Schulze, Ahmed Kadem, Irmgard Werk, Wilhelmine Eichler, Ingeborg Prietz, Annemarie Rüther, Gisela Hildebrandt, and Elfriede Petschulat. Dr. Georg Kaspar and Dr. Hans-Joachim Kissling were responsible for liaison with the military, which had its own signiﬁcant propaganda efforts.19 Germany’s military victories in May and June 1940 over French and British forces in Europe enhanced its prestige among potential Arab and Muslim supporters in the Middle East. In Europe, antifascists viewed these months as ones of victory of the dictators over the democracies. Radical nationalists and Islamists in the Middle East saw the same events as defeats of colonial powers by the Third Reich, which presented itself as an anticolonial power. On July 6, 1940, one of Husseini’s representatives, Naji Bey Shawkat, the former minister of justice in the Iraqi government, met with the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen. Via Shawkat, Husseini asked von Papen “to convey to His Excellency the Great Chief and Leader [Hitler] my sincerest felicitations on the occasion of the great political and military triumphs which he has just achieved through his foresight and genius. I beg Your Excellency to convey to him my regards and compliments, together with my best wishes for the undertaking entered upon to create a new order.” Husseini also expressed his thanks to Hitler for the attention he had given to the Palestine problem in the preceding four years. He told Hitler that “the Arab nation everywhere feels the greatest joy and deepest gratiﬁcation on the occasion of these great successes” of the

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German armies in Europe. Palestine had “been ﬁghting the democracies and international Jewry” and was now “ready at any time to assume an active role and redouble her efforts both at home and in the other Arab countries. The Arab people, slandered, maltreated and deceived by our common enemies, conﬁdently expect that the result of your ﬁnal victory will be their independence and complete liberation as well as the creation of their unity, when they will be linked to your country by a treat of friendship and collaboration. . . . I beg Your Excellency to believe the most brotherly sentiments of the Arab people toward your great and valiant people, and present to you, Excellency my best greetings.”20 While pleased to receive friendly greetings from Husseini, the Germans reacted cautiously because they placed greater priority on close relations with their ally Mussolini, who had imperial ambitions of his own in the Mediterranean, than they did with a Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who had no state or army to offer. The director of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, State Secretary Ernst Woermann, informed von Papen in Ankara and Ambassador Fritz Grobba in Baghdad to continue talks with Shawkat yet not to undermine Italian primacy in formulating Axis policy toward the Arabs.21 In August, these diplomats had further meetings with Husseini’s representatives. The latter promised “to assist Axis powers everywhere in their war against the English, especially by a new revolt in Palestine” as well as with activity in Iraq.22 With France defeated and England weakened, Husseini and fellow exiles, gathered in what was called the Arab Committee, received a reserved but sympathetic hearing from the Germans.23 In August and September 1940, Husseini’s private secretary, Osman Kemal Haddad met in Berlin with Grobba, Melchers, and the number two ofﬁcial in the Foreign Ministry, State Secretary Ernst von Weizäcker. Speaking on behalf of an “Arab Committee”led by Husseini, Kilani, and other political ﬁgures from Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Haddad conveyed the ﬁrst of many requests for a joint German-Italian declaration in support of Arab independence from Britain and France. In exchange, the Arab Committee promised to: support restoration of diplomatic relations between Iraq and Germany, which had been broken off when the war began; try to form an Iraqi government that would provide Germany and Italy preferred access to Iraqi oil and try to foster a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia; start a general uprising in Palestine with up to 10,000 men; and prevent movement of British and Indian troops from India to the Middle

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East while admitting all German agents and experts necessary for these policies.24 According to the ideas put forth at that time, the joint declaration would “recognize the full independence of the Arab countries” that were “already independent or under French or British Mandate.” Moreover, it should state that “Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements in Palestine and the other Arab countries in a manner that conforms to the national and ethnic interests of the Arabs, and to the solution of the Jewish question in the countries of Germany and Italy.” Finally it would afﬁrm that Germany and Italy had “no imperialistic designs on Egypt and Sudan.”25 In a September 9, 1940, memo to the German Embassy in Italy, Weizsäcker, responded positively to the Arab Committee proposals, provided the Italians agreed. As outlined in his memo, the Axis powers would recognize independence of Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Egypt, the Sudan, and the border regions of the Arabian Peninsula. They also agreed that “Arab countries had the right to solve the Jewish question in the national and racial interest on the GermanItalian model,” which at the time meant denial of citizenship rights, economic persecution, and expulsion. Diplomatic relations between Germany and Iraq would be resumed, and the Iraqi government would provide “friendly collaboration in all matters of common interest.” That would include an Iraqi declaration of strict neutrality in the European war, which would be followed by similar declarations by Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan. As a result, passage of English or Indian troops through Iraq would be banned. The Iraqi government would promise: not to support the English war effort, to remove pro-British Foreign Minister Nuri Said, to conclude a secret agreement with Axis powers that gave them preferred access to Iraqi oil, and to seek similar agreements with other Arab countries. The Arab Committee offered to organize in PalestineTransjordan a large-scale rebellion, based in Syria with captured French equipment and with the Axis powers providing up to half the required ﬁnancial support, up to 20,000 pounds sterling. Weizsäcker cautiously replied that the German government took “a positive stand on the matter.” It would “in certain circumstances be prepared to help with captured arms and money, but it would proceed only in agreement with Italy.” Indicative of his uncertainty about whether the Arab Committee proposals were viable, Weizsäcker asked Hans Georg Mackensen, the German ambassador to Italy, to ask Italy’s foreign min-

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ister, Gian Galeazzo Ciano, if he thought that an armed revolt in Palestine had any chance of success.26 Nazism’s Arabic-language radio propaganda should be placed in the context of these diplomatic feelers. Husseini and his associates had quickly realized the importance of shortwave radio as a means of political communication. In September 1939 following a meeting with Shawkat, Woermann agreed to support a radio broadcast in Arabic on German radio dealing with some of the issues of mutual interest between Husseini’s representatives and ofﬁcials in the German Foreign Ministry.27 In September 1940, Weizsäcker agreed to state publicly that “Germany has always followed with interest the struggle of the Arab countries to attain their independence. In their striving toward this goal, the Arab countries will be able in the future also to count upon the full sympathy of Germany.”28 On October 18 in Berlin, Grobba met again with Haddad. Haddad said that Germany’s victories in spring and summer 1940 and the resulting weakening of England and France in the Middle East meant that the Arabs who “have always felt sympathy with Germany” but were previously unable to “make their real views known” because of the presence of British troops in Iraq, the French in Syria, and the Turks in the north could now do so. They were now taking “the ﬁrst opportunity that was offered to get in touch with Germany.” He stressed that “the enemies of the Arabs and Germany are the same, namely, the English, the Jews and the Americans who favor the Jews. There is no conﬂict of interests between the Arabs and Germany.”29 Grobba read Haddad a statement that “shall also broadcast on the radio.” It stated that Germany had “always been animated by sentiments of friendship for the Arabs.” It supported their desire for “a place among the peoples of the earth in accordance with their historic and natural importance.” It had closely observed Arab struggles for independence. “In their efforts to attain this goal Arab countries can count upon Germany’s full sympathy also in the future. In making this statement, Germany ﬁnds herself in full accord with her Italian ally.”30 Haddad replied that he appreciated Germany’s good intentions but that the Arabs expected more, namely, “a German statement regarding the recognition of the independence of the Arab countries.” Grobba pointed out that Germany already recognized the independence of Iraq and Saudi Arabia and assured Haddad that the statement to be broadcast was “only the ﬁrst step on the path of collaboration between Germany and the Arab countries” which will be

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the subject of “future conversations” between the foreign ministers of Germany and Italy and the Iraqi government.31 As promised, Germany’s Arabic stations broadcast the statement Grobba wrote on December 5, 1940. From Husseini’s ﬁrst conversations with Walter Doehle in Jerusalem in 1933 to the conversations by his aides with high-ranking German diplomats in Berlin in summer and fall 1940, the initiative for contact came from the radical Arabs. They recognized that Nazi advances in Europe weakened Britain and France and that the persecution of the Jews was an attack on an “enemy” whom they also despised. As of summer 1940, the highest-ranking ofﬁcials of the Nazi regime had a great deal of evidence that there were politically engaged Arabs who were willing and eager both to ﬁght against Germany’s enemies and to become its political, ideological, and military allies in World War II. By late 1940, the meeting of hearts and minds in Berlin was producing remarkable broadcast appeals to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East. Compared to the broadcasts following the arrival in Berlin of Husseini, Kilani, and their entourage in fall 1941, the broadcasts of the ﬁrst eighteen months of the war often sounded like the opinions of a sympathetic, well-informed, politically engaged scholar, eager to please yet not fully familiar with either the details of local politics or the colloquial expressions of Arabic.32 Yet they sent a clear message that the Nazi regime, far from celebrating the superiority of Aryans over inferior Middle Eastern Semites, was a friend to both Arab nationalists and Muslims. The only documents in German archives of the Germanlanguage verbatim full texts that were the basis for the Arabic broadcasts encompass the period from December 1940 to February 1941. Kurt Munzel’s initials are on all of them as author or coauthor. On December 3, 1940, Munzel’s Orient Ofﬁce broadcast “a paper about the English occupation of Egypt.”33 Beginning with the incantation “Oh Mohammedaner” (Oh Muslims!), the broadcast made a direct appeal to Muslims— and not only to Arab nationalists opposed to British rule in Egypt. It did so in the repetitive incantations of a religious sermon that evoked the authority of the “holy Koran” and past days of piety. Oh, God’s servants! Above all of the other commandments, none is more important to the Muslims than piety, for piety is the core of all virtues and the bond of all honorable human characteristics. Muslims you are now backward because you have not shown God the proper piety and do not fear him.You do things that are not commanded and you leave to the side things that are. God’s word has

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proven to be true and you are now the humiliated ones in your own country. This has come about because you don’t have the piety and fear of God as your pious forefathers did. Of them, one can say that they “are strong against the unbelievers and merciful amongst themselves.”Oh Muslims! Direct your gaze to the holy Koran and the tradition of the prophets. Then you will see that Islamic law is driven by piety toward God and fear of his punishment. The Koran inscribed piety as above all other commandments. Read, for example, the words: “Oh, believers, be pious and do not die without being a Muslim. Stand by God and don’t be divided.” Oh Muslims! I call you to piety toward God because it is an inexhaustible source and a sharp weapon. It offers the good and prevents evil. In short, it is Islam, that is, surrender to God! Oh Muslims, you’ve seen how God placed piety at the top of all the commandments and how God has rewarded the pious with victory and success, how he helps him in every situation.

The announcer stated that the pious Muslim does what God demands. He prays, fasts, gives alms, loves his neighbors as himself, and at the same time helps Muslims ﬁght those who oppress and humiliate Muslims. He reminded listeners that Mohammed, God’s prophet, asked God to “show the Muslims the right path, unite them and help them against their enemies for no one will be humiliated that follows you and no one will be elevated that is your enemy!”34 Nazi broadcasts stressed afﬁnities between what they called the “values of Islam” and those of National Socialism. Both, for example, favored piety, obedience, community, unity rather than skepticism, individualism, and division. That this assault on modern political values was conveyed via the most modern means of electronic communication in 1940 was another example of the “reactionary modernist” nature of aspects of Nazi ideology and policy.35 This and other broadcasts conveyed the message that the Nazis viewed Islam—not fundamentalist, radical, or political Islam, but simply Islam—as an ideological parallel to Nazism’s revolt against Western political modernity. Most obviously, this and the host of broadcasts that followed illustrate that National Socialism was appealing to Muslims as Muslims, not just to Arabs in their struggle against the British. While Nazi propaganda claimed that there was a regrettable elective afﬁnity between English Puritanism and the Jews, it also postulated a positive and welcome afﬁnity between National Socialist ideology and what it selected from the traditions of Islam.36 On December 12, 1940, German radio from Berlin broadcast what it called a “religious talk,” also beginning with the incantation “Oh Mohammedaner.” The broadcast stressed that Islam “is a religion of the community, not a religion of

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the individual. It is thus a religion of the common welfare [Gemeinnutzes] and not of self-interest [Eigennutzes]. Islam therefore is a just and true nationalism, for it calls on the Muslim to place the general interest ahead of private interests, to live not for himself but for his religion and his fatherland. This is the most important goal that Islam follows. It is at the basis of its prayers and commandments.”37 The priority of “the common welfare” over self-interest was a continuing and key theme of the Nazi Party before 1933 and of the Nazi regime afterward. Islam, the sermon continued, was a religion that fostered generosity and denounced greed. Generosity extended not only to money but to the soul, “for he who sacriﬁces and gives blood for God’s sake is the most noble example of generosity.” “As long as the Muslims were generous with their goods and their souls, God helped them and gave them the strength to build a great empire, which they alone ruled. This is not a surprise, for a nation which subordinates the individual deserves to have a much glory. This was so among the great Islamic empire for in those days the Muslims believed in the book of their ruler and the commands of the prophets. However, when they turned away from Islam and the Prophet’s commands, and when everyone looked after his own individual interest for their own sake and sacriﬁced the common good, the Muslims’ driving force became weak and the anger of God and the Prophet fell upon them.” The sermon ended with another plea for Muslims to recall the Prophet’s warnings against injustice and greed “for it was greed that destroyed your ancestors.” Those words were “a warning to all who have ears to hear.”38 The implicit message was that a religious revival ought to accompany a political, national, and civilizational revival. These religious messages offered a cultural point of entry that would hopefully establish a willingness among devout Muslim audiences to listen to Nazism’s political messages. On the same day that Radio Berlin broadcast the above message, it sent out “A Government Statement for the Arabs,” which had emerged from the agreements between the pro-Axis Arabs and the Foreign Ministry in the previous months.39 From the same station in the same hour, perhaps with the same announcer, Nazi radio moved seamlessly from the religious to the secular and political. Listeners heard that Germany expressed “full sympathy” for the Arabs’“struggle for freedom and independence” so that they could “take their proper place under the sun and to recover the glory and honor in service of humanity and civilization.” The German government’s expression of “love and sympathy” for the Arabs had “found a strong echo among the Ger-

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man people” while strengthening “the bonds of friendship with the Arabs, which the Germans have cherished for many years.” This connection was not surprising, the statement continued, because Germans and Arabs shared “many qualities and virtues,” such as “courage in war . . . heroism and manly character.” They “both shared in the suffering and injustices after the end of the [First] World War. Both of these great peoples had their honor insulted. Their rights were denied and trampled underfoot. Both bled from the same wounds and both had the same enemy: namely, the Allies who divided them and allowed them no claim to honor. Now Germany has been able to get out from under this disgrace and to regain all of its old rights so that its voice is now heard everywhere and has again taken its old place.”40 German empathy for the Arabs was not limited to the political sphere. For many years, German scholars had studied the “books, spirit, civilization and scholarship of the Arabs.” The broadcast informed its Arab and Muslim listeners that many institutes of Oriental studies existed in Germany; these institutions created a “bond of mutual understanding between Arabs and Germany.”German scholars devoted particular attention “to the prophet and his life story.”Thereby they were able to “appreciate and admire Islam”and arrive at insights that “can be regarded as the greatest scholarly investigations about the Koran and Islam studies.” Germans had also turned to the study of the Arabs’ “new national movements.” The German press and media had praised the revolts and the leaders of revolts against British and French colonialism in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq.“With heartfelt feelings of friendship for the Arabs and with full sympathy for them, Germany has followed the revolt in Palestine, which England ignited and which the Jews, who want to rob the Arabs of their fatherland, continued with the English.” As a result of all of these things, friendship between the Arab peoples and Germany was “on a ﬁrm foundation” and would “remain so in the future and bear fruit.”41 In a remarkable blend of an attack on the idea of a pluralist, liberal democracy with an evocation of fundamentalist Islam, the December 19, 1940, “religious talk” of the week again stressed the link between Islam and “community.” Oh, servants of God! Islam calls on Muslims, indeed it commands you to be brothers, to do good and avoid evil. It gives you these commandments because they are useful to you and are in your interest. Nothing leads to the good and happiness of the individual more than community, unity, and cooperation. Con-

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ﬂict and division, on the other hand, are an incurable disease that has already led many people to ruin. If you look at nations today, you will see that a nation’s strength depends on its unity and cooperation. However, if its [social] classes are split, the structure of the state collapses. Strength comes from unity. Weakness comes from division. No distinction between rich and poor should exist other than work. The young, upward-coming nations represent this idea, nations that have replaced weakness with strength and defeat with recovery. Oh Muslims! It is thus no surprise that Islam calls you to unity and cooperation and forbids disunity and conﬂict. In God’s book and in the traditions of the Prophet you will ﬁnd many verses that make this point. In the Koran, one reads: “Be loyal to God and do not divide yourselves!” The Prophet said: “The believer should act toward other believers as a building whose parts support one another. . . .” Oh Muslims! Your enemy . . . has tried to divide you and disperse your unity so that different parts of your people will ﬁght one another. As a result your enemies can more easily rule, oppress, and exploit you. As there is no bond amongst you, it’s no surprise that you’re now in a condition that your enemy hoped to put you in. God will not help you until you unite and heal your souls from the sickness of this conﬂict. Victory and glory will only be yours when you are uniﬁed and no longer engage in conﬂict! Today, it is more important than ever for Muslims to unify and to stick ﬁrmly together. May God help you and lead you to this uniﬁcation! Truly, he is the answer and the salvation!!42

This text offered religious legitimation to the fascist and Nazi association of weakness and national decline with pluralist, democratic institutions. The Nazi lesson from Germany’s defeat in World War I and from the postwar era was that Germany had suffered from too much democracy. The path to strength and renewal required an end of division offered by dictatorship. This broadcast from Berlin made an implicit link between, on the one hand, the Nazis’ totalitarian vision of the “people’s community,” the Volksgemeinschaft, and, on the other hand, the association of strength with unity and faith stemming from passages in the Koran. Partisanship for Arabs in Palestine also was present in these early broadcasts. It remained a central aspect of the Arabic-language broadcasts throughout the war. In “England’s Betrayal of the Arabs in Palestine” of December 24, 1940, German radio declared that “from pre-Islamic times” to the outbreak of World War I, Palestine was an “undivided part of Arab land. Its inhabitant consisted of pure race Arabs [reinrassigen Araber].” After “Islam defeated the Jews” they (the Jews) had no share in the country and ﬁnally had to leave it “to stir up disorder and harm elsewhere in the world.” The broadcast attacked the Balfour

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Declaration and its support for establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. It described the declaration as being the product of Jewish money and support during World War I. “Arabs, remember again the rivers of blood that had to ﬂow as a result of that Declaration and this promise [to the Jews].” With reference to what it described as “Arabs’ futile sacriﬁces” during World War I, the text concluded with a verse from the Koran: “Memory serves the believers.”43 As the Arabs, according to this narrative, were the real victims of contemporary history in 1940, it was a religious duty to keep the memory of this victimization alive. The “religious weekly talks” often afﬁrmed generally if not universally held values to be distinctive contributions of Islam. A broadcast of December 26, 1940, drew a sinister implication from the value of truth rather than falsehood. He who made false statements in order to “mislead or blind the people as today some newspaper people in the Orient do, is a hypocritical liar and a traitor to his fatherland and his people. At the same time, however, he violates the laws of his religion. These laws prescribe that such a man must be fought, yes he must be killed [ ja getötet werden muss] because he is a harm to the nation and will slowly bring it to ruin.” The text closed with: “Oh Muslims! Be truthful . . . and think of God’s word: ‘Oh believers, fear God and be among the truthful. . . . If you are truthful with God, it will be better for you.’”44 With religious arguments, it made the case not only for censorship but for murder of those who disagree. The “cultural talk” of December 31, 1940,“Truth and the Strength of Belief,” used a famous story from the Koran to make a political point. An “enemy” of Mohammed tried to assure him that he actually had no hostile intentions. The son of this “hypocrite” told the Prophet that his father intended to kill Mohammed. If Mohammed wanted to kill the father, the son begged permission to do the deed himself because, as the Koran stated, he feared that Mohammed would order someone else to kill his father. In that case he would be forced to take revenge for his father’s death and kill a believer for the sake of an unbeliever. The text continues: “What truthfulness and strength of belief, but also strength of sacriﬁce is expressed in these words! The love for his father was surpassed by the honor of his belief.” Mohammed declined to kill the man and instead extended his pity. The son’s religiously based willingness “to devote his private interests to the general welfare of Islam” was a great example of “loyalty and sincerity” and one all Arabs should remember.45 Here again the political

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and religiously grounded collectivist message was clear. The broadcast praised this devout believer because he placed the demands of religious belief ahead of the life of an individual, in this case, his own father. The broadcast of January 8, 1941, began with attacks on England and the Balfour Declaration and then introduced anti-Semitic arguments.46 It told its listeners that in 1917, Balfour “met often with an American Jew” who was “a fanatical member of the Zionists.” These meetings were said to have led the British government to “promise Palestine to the Jews.” The Balfour Declaration was a history of a “threefold betrayal . . . the most shameful hypocrisy and deceptions ever in history.” Britain’s promises to the Arabs were forgotten at the Versailles Peace Conference. Palestine, Iran, and Transjordan remained under English control. “These events are the foundation of the great Arabic freedom struggle [Grossarabischen Freiheitskampf ] for justice, honor, and freedom of the Arabs.”47 The phrase, “great Arabic freedom struggle,” was a borrowing from the German phrase Grossdeutschen Freiheitskampf, “great German freedom struggle,” which was the term used in some Nazi accounts to describe World War II. The broadcast drew a parallel between Nazi Germany’s “great freedom struggle” and that of the Arabs.48 On January 16, 1941, a religious homily addressed the supposed connection between “selﬁshness” and national decline. It presented Germany after 1933 as a model for the Arab and Islamic world. Oh Muslims. Nothing is uglier than selﬁshness and favoring the personal welfare over the good of the community. Selﬁshness is an incurable disease. If a nation succumbs to it, it will not only be weakened but will slowly collapse because the individual members of the state will be in constant conﬂict with one another as they look after their personal interests. Because Islam is the religion of a community, not the individual person, and prescribes mutual aid, it orders every single believer to forget the self and to do everything for his fellows. The highest of all social orders demands that the Muslims be members of a ﬁrm and equal community. . . . Extreme selﬂessness of early Muslims . . . gave them strength, power, and glory. However, the later generations have forgotten so many of the commandments of their religion and have become egoists instead of being selﬂess. They have borne the consequences of their unbelief. They have fallen into weakness and division.

Muslims should see that “the strength of the powerful, young nations [i.e., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany] lies in the fact that the social relationships between all classes of the people are strong and close. As Mohammed’s many statements demonstrate, Islam demands the same from you. . . . May God help

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the Muslims to act according to the commandments. After their decline, may he make them powerful again so that they can be victorious over their enemies.”49 Hitler told the Germans that they had lost World War I and suffered economic and political crises under the Weimar Republic because of internal division. Hence one uniﬁed Reich, one people, and one Führer would bring Germany strength and renewal. The text of January 16 presented the same themes about the virtues of uniformity and the dangers of individualism, but in religious terms. Again, Nazi radio invoked Islam and the Koran, not contemporary Nazi texts, to support these arguments. As past division had led to weakness, political revival called for combining the injunctions of the Koran and Islam with the modern example set by the German dictatorship. In the text of several broadcasts of January 31 and February 1, 1941, Munzel made a connection between propaganda in modern times and in Mohammed’s. Propaganda, he wrote, was one of the weapons needed to make great ideas easier to understand and convey to a broader audience. Early Islam had faced many opponents. The Prophet not only turned to the Koran to spread the ideas of Islam but to poetry as well. Poets had confronted the enemies of Islam and answered their attacks. Islam, in contrast to England, offered propaganda that was true.50 Here again, the entry point into Arab and Muslim hearts and minds lay in the National Socialist reading of the Koran and in its interpretation of the traditions of Islam, not in texts by Hitler or other European exponents of Nazism and fascism. On February 6, 1941, Berlin radio returned to the connection between the erosion of religious faith and political decline, on one hand, and religious revival and political strength, on the other. Oh Muslims, you have been in a deep sleep and amnesia for a long time. In that time, you became prey for all, for you permitted everything.You experienced this weakness and decline because you turned away from the correct path of your religion and because you acted contrary to it and did what was forbidden. You’ve done much injustice and many bad deeds and ﬁlled your minds with empty notions. Therefore you’ve become a community that no longer has any bonds. The wealthy among you use the weak, and the ignorant among you raise themselves with pride over the learned. Therefore your strength is divided and your weapons have become dull. The word of the Koran now applies to you.“You have forgotten God. Therefore he himself has forgotten you and thus you now are among the guilty.” Oh Muslims, I should show you a way that will rescue you from this torture.“Believe in God and his prophets and ﬁght for God with your goods and your soul.”51

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Belief in God, according to Berlin’s Arabic broadcast, was “the foundation for all good deeds.” It had been “unshakable among the earlier Muslims” and helped them “overcome all misfortune.” God, the broadcast continued, told the Muslims to ﬁght for him with their goods and souls. The result was a battle “of the soul and the sword” without which a nation cannot exist. So long as Muslims fought both battles “they were strong and were able to frighten God’s enemies.” God’s religion became widespread, and a powerful state emerged. Today, however, Muslims believe with their tongues but not with their hearts. They have turned away from the battle for God and turned to the unbelievers in hopes that they will get help from them in their hour of need. Now, however, the hour has struck. Oh Muslims, wake up from your long sleep and show the world that you are God’s followers, ﬁrmly defend his religion and always recall that “God sees all who only do good and that those who do evil will be seen by God.” This is the path I call you to take. May God give you work that satisﬁes you. May he take you on the path of good and help you against your enemies. Truly, he is all powerful.52

As a rich body of scholarship has informed us, the relationship between Christianity and Nazism was closer than postwar denunciations of its atheist or pagan character suggested.53 Although Hitler presented himself as a prophet, his anti-Semitism drew on centuries of Christian-inspired hatred, and the liturgy of Nazi mass rallies drew on older religious themes, National Socialism was fundamentally a secular political ideology. Mein Kampf, not the New Testament, was its bible.54 But in its appeals to Arabs and Muslims, Nazi radio advocated a Muslim religious revival. Its message echoed the appeals of Muslim fundamentalists for an awakening from an alleged “long sleep” and a return to the message of the Koran as a precondition for Islamic political resurgence. On February 20, 1941, in a broadcast on “Renewal and Superstition in Islam,” Berlin radio returned to themes of decline and renewal while also offering a reading of the Koran that focused on its anti-Jewish passages: “Oh Muslims! Many of you have departed from your religion and follow your personal desires. Religion has become an empty name for you. Your deeds and words, your intentions and qualities of character are free from Islam and no longer have anything to do with it.” Now “ignorant Muslims and unbelievers” have suggested ideas about Islam that really had nothing to do with it. Most of these superstitions come from those “who secretly ﬁght against Islam. It is above all the Jews, who in the past pretended to have adopted Islam but in fact were very far

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from it.” The broadcast continued, citing words of God from the Koran: “‘You will ﬁnd that those who are most hostile to the believers are Jews and idol worshipers!’” It was “the Jews who have always been and are also today the enemies of Islam and the Muslims and who try with all means to wage war against both Islam and the Muslims.”Yet all efforts to insinuate superstitions into Islam had failed because “Islam has not lost any of its brilliance.” In conclusion, Munzel’s text asked God to protect Islam from those who try to “introduce innovations” and to help Muslims “for victory against their enemies and the enemies of their religion!”55 The assertion the Jews “have always been” and were in 1941 “enemies of Islam” remained a staple of Nazi radio broadcasts that highlighted the Koran’s anti-Jewish passages. They repeatedly asserted that there was a continuity of Jewish antagonism to Islam from the seventh to the twentieth century and that efforts by the Jews or anyone else to introduce innovations into Islam were actually designed to weaken and destroy it. The broadcasts presented Islam as a religion under siege. Muslims needed both to return to the piety of their ancestors and to ally with a great power, such as Nazi Germany, which was also ﬁghting against political and cultural modernity. According to Berlin radio, Nazi Germany and traditional Islam met on a shared terrain of political Manicheanism that divided the world into friends and enemies; believers and unbelievers; Germans and Muslims, on one hand, and Jews, on the other.56 The Munzel broadcasts of winter 1940 – 41 implicitly and explicitly drew parallels between the teachings of the Koran and Islam and the ideology and practice of the Nazi regime. They were the opening salvo in a propaganda barrage that lasted another four years. Their references to the Koran and to the Islamic commentaries on it offered cultural entry points to Arab and Muslim listeners. The early broadcasts did not discuss day-to-day events. Notwithstanding a slightly academic tone, efforts to connect Nazism with the religion of Islam remained a key element of Nazism’s Arabic-language propaganda campaign throughout the war. Some German diplomats had few illusions about the difﬁculties Nazi Germany faced in the Middle East. In a December 9, 1940, memo on “Germany in Arabia” Melchers observed that although Germany saw Arab nationalism as its “natural ally” even before the war, for the Italians,“recognition in writing of the independence of the Arab countries or formation of their right to form a union was out of the question.” All statements made in the press and on radio that

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suggested Germany was truly interested in Arab independence “were merely propaganda” if doing so would undermine Italian inﬂuence in the region. It was German policy to give Italy the “absolute lead politically in the Arab area.” German diplomats and intelligence agents, however, were reporting that in the aftermath of Italy’s war in Ethiopia and occupation of Libya, the Arabs preferred the English to the Italians. Moreover, the “Jewish-Arab conﬂict” in Palestine was “no longer apparent.” The people of the region wanted peace. Melcher’s pessimism extended to German prospects in Egypt, the most important country in the region. The country was “entirely in English hands” and was occupied by “at least 175,000” English, Australian, New Zealand, and Indian soldiers. Among the Egyptians, the older ofﬁcials and rich families were “for the most part pro-English, the younger ofﬁcials and ofﬁcers of the insigniﬁcant Egyptian army probably pro-German.” The lower classes were “not interested in politics,” and the government’s policy was to keep the country out of war and preserve its outward independence. Hence “resistance through internal struggle seems hopeless.”57 Melcher offered the following sober view of the Arabs and their potential as allies of the Axis: “The national, military, cultural, and state-building forces of the Arabs should not be overestimated. We have no reason at all to be sentimental about these people who are basically anti-European and torn by religious, family, and tribal differences.” But as the Arabs inhabited the land bridge and routes leading to southern and eastern Asia, as well as to East Africa, and were “the foremost representatives of Islam in the world,” they were “a tremendously important power factor. Germany must not jeopardize her great prestige here if she does not wish to suffer most severe reverses for a long time to come.” The political and military efforts of the English and the Gaullists, Italian defeats in Greece, and disappointment with insufﬁcient German support for Arab aspirations could “result in a defection of the Arabs to the side of the English, which is bound to affect decisively the conduct of the war in the eastern Mediterranean in a way that is detrimental to us, and may perhaps even create a disastrous situation in the whole of North Africa.” Hence, without giving up the principle of Italian preeminence in the Arab area, Melchers recommended that “in the interest of assuring an appropriate, efﬁcient conduct of the war,” German military and political authorities establish liaisons with the Italians in the region. He also supported issuing a written declaration in which the Arabs and the Egyptians in particular were “assured political freedom and self-deter-

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mination” and suggested that “the Arab world could be promised a solution of the Jewish question that it would ﬁnd tolerable.” Adoption of any of these proposals would “profoundly stir up the entire Arab world (presumably North Africa also) and probably take the wind out of the sails of England and of de Gaulle.”58 If so, diplomacy and propaganda might contribute to Nazi military success in the region, which in turn would reinforce the propaganda messages about Axis prospects for victory in the war. Two days later, Melchers noted that the German and Italian Joint Declaration about Arab “aspirations for freedom” read on Arabic-language radio on December 5, 1940, had aroused “lively demonstrations of sympathy [for the Axis] among the Arabs.” In Ankara, Rashid Ali Kilani’s brother suggested to the German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, that the statement be put in writing and presented to Kilani in Baghdad. Melchers concluded that “in view of the splendid effect achieved by the statement” and the fact that the situation in Syria and Iraq had become “much more acute, it seems desirable to comply with the wish of the Iraqis.”59 So long as the Italians agreed, there was every reason to make what were modest expenditures of time and effort.60 On January 20, 1941, following contacts with Grobba, von Papen, and Italian diplomats, Haj Amin el-Husseini sent his ﬁrst letter to Adolf Hitler. The Grand Mufti, writing from Baghdad, began with an attack on England. “Excellency: England, that relentless and crafty enemy of the true liberty of peoples, has never tired of forging chains to enslave the Arab people, sometimes in the name of the perﬁdious League of Nations and sometimes by ﬂaunting false and hypocritical sentiments of humanity for the others, but always in truth, for the most imperialistic designs camouﬂaged by the principles of democracy and of a mendacious internationalism.” He stressed the strategic signiﬁcance of the “geographic coincidence”that placed “the Arab people”at the center of the land and sea crossroads of British imperial communications and of the conﬂict between Arab nationalism and England. The case of Palestine was well known to “Your Excellency” because Germany also had suffered from “the perﬁdy of the English.” English policy in Palestine was “creating an obstacle to the unity and independence of the Arab countries by pitting them directly against the Jews of the entire world” who were “dangerous enemies.” The Arabs had been ﬁghting the British and the Jews for twenty years. The Palestine question had “united all the Arab countries in a common hatred for the English and the Jews. If a common enemy is the prelude to the formation of national unity, one may say that

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the Palestine problem has hastened this unity. From the international point of view, the Jews of the entire world have given their allegiance to England in the hope that, if she is victorious, she will be able to make their dreams come true in Palestine and even in the neighboring Arab countries. If the Arabs are aided in defeating the Zionist aims, the Jews, and especially those of the United States, will be so demoralized at seeing the object of their dreams fade into nothingness that they will lose their enthusiasm for aiding Great Britain and will retreat before catastrophe.” Husseini thanked Hitler for “having again and again brought up in ringing speeches the question of Palestine” and assured him of “the sentiments of friendship, of sympathy, and of admiration which the Arab people pledge to Your Excellency, Great Führer, and to the courageous German people.” Further, he added, he was sending his private secretary, Osman Kemal Haddad, “to initiate in the name of the strongest and largest Arab organization and in my own name the negotiations necessary for loyal cooperation in all ﬁelds.” Husseini wrote “that the Arabs are disposed to throw their weight into the scales and to offer their blood in the sacred struggle for their rights and their national aspirations, provided that certain interests of a moral and material order are assured.” The Arabs could “endanger [British] imperial communication and paralyze all connections between India and the Mediterranean and Turkey via the Persian Gulf.” They could thereby bring an “an end to the exploitation and sale of petroleum for the beneﬁt of England.” He wished Hitler “a long and happy life and brilliant victory and prosperity for the Great German people and for the Axis in the very near future” and repeated his “sentiments of great friendship, of gratitude and admiration.”61 The next week, Haddad left Baghdad for Rome and Berlin to convey the message that the Iraqi government was now ready to cooperate with Nazi Germany “in every way.”62 These were important steps to the meeting of hearts and minds that took place ten months later in Berlin and Rome and which then lasted throughout World War II and the Holocaust.

chapter 4

Propaganda and Warﬁghting in North Africa and the Middle East in 1941

y early 1941, Hitler, a Eurocentric politician with dreams of world power, acknowledged the role that defeating Britain in North Africa and the Middle East could play in winning the war in Europe. The British, too, grasped the strategic signiﬁcance of the region both for preservation of their imperial status as well as for the possibilities of winning the war. It was in this period that American ofﬁcials also expanded their understanding of the role the Middle East would play in the outcome of the war in Europe. The Middle East meant access to oil, transit between the European and Paciﬁc theaters through the Suez Canal, and an increasingly important base from which to attack Nazi-occupied Europe. A German and Italian occupation of the region would pose great difﬁculties for a possible Allied counteroffensive. As Hitler’s comments to the Grand Mufti on November 28 suggested, an Axis victory in North Africa and the Middle East would also mean an extension of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe to the 700,000 Jews living in the Arab world. German occupation of Iran carried with it the same potential. Accordingly, the Nazi regime presented itself both as a supporter of Arab antiimperialism aimed at Britain and as a friend to Arabs and Muslims based on common values and a common hatred of the Jews and Zionism. On January 11, 1941, Hitler issued Directive No. 32, which stated that “after Soviet Russian armed forces have been crushed,”Germany would “carry out the main attack against the Suez Canal with German and Italian forces” in North Africa, with an additional armored and a motorized division to supplement the

B

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German Africa Corps.1 The directive also called for “utilization of the Arab liberation movement.” The situation of the English in the Middle East was to be made “all the more difﬁcult the more forces are tied down at the proper time by centers of unrest or insurrectionary movements. All military, political, and propaganda measures serving this purpose must be harmonized very closely with one another in this preparatory period.” Hitler designated Special Staff F (Sonderstab F ) in the Wehrmacht Southeast “as the central ofﬁce in the ﬁeld to participate in all planning and measures in the Arab area”; it was to receive “the best experts and agents.”2 On February 6, 1941, in “Operation Sunﬂower,” German forces under General Erwin Rommel landed in North Africa. Their initial mission was to prevent the loss of Italy’s North African colonies and to launch a joint German-Italian counteroffensive in combination with the German air force, the Luftwaffe.3 For the ﬁrst time, Nazi propaganda aimed at Arabs and Muslims would be accompanied by armed forces on the ground. Nazi diplomacy continued to balance support for Italy with appeals to the Arabs and Muslims who opposed another European colonial endeavor in the region.4 On February 4, 1941, Ernst Woermann, then director of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, noted that Foreign Minister Ribbentrop continued to defer to Italy in Middle Eastern policy, although in “appropriate instances” Germany would “take the initiative.” Taking the initiative in this context meant making stronger efforts to court Arab and Muslim collaborators. Along these lines, the foreign minister supported both delivery of arms to the regime in Iraq through any routes other than through the Soviet Union and continued ﬁnancial contributions to the Mufti.5 The military leadership was also reconsidering the policy of deferring to the Italians. On February 5, 1941, General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of High Command of the Wehrmacht, wrote to the Foreign Ministry and suggested that the policy of giving Italy freedom of action in the Mediterranean be reconsidered because the Italians had expressed no interest in the emergence of independent Arab states. In Keitel’s view, the time had come for Germany to take “quick and vigorous action . . . to direct the future political activity in the Middle East.” Doing so required “our recognition of the independence of Arabia as a war aim of the Axis. We are in a favorable position insofar as we need not promise the Arabs a merely ‘tolerable’ solution of the Jewish question in Palestine but can with a good conscience make the Arabs any concession in this ﬁeld.”6 By February 1942, following Hitler’s various decisions of fall 1941 regarding the launching of the Final Solution, and then con-

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veyed to the relevant German ofﬁcials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Keitel’s “good conscience” and willingness to make “any concession” on the Jewish issue actually meant supporting massive violence against Jews in the region. His views reﬂected the German military leadership’s support for Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies in Europe, which had been apparent in the conduct of the German occupation in Poland since fall 1939.7 Woermann’s “Memorandum on the Arab Question” of March 7 addressed the issue “with reference to our aim of achieving England’s defeat.” In view of the presence of British forces in the Middle East,“the Islamic idea of [holy war] is impracticable under the present grouping of powers.” Therefore “questions touching Islam must be dealt with tactfully.”8 Woermann underscored the area’s geostrategic importance. The Suez Canal was vital for the British Empire. The region was a land bridge between Africa and India that made it possible to move Indian troops loyal to the British. England and the Soviet Union might join hands there. Of course, oil was an important factor. He concluded that “a decisive blow to the British Empire could be delivered in this area only through operations against Egypt and/or military occupation of the Arabian land bridge.” In March 1941, however, except with use of the Luftwaffe, both areas were “beyond the effective range of the Axis powers at the present time.”9 Though “certain contacts” in Egypt held out promise, the country was still under British inﬂuence. He listed King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, the Iraq government, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as potential partners. Expanded propaganda efforts would be “conducted mainly by radio broadcasts in the Arabic language, the exertion of inﬂuence on Arab newspapers and periodicals, [and] cultivation of personal relations with individuals.”10 German agents in the region would try to foment sabotage and anti-British uprisings. Woermann supported sending 400 light machine guns, 50 light tanks, 10 antiaircraft batteries, high explosives, antitank weapons, and 100,000 gas masks to Iraq, as well as an immediate payment of 100,000 reichsmarks for Husseini, who was then in Baghdad. Germany “will take greater initiative making due allowance for Italian sensibilities.” Nevertheless, out of consideration to Italy, the Germans would not “at this time” make a public declaration in favor of a Greater Arab Federation.11 A month later, on April 8, State Secretary von Weizsäcker replied to the letter of January 20, 1941, which Husseini had sent to Hitler from Baghdad. The state secretary wrote that Hitler noted “with great interest and sympathy your

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statements about the national struggle of the Arabs” and sent “his regards and his thanks and best wishes for the continued success of the Arab cause.” Germany had “no territorial aims in the Arab area.” The German government recognized that “the Arabs, a people with an old civilization,” had “demonstrated their competence for administrative activity and their military virtue”and were thus “entirely capable of governing themselves.” Germany “therefore recognized the complete independence of the Arab states, or where this has not yet been achieved, the claim to win it. . . . Germany and Arabs have common enemies in the English and the Jews and are united in the struggle against them.” The Reich was “glad to cooperate in a friendly manner with the Arabs and, if they are forced to ﬁght England in order to achieve their national aims, to grant them military and ﬁnancial assistance in so far as is possible.”12 On April 1, 1941, Rashid Ali Kilani led a pro-Axis coup that overthrew the Iraqi government of General Taha el-Hashimi. Haj Amin el-Husseini was deeply involved. The coup plotters included Yunis es-Sebawi, who had worked on an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf.13 The Baghdad coup took place against the background of Axis military success in the Balkans: by May 1 German armies had occupied Yugoslavia and Greece. Control of Iraq was important for the outcome of the war in Europe because of the country’s oil reserves and also because it was a transit point for troops from Australia, New Zealand, and India to North Africa. The British, aware of the close ties between Kilani and the Axis, landed troops in Basra with the intent of overthrowing his government. Kilani requested large amounts of military assistance from Germany and Italy (50 squadrons of planes, 50 light armored cars, 400 armor-piercing guns with 80,000 cartridges, 60 armor-piercing cannon with 60,000 rounds, 10,000 hand grenades, 600 light machine guns, 84 Vickers machine guns, and 3 million bullets).14 On April 21, 1941, Ribbentrop requested that Hitler decide if arms deliveries to the new Iraqi government should be started “if it appears that the Iraq government still has the will to resist” the English.15 In the last week in April, the Iraqis tried and failed to prevent the landing of British troops in Basra. On May 2, British planes based at the Habbaniya air ﬁeld began to bomb Iraqi soldiers who had encircled it. The Muslim clergy, urged on by Husseini, declared a jihad against the British. Though the Axis powers were heavily engaged in Europe, on May 3 Hitler agreed to send more aid to Kilani’s government. Particularly in view of Italian setbacks in North Africa, success would deepen German ties to Arab nationalists inside and out-

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side Iraq and perhaps encourage revolts against Britain in the region.16 German arms shipments to Iraq began in April and expanded in May. They included 30,000 riﬂes, 200 light machine guns, 6,000 machine pistols, riﬂe ammunition, and grenades.17 Hitler’s Directive No. 30 of May 23 regarding the interaction of war, diplomacy, and propaganda in the Middle East stated, “The Arab liberation movement in the Middle East is our natural ally against Great Britain.” The “rising in Iraq” had “special importance.” It strengthened antiEnglish forces outside Iraq and hampered English communications and tied down British troops. Therefore he had decided “to advance developments in the Middle East by giving assistance to Iraq.” The question of how England would be defeated “between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf” would be decided “only after Barbarossa,” the invasion of the Soviet Union he planned to launch the following month. In the same directive, Hitler also stated that the Foreign Ministry would conduct propaganda in the region in collaboration with the High Command of the Wehrmacht and its propaganda arms. The core idea of German propaganda in the near term would be that an Axis victory would liberate the countries of the Middle East from “the English yoke and thus realize the right of self-determination. Whoever loves liberty will therefore join the front against England.” But given the need to sustain Vichy France, propaganda against French positions in Syria “must be avoided.”18 By then, events in Iraq had taken a quite different direction. By mid-May, British planes had destroyed the Iraqi air force. A British motorized force left Haifa on May 10 and reached Baghdad on the thirtieth. On May 31 the Kilani government surrendered the city without resisting, and its leaders ﬂed to Turkey and Iran.19 Ambassador Grobba ﬂed as well. The collapse of the Kilani government and Germany’s failure to establish a foothold in the region was due in part to the overwhelming priority Hitler had given to the coming attack on the Soviet Union. The Germans lacked the military resources to simultaneously prepare for the invasion of Russia, prevail in Greece and Crete, and defeat the British in Iraq. German military aid in Iraq was too little and too late. The Iraqi military displayed low ﬁghting ability. The initiative and determination of the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, in ordering the armed intervention caught the Germans off guard. As Hirszowicz put it, “The rapid collapse of the anti-British movement in Iraq was, under the circumstances, an important success for the opponents of Nazism and Fascism everywhere.”20 On June 8, the British army and Free French forces entered Syria from Iraq and

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Palestine, defeated the forces of Vichy France, and maintained a pro-British regime for the rest of the war. As a result of these setbacks, Nazi Germany’s hopes for inﬂuencing the Arab and Muslim world turned to Rommel’s tank forces in North Africa. Without a land base in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq, shortwave Arabic-language radio broadcasting from stations in Germany and Italy would be the only way to reach a large, and still mostly illiterate, audience in the region. On May 5, Gerhard Ruhle, then director of the Department of Radio Policy in the Foreign Ministry, sent Ribbentrop an assessment of the prospects and tasks of German radio propaganda in the Arab region. Following the British victory in Iraq, opportunities were few there and in Saudi Arabia. In the other Arab countries outside Egypt, there was “sympathy for Germany and the reputation of the Führer is high.” Hence it was expected that broadcasting from ofﬁcial German radio would be effective. Given the British presence in Egypt and considerable Egyptian support for the British, Ruhle advocated that radio aimed there should be clandestine, should be presented as coming from an Egyptian station, and should make nationalist appeals for a revolt against the English. He reported that German Arabic-language radio broadcasts were currently going to Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Aden, the Gulf Emirates, and the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) in North Africa. The listening audience of radio owners were members of the “possessing classes,” encompassing large landowners, merchants, government civil servants, and intellectuals. But German diplomats, intelligence agents, and “numerous Arabs” reported that German broadcasts “actually reach the whole population because the listeners immediately pass on their content.” Broadcasts in Iraq and Syria were “quickly widely known” as a result of “strong interest in Germany and the fanatical admiration for the Führer.” German radio broadcasts in Arabic had contributed to Iraq’s resistance to English intervention. Ruhle pointed to similar success of radio broadcasts in Palestine and Transjordan.21 “The sympathy for Germany in Egypt is smaller as is the resonance of our radio broadcasts. However, it is certain that the content of these broadcasts are generally known in the Egyptian cities.”22 Nazi radio was currently broadcasting ﬁve shortwave programs from Berlin in Arabic every day, one in the morning and four in the evening, for a total of an hour and forty-ﬁve minutes a day.23 German radio broadcasts continued the themes begun in winter 1940–41

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and included quotations from the Koran and abundant reports of British setbacks and German successes. Literary and historical topics evoked past Muslim glories and heroes. Ruhle was planning a series of lectures on religious themes “in which through propagating Islam, interest in the broadcasts will be increased.” At the same time, “examples from the Koran will be presented to demonstrate the necessity of engagement for the fatherland and for resistance against foreign occupation.” Phonograph music to expand interest in the broadcasts would also be used.24 Nazi broadcasts would call for an Arab revolt against the English, attack English “domination” in the Orient, recall England’s “broken promises” to the Arabs, offer quotes from the Koran that called for struggle against oppressors, recite nationalist poetry calling for independence from foreign powers, and play nationalistic music. Ruhle argued that German broadcasts should focus more on secular struggles for independence from Britain than on a strictly religious appeal. Proclamation of a holy war coming from a German radio broadcast would “have little effect”; despite the religiosity of the Arab lower and middle strata, such an approach would “not set the Arab area into motion.” Among Arabs, nationalist goals of independence from British control were primary. Appeals by “outstanding Arab personalities,” such as Amin el-Husseini, were “essential” to success of German propaganda.25 In reality, in the succeeding years, the line between secular and religious appeals became indistinguishable. A memo from Hitler’s headquarters to Ribbentrop’s ofﬁce of April 18, 1941, dealing with Arabic-language clandestine broadcasts to Egypt underscored the link between war, diplomacy, and propaganda. The shortwave broadcasts should address the “young revolutionary Egyptian movement” and state their goal as being an “Egypt for the Egyptians.” The target audience was of civil servants, Egyptian army ofﬁcers, and young people and university students. The key themes should be: increased English inﬂuence since the beginning of the war; Egypt’s economic “suffering”; domestic problems that were “harmed by the division of the population into different parties”; criticism of Egyptian politicians who support England and entry into the war; and general criticism of English presence in Egypt.26 The memo concluded that prospects for an anti-English revolt in Egypt could “take place only after revolts break out in the other countries and with a further advance of German troops.”27 Propaganda would achieve its aims only in conjunction with military successes. The reports to London’s Foreign Ofﬁce from Britain’s ambassador to Egypt,

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Miles Lampson, provided a regular commentary on the interaction of events on the battleﬁeld with German policy and propaganda. Lampson was the most experienced and well-informed Western diplomat observing developments in Egypt and the Arab world.28 His assessments in spring and summer 1941 were sobering. On April 4, the British base in Benghazi, Libya, fell to Rommel’s North Africa Corps. On the tenth, Rommel’s forces encircled and bypassed Australian forces at Tobruk and reached Sollum in Egypt. On April 19, Lampson wrote,“Recent events have considerably strengthened feeling amongst certain classes of Egyptians that the Germans may be too much for us. We are of course strenuously countering this and I believe not without some effect.” The Egyptian prime minister, Hussein Sirri Pasha, continued to “take an admirable line against defeatism in Egypt,” and recent Allied military successes in Libya had “allayed panic, at one moment very pronounced, caused by the encirclement of Tobruk and the occupation of Bardia and Sollum.”29 A week later he wrote that “pessimism regarding the war continues and seems to have taken a fatalistic tinge.” The German victory and occupation of Greece and the resulting stream of refugees accentuated this mood. It was likely that ﬁfth column activities were increasing. The Egyptian authorities had arrested “minor agitators,” and “the police seem to have been more active than before in suppressing pamphlets.”30 In a memo of April 29, Lampson sent Foreign Minister Anthony Eden a review of political developments of the previous three months. He reported on a struggle between the current prime minister, Sirri Pasha, and Ali Maher Pasha, who had been prime minister in 1936 and again in 1939 –49, regarding Egypt’s stance toward Britain and the war. As part of his offensive against Ali Maher Pasha, Sirri Pasha exiled Hassan al-Banna, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the Egyptian town of Qena and limited the activities of the Young Egypt organization led by Ahmed Hussein. Yet the effect of British reverses in Libya, the Balkans, and Greece had been “profound.” Egyptians had a new awareness of Britain’s “military limitations in the Middle East,” and the public was “now fundamentally pessimistic regarding the outcome of this war. . . . It is now generally thought that the Germans will be able to cross the seas in sufﬁcient numbers and with sufﬁcient material to make a British defense of Egypt impossible.”31 Lampson praised “Sirri Pasha’s courage and loyalty” in “the face of such defeatism,” as well as his “measures against enemy agents and defeatists, some of whom he has already interned.” Such measures were “exceedingly nec-

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essary at the present moment when the deterioration not only in the upper but in the lower classes in their attitude towards the British and British troops has become apparent.” Lampson thought that the course of military events was the crucial determinant on Egyptian thinking. What he called “the pressure of external events” would determine “the extent to which the above mentioned deterioration in the Egyptian attitude constitutes a positive danger to our position in Egypt.”32 In his view, “the fundamental question for us now is the attitude of the Egyptian population in the trials in which it is likely to be involved by enemy action in the near future—aerial bombardments, parachutists, raids of mobile columns, even massive German advances from the West.” More democracy and representative government would help, but unfortunately the majority party, the Wafd, was excluded from sharing political responsibility.33 From “friendly Egyptians” and their own sources, Lampson concluded that “the Fifth Column has greatly increased in Egypt,” and various paramilitary formations constituted “a serious potential danger.” Sirri Pasha’s “gallant attempts” to counter “defeatist and anti-British tendencies” did not receive enough support in public opinion, which,“where not apathetic, is now deteriorating in an anti-British sense.” The ability of the Egyptian prime minister to “stem the tide” would “depend largely on the development of the military situation.” If “the German menace” grew, “direct security measures by our British Military Authorities may become necessary.” Presumably Lampson meant direct intervention in Egypt comparable to the intervention in Iraq to prevent the emergence of a pro-Axis government in Cairo.34 On May 22, Lampson informed the Foreign Ofﬁce of a campaign of death threats to Egyptian newspaper editors who supported Britain. The threats were part of “certain dangerous under-currents which if events go wrong might become serious.”35 In response to Lampson’s request to do so, the Foreign Ofﬁce, presumably Eden, wrote to the Egyptian prime minister via Lampson to note “with grave misgiving the growth of defeatism in certain quarters in Egypt, especially over the past few months,” and asserted that “nothing short of ﬁrm and resolute action against the principal offenders,” such as Aziz el Misri and Ahmed Hussein of Young Egypt,“will put a stop to it.” Eden added that “no improvement” would be possible “until the more inﬂuential defeatists are arrested and detained for the duration of the war.” The British greatly appreciated the actions Prime Minister Sirri Pasha had already taken and assured him of “their

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continued and wholehearted support should he ﬁnd it necessary to take most drastic action now that the enemy is on Egyptian soil.”36 On May 26, Lampson reported that the “rain of anti-British pamphlets continues undiminished and I am increasingly uneasy regarding the internal situation.” He was particularly concerned about political activities at Al Azhar University, the leading university of Islamic studies in the Arab world. He urged the prime minister to deport “foreign Azharist students guilty of anti-British activities”; make it a penal offense to distribute or read anti-British propaganda; and keep an eye on students at Al Azhar University and have them searched for anti-British propaganda. Sirri replied that he had already deported “ﬁve foreign Azhar students,” was considering legal restrictions on anti-British propaganda, and noted the suggestion regarding students at Al Azhar. The Egyptian government arrested several people. It found about ﬁfteen pamphlets not yet in print as well as “an elaborately written program of violence and murder” of political ﬁgures including Prime Minister Sirri Pasha, Lampson, and “many others.”37 At a time when Prime Minister Sirri Pasha was attempting to repress proAxis ﬁfth column activity, Lampson noted the failure of the Egyptian police to arrest important suspects, which led him to suspect that there were “higher placed traitors and defeatists” in Egyptian politics and government.38 On June 7, Lampson wrote that a “further seizure of printing presses and further arrests of minor agitators” had not led “to any extensive exposure of Fifth Column activities.”Yet the following week he reported that the “recent repressive measures of the Government against agitators has had good effect and some of the more prominent ﬁfth columnists are at present keeping their mouths shut.”39 In September 1941, according to Lampson, the “internal political situation shows signs of serious deterioration.” Though Britain was buying Egyptian cotton at above market prices, much of the public, wrongly, “still believe that we are out to proﬁteer by purchasing cotton at an unreasonably low price.” Sirri Pasha was being attacked by the parliamentary opposition as a British servant. Lampson did not want to antagonize the Wafd Party, the standard-bearer of Egyptian nationalism, but the war effort might call for suppressing “anything written or spoken, no matter by whom, which threatens to jeopardize the security and stability of our base in Egypt.” Doing so meant supporting Prime Minister Pasha “in any action taken to that end, including possibly, dissolution of Parliament.”40 Given the centrality of Egypt to the British war effort, Lampson wanted to avoid a repetition of the events in Iraq of spring 1941.

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In his September 23, 1941, review of political developments in Egypt in the previous ﬁve months, Lampson expressed concern about anti-British sentiment voiced by the Wafd Party. It had “much increased the anti-British feeling already long fostered by Palace elements and enemy agents.”41 Agitation about the price of cotton, the high cost of living, and food shortages; the fear of German air raids; and the agitation for declaring Cairo an open city all “lend themselves to easy exploitation by hostile elements.” Although fear of an imminent invasion had declined since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June, “the majority of Egyptians still remain convinced of German invincibility, and this conviction, suitably strengthened by hostile propaganda, constitutes a permanent encouragement of all anti-British manifestations. As the hardships of the people increase through growing economic difﬁculties and more intensive air raids, so will the opportunities increase for enemy exploitation of popular feeling against us. The greater then will be the need for governmental action to control both the enemy agents and their dupes.”42 Lampson worried about Egypt’s King Farouk and the advisers around him. “So long,” he wrote, “as every anti-British movement is believed to radiate from, or be supported by, the Palace we cannot expect to have a favorable atmosphere at our Middle Eastern base. Sooner or later we may, in all probability, have to bring King Farouk to heel or remove him from the Throne. . . . It is not a pleasant situation in which we ﬁnd ourselves—backing a minority though entirely friendly government against a hostile majority. . . . But as I see it at present, there is every indication of stormy times ahead with the probable corollary of more forceful action by us—on the guiding principle that anything emanating from whatever quarter that threatens to prejudice the safety of our military base in Egypt must be put a stop to.”43 Lampson believed that antiBritish sentiment was far broader than pro-Nazi and pro-fascist circles. Yet the consequence of such sentiments was the same, namely, to help the Germans by working to end the British presence in Egypt. Lampson supported parliamentary institutions in Egypt, but he was open to the possibility of direct political intervention if it proved necessary to prevent a pro-Axis government. Yet such an intervention would likely intensify nationalist sentiment against Britain. Egyptian nationalists motivated by a desire to end British presence could “objectively” serve Axis interests in the war’s zero-sum game. In Berlin, the military and diplomatic policy makers were well aware of the dilemma of the British position in Egypt. Both the Germans and the British understood the close con-

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nection between the battles raging in the North African desert and the political situation in the Arab countries. In the aftermath of the setback in Iraq, German diplomats acted quickly to contact Kilani and Husseini. On June 1, Weizsäcker advised the German Embassy in Iran to get in touch with them as Germany would not “drop friends as soon as they have experienced a failure.” The Foreign Ministry wanted to know about Kilani’s possible “further political activity” and was particularly interested in convincing Husseini that “we will continue to support him and the Arab ﬁght for freedom. He can likewise be promised further ﬁnancial support.”44 On June 6, Woermann thought it advisable that both leaders come to Berlin as they “are of value for us and for the Arab movement only if they are in a position to participate actively.”45 Faced with the absence of a political base in the Middle East, the only possible locale for active engagement by pro-Axis Arabs was in Rome and Berlin. German diplomats, such as as Rudolf Rahn (1900–1975), then active in Syria, could offer distinctly frank and sober assessments of Germany’s prospects in the region. Rahn had an elite biography typical of members of the Foreign Ministry. After ﬁve months of military service at the end of World War I, he studied sociology, political philosophy, and sociology of religion at the universities in Tübingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He received his doctorate from Heidelberg in 1923. He entered the diplomatic corps in 1928 and was posted to Ankara in 1931. He joined the Nazi Party on June 1, 1933. In Berlin he worked in the Orient Ofﬁce on economic affairs and cultural affairs. During the invasion of France, he worked with the military to coordinate propaganda efforts. In 1941, he purchased arms in Syria for the Kilani government.46 In 1941 he served on Ribbentrop’s staff. In 1942 and 1943 he worked in the German Consulate in Tunis, where he worked closely with the German army in Africa. In 1943 he became German ambassador to Rome. His “Report on the German Mission in Syria from May 9 to July 11, 1941,” submitted on July 30, 1941, offered a most unromantic view of the political situation there. After a brief stay in Syria, I found to my astonishment that there was, at all events, no Arab movement there. True nationalist sentiment is unknown to the Syrian tribes, a wild and for the most part unlovely mixture of races and religions, spoiled by greed, intrigue, and jealousy, accustomed from olden time to bribery by rival powers. What Beirut wants, is opposed by Damascus. What Damascus advocates, is considered treason in Aleppo, Homs, or Hama. Independence is the pretext for unbridled speculation—freedom, the shield for unrestrained

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exploitation of the worker by the ruling class. Even the best racial part, the Bedouins, have succumbed to the general corruption and follow whichever power is the strongest, as the jackal follows the beast of prey. All of them demand arms—in order to plunder the neighboring tribe; all demand money—in order to extort still greater sums from the enemy power. . . . I found nothing in Syria that would have been capable of militant action. At the moment of danger, the swaggering leaders of the Arab freedom movement all failed. In undisguised anxiety, they asked for assistance in ﬂeeing abroad, if they had not already preferred “as a precaution” to make contact with the French.47

In Rahn’s view the Arabs then could have only a modest impact on the outcome of World War II. He did not think an Arab or Muslim revolt would emerge unless Axis forces were victorious in the region. Axis victories enhanced the chances that propaganda would strike a chord among an active minority. Compared to the vast wartime expenditures on arms, radio and print propaganda were inexpensive ways of planting seeds of possible collaboration and shared hatreds that might pay dividends should the tide of battle turn in favor of Germany and the Axis powers in general. The cost and expectations were modest, but the payoff was possibly signiﬁcant. In spring 1941, the American understanding of the strategic importance of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East for the outcome of the European war was in its early stages. Alexander C. Kirk, a key ﬁgure in that emerging understanding, arrived in Cairo in 1941 after having served two years as the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, and on March 29 he took up his position as the head of the American Legation. With the upgrading of the representation to an embassy, he became the American ambassador to Egypt and served in that capacity until March 29, 1944. Kirk took a close interest in Nazi efforts to inﬂuence politics in the region. On September 13, 1941, he sent one of his ﬁrst, if not the ﬁrst, summary of Germany’s Arabic-language broadcasts to the ofﬁce of Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington.48 By April 1942, Kirk had organized a staff of native Arabic speakers, stenographers, and American translators whose task was to produce verbatim English transcripts of the Axis Arabic-language radio broadcasts to the Middle East. He sent these dispatches to Hull’s ofﬁce in the State Department in Washington every week until March 1944, and his successor, Pinkney Tuck, continued to do so until spring 1945. The resulting several thousand pages constitute the most complete record in any language of Nazi Germany’s and Fascist Italy’s broadcast efforts to spread their views to the Middle East during World War II.

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In March 1944, Kirk submitted a detailed report summarizing the embassy’s activities during the past three years. One of the most important of these was “political reporting.” Cairo, he wrote, offered “unique and extensive” opportunities for political reporting on developments in Egypt and in the Near and Middle East in general.“It was,” he wrote,“in Cairo that plans were laid for the defense of Egypt, the resistance of Yugoslavia and Greece, the conquest of Ethiopia and Italian East Africa, the occupation of Iran, the quelling of the Iraqi revolution, the rendering of Jibuti, the wresting of Syria from Vichy, the maintenance of order in Palestine; in Cairo centered the administration of occupied enemy territory, the organization of supply for the Middle East area, the planning of political warfare in the Balkans, the centralization of military intelligence, the planning of Allied propaganda and the myriad other functions incidental to modern total war.” Cairo was “the cultural fountain head of Islam and the capital of by far the most important state in the Arab world” and thus the place where discussions about “so-called Arab unity” took place.49 Kirk observed that the embassy’s political reporting about Axis efforts and local conditions had occurred in two phases. The ﬁrst occurred “during the dark days when the fate of the vital Near and Middle East, as the bulwark between the European and Asiatic [i.e., Japan] segments of the Axis and the source of supply of vitally needed oil was hanging by a thread so slender that it was felt in many circles, and particularly, we had reason to believe in Washington, that defense was well nigh hopeless and that the sending here of urgently needed supplies would only result in prolonging a lost cause to the detriment of other important areas where the supply question was also critical.” Convinced that “the least adverse effect that would result from the loss of this area would be a prolongation, perhaps of years, of the war, the one main objective to which the Legation bent its efforts until the ﬁnal defeat of Rommel in the autumn of 1942 [actually spring 1943] was to endeavor by every means in its power to emphasize the importance of retaining control of the Near and Middle East and to do everything possible to that end by examining problems in their local aspects and making urgent suggestions and recommendations both to the Department and to American and British authorities.” This was a period of “emergency with the accent on action rather than deliberation.” A second phase began in 1943 after the Axis military threat had passed and political activity of the prewar type returned. The embassy staff examined local political developments, Arab nationalism, developments in Sudan and in

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Palestine, Egypt’s postwar ambitions, refugee problems, the status of foreigners in Egypt, Egyptian foreign relations, British policy in the Middle East as well as the “nature and effectiveness of Axis propaganda, particularly as carried on by broadcasts in Arabic.”50 By late summer and fall 1941, Axis Arabic radio broadcasts had come to the attention of ofﬁcials in the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence in the Overseas Branch of the United States Ofﬁce of War Information (OWI).51 In a report of September 29, 1941, Anne Fuller, an OWI analyst, wrote that German propaganda in Arabic was “mainly concerned with creating an atmosphere of distrust in regard to the British promises to the Arab world.” It “constantly” voiced the view that “only a German victory” in the war would lead to Arab independence.52 It attacked pro-Allied Arabs, such as Emir Abdullah of Transjordan and pro-Allied politicians in Egypt, as traitors to their countries and the Arab cause while celebrating “pro-Nazi Arabs, such as Rashid Ali al Gailani [sic]” as “heroes and patriots to the cause of Arab freedom.” Furthermore,“Interwoven into every program is the ‘Jewish menace.’ The Zionist question provides the basic theme.” Axis radio claimed that Jewish aims went beyond Palestine and that the Allies had promised Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq to the Zionists, that the “Jews of Iraq wish to control the entire country,” and that “world Jewry” was “in league with Great Britain in instigating unrest [and] war in the Near East.”53 However, “the strength of the Nazi broadcasts to the Near East lies as much in their announcer as in their subject matter. Unis [sic] Bahri, a young Iraqi, is the Arab Lord Haw-Haw. He has understood the Arabs’ love for local information and the personal items. The programs are interspersed with reference to leaders, to contemporary writers, particularly to poets. The BBC itself admits the success of Bahri’s technique and of late has been making deﬁnite attempts to imitate and if possible to outshine him.”54 In this and other memos of fall 1941, Fuller discussed how the United States should respond to Nazi broadcasts. “The Zionist problem,” she concluded, presented “the most difﬁculties in broadcasting to the Arab world.” The Axis broadcasts focused on the Zionist issue and continually reported that the British planned to extend the boundaries of the Jewish national home and favored the Jews at the expense of the Arabs. The BBC, on the other hand, did not address the issue of Zionism; it left “the Axis powers with an important weapon with which to stir up discontent within the Arab world.” Fuller advised that the United States should follow the BBC’s policy and “make no mention of the thorny subject. Admittedly this is far from satisfactory. But until the precarious

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future of the Near and Middle East is better deﬁned there seems no other course.”55 In another report, Fuller argued that American broadcasts stress growing American strength, concern with the welfare of countries in the Middle East, and conﬁdence that the democracies would win the war. Further, Americans “must admit our own limitations. We do not have any great wealth of ﬁrsthand and fresh information of a local character in regard to the Near East.” Hence American broadcasts should focus on American activities in the Middle East.56 Yet however reticent American or British ofﬁcials may have been about discussing Zionism, Axis radio did all it could to identify the Allies with the Jews and with Zionist aspirations. Indeed, in her report of October 25, 1941, on “Anti-American Propaganda in the Near East,” Fuller noted a trend to more anti-Americanism in Axis broadcasts.“For the most part,” she wrote,“this propaganda is based on American support of Zionism; but more recently it has begun to condemn American missionary enterprise within the area.”57 In fact, throughout the war, no matter how much or how little British or American leaders spoke about the extermination of the Jews in Europe or about a Jewish state in Palestine, Axis propaganda constantly identiﬁed them with the Jews. In his weekly dispatch of September 13, 1941, Kirk summarized themes from the broadcasts of August 18 to September 7, 1941. His observations accurately captured the strategic guidelines being established in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The broadcasts celebrated German victories in Russia and reported on alleged food scarcities in Egypt and other areas under British occupation. Further,“well worn anti-Jewish themes are maintained, among them the assertion that Britain plans to unite Palestine and Syria and make them into a Jewish center.” Fascist Italy’s broadcasts from “Bari in Arabic,” also focused on events in Iran, speciﬁcally alleged Soviet efforts “to establish a Soviet-Iranian Republic.” Kirk noted that the German broadcasts asserted that had it not been for American help, Britain would already have lost the war and that “the British would have been beaten by the Germans in North Africa had it not been for American assistance.”58 Already in these early reports, Kirk observed that Axis radio’s anti-Semitism went hand in hand with attacks on Britain and the United States. Broadcasts of the week ending September 21, 1941, about “British exploitation of Egypt,” alleged that “Jews control American ﬁnance and commerce and are inﬂuencing the President to pursue an aggressive policy.”Kirk reported that Radio Bari claimed that the United States had “a direct interest in encouraging aggression in the Middle East because of American ‘interest in oil

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ﬁelds and even more so in the Jews in Palestine.’” It asserted that as a result of Roosevelt’s “‘Jewish advisers of the Brain Trust,’” the Arabs had “‘a new antagonist in the person of Roosevelt.’”59 Axis radio presented Britain as a ﬁrm supporter of “Jewish exploitation in Palestine and Syria” and as planning to “separate Lebanon from Syria and unite it with Palestine as an area for Jewish exploitation.” It appealed to Muslims—not only Arabs—noting that “Ramadan comes this year with sadness as the whole Moslem world is under the tyranny of the British.”60 In late September and early October, German and Italian radio were pleased to report Axis military successes, especially those on the Eastern Front in Europe, where “all objectives” had been reached in a battle that was “near its end.” Although there were signs of “widespread revolt against the British throughout the entire Middle East,” the British continued to issue permits for Jews to enter Syria and Lebanon. The Italian navy was successful in the Mediterranean while the United States and Britain were unable to effectively aid Russia. Radio broadcasts also reported that a “Jewish army of 50,000” was “being built up for eventual use against the Arabs.”61 In mid-October, Radio Berlin announced that Germany had given “striking demonstration of its invincible power” in Russia and that “Jewish criminals are being released from prison in Palestine on condition that they join the army.”62 In the realm of complete fabrications, Radio Berlin in late October reported that four million Muslims had been murdered by the Soviet government. It was “the duty of Moslems the world over to come to their relief by collaborating with the Germans who are dedicated not only to the destruction of Bolshevism but also to that of Islam’s other two great enemies, the British and the Jews.”63 That is, according to Radio Berlin, in 1941 Muslims were being exterminated at the same time that a large Jewish army was emerging. That both claims were false did not prevent their repetition on the air. In his dispatch covering the period of October 27 to November 2, Kirk reported that Radio Berlin stated that Charles de Gaulle had communicated to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, a promise to support the Jews at the expense of the Arabs in Syria. During that same week, Radio Bari declared that “the Mufti,” that is, Haj Amin el-Husseini, was “universally regarded as the leader of the Arabs in their struggle for independence,” and “his escape to Italy is a source of rejoicing to all Arabs and Moslems.” It further reported that President Roosevelt had stated that “the United States considers the problem of

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the Jews in Palestine as an American problem and any menace to them as a threat to the United States.”64 Husseini and Kilani, with assistance from the Germans and Italians, had ﬂed Baghdad in spring 1941, traveling to Tehran, Ankara, Rome, and then to Berlin. Nazi Germany’s Arabic broadcasts received an important boost with their arrival in the Axis capitals. Husseini arrived in Rome on October 13, and the Italians immediately recognized his utility for Arabic propaganda.65 On November 5, Husseini, Mussolini, and Foreign Minister Ciano agreed on the wording of a proposed joint Axis declaration about the Arabs’ ﬁght against “British domination and oppression.” The draft stated that the Axis were prepared to recognize the “full sovereignty and complete independence of the Arab countries in the Near East which are now occupied or controlled by the English” and were prepared “to give their consent to the elimination of the Jewish national home in Palestine.”66 The following day, Husseini arrived in Berlin, where he was greeted by Wilhelm Melchers and Fritz Grobba in the Foreign Ministry’s Political Department. Grobba reported that Husseini looked forward to meeting Hitler, an event he hoped would “have a great propaganda effect on the entire Arab world and, beyond that, the Islamic world.”67 On November 13, Ribbentrop wrote to Hitler, asking that he meet with Husseini. He argued that Germany’s policy in the Middle East “must ﬁrst and foremost be guided by military needs and therefore must serve the purpose of defeating England. Political propaganda measures must pave the way for permanently eliminating England from these areas. All utterances by Arab leaders indicate that the alpha and omega for the Arab world is a new political declaration of the Axis Powers on independence for the Arab countries. The German declaration broadcast by radio on October 21, 1940, is judged by the Arab world in general as inadequate.” Hence a statement by Germany and Italy in favor of the Arab world appeared “absolutely indispensable”because its absence had become an obstacle to “loyal cooperation with the Arabs.”68 Ribbentrop viewed the text proposed by Husseini and Mussolini as “acceptable . . . with minor changes.” He further informed Hitler that radio broadcasting was “by far the most effective weapon” for propaganda aimed at the Middle East and that broadcasts in Arabic were being made “daily from Berlin.”69 On November 28, 1941, Husseini met with Ribbentrop in Berlin.70 He stressed that “the Arabs were naturally friends of Germany because both were ﬁghting three common foes: the English, the Jews, and Bolshevism. It had been

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a great deed on the part of Germany to have proceeded against these three enemies. The Arabs hoped that Germany would also help them in their ﬁght on these three fronts. They thought that victory in this battle was important not only for the Arabs, but also for their own people.” Husseini continued that the Arabs were prepared to “do everything” to help, including sabotage and insurrection as well as creation of a ﬁghting force, an “Arab Legion,”to ﬁght with Axis forces. The Arabs in Palestine “were on the best of terms with the centers of the Moslem faith” and would try to inﬂuence Muslims in India and Indian prisoners of war to rally to the Axis cause.71 He also again asked that the Axis issue a declaration in support of Arab independence without delay. Ribbentrop acknowledged Husseini’s comment about “the three common foes of the Arabs and the German people,” declared that Russia was “as good as beaten and the political power of Bolshevism was almost broken,” and assured Husseini that “as a sworn enemy of the Jews, Germany understood the troubles of the Arabs in this ﬁeld.” Further, “the war against England was another bond uniting the Axis and the Arabs.” Yet, as the setback in Iraq indicated, it was necessary to proceed “very cautiously and prudently.” Ribbentrop did not think that the time for a declaration had arrived. It needed to be “made at the proper time.” Now it was “better to wait until the guns did the talking.” Given the German advance into the Soviet Union and the Caucasus, the Black Sea would become a German base of operations “in the near future.” When the Germans “had advanced to the areas of the Near East, that would be the right moment for the declaration.”72 Husseini urged an immediate declaration to counter English appeals to Arabs but again Ribbentrop demurred. Ribbentrop pointed to all the “trouble” the Arabs had with Jews and doubted that the Arabs would ally with Britain after “all the English had done to them.” Husseini replied that although anti-British sentiment was strong among Palestinian Arabs, unnamed “others” thought differently. Ribbentrop persisted that a declaration now would be harmful “particularly since it was not a question of years but could be only a matter of months before intervention in the Near East was possible.” He also didn’t want to place German sympathizers in the Arab world at risk of being suppressed by the English.73 German diplomats also urged caution out of a desire not to antagonize Italy and France, both of which had intentions toward the Arabs that conﬂicted with complete independence. The exchange illustrated the connections between the course of the war in Europe and political events in the Middle East. The Mufti repeatedly emphasized that realization of Arab aspirations

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was inseparable from the military success of the Axis powers, and especially that of Nazi Germany. Later on the same day, Husseini had his scheduled meeting with Hitler in the company of the Foreign Minister, as well as Fritz Grobba.74 A photo of the meeting appeared in the German and world press and on German propaganda materials in the Middle East. Hitler now personally experienced what the memos of his diplomats had previously indicated, namely, that Husseini was a true comrade in arms and ideological soul mate. Unlike Hitler’s German, Austrian, and European collaborators and allies, Husseini’s journey toward agreement with Hitler began in non-European traditions. His hatred of Jews, Communists, the British, and the Americans began in radical Arab nationalism and militant Islam but also drew on ideologies of the European far right. The meeting between them on November 28, 1941, was not a clash of civilizations but a meeting of hearts and minds, and a convergence from different starting points. Husseini told Hitler that the Führer was “admired by the entire Arab world.” He thanked him for the sympathy he had shown to the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause. He was convinced that Germany would win the war and that as a result the Arab cause would prosper. As he had with Ribbentrop, Husseini said that “the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely, the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” Speaking for the Arabs, he said that they “were therefore prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion,” that is, a force ﬁghting with the German armies. The Arabs could be useful allies both because of their geographical location and “because of the suffering inﬂicted upon them by the English and the Jews.” They also had “close relations with all the Moslem nationals, of which they could make use in behalf of the common cause.” An Arab Legion composed of prisoners of war from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco was feasible. “The Arab world” was convinced that Germany would win the war “not only because the Reich possessed a large army, brave soldiers, and military leaders of genius, but also because the Almighty could never award the victory to an unjust cause.”In their struggle for independence and for the unity of Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, the Arabs had the fullest conﬁdence in the Führer and looked to his help to sooth the “wound which had been inﬂicted upon them by the enemies of Germany.” Husseini

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then mentioned a previous German statement (of April 8, 1941) recognizing Arab aspirations for independence and freedom and supporting “the elimination of the Jewish national home.” A public declaration of that nature “would be very useful for its propagandistic effect on the Arab peoples at this moment. It would rouse the Arabs from their momentary lethargy, . . . give them new courage,” and facilitate Husseini’s secret efforts to organize an Arab revolt, which he would unleash “at the right moment and only strike upon an order from Berlin.”75 Hitler’s reply was more interesting than Husseini may have anticipated because it included his ﬁrst hint that he intended to extend the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe to Jews living outside the Continent. He said that Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine. Hitler made it clear to Husseini that his private views matched his public pronouncements: Germany was at the present time engaged in a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia. Theoretically there was a difference between England’s capitalism and Russia’s communism; actually, however, the Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal. This was the decisive struggle; on the political plane, it presented itself in the main as a conﬂict between Germany and England, but ideologically it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews. It went without saying that Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle, because platonic promises were useless in a war for survival or destruction in which the Jews were able to mobilize all of England’s power for their ends.

Hence, Hitler continued, “the Mufti could not but be aware, however, that the outcome of the struggle going on at present [in Europe] would also decide the fate of the Arab world.”76 Hitler approved issuing the kind of declaration requested by Husseini but not in November 1941. As Germany was now ﬁghting in the Caucasus, he did not want to antagonize the French with a declaration about Syrian independence which would be seen as an effort to break up France’s colonial empire. But Hitler then made a striking promise to Husseini, “enjoining him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart.” He promised to “carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.” German armies ﬁghting on the Eastern Front at some moment in this struggle would “reach the southern exit” from the Caucasus. At that point, Hitler would “give the Arab

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world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour, the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman of the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operation which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.”77 In short, Hitler told Husseini that should his armies succeed in defeating the armed forces of the Soviet Union and thereafter move south from the Caucasus, the policy of “destruction of the Jewish element” would extend to Jews living in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan. During the summer and fall months of 1941, there was a great deal of discussion at the top levels of the Nazi regime that pointed to the elaboration of a Europe-wide plan to murder the Jews.78 Hitler’s comments to Husseini on November 28, 1941, indicate that given the opportunity, he wanted to extend the Final Solution outside Europe. Doing so was, in his mind, the logical corollary to the idea that an international Jewish conspiracy was waging war against the Third Reich. If so, then the counterattack, that is, the Final Solution, should be no less international. The battles in the Caucasus in fall 1941 and later in North Africa were thus signiﬁcant events not only in the history of World War II but in the history of the Holocaust as well. Their outcome would determine whether the more than 700,000 Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa would also fall victim to a Final Solution no longer limited to Europe. Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda was thus both a counterpart to conventional military strategy in World War II and an incitement to wage a “war” against the civilian, Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa comparable to the one taking place in Europe. The presence of the Panzerarmee in North Africa made it easier for German agents to spread Nazi propaganda with Arabic-language leaﬂets. An intelligence unit was attached to Rommel’s army and commanded by Konstantin Alexander Freiheer von Neurath, the son of Konstantin von Neurath, Germany’s foreign minister from 1932 to 1938. The younger von Neurath participated in writing and distributing propaganda material. His career illustrates the salience of aristocratic background and nationalist views in the German Foreign Ministry. From 1924 to 1927, he worked as an honorary attaché with his father in the German embassy in Rome. In 1928, he received his law degree

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(cum laude) from the University of Greifswald, and then spent four years (1927– 31) as an employee of the major electrical ﬁrm Allgemeine Elektrizität Gesellschaft (AEG). He joined the Nazi Party on October 1, 1934. He entered the Foreign Ministry in 1931 and served in the German Embassy in Brussels from 1936 to 1940. From 1941 to 1943, he was a liaison ofﬁcer (Verbindunsmann) from the Foreign Ministry to the Africa Corps (1941– 42) and Rommel’s Panzerarmee (1942– 43) in North Africa. Von Neurath worked closely with his assistant, the Orientalist Dr. Hans Alexander Winkler (1900–1945).79 Winkler wrote a doctorate (1925) and Habilitation (1928; the second advanced degree required for promotion to the rank of professor in German universities) in the history of religion and Oriental studies at the University of Tübingen, where he was a teacher and researcher at the Oriental Institute. From 1922 to 1928 he was also a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). His membership in the KPD led to his ﬁring from the university in September 1933. Winkler, however, was able to work on archeological expeditions in Egypt in the 1930s. In 1936 he published Ägyptische Volkskunde (Egyptian Folklore) and received recognition from the international scholarly community of Orientalists. In 1939 he joined the Nazi Party, entered the Foreign Ministry, and served as the cultural attaché in the German Embassy in Tehran. In 1941 and 1942, until he was wounded, he served with von Neurath in the Africa Corps, where he was able to place his knowledge of the Arab world and Islam in the service of the German war effort.80 Von Neurath handled communications with the Foreign Ministry in Berlin and with military ofﬁcers in the Panzerarmee in North Africa, while Winkler appears to have had the major responsibility for writing and translating leaﬂets that would appeal to Arabs and Muslims. On November 20, 1941, von Neurath sent the Foreign Ministry in Berlin a draft of a leaﬂet entitled “War and Starvation,” suggesting it be distributed in North Africa. The text was probably written by Winkler. Its purpose was to challenge the view that National Socialist anti-Jewish policy entailed an “antiSemitic” hatred and contempt for non-Jewish Semites. Its ﬁrst paragraph mimicked the themes of British political warfare: the war in Europe had been “unleashed by Nazi race hatred, which regards everything that is not German or Germanic as inferior and animal-like and treats it accordingly.” Although Hitler’s war machine had overrun many countries, hope for resistance lay with Russia, which had formed an alliance with Britain “in order to stop the ﬂood of barbaric Nazism.” If Germany were to win this battle, “it would not only mis-

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treat Europe. First it would oppress the Oriental peoples! The Germans still regard the Europeans as their neighbors with whom they want to remain in good standing and as human partners. However, woe to the Oriental people if they should come under the Nazis’ thumb. The Germans would treat them as born slaves, according to the incredible German madness of anti-Semitism which Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg swear by.”81 The leaﬂet then abruptly changed tone. Arabs, can anyone who speaks to you in this way be anything other than a Jew, one who lies and turns the facts on their heads? What is he doing other than in his moment of danger to hide behind you even though you have nothing in common with him regarding religion, morals, and traditions? All that he has in common with you is what he as a parasite has taken from you! However, listen to how he really behaves! Germany was fed up with its many Jews who sat like maggots in meat as professors, lawyers, artists, doctors, and not least as industrialists and salesmen. Since 1933, the Führer turned things around. Of course he didn’t do so with brute force as the Jew expected he would. Rather he did it in the honest, honorable, and German way, through laws that laid down the role that the aliens could have in the nation. Now they are crying: Oy veh! And many have moved abroad where it is supposed to be “better” for them, in London and New York. There they agitated until they had their war. And now they are trying to bring not only Europe but the whole world into the mess. With the help of others they want “revenge”for the “injustice” that took place when a free people defended itself in its struggle for survival. The Jews’ path is always crooked. Now, son of the Arabs, you are in its path. Egyptians, Syrians, and Iraqis! Now they are lying to you about Nazi race hatred and anti-Semitism. They want to capture you for their front against the enemies of the Jews. They want to separate you from those who are also ﬁghting in your interest against the holy alliance of the English and the Bolsheviks. “Anti-Semitism,” yes, it’s true that this expression comes from Germany. But it comes from a time in which the Jews hid behind their “Semitic” language and had not yet been clearly recognized as the general enemy of the peoples. How stupid it is to claim that Germany today directs this concept [anti-Semitism] against the Arabs. As every child in the world knows, Jews and Arabs have no cultural traditions in common. Indeed, by instinct and history, they are separate from one another at their very core! The German racial idea, which the Jews are trying to turn upside down, strives to advance the racially superior, that is, the genuine and true component of a people. This does not only apply to the Germans. It recognizes that every people is God given, except for the corrupt, parasitic Jewish people. It is precisely those völkisch values which lead the Arab peoples to such heights that the Germans know how to appreciate, as is demonstrated by the scholarly writings of the young German generation who feel drawn to the Arabs. . . .

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. . . When the young people of Egypt, Syria, or Iraq have had the opportunity to spend time in Germany as students, business people, engineers, and civil servants, they found a welcome which demolished the Jewish lie about “racism.”Ah, if only all of you could be guests in this Germany! One day, Arab youth, you will face the question of your nation’s essence [Volkstums] just as we have. It is up to you to decide if, in light of your national pride, you want to remain free from alien blood. . . . In any case, Germany will not adopt any prejudices toward you as a result of Jewish lies! Rather, Germany takes part in your struggle against the English and the Jews with warm sympathy and, God willing, soon with more than that.82

Another, untitled, text from von Neurath and Winkler of November 1941 integrated anti-Communism with appeals to Islam. It identiﬁed Germany as the only power on earth that could save humanity from the Bolshevik threat. The ﬂag of the Muslims is green. The prophet’s ﬂag is green. It has been so since the times of the foundation of the “surrender” (Islam) and it should remain so until the most recent judgment brings an end of days. However, in the meantime, false prophets have emerged which trample on the green ﬂag with their feet. They have raised a red ﬂag on the mast of their presumptuousness. This is the ﬂag of murder and blood, the ﬂag of hell, sponsored by the “godless ones” as they call themselves. In Russia they have forced millions of men under their devilish yoke. Indeed, they wanted to conquer further domination in the world for the red ﬂag with hammer and sickle. He who believes in God and prays will merit death. He who owns a ﬁeld will have it taken away. He who owns a donkey will have it taken from his stall. A hut of straw and clay will be too much for its owner to allow him to keep it. The goods of a businessman will now belong to the collective. Whoever owns a store will see all his proﬁts go to the commune. The state civil servant cannot be a content ofﬁcial. He will be treated like a machine and his soul will be broken on the gears of a soulless apparatus. You outside in the desert, sons of Arabs, he will also take from you your last camel, your home and your tent. None of the commandments will apply any longer. Children raised by their parents will not be loyal to them any longer. Rather the sons will betray the fathers. The young will be free to go their own way, far from the morals of the country and disloyal to the traditions of old. There will be no more home life, no family, no longer orderly tribes. They promise instead mammoth cities with suffering the likes of which have not yet existed. In these cities you should really lose your God!83

The text stated further that “the prophet of Bolshevism is England!”

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Was it not England who brought the Russians to Iran, a peaceful Muslim country that is friends to all Arabs? Did not English power force Egypt to open diplomatic relations with the USSR, something that none of you thought or desired? The ﬁrst deeds of these “prophets” are to announce their “God.” More will follow only too quickly! . . . As far as you look, you will ﬁnd only one power which resists the devil on this earth. It is Italy’s ally, Germany! With heroic courage and powerful force it has already gone into the hell of the monster, seized it and taken its measure. . . . Only Germany can save the world and it will also save you and your religion from subjugation under the threat of the red ﬂag.84

The leaﬂet urged Arabs to think hard about who “your true friends are” and to do their duty for family, people, religion, and tradition. It concluded by quoting from the Koran: “Do not fear, for He [Allah] knows what you do not know! For in addition He declares that victory is near.”85 The third of the Neurath-Winkler texts dealt with “The future of the Egyptian economy.” It applied National Socialist “anticapitalism” to local circumstances. Why, the authors asked, in view of their centuries-old civilization and agriculture, were the Egyptian people impoverished? The answer:“Money, capital, and speculation dominate the world rather than the law of labor and of blood.” Unnamed representatives of “high ﬁnance” undermined economic attempts to satisfy the welfare of the community. They sought “proﬁt for a small clique of international beneﬁciaries” more preoccupied with stock exchanges than the production of cotton for its own sake. Now “the leader of the new Europe” respected the needs of the countries that grow, for example, cotton, wheat, and olive oil. In contrast to ﬁnancial manipulations by “Jewish agents,” this new (Nazi-dominated) economy regulated production and supply for years in advance. In Germany, “the power of ﬁnancial speculation has been broken. Labor and performance are again the true sources of wealth.” As a free country, Egypt needed to decide “if it wants to remain caught in the chains of AngloJewish capitalism” or if it would rather have an economy that restored order and human bonds. Didn’t the Egyptians want the “fruits of your labor to beneﬁt” them rather than foreigners? “Since the time of the Pharoahs, it was foreigners, Greeks, Romans, Turks, and the English who took the wealth of your country and of its inhabitants. But now, Egyptians, the day will come where you will live for yourselves and your land will be fruitful for you!”86 The proposed leaﬂet adapted the themes of right-wing and nationalist “German anticapitalism” to the Egyptian context.

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American ofﬁcials, aware of Nazi propaganda efforts, began to fashion a response. On November 14, 1942, the OWI Overseas Operations Branch in Washington issued a Weekly Propaganda Directive regarding Nazi propaganda in the Middle East. Among other things, it ordered that Voice of America programs “must speak to the people of Palestine with greater tact and caution than elsewhere in the Middle East.” The directive reﬂected a view among OWI ofﬁcials that successful appeals to Arabs precluded support for Zionism. The directive’s key sections read as follows: 1. Spoken and written words must alike be guided by an honest acceptance of the fact that the subject of Zionist aspirations cannot be mentioned, inasmuch as any serious outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling which might result among the Arab peoples in this area would jeopardize our strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. 2. Equally taboo, at present, is any mention of a Jewish army. 3. It must be remembered that, as a whole, the Jews are staunchly supporting the cause of the United Nations: the Arabs are not. Therefore, our words must be addressed primarily to Moslem and Christian Arabs, especially in view of the effectiveness of enemy propaganda. 4. Quote Hitler’s own observations in regard to alien races and cultures, and hold them up to ridicule and scorn. Stress the Paganism of our enemies and embroider our comments with biblical and Koranic phrases of denunciation.87

In view of the importance placed on Koranic quotations in Nazi propaganda, it was notable that the OWI directive did not suggest challenging the interpretation offered in Nazi broadcasts. One OWI recommendation was to contrast “the terrible consequences of German rule upon her own allies and in the occupied countries with accounts of the beneﬁts to be reaped by all people when victory is ours.” American broadcasts, the directive continued, should “underscore the certainty of our victory. Here is our opportunity to show strength, a quality admired above all others by the Moslem world.” Broadcasts should also stress American “philanthropic and educational enterprises in the past, which have beneﬁtted Jews, Christians and Moslems alike,”and emphasize that “rewards are to be expected as the peoples of Palestine” became more familiar with American technological accomplishments and political ideals of “freedom of all peoples.” Americans understood the common “love of Moslems, Jews and Christians for the Holy City of Jerusalem.” Referring to “a common tradition of religious toleration” among Muslims and Americans would work in the Americans’ favor. Indeed, the United States could build its “best propaganda upon this common heritage.”88

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The OWI’s “greater tact and caution” and its refusal to mention the subject of Zionism is an example of what the historian Shlomo Aronson has called the traps into which Jews fell during the war.89 Rather than directly confront Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, the OWI memo advocated an American political warfare that distanced itself from Zionism. The author(s) of the memo assumed that Nazism’s anti-Zionist propaganda had struck a responsive chord among “the Arab peoples.” Hence American denunciations of Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews in Europe as well as American support for “Zionist aspirations”could “not be mentioned”as this would “jeopardize our strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean.” Allied propaganda should try to convince the Arabs that the Germans had a broad, not narrow, understanding of the meaning of “anti-Semitism,” that is, that it was a form of racism directed against Arabs, Persians, and Muslims as well as against the Jews. Although the OWI ofﬁcials referred to a “common culture of religious toleration” in “Moslem and American culture,” they did not advocate a direct confrontation with the antiSemitic propaganda coming from Berlin. Judging from a report on Axis propaganda in the Muslim world published in December 1941, it is clear that military intelligence ofﬁcials in Washington had acquired a basic understanding of the subject. The Arabs were united in their desire “to free their world from the domination of French and British masters. Arabs in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Iraq are apparently blinded to Italian imperialism in Libya and Ethiopia and to German domination of Europe by their anxiety to get rid of British control.” This blindness arose both from a desire to “play all European powers off against each other” and “from a naivete which assumes that anyone who is against Britain is automatically a friend of the Moslems. They fail to realize that, in case of a British defeat, there would be a substitution of Axis for British imperialism.” “Dislike and mistrust of Britain” was strong “throughout the Arab world, as well as in Iran and India,” for two reasons. “One is British support of the Jews in Palestine and of other minorities for the apparent purpose of dividing and ruling the Arab states; the other is the reluctance of Britain to grant independence to mandated territories.” Arab mistrust of Britain in view of promises “broken in the past” made it “easy for Axis propaganda to stir up Arab feeling.”90 The report addressed the way German Arabic radio broadcasts were playing on anti-imperial sentiments in the Arab world.“The Zeesen radio has lately been giving unusual attention to the exile and persecution of Arab leaders by

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Britain and this cannot help but have considerable effect upon the Arabs.” The report cited two sources for the growth of anti-American sentiment in the Arab world. First there was “the expression by American public ofﬁcials of sympathy with political Zionism.” Such expressions led Arabs, especially in Palestine and Syria, “to suspect the United States of siding with the Jews against the Arabs in Palestine.” Second, the “increasingly close alliance [of the United States] with Britain has led the Arabs to believe that we support Britain’s policies in the Arab world.” The Indians as well had become critical of the United States due to the exclusion of Indian independence from the clauses of the Atlantic Charter. These factors were “being fully exploited by the Zeesen radio broadcasts to the Near East and India as evidence of the hypocritical attitude of the United States in preaching independence and self-determination for minorities, on the one hand, while supporting British imperialism, on the other.”91 The discussion of “anti-Jewish feeling” in the report expressed American ambiguities about the issue. Acknowledging that anti-Semitism (that is, hostility to Jews) has had “an important effect on the Arabs” in Syria and Saudi Arabia, the author(s) conﬁdently asserted that there could be “no doubt that the situation created by the Zionist program in Palestine has caused the position of Jews to deteriorate throughout the Arab world.” In North Africa, however, antiJewish feeling was distinct from the Palestinian problem. “Ever since the Arab invasion [of North Africa], the Jews have been a despised element of the population, and this antipathy has been increased since the nineteenth century by the undoubted part which the Jews have played in facilitating foreign control of both French and Spanish Morocco.” The passage, by implying that anti-Semitic sentiment had some basis in the actions of the Jews themselves may have belied the existence of anti-Semitism among some American military intelligence ofﬁcials.92 Yet the report also noted that “Zeesen has recently been reading antiJewish passages from the Koran, emphasizing that the Jews are ‘enemies of Islam.’” While Axis propaganda could not utilize anti-French sentiment “as long as German-controlled Vichy retains holdings in the Arab East,” Axis anti-Bolshevism struck a chord among the educated and propertied classes, convincing Arabs that the Germans were “engaged in saving capitalist civilization from the menace of Bolshevism,” and that a Nazi regime would “not seriously damage their position, whereas a Bolshevik regime would exterminate them and the system under which they are accustomed to live.” Axis propaganda, according to the report, depicted the British as enemies of Islam. It nourished anti-Chris-

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tian bias, nationalist xenophobia, and concern for Muslim minorities in Russia. Yet the author(s) thought it “doubtful whether such ridiculous appeals to presumed Moslem ignorance are going to help the Axis cause.”93 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 “AngloJudeo-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-

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trop “in the course of which matters of great importance to the future of the Arab world were discussed. The Führer 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 Führer 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 11,” 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.”95 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.1 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

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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 Weizsäcker, 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

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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 (Ortsgruppenleiter) 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-Oberführer in 1938 and Brigadenführer in January 1941. On March 18, 1944, he entered military service as a Hauptsturmführer in the Waffen SS. As we will see, Husseini’s contacts with other SS ofﬁcials extended to cooperation with Heinrich Himmler himself.7 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.8 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

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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. On March 24, Ribbentrop issued guidelines for propaganda aimed speciﬁcally at the United States, which would apply to press and radio propaganda sent to the United States, to German-occupied Europe, and to neutral countries abroad, including those in the Middle East.11 A propaganda assault on President Franklin Roosevelt was at its core. Roosevelt’s goal was “world domination”and entailed subjecting Latin America to “Yankee imperialism”and inher-

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iting the British Empire. He was “the sick man in the White House” who was “not psychologically normal.” As a result of his paralysis he “suffered from complexes, delusions of persecution, megalomania, dreams of world domination, and views himself as an apostle in this world.” Because American society was composed of “all races and peoples, among them a high percentage of Negroes, mixed breeds, and Jews” the “formation of a decisive national will” was not possible. American domestic institutions could not “withstand serious blows.” Its people did not want the war. They would awaken, demand an accounting, and direct “their rage at Roosevelt and the war mongers, especially the Jews.” The United States was “the land of the bluff.” It did not have “impregnable strength.” The current century would not be “an American century” because the United States lacked “creative cultural power” and was “a soulless civilization.”12 In this directive Ribbentrop again assigned to Roosevelt primary responsibility for the war: he had rushed into it out of personal ambition, lust for power, and an understanding that he was unable to solve America’s domestic economic and social problems. Roosevelt was lying when he claimed to be ﬁghting for democracy and freedom. He was in an alliance with the British Empire,“the century-long oppressor of peoples (Ireland, India, Palestine, Jamaica, Egypt, Iraq, etc.), as well as with Soviet Russia, that is, the most bloody dictatorship and enemy of democracy (Soviet invasion of Finland).” While eliminating the free market economy at home, Roosevelt was “opening America’s door to Bolshevism.” “Roosevelt’s war” was not in the American national interest but instead served “the Jewish position in the world.” Roosevelt was “the advocate of world Jewry” and was “surrounded with Jewish advisers.” Due to its “complete domination of the American people, world Jewry” hoped to regain the “world position” it had lost in Europe from its base in America. Although World War II would result in an enormous “economic and social crisis . . . the American Jew” avoided combat while making “money off the war.” In any case, the United States was going to lose the war because it had to divide its forces between the Atlantic and Paciﬁc and was ﬁghting at huge distances. The “huge tonnage in shipping”needed to bring troops and materials to Europe, Africa, and Asia “will never be available.” A landing in Europe, as in 1917, “absolutely cannot take place.” The United States would lose “a two-front war.” The efforts of “Mr. Roosevelt and his Jews to force the American people” to stop the Axis were in vain.

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“All of America’s efforts are hopeless.”13 In other words, although the Jews had been powerful enough to drive the United States into the war against its own best interests, the American war effort was doomed to failure.14 As the Nazis adapted these general lines of attack to the circumstances of the Middle East, Allied ofﬁcials tried to assess the impact of the propaganda barrage in the region. On January 8, 1942, Miles Lampson sent the Foreign Ofﬁce in London a cable entitled “Growth of Anti-Semitism in Egypt.”15 The report betrayed his own genteel anti-Semitism.16 The Jews, he claimed, had “long enjoyed a privileged situation in Egypt” due to “intimate relations with inﬂuential authorities including the Palace.” In the prewar years, “the Palestine question began to create feeling against the Jews,” which reached “considerable dimensions during the last Palestine rebellion,” that is, the Palestine revolt of 1936– 39. He accused the Jews in Egypt of attempting to “bribe the press” to moderate its anti-Jewish offensive and to increase its attacks on the British.“No effort was made by the Jewish community to prevent this deﬂection of popular hostility from themselves to us. In spite of the relative silence in the press, feeling against the Jews was stirred by Palestinian refugees arriving here and by various Moslem societies which naturally espoused warmly the cause of their coreligionists in Palestine. Italo-German propaganda of course made the most of the Palestinian situation to stir up the Egyptians against the Jews and ourselves.”17 Lampson did not elaborate on what the Jews in Palestine or Egypt could have done to prevent “this deﬂection of popular hostility” onto Britain. Nor did he offer evidence that Egyptian Jews were bribing Egyptian newspapers. Lampson did not reject or criticize anti-Semitism, nor did he acknowledge its absurdity. “After the outbreak of the war anti-Jewish feeling [in Egypt] received a great impetus owing to the widespread allegation” that “various local Jews employed as military ofﬁcers or civilian ofﬁcials”ran the economic side of Britain’s headquarters “with the result that the Jews were getting most of the army orders,” that is, local purchasing contracts. “It was widely asserted that it was impossible for a Moslem to get an order without going through a Jew.” Lampson did not determine if the ﬁrst assertion was true or, if so, what was objectionable about a Muslim having to go “through a Jew” to do business with the British army. He continued, “I did not fail to represent to our military authorities the danger of this situation, and ﬁnally steps were taken to establish a Joint

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Anglo-Egyptian Committee for Co-ordination of Purchases in Egypt.” There Egyptian complaints could be “ventilated”and the ground was thus “cleared for better understanding.”18 Lampson viewed the situation as dangerous for British interests because he believed anti-Semitism was widespread in Egypt and that the presence of Jews assisting the British reinforced existing stereotypes and prejudices. “There can be no doubt,” he wrote, “that 90% of the Egyptians, including their government, believe that the Jews are mainly responsible for shortages and high prices of essentials of life. Enemy propaganda has naturally been quick to utilize this belief and to represent the Jews as acting as British agents to deprive the people of food supplies in favor of themselves and of British troops.” He concluded that “anti-Semitism created by the Palestinian situation and intensiﬁed by Jewish monopolizing tendencies during the war, has certainly now become a more or less permanent factor in Egypt.”19 Lampson did not entertain the possibility that a previously existing animus against Jews may have been a cause as well as a result of the “the Palestinian situation.” He had become increasingly worried about King Farouk’s sympathies for the Axis and his willingness to tolerate or even encourage ﬁfth column activity in Egypt.20 On February 4, 1942, the crisis came to a head. The British ambassador, with orders from London, surrounded Farouk’s palace with tanks and armored cars and told the king that he could either abdicate his throne or appoint a new prime minister, namely, Nahas Pasha, who was favorable to the Allies.21 Farouk appointed Nahas Pasha. For many Egyptian nationalists, the events of February 4 represented unacceptable interference in Egypt’s internal affairs. From the Allies’ point of view, they were essential to prosecuting the war and part of the ﬁght against fascism and the reactionary forces in Egypt that sympathized with the Axis powers. Lampson’s reports to the Foreign Ofﬁce in London assessed the interaction of the war between the Allies and the Axis and domestic politics in Egypt and in the Middle East. His memos also speciﬁed where in Egyptian politics and society the sources of pro-Axis sentiment were strongest. He sought to support the pro-British stance of Egyptian Prime Minister Nahas Pasha in opposition to the pro-Italian and possibly pro-German sympathies of King Farouk. In his review of the political developments of 1941 sent on March 10, 1942, Lampson wrote that British success in Libya and Abyssinia led to a “swing of popular feeling in our favour” in Egypt, yet German-Italian successes in March 1941 in the

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Mediterranean caused “uncertainty.” The Italian and German advances in North Africa in April 1941, preceded by the Iraqi coup d’état of March 1941, “created fresh apprehension as to the security of our Eastern Front,” one that was also fostered by radio broadcasts from Ankara. He was pleased to report that Egypt’s new prime minister, Nahas Pasha, had sought to curb the inﬂuence of the former Egyptian prime minister (1936, and 1939 – 40), Ali Maher, by having him arrested. He also banished Hassan al-Banna, “the leader of the Akwan al Moslemin, a widespread fanatical organization,” to Qena in Upper Egypt and arrested Ahmed Hussein, the president of the Young Egypt Society. Yet German and Italian advances in spring 1942, including the crossing of the Egyptian frontier by German troops, “put new heart into the ﬁfth columnists in the country, and created an atmosphere of extreme pessimism which furnished just the right medium for their work.” Lampson expressed concern about the appearance of “a number of inﬂammatory pamphlets” urging an Egyptian anti-British revolt but also wrote that Prime Minister Nahas Pasha had taken a “courageous line” and “did much to calm the timorous.”22 In Berlin, German diplomats also kept a close eye on developments in Cairo. On April 11, the German ambassador in Rome, Hans Georg von Mackenson, in a memo to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, described Ali Maher as “the closest political adviser and trusted aid of King Farouk, who is seen as the strongest ﬁgure among the antiEnglish currents in Egypt.”23 Lampson referred to the “nefarious” role of Ali Maher, whose “wicked advice . . . misled the young King Farouk” and in so doing “was the cause of all the resultant evils from which the country and we were now suffering. It was Ali Maher who, working on his young [twenty-two years old in 1942] and impressionable sovereign, had perverted King Farouk and turned him against us.” Yet in February 1942, Nahas Pasha had challenged and curtailed Ali Maher’s inﬂuence.24 This was welcome news as the “central feature of the Egyptian political situation during 1941, as in the past, had been the unsatisfactory attitude of the Palace,” that is, the willingness of King Farouk to lend support to antiBritish and pro-Axis forces. Lampson reported that the “National Islamic party [Young Egypt], the Moslem Brethren, the Young Men’s Moslem Association and other reactionary Moslem societies, consistently worked against us with Palace encouragement.” Al Azhar University, with support from the king and the university rector,“Sheikh Al Maraghi,”had “played a similar part.”The Egyptian political leader Ali Maher, “though forced to work behind the scenes, was

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notoriously the spider in this web of anti-British intrigue.” As long as Farouk remained “under the inﬂuence of this evil symbol of anti-British activity in his country, it was hopeless to expect that any Government under the existing regime could act whole-heartedly with us.”25 In several other March dispatches, Lampson discussed “considerable agitation at Al Azhar University of an Anti-Wafd and anti-British nature” and attempts to “enlist reactionary Moslem feeling in the country against us and the Wafd.”26 Lampson thought Mohammed Mustafa-el-Maraghi, the rector of Al Azhar University, before and during the war had played “an important but unobtrusive role in Egyptian politics.”As a “religious tutor” to King Farouk he had acquired “considerable inﬂuence over his young pupil” and had fostered “the conservative tendencies apparent in the policy of the Palace.” As rector, he had made Al Azhar University into a “stronghold of the anti-Wafd student movement. . . . The political activities of this ambitious divine have recently caused concern among the more progressive elements in the country.”27 When the war began in Europe in September 1939, the German embassies in Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem were closed, severely curtailing the Third Reich’s possibilities for regular, well-informed political reporting. Nonetheless, the Foreign Ministry in Berlin and German intelligence services continued to follow trends in Egypt, and they reached conclusions broadly similar to Lampson’s. On April 8, 1942, German military intelligence reported that the mood in Cairo was “emphatically hostile to England.” “Thousands” attended a large demonstration and cheered Rommel as a great general who would “liberate Egypt from the foreign yoke.” The German military High Command ordered the leadership of the Africa Corps to “strengthen the mood of hostility to England in parts of the Egyptian population through intensiﬁed propaganda” on the radio and in printed material. Its core theme should be that “the German soldier under the leadership of General Rommel will bring about Egypt’s liberation from English domination.” Among the leaﬂets to be distributed were those by Hans Alexander Winkler, regarded as a “good observer of the ArabicEgyptian mentality.”28 Following the arrest of Ali Maher Pasha, German intelligence reported that he had been “the closest political adviser and trusted aid of King Farouk, who is seen as the strongest ﬁgure among the anti-English currents in Egypt.” German ofﬁcials agreed with Lampson that the core of proAxis support lay among the Islamists in Young Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, Ali Maher, and the king and his circle.29

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Alexander Kirk’s decision in these months to expand monitoring of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language radio broadcasts should be understood in light of the strategic importance he attributed to the Middle East in World War II. Kirk’s view of the Middle East’s importance to the outcome of the war was made clear in a remarkable cable he sent to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on February 16. Kirk wrote that he needed to know if “this part of the world is being laughed off as a factor in the defeat of Hitlerism” due to the demands of the war in the Paciﬁc following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and other advances in Asia or if this was the result “merely from lack of a practical realistic concept.”30 Hitler could only be hit from Russia, England, “and here.” Kirk bluntly wrote that “British bungling[,] . . . a lack of uniﬁed command, defective strategy and dilatory methods have constituted the chief factors of defeat.” All of these factors “have brought us to the present situation and as a consequence this place [Egypt and Cairo] is now wide open from the land, from the sea and from the air” to a possible advance by Rommel’s tank armies. The Middle East had “the richest oil ﬁelds”; made possible communications to India, China, and Japan; and could serve as “the springboard for offensives against Germany and Italy,” which had been “germinating the hell to which we have been reduced.” If the region was to be laughed off, his job would be “mostly one of discreet preparation for a possible evacuation of Americans.” Should Hitler decide to strike in the Middle East, he would “succeed unless something is done immediately either to ward off or to oppose him when he does.” If the war was to be won, the United States had to bring victory about “not only with material but with the domination of our judgment in the strategy of selecting the time and place for the inﬂiction of direct and ruthless blows against the Axis Powers, for which the world has been too long waiting.” The Middle Eastern theater of the war would have a decisive impact on its outcome.31 On April 18, in another dispatch to Welles and Hull, Kirk summarized themes of Axis Arabic broadcasts during the past six months. In this and in subsequent dispatches, he demonstrated a remarkable ability to convey the Axis messages in their own terms. Kirk correctly pointed out that the broadcasts focused on Middle Eastern themes but also followed “the line taken in Axis transmissions in German, Italian, English and French” that were “being monitored in the United States.” German propaganda broadcasts, he wrote, attempted to convince the Arabs of the following: the Axis countries had “a natural sympathy

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with the Arabs and their great civilization, the only one comparable with the civilization introduced by the New Order in Europe, which is now being suppressed by ‘British Imperialism,’ ‘Bolshevik barbarity,’ and ‘Jewish greed’ and more recently ‘American materialism.’” Indeed, “one of the main German war aims” was “to release Arab countries from the oppressive grip of Anglo-Bolshevik Imperialism.” It was necessary for “the Arab countries to aid their liberators by uniting against the common enemy.” They could do so with conﬁdence because “the Allies ‘despise but fear’ the Arabs and each day German victory and the breakup of the British Empire were becoming more certain.” In the scramble that would “follow this imminent British collapse” when “Americans, Russians and Jews” would “try to seize the countries now held by Britain, the Arabs may ﬁnd themselves with new masters if they do not move quickly.” They could never be Britain’s friends because “her promises are false.” Britain had “destroyed Arab unity and murdered Arab patriots; she has handed Palestine over to the Jews and loosed the Communists over Iran and Iraq.” The Arabs remembered “the generous promises made by Britain in the last war.” Those promises were broken, and “British oppression” continued into the current period.32 Kirk noted the blend of secular and religious appeals in the Axis broadcasts. They told listeners that “before Islam” the Arabs had been “divided against themselves. When Mohammed united them they overthrew the Persians, Romans and Jews as they can now overthrow the British, Russians and Americans.” Now they would “be led by their great leaders the Mufti [Haj Amin el-Husseini] and Rashid Ali [Kilani] who are continually exchanging congratulatory messages with Hitler and Mussolini.” These two leaders were “ﬁghting for Arab freedom” and frequently discussed the future of Arab countries with the Axis leaders. The Axis sympathy for the Arabs was understandable given the Arab contributions to civilization and culture. It was only necessary “for the British criminals to be annihilated for Islam to share the world with the Axis.” As horrible as it seemed to any devout believer and to the Axis radio commentators, there were “Mohammedans willing to sell themselves to Britain and, by so doing, prove false to Islam.” They included “‘Rabbi’ Abdullah [King Abdullah], the buffoon of Transjordan; the traitor Nuri el-Said of Iraq and the Sheikh Tajeddine of Syria.” They would fall with their masters. An Axis victory in the Middle East would be “a bad day for traitors when the victorious and righteous liberators of Islam arrive” assisted by “a wide-spread revolt throughout the entire Near East” by the Arabs.33

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The subjects most frequently treated in Axis broadcasts from November 1941 to April 1942 included the Jews, Bolshevism, and events in individual Arab countries as well as in Turkey and Iran. In these months and for the remainder of the war, the broadcasts also commented on selected political events of the day concerning both the course of the war and political news in the Middle East. Axis radio also, as Kirk put it, attacked the Jews “ad nauseam.” Axis Arabic radio broadcasts reported that the Jews, backed by Britain and the United States, were “the arch-enemies of Islam.” They controlled American ﬁnance and forced Roosevelt to pursue a policy of aggression. Roosevelt and Churchill, though criminals themselves, were “playthings in the hands of the Jewish ﬁends who are destroying civilization.” It was known that “the White House ‘is full of Jews’ and most eminent ﬁgures among the Allies in the Near East are Jews.” The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was an “aspirant to the throne of Palestine.” He was “determined that Palestine, Syria and Transjordan will be united as a pure Jewish centre that will control the whole of the Middle East and, eventually, the world.” America and Britain supported this plan. The Arabs, who had “lost their lands and wealth to the rapacious Jewish settlers in Palestine and their liberty to the British, will now be deported to suffer famine and discomfort in lands even more barren than those palmed off on them in Palestine.” Five million Jews were soon to be brought to Palestine. The Jews promised to raise an army of 20,000 men “ostensibly to assist the Allies, but in reality to wipe out the Arabs should the Germans advance.” In fact, both before and during the war and the Holocaust, Britain severely restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine.34 The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, ofﬁcially (but seldom) known as the Treaty of Alliance between His Majesty, in Respect of the United Kingdom, and His Majesty the King of Egypt, required the United Kingdom to withdraw all troops from Egypt except those necessary to protect the Suez Canal and its surroundings, that is, all but 10,000 troops plus auxiliary personnel. The United Kingdom would also supply and train Egypt’s army and assist in its defense in case of war. Nazi propagandists understood the value of connecting a particular name and face to an otherwise impersonal international Jewish conspiracy. In their propaganda aimed at Germans and Europeans, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Baruch, Samuel Rosenman, and Herbert Lehmann were the names and faces, literally the poster images of the New York–Washington, D.C., branch of the world Jewish conspiracy that preoccupied the Nazi imagination.

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In the Arabic-language propaganda, the name and face of Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Congress, became the name and face of the Zionist dimension of the plot. A British chemist, Weizmann had worked with British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to fashion the Balfour Declaration of 1917, according to which Britain would “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” During World War II and the Holocaust, he was one of the Jewish leaders who tried and failed to convince the British to allow more Jewish immigration to Palestine and who were equally unsuccessful in convincing the British or Americans to bomb the extermination camp at Auschwitz. He was one of the founders of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later served as president of Israel. The Nazis depicted Weizmann as the key Zionist power broker who was able to make the Allies obey his every command. The blend of Islamist and secular messages was equally apparent in Axis anti-Bolshevik propaganda. It offered “fantastic accounts of Russian losses and failures on the Eastern Front” and took pleasure in contrasting “Germany’s profound respect for all religions, especially the noble and high-minded Islamic one, with the barbaric atheism of the Communists.” Here Axis radio introduced a recurring, and false, assertion, namely that the Communists’ hatred was “especially concentrated on Moslems—4,000,000 Moslems having been butchered in Russia and many mosques destroyed. The ﬁgure of four million murdered Moslems was frequently repeated on Axis radio. All Islamic ideas and traditions” were “contrary to Bolshevism and to British capitalism, and yet Britain can ruthlessly expose the Arab countries to the ravages of Russian soldiery and the British are too weak to control them.” England was “now completely under the control of Russia and, in return for Russian help, not only Iran but Iraq and other Arab countries unnamed will be handed over to the brutal Bolsheviks.” American and British aid to the Soviet Union would be no more helpful than it was to other countries now occupied by Nazi Germany, for example, Poland, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece. British and Russian reports on German losses on the Eastern Front were “wildly inaccurate.” Germany was “winning easily, strengthened by the force of her desire to save the Arab countries from Communism.” It was also “necessary for the Arabs to rise up against Communism.”35 Axis radio depicted an Arab and Muslim world suffering from “British cruelty and exploitation.” “In spite of the fact that Egypt is the oldest civilization,

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the British see the Egyptians as a backward race needing foreign control.” The broadcasts, as summarized by Kirk, denounced Egyptian politicians, such as Prime Minister Nahas Pasha, who supported Britain and denounced the arrest of Ali Maher Pasha as “proof of the British stranglehold on the new government.” Iran was “second only to Egypt in the suffering that has been inﬂicted by ruthless British Imperialism and now that she is being ravaged by Godless Communists she is fast becoming Victim No. 1. Iran is a mutilated body trampled on by the feet of the British and the Russians who struggle to double-cross each other.” Soon all of Iran would be in the Bolsheviks’ grip, and that would offer further proof of “the British collapse.” Moreover, according to the broadcasts, Iran’s cabinet following the overthrow of the Kilani government in May 1941 was “full of Jews and Jewish greed is devouring the country.” Economic difﬁculties in Iran as well as in Egypt were due to British and Russian policies.36 In Iraq, the current prime minister, Nuri el Said, was an “arch-traitor” who would “meet the same fate as Nashashibi [Palestinian leader opposed to the Husseini clan] who was killed by an Arab patriot in a rising against the British and Jews.” In Iraq and elsewhere, “Jewish greed” was “exploiting the populace and rousing indignation.” The Jews were “looting the country.”37 Axis radio praised Saudi Arabia as one Arab country “that appears still to be reasonably free from the evils brought on innocent Arabs by the British” and applauded what it called King Ibn Saud’s “contempt for Britain.”38 Britain was the cause of riots, pillage, and famine in Syria. There too, Jews were “exploiting the suffering people” and were “ﬂocking into the country.” The Jews planned to separate Lebanon from Syria and unite it “with Palestine as an area for Jewish exploitation.” Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French forces, had written to Chaim Weizmann to promise his support to the Jews at the expense of the Arabs in Syria.39 As for Turkey, it was menaced by Britain and Russia. Only cooperation with the Axis could save it “from eventual Russian occupation condoned by Britain.” Germany, on the other hand, had a policy of “Turkey for the Turks.” Although the British had forced Afghanistan to expel German and Italian nationals, “her relations with the Axis remain cordial because of the deep friendliness existing between this country and the Axis countries.” If Afghanistan does not revolt against the British, it would surely “fall victim to Communist frightfulness.”40 Kirk reported that Axis radio painted a grim picture of life in Palestine. It was “swimming in a pool of blood.” Its people lived “in an atmosphere of shame

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and misery” and were “ruled by a reign of terror dominated by the brutal British and the dirty Jews.” The British violated the Arab “holy places,” spread famine and poverty, and brutally ruled the Arabs, whom they would soon deport. The Jews were intending to combine Palestine with Syria and Transjordan in a “huge Jewish Home.” Britain’s main aim in the Middle East was “to annihilate the Arabs entirely and to aid in this purpose large numbers of Jews are being enlisted in a Palestine army.” (The idea that the Jews were going to participate in the annihilation of the Arabs was a Middle Eastern counterpart to the Nazi assertion that Jews were ﬁghting World War II in Europe with the intent of annihilating the German people.)41 In addition to Britain and the Jews, “a new oppressor in the shape of the U.S.A.” was soon to arrive. It was known “that when the Americans seize the British Empire they intend handing over Palestine to their masters—the Jews.”42 The themes of these broadcasts persisted throughout the war. They included the following: Arab and Muslim victimization at the hands of the Jews, British, Soviets, and then the Americans; the expectation of Axis victory and Allied defeat; denunciations of Arab leaders who sided with the Allies; predictions of murderous and expansionist policies by the Jews against the Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere; and support for Arab independence against British rule combined with religious appeals to Muslims. On the same day that he sent his summary of Axis Arabic broadcasts, Kirk sent the ﬁrst of more than 150 weekly wartime dispatches about Axis radio to the Ofﬁce of Secretary of State in Washington. These “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” were verbatim English translations of Axis broadcasts of the previous week. The dispatches amounted to 15 to 30 pages of text each week or about 3,000 pages in all. Copies regularly went to American embassies and consulates in Jerusalem, Beirut, and Jidda. In Washington, the texts were circulated to the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services (OSS), military intelligence agencies, and the Ofﬁce of War Information. In this book I will be drawing on representative selections from “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” an enterprise noteworthy for its faith in the power of repetition. The Cairo embassy dispatches included the date and time of broadcasts. For example, in his April 18 dispatch covering April 10 –16, 1942, Kirk reported that on April 10 at 7:30 p.m. Cairo time the Germany in Arabic station broadcast “The British, the Jews and the Communists Are the Common Enemies of the Arabs.” The broadcast asserted that the present war had “let the Arabs know who is friend and who is foe.”Axis powers “show the greatest possible sympathy

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towards the Arabs and towards their struggle for liberty and independence,” while “enemies of the Arabs are haggling amongst themselves as to who can seize the right apple.” But the Allies took a different stance. Britain has shown her enmity to the Arabs. . . . The British committed one of the worst crimes against the Arabs by bringing the Jews to their country and giving them every support, holding them superior to the Arabs and manifesting their sympathy towards the establishment of a Jewish Kingdom in the Arab countries. This was done by the British and the Jews because of their lack of insight, but they will shortly learn how sadly they were mistaken. The Zionist world movement depends on Britain in order that this movement may realize its oppressive hopes, and the Jews have plotted with Britain to strangle Islam. Not only that, but the Jewish movement also enjoys great support from the U.S.A. and the Jews in America have supreme inﬂuence. President Roosevelt is a toy in Jewish hands and he has dragged his country to war bowing to Jewish orders. He has sent his son as a personal envoy to Palestine in order to assure the Jews that President Roosevelt is whole-heartedly supporting them and that he is a follower of their religion. England has placed herself in the hands of the Communists and of the Jews, and they, the Jews, have greatly rejoiced at the new ally, hoping that they would ﬁnd a great supporter in the Communists, but Communist Russia is being overridden by the Germans, and the Soviet Army is either being annihilated or utterly crushed. Neither American help nor British aid will be of any use to Russia and this we shall very soon be able to witness. Arab countries should ﬁnd consolation against British oppression, Communist tyranny and Jewish ambitions inasmuch that there are still some powerful countries which carry the banner of truth and justice, and at the head of these is Germany and her powerful Army, not to mention Japan with her overwhelming power.43

At the time Britain was restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Franklin Roosevelt had postponed a formal decision in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine until after the end of the war. The Soviet Union, on the whole, did not focus on the mass murder of the Jews on the Eastern Front. Nevertheless, at this moment of complete Jewish powerlessness, the Arabic broadcasts from Berlin skillfully adapted the general Nazi propaganda line about Jewish domination of the anti-Hitler coalition to a radical Arab and Islamist view of events in the Middle East. A broadcast of April 12 praised the “glorious achievements of the German troops” and denounced “atrocities committed by the Russians against the Moslems in the Soviet Union.” The Bolsheviks had “continually fought Islam because Islam is a sound religion which preached principles completely differ-

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ent and contradictory to all Bolshevik principles.”44 Germany and Italy, on the other hand, were allies and friends, a friendship manifest in praise for some Arab leaders. Also on the twelfth,“Italy in Arabic” asserted that “the Arabs have one leader and he despises the British and deﬁes the threats of British forces— he is the Mufti,” that is, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Moreover, “Palestine is an Arab country and will remain an Arab country.”45 On April 29, the Voice of Free Arabism (VFA), which by now had a well-deserved reputation for stridency, announced that Husseini and Kilani had been “warmly received everywhere in Italy.” The station seized “the opportunity to congratulate the Mufti and Rashid Ali on their escape from the hands of the criminal British. We pray that God will keep them well for the sake of Arabism and of Arab freedom.”46 In a broadcast of “Germany in Arabic” on April 14 entitled “Egypt and Bolshevism,” the speaker declared that Britain’s alliance with the Bolsheviks had “opened wide the gates of the Middle East” to the Communists. But “thanks to the Islamic faith of the Egyptians, which is in open conﬂict with Bolshevik teaching, and thanks to the late King Fouad” as well as to “religious leaders led by the heads of Azhar University, the Bolshevik plague has been prevented from gaining a hold in Egypt.” Reﬂecting the interweaving of religious and secular themes, the speaker argued that “Bolshevik principles are irreconcilable with Islam”and expressed conﬁdence that “the Arabs will certainly defend their religion against its enemies.”47 The coupling “Britain and the Jews” became one of the most ubiquitous phrases in the rhetorical arsenal of Axis radio propaganda. Despite AngloAmerican refusal to openly support Zionist aspirations, the April 14 broadcast entitled “Britain and the Jews” stated that “the whole Arab world is now thoroughly acquainted with the aims of the Jews, if the British and the Bolsheviks win this war. The knowledge of these aims, which are supported by the British and Americans, is the reason why the Arabs have refused to side with Britain in the present war. The Arabs realize that their freedom can only be gained by an Axis victory.” The British would be advised to “cancel their promise to the Jews.” In any case, the Jews’ hopes would not be realized “because the present war will result in the Jews being driven out of the Arab countries.”48 An Axis victory would mean not only the end of Jewish hopes for a state in Palestine but would lead to the far more extensive goal of expulsion of the approximately 700,000 Jews from the Arab countries. On April 25, VFA broadcast “Britain and the Arab Volunteers.” The speaker stated that all Arabs knew “that all who help

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Britain in the war effort are traitors to their country and their religion.” Britain alone had been responsible for Jews laying “hands on everything worthwhile in Arab countries . . . by opening doors of the Arab country to the Jews and helping them in underhand competition against the Arabs whom they bribed away from their homes.”49 On April 24, a broadcast from Germany in Arabic on “Arab Unity” urged the Arabs to reject British plans for that goal and not to forget the aim of “independence and complete freedom from British and Jews.” Despite support from “the Americans, Jews and Communists,” the British would gain nothing from such efforts. In fact, the Allies were collapsing “under the deadly blows dealt them by the Japanese and Germans.” In a striking celebration of ethnic cleansing, the announcer stated that the Japanese had “puriﬁed Eastern Asia from the dirt of the Americans.” Despite Roosevelt’s claims of great strength, “when war became a reality the American lion turned into an ostrich, and the American horse became a donkey.” The Communists also were “about to collapse and in a few months will be annihilated. The Jews thought that with their ﬁnancial intrigues and treachery, together with the British and American aid, they could turn the world upside down, but they have failed.” Their goal extended beyond Palestine into Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt. The Jews sought to penetrate “into other Arab countries to take over control of their ﬁnancial affairs.” It was vital that the Arabs understood that in spring 1942, Axis victory and with it Arab independence was “at hand.”50 As a result of the invasion of Greece in April 1941 and the subsequent occupation of the country, Nazi Germany was able to establish a shortwave radio station in Athens, and moved closer to the Middle Eastern audience. On April 25, the German station Athens in Arabic broadcast “Jews in America,” repeating anti-Semitic descriptions of the United States that by now had become familiar themes of German propaganda. According to Axis radio, the Jews in the United States owned “97% of the newspapers, 90% of the broadcast stations and all the cinemas and theatres. They also own 98% of the banks and 87% of other important industries. Thus we see that the vital life of America is being directed by the Jews for their own beneﬁt.”51 This collection of bogus statistics suggesting great exactitude combined with assertions about Jewish power was another, oftrepeated, component of the offensive. On the same day, a station calling itself the Arab Nation pursued the same theme. The United States had 7 million Jews.“One inﬂuential Jew” was “enough to demoralize a whole country to say nothing of

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what 7 million will do. They could demoralise the whole world and the rest of the planets as well. The low level to which the U.S. society has sunk can be clearly attributed to the inﬂuence of the Jews and this is instanced in American ﬁlms where prostitution, immorality and crime are depicted as acts of heroism and encouraged in the ﬁlm industry. Furthermore the Americans are well known to be slaves to money making to satisfy their physical appetite and their gluttony for food and drink.” This demoralized population of American workers would not put in long or strenuous hours in munitions factories. On the battleﬁeld, the “hard little Jap soldier whose faith is to be killed in battle so that his soul will go in peace to Heaven” met “the Yankee soldier who wallows in luxury and is soft and degenerate.”52 The Arabic broadcasts obsessively associated Franklin Roosevelt with the Jews. Indeed, a broadcast of May 27 from Athens in Arabic on “Roosevelt and the Jews” referred to “the Grand Rabbi, Roosevelt.”53 On April 27, VFA called him “the head of Zionism” who was “working for the Jews, and getting paid for her work.”54 Two days later, the Arab Nation announced that Roosevelt’s idea of peace meant that “Jewish Capitalism and British Imperialism shall dominate the world. If anyone tries to get rid of these two evils, he is immediately accused by the Anglo-Saxons that he is working against peace. We do not understand such a peace, and we want war, a destructive war which will liberate us deﬁnitely from such evils.”55 On April 29, VFA described a meeting between Alexander Kirk and the Egyptian prime minister to discuss aid to Egypt as evidence that “the Americans, or in other words, the Jews of America, intend establishing Jewish control in Egypt under guide of Lease and Lend facilities.”56 The virulent denunciations of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Jews continued in a broadcast from Athens in Arabic of April 30. Churchill and Roosevelt were “the greatest enemies of their own countries.” The Jews supported them both and “elected Roosevelt because they wanted to use him as a means of pushing America into the war.” Both leaders had “yielded to the Jewish demands, thus enabling them [the Jews] to extend their domination throughout the world.” The cowardly Jews used ﬁnancial power to attain their ends while remaining “hidden behind the scenes. The National Socialist Government, realizing the danger and realizing the evil consequences which the world would suffer from the Jews, immediately set about annihilating them before it was too late. History will record this action as one of the wisest steps ever taken.”57 This frank and public assertion of an ongoing program of “annihilating the Jews”mirrored

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similar blunt comments by Nazi leaders addressed to the domestic German audience. Doing so was intended to enhance Arab support for the Axis. As the ﬁghting in North Africa approached Egypt, Axis propaganda attacks on the Jews continued. On May 5, VFA stated that it was its “duty to keep the Arabs informed of the activities of the Jews, so that they may unite in their struggle against them.”Unfortunately, Egypt and the Egyptians had “never fully recognized the Jewish danger. . . . Egyptians allow the Jews to plunder their country and try to lay their hands on Egypt’s wealth and trade. They allow the Jews to worm their way into Egyptian administration to such an extent that the whole country became nothing more than an appetizing meal for them.Whether as doctors, lawyers, merchants or public servants, the Jews are controlling the destiny of Egypt. They dominate the Egyptian Press and the large industrial concerns.” “With their enormous power,” the Jews were exercising “a great inﬂuence in the internal and foreign policy of the country” as the Zionists tried to occupy “not only Egypt but other Arab countries.” The station urged Egyptian politicians “to resist Jewish inﬂuence and to create a solid front against the Jewish inﬁltration.” Had the Egyptians put up a more effective resistance, neither the Jews nor British “could have made of Palestine a Zionist colony.”58 On May 9, VFA returned to the theme of “Egypt and the Jews.” It expressed regret that “Egypt has not taken a ﬁrm stand” against Zionism, was not “helping her cousins the Arabs of Palestine and the neighboring countries,” and did not take “a patriotic attitude towards the Jews who have taken the wealth of Egypt.” The Jews were “the leading people” in England and had “hindered to a great extent Egypt’s attainment of freedom.” While the Zionists were trying to “occupy the whole of the Arab countries including Egypt and her neighbors,” Egypt’s willingness to assist the British was a “shameful attitude.”59 The May 12 VFA broadcast, “Palestine and the Jews,” asserted that in Palestine, the Jews were determined to throw “the Arabs out of their own country by force.” They had “spent much of their money in corrupting the British in order to have Palestine as a reward. They have also urged the U.S.A. to enter the war to help Britain for that same purpose.” Yet all this would be in vain because “this war will put an end to the British, to the Americans and the Bolsheviks including the Jews”; Jewish decisions would “remain so-much ink on paper.”60 On May 10, Athens in Arabic sent the following child-rearing advice to Egyptian mothers: “Arab mother, teach your baby to hate the British and when he grows a little bigger teach him every morning and every night that his duty is to take revenge

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on the British. Arab mother, if you give your baby a nasty medicine, tell him that it is like Britain and when you give him sweets to take away the nasty taste tell him that is like the revenge he will take on Britain. When you rock him in the cradle sing him the lullaby of revenge against Britain, and see that your baby grows up with a bitter hatred of every thing that is British.”61 On May 10, 1942, VFA informed its listeners that its purpose was to voice “the ideals of the Free Arabs, [and] to collaborate in the Arab effort against the British and the Jews.” Though broadcasting from Germany, it declared that, in fact, it was located “in the heart of the Arab world” near “the enemy who is always endeavoring to crush any movement which aims at Arab independence.” It sought to expose “the evil deeds of the English,” warn the Arabs about them, and aid the Arab struggle “to get rid of the English and the Jews.” It was “the voice of liberty which is our aim since the British violated our territory and profaned its sacred soil.” It was the voice of freedom of “the whole Arab world” and of an “Arab dignity” and freedom that had been lost and stolen “since the English with brutal force occupied our countries.” It was the voice of “the true Arab nation” and of “the fraternity and love which we used to possess before the British came and separated us into many countries.” VFA was a voice of generosity and faithfulness, strength and bravery, which had enabled Arabs “to ﬁght and defeat any nation who came against them until Britain came and made it her purpose to kill us and spoil all our efforts.” It was also the voice of revolution against humiliation and injustice, revolution for the sake of our complete independence and freedom and revolution to crush the British who occupy our countries and oppress us. Oh! Arab world the time has come for you to rise for the sake of your freedom and welfare. Stand up like a man and let there be no difference between a Syrian and an Egyptian or an Iraqi and a Palestinian. Let those who live in Arabia and in North Africa be as one, for in the veins of all Arabs runs the clean blood of Arabism which refuses to be humiliated and oppressed. Rise ye Arab nation as one man against your sole enemy, Britain. Our voice is your voice, harken to our appeal and respond to it for the hour of deliverance has struck.62

From Nazi Berlin, VFA spoke in the name of freedom, liberty, dignity, justice, fraternity, love, generosity, faithfulness, strength, bravery, and revolution against humiliation, injustice, and Britain. For the remainder of the war, Nazi propaganda to the Arabs continued to present itself as the genuine voice of antiimperialism and to speak to an “Arab nation” united by “clean blood.”

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The broadcasts continued the blend of religion and politics that was evident in the earlier Munzel programs of winter 1940–41. On June 1, Bari in Arabic broadcast “Islam and Anglo-Saxon Democracy.” Democracy was “a sweet word” that the Anglo-Saxons repeated to convince Arabs to believe that Britain was “a traditional friend of the Arabs” and that British democracy was “similar to Islamic democracy.” Yet “the British are liars when they say this, as Islamic democracy is based on justice, equality and fraternity and not on oppression, tyranny and exploitation.” There was a “great difference between false democracy and the democracy of our great leader Mohammed whose armies conquered the world and made everyone equal. . . . Islam was not only a democracy but also admitted a dictatorship based on justice and equality.” What it called “the democracies of Islam” could not be compared with “the British democracies based on oppression and persecution.” Could “the murder of the whole nation, and the driving of that nation from its homes in order to let the foreign intruder in be called democracy?” Did British democracy mean hanging nationalists, the “dragging of thousands of innocent men to prison,” and dragging nations into World War II “in order to annihilate them”? The British applied democracy to themselves, but, the broadcast implied, they did not extend it to Muslims.63 In Directive No. 30 on the Middle East, issued on May 23, Hitler assigned General Helmut Felmy, who had served in the German air force on the Sinai Front in World War I, to be the head of Special Staff F (Sonderstab F ). By the end of May, Special Staff F had about forty personnel.64 Its responsibilities included: advising and supporting the military forces of the pro-Axis Iraqi government in power since April; if possible to establish military ties to forces outside Iraq that were hostile to England; and to collect experience and information for the German military.65 In late May, Ribbentrop met with Grobba and General Felmy to discuss “the political preparations for the German march to the Arab countries.” The three agreed that the Arabs were generally hostile to England and that their political views had been inﬂuence by German radio broadcasts and leaﬂets. As a result of German willingness to issue a declaration in support of Arab independence, both Husseini and Kilani had agreed to “actively participate” in German propaganda efforts. Both had “taken measures to supply continuing material in Arabic for German radio.” Ribbentrop was conﬁdent that when a victorious German army advanced to the Arab countries, especially into Egypt, the Arabs would rise against England.66

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On June 1, in the wake of Rommel’s successful spring offensive and as the ﬁghting in North Africa moved closer to Egypt’s western border, Ribbentrop ordered an intensiﬁcation of radio and print propaganda aimed at Egypt. He speciﬁed that it stress the following themes. First, England had “robbed Egypt of its freedom,” turned it into a battleground, and tried to draw the Egyptians into the war and to sacriﬁce them for its “imperialist goals.” Second, England had cut Egypt off from the natural markets for its goods, especially cotton, and as a result the Egyptians endured hunger and economic distress. Third, the English troops behaved as if they were rulers in Egypt, had contempt for the Egyptian army, tormented the Egyptian people, and paid no attention to respecting Egyptian laws. Fourth, because of the importance of the Suez Canal and the Sudan, the English would not leave Egypt unless compelled to do so by force. Fifth, Rommel’s soldiers and those of the Axis powers were “ﬁghting for Egypt’s liberation from the English yoke,” had “no hostile intentions toward the Egyptian people,” but rather came as friends. They had “only one, single enemy: the English and the peoples helping them.” Sixth, the Egyptians needed to make “an appropriate contribution to their liberation” and should offer no support to “the British oppressors.” Seventh, the Axis powers were “friends of the whole Arab world” and would “be welcomed and greeted in Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as in Egypt, as liberators.”67 In mid-June, the broadcasts focused on Axis victories and denunciations of the Jews. On the thirteenth, VFA expressed “great pleasure” about “news of the British defeat in Libya” and denounced the Allies’“Jewish propaganda.”68 In response to reports that Jews were volunteering to ﬁght in Allied forces, on June 15 in “The Jews,” VFA stated that Jews were unable to ﬁght but rather fed “on other people’s blood” and robbed them of their wealth. “The Jews did this after the last war from 1918 to 1933. Then Nazism exposed these Jewish methods and the Jewish evil strangling the whole world.” The Arabs had been ﬁrst to “realize the British danger for they are well acquainted with the dirty tricks of this dirty race.” Jews desired a British victory because both Britain and the United States had “promised to give them a free hand to exploit the Arab people. The Arabs, on the other hand, are waiting for the hour of salvation when their bitterest enemies, namely the British and the Jews, will be crushed.”69 On June 16, a Berlin in Arabic program quoted Husseini as saying that compromise with the Jews in Palestine could “never come about, and that Arabs could never accept a compromise because they are convinced that the Jews have no right whatever to be

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in Palestine, and their presence in that country has been imposed upon the Arabs by sheer British brutal force.” Husseini expressed conﬁdence in “ultimate Axis victory,” welcomed “defeat of the common enemy, who is working together with Jewish capitalism,” and was “looking forward to the destruction of Bolshevism” followed by a “new order” of “justice, equality, liberty freedom and progress” in which Arab nations would “realize all their aspirations for their freedom and independence.”70 As the ﬁghting in the desert approached Egypt, German radio expressed optimism about the war. On June 18, VFA spoke of the “British Defeat in Libya” and predicted that an Axis offensive would continue until the British were thrown out of the Nile Valley. “Egypt,” it declared, “will never again have freedom except by annihilating the British and the Jews [and thus] putting an end to that low, brutal element.”71 The VFA broadcast of the evening of the nineteenth delivered a particularly menacing threat to Egyptian Jews. It stated that “20 Jews” met in Egypt to discuss the position of Jews “subsequent to the British defeat in Libya.” The Jews, it continued, had “every reason to be anxious because it will not be the Axis Powers who will suppress them, but the Arabs themselves. We, the Arabs, will seize the opportunity when the British are driven out of our country and will suppress the Jews. We can add to this that we know the name of every Jew who has cooperated with the British and who has fought against the Moslems. These Jews will in due course receive their just punishment.”72 On June 23, VFA again foresaw British defeat in North Africa and made further threats. Egypt and the Arab countries could “expect to see the Axis troops come to liberate them at any moment” from the British. The Axis meant the Arabs no harm. But, the broadcast declared,“we [pro-Axis Arabs] do not like the Jews because they have exploited us and plundered our resources.” It continued: “We think that any man who helps the British or the Jews is a traitor who deserves to be shot. Any person who has collaborated with the British is an enemy of the Arabs and of Arabism and does not deserve to live amongst the Arabs.” Liberty was knocking at the door. It was the Arabs’ “sacred duty to collaborate with the advancing Axis forces to drive the British from our land.” With a common enemy, the Arabs must “go forward hand in hand to crush the Anglo-Jewish Empire,” aid the Axis, not help the British in any way, and keep a close eye on those Arab “traitors” who sided with the British.73 On June 24, Berlin in Arabic asked,“Who of us Arabs has not been proud of Rommel? Who of us is not sympathizing with him?”74

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In Europe, the ability of the Nazi intelligence services to identify Jews far exceeded what they could manage in the Middle East, where any effort to locate and arrest Jews would depend on the cooperation of local collaborators. The incitement to violence against the Jews continued the following evening when VFA announced that Egypt was depending on her youth “to save her from her enemies the British and their accomplices the Jews” and to spread the message that Britain’s exit would mean Egypt’s freedom. The tasks of youth included guarding cities and public utilities so the British could not destroy them should they retreat as well as keeping an eye on the Jews. “All over the country the Jews should be watched. Every Jew’s name must be written down, together with his address and his business. The Jews must be watched carefully so that they may be wiped out at the earliest opportunity. The youth of our country must explain to workmen, laborers and farmers all over the country, that when the British leave Egypt, it will be free.” Older people who had lived under British rule “must have no place in the government of the new and free country. Government must be in the hands of youth.” Moreover, everywhere people were “asking what part they can play in wiping out the British and the Jews.” The VFA announcer requested that Egyptians in important cities like Cairo and Alexandria “write down the names of the owners of Jewish ﬁrms and of those belonging to the traitors, de Gaullists, British and Americans. In this manner, we shall be able to put our ﬁngers upon those who have sucked the blood of the nation and enslaved our country.”The “hour of liberty”was at hand. It was time for the Egyptian nation to rise, for the British were “as weak as sheep.”75 The “hour of liberty” coincided with incitement to mass violence against the Jews. As we have noted, in view of SS preparations to send an Einsatzgruppe to the Middle East, this propaganda of incitement was closely linked to actual preparations to carry out mass killings of Jews in the Middle East. On the evening of June 26, the Arab Nation station brought themes of anticapitalist resentment to bear on a discussion of “the Jews in Egypt.” It claimed that the Jews monopolized Egypt’s ﬁnancial, economical, and commercial life, as well as theaters, cinemas, and all places of entertainment. The Jews caused Egyptian businesses to go bankrupt; supported the Bolsheviks, the British, and the Masons; and they employed only Jews. Most lived a “life of luxury in Egypt” because they took money from Arab workers and left “the Egyptian nation to starve.” The station urged Egyptians “to wake up and take united action against the Jews.”76 At 9:00 p.m. on June 28, a VFA broadcast about “Jews in Egypt” de-

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clared that it was “a well-known fact that when the ship rats leave their holes and try to throw themselves in the sea, it means that the ship is about to founder and there is no hope for anyone on board. Jews, as we all know, are the rats of all nations who thrive on plundering the resources of others on the sly. Once they try to leave a country, it means that the country is in a parlous state.” As Rommel’s Panzerarmee moved closer to Egypt, the Jews were trying to leave Egypt and Palestine. The station urged its listeners not to allow Jews to take their money out of the country, a plea that served as a justiﬁcation for theft of Jewish property.77 As Rommel continued his march toward Alexandria, Axis radio urged Arabs to rise to the occasion. On the evening of June 29, VFA urged Arabs to “hamper the enemy by destroying communications, by blowing up bridges, derailing trains, and destroying railway lines and every kind of raw material that may come to your hand. Fellaheen [peasants], cut the enemy’s telephone lines, attack British convoys passing through your lands and do everything in your power to spread confusion among the British forces. Into action. Into action.”78 The following evening, Bari in Arabic stated that the British and Americans “are plotting with Jews to deprive the Arabs of their legal rights and they are aiming at establishing a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs.” But, the broadcast continued, “in a few days, the Arabs will have the fate of all the Arab countries in their hands and the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews will be driven out. The Arabs will then be freed of Anglo-Jewish exploitation.”79 Fifteen minutes later, VFA added to the chorus of appeals to the Egyptians “to rise against the British and against the traitors who have sold themselves for British gold.” The British were “weaker than ﬂies” yet had “decided to destroy our country.” The hour had come for the Egyptian people and army to rise against the British “so that our enemies are caught between two ﬁres, the ﬁre of Italy before them and the ﬁre of Egypt behind them.” Britain wanted to destroy Egypt and set it on ﬁre. “Does that please you, you heroes of the Egyptian army? You cannot stand by and watch it happen. Though it may cost you your life you must act. The British have always laughed at the Egyptians and now is the time to prove to the world that Egypt is alive. Prove that the Egyptian blood is running in your veins and ﬁght for your country.”80 German intelligence agencies expected that if Rommel defeated the British and entered Alexandria and Cairo, there would be Arab collaborators who would respond positively to these messages.81 On June 24, Alexander Konstan-

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tin von Neurath cabled the Foreign Ofﬁce from the North African Front. As a result of “today’s successful invasion of Egypt,” he requested guidance about the stance of King Farouk, the Wafd Party, and Prime Minister Nahas Pasha toward Germany. Weizsäcker replied the following day. Although Egypt had broken diplomatic relations with Germany at the beginning of war and interned Germans, Prime Minister Nahas Pasha had resisted English pressure to enter the war. Weizsäcker described Farouk as “friendly to Germany and hostile to England.” The Wafd Party’s nationalism was tempered by the reality of English power in the country. No Egyptian political party advocated sympathy for either of the warring parties, “though in circles of the Egyptian student movement and in Azhar University there are strong sympathies for Germany.” German propaganda should not attack Nahas Pasha. Most of the Egyptian people were politically uninterested and concerned only with “personal and economic” issues. The young ofﬁcers in the Egyptian army had “great sympathy for Germany”but lacked effective weapons. If German troops entered Egypt,Weizsäcker ordered, the German position should be as follows: “The English have illegally robbed Egypt of its sovereignty and turned it into a base for the British army, ﬂeet, and air force. The English are responsible for all acts of war that take place on Egyptian territory. The armies of the Axis powers come as friends, not to conquer Egypt but to liberate it from British imperialism. The Axis powers are the natural allies of every Egyptian government that pursues the interests of the nation. Egyptians, therefore, do not help the enemy and greet the troops of the Axis powers as friends.” He thought it unlikely that Egyptian troops would ﬁght Axis forces. It was important that the Germans act in ways that would secure a friendly stance.82 Weizsäcker repeated a commonplace of German propaganda in the Middle East when he placed the slogans of anti-imperialism in service of Nazi expansion. By May 21, at least six texts had been prepared and approved for distribution in North Africa and the Middle East. They included “Islam and the Jews,” probably written by the Mufti; a cartoon-like series mocking the English,“King George and His Ministers”; “Bolshevism, the Plague of Humanity”; and Hans Alexander Winkler’s previously mentioned call for sabotage entitled “Oh Englishman.”83 The texts were printed with folded, pocket-sized color drawings. The text of “Bolshevism, the Plague of Humanity” warned Arabs of the fate of Islamic Iran at the hands of the “godless” enemy. England, it began, “sold the Moslems in Iran to the Bolsheviks,” who moved into the country and “stole the

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wealth, raped the women, and destroyed what was beautiful. What was holy to the believers, they desecrated and covered with ﬁlth.” The colored drawings depicted the disaster inﬂicted on Iran by “godless hordes.” The text reported that it began when “England gave its allies, the godless Bolsheviks and the Jews, free entry into the free and proud countries of the Middle East.” In “a stream of blood and suffering, the red hordes poured into Iran and the Arab countries [and] destroyed everything in their path that was sacred to the believers.”“Like a column of locusts,” along with “this river of blood and suffering a second plague came to the country: the Jews! For England had promised all these countries as a reward to them [the Jews] and the Bolsheviks.” “The Muslim’s defenseless women are the victims of the red beasts. Only God knows the number of women who have been raped.” Those Iranians who believed the English and Bolsheviks suffered “oppression and tears.” The enemy grabbed “everything that is valuable,” and under force and violence,“the oppressed people . . . sends the country’s wealth to England and to red Russia.” The starving now cried out for bread “because the English and the Bolsheviks have taken all the food for their soldiers.” The text urged the reader look closely at its pictures to “understand what the word ‘freedom’ means to the English and the Bolsheviks. Then you will know where your friends are and who has fought you as an enemy.” It was time to “wake up and act. Otherwise it will be too late and the English and the Bolsheviks will rob you of everything that you hold sacred. Your faith, your freedom, and your honor.”84 “King George and His Ministers” offered a remarkable fairytale-style account, complete with twenty color pictures and captions, of the ﬁrst years of World War II in Europe, ending in a complete British collapse.“Once there was a great king named George.” Mimicking the style of a traditional chronicle, it reports that “this king had a minister named Churchill” who was “great but only in spreading lying propaganda and drinking whiskey.” The British succumbed to arrogance and thus “declared war on another country that was peacefully going about its work.” Yet “this people was young and strong” and threw King George’s soldiers “into the sea.” The images show British soldiers retreating at Norway, Dunkirk, Greece, Crete, Malaysia, and Singapore. Further, “many of the king’s warships and merchant ships were sunk by the submarines and ﬂyers of the brave adversary.” It mocked the sovereigns who escaped to London and who “acted as if they still had their countries, that they governed them, and had a strong army that followed their orders.” As the situation be-

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came more dire, King George sent Churchill to see “the warmonger Roosevelt in distant America to ask him for help.” But Roosevelt had started a war himself and “had been hit so hard by the adversary that he couldn’t give ships or soldiers to the minister.” In desperation, “the king and his minister seized at the last straw. They became pious.” But “God saw through their hypocrisy because the king had lied too much and had brought too much trouble to the world.” He turned his back on the king and hid “all the king’s countries,” such as Canada and Australia. Having lost the British Empire, “King George gave up the ﬁght.” Thereby “the many oppressed peoples of the world were again free” and looked to the future “full of hope and happiness.” This, the pamphlet concluded, “was too much for Churchill, who could not live without war and lies. He collapsed and abandoned his soul, which at that same moment went to hell.”85 On June 25, Neurath informed the Foreign Ministry that Rommel had requested “immediate implementation of active propaganda in Egypt.” The following day, the Foreign Ministry informed him that 700,000 leaﬂets had been prepared for distribution.86 In addition, the German military leadership was sending the following: “Rommel, the Lion of the Desert” (500,000 copies),“Oh Mohammed Ali Zaghlul”(100,000), “A New Era Has Broken Out” (100,000), “England, Master of Lies” (100,000), “Green Is the Color of the Muslims” (100,000),“Oh Englishman” (100,000), and “Signs of Collapse” (100,000), with all leaﬂets to be distributed by planes over Egypt’s major cities.87 On June 29, 250,000 additional leaﬂets were sent by plane to North Africa,“another million copies” were being printed, and more were being prepared.88 On July 15, 1942, following the orders from the Army High Command and the Foreign Ofﬁce, the Luftwaffe ﬂew 760,000 leaﬂets to North Africa. They included 200,000 copies of the appeal by Husseini and Kilani that had been read on the radio, 100,000 copies of “Awake You Who Are Sleeping,” and 50,000 colored postcards entitled “Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Arabs.”89 Allowing for possible overlap in these ﬁgures, the leaﬂet blitz of June and July 1942 amounted to between 2 million and 3.86 million Arabic-language leaﬂets dropped from planes or distributed by Afrikakorp soldiers and intelligence agents on the ground. The text of “Rommel, the Lion of the Desert” expressed the mood of imminent victory, Axis and Nazi anti-imperialism, and appeals to Egyptian nationalism similar to those being broadcast on Axis Arabic radio. Egyptians, seize the day! Don’t miss the coming, unique opportunity to shatter the British yoke forever.

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Hunt the foreigners who act like masters in your own country! Drive out the oppressors, who think only of themselves and let you starve! Out with those who torment and torture you and have your brothers thrown in dungeons. You are not alone! Friends stand ready to help you complete the work of liberation! The soldiers of the Axis with their brave allies have again marched on all fronts to new battles and new victories. And as shining as the fame of its army is, so too is the fame of its leader: General Rommel! Last year, General Rommel defeated the English without difﬁculty and brought their march to Tripoli to a sudden end. This year, he again will strike them until a new “victorious” retreat of the English army takes place. . . . This time, though, the English retreat will not take place in distant countries but rather through Egypt, your own country! Protect yourself so that the English don’t leave your beautiful homeland as “scorched earth” as they did in the Philippines, Malaysia, Java, and Burma and as they have done everywhere in their countless retreats all over the world. Guard your home and your ﬁelds. Guard your camps and your factories. Guard your bridges and your dams. Guard everything that you hold dear from the torches and madness of this oppressor of all peoples! The great hour will come. . . . Work for your freedom as Rommel works for you. Welcome him into your hearts as the harbinger of a new era and the friend of the Egyptian people! God willing, England’s defeat is certain!90

In these and other leaﬂets and broadcasts accompanying the Panzerarmee advance, the slogans of German and Italian propaganda included the following: “Egypt must be free from England,” “Egypt for the Egyptians,” and “The Axis ﬁght for Egypt’s complete independence, political freedom, and sovereignty.”91 Nazi Germany, which was occupying and exploiting the European continent for its beneﬁt, presented itself to the Arabs as a liberator and advocate of national independence and freedom. In these same weeks, Italian Foreign Minister Gian Galeazzo Ciano approved the aerial distribution of two leaﬂets over Egypt. The ﬁrst read: Egyptians, the hour of your liberation has ﬁnally come. The powerful Italian and German troops are marching with unstoppable speed toward the friendly Egyptian people. The unbearable British arrogance that for sixty years has stolen the fruits of your labor, expropriated the wealth of your soil, insulted your military dignity, and damaged your independence is about to fall under the unavoidable

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blows of the Axis soldiers. Today, Egypt and the Axis powers are united in the same ideal and goal: that Egyptian soil should be liberated of our common enemy. Egyptians, receive the soldiers of the Axis armies as friends. Their victory is your freedom!

The second sounded a similar note: The soldiers of the Axis will make you once again masters in your own country, following the Duce’s word: “The Mediterranean belongs to the Mediterraneans.” Facts will show you that the Axis troops come to Egypt as friends with the single goal of driving the English out. Germany and Italy will respect your freedom, your independence, and your sovereignty.92

In early April 1942, Hans Alexander Winkler, working with Neurath, in North Africa had sent seven drafts of leaﬂets to the Foreign Ofﬁce for approval for distribution in Egypt.93 By late May the Wehrmacht leadership had approved his drafts.94 On May 29, Gerhard Rühle, the director of the Department of Radio Policy in the Foreign Ministry, who was also an SS ofﬁcer and later participated in the Einsatzgruppen murders on the Eastern Front, sent Kurt Munzel to North Africa to work with von Neurath and Winkler for two months.95 On July 21, Josiah von Rantzau, working in the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, informed Winkler, “Your initiatives have fallen on very fruitful soil here and your texts will be used extensively.” The leaﬂets would be ﬂown to North Africa and “immediately distributed” by the Luftwaffe. Rommel “had spoken of them with high praise.”96 Winkler replied, expressing his pleasure at this news and saying he thought that “a great deal can be accomplished in this way.” Egypt was “so full of tension, that a clever and determined propaganda can unleash movements for us.” He added that “the enemy’s main argument against us”was that the Nazis were advocates of the doctrine of racial superiority.“Given the inclination of the Orientals to feelings of inferiority, this enemy agitation is not without success. But the wind can be taken out of the sails of English propaganda with praise of the Egyptians’ cultural accomplishments and an emphasis on the Jews as the common racial—and for the Egyptians—religious adversary.”97 As Nazi ofﬁcials had done earlier during discussions in the 1930s about the relevance of the Nuremberg race laws for Arabs, Persians, and Muslims in general, Winkler argued that Nazism was a doctrine aimed only at the Jews. One of Winkler’s creations was a long-winded (116 lines) leaﬂet in poetic form calling for the prevention of sabotage in Egypt in the event of a British defeat. He urged Egyptians to awaken from a long political slumber to ﬁght with

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the Germans against the English oppressor. In the poem an English voice says: “I will destroy everything. And he burned the peasant’s harvest. And he ignited the gasoline tanks. And he started ﬁres in the big cities. And he killed the pigs and sheep. And he blew up the bridges. And he destroyed the trains.” Before the English “ﬂees, he destroys the country. So that nothing is left. Not even the mosques and schools.” The text extols the alertness of “the men of the country” who guarded the wheat harvest, mills, coal reserves, train stations, post ofﬁces, electricity works, cotton ﬁelds, oil tanks, rail lines, bridges, radio stations, and waterworks. “When the English came in the night with their helpers . . . Jews and traitors” with “ﬁre and dynamite . . . the men of the country” protected everything. The “dynamite cartridge exploded in the criminals’ hand and tore him to pieces, and the ﬁre in his hand enveloped the Jews and burned him.” The English ﬂed “because the strong one hunted him,” and thus he was “not able to carry out his destruction. . . . The hour of liberation arrived. And the women made a trilling joyful sound. And the children’s home was preserved. And the businessman went to his store. And the traveler took the train. And the bus drove over the bridge. And the children went to school. And the students rushed to the university. And the cotton could be sold. And the wheat was turned into bread. And the people thanked God for his blessings. And the work of human hands could not be destroyed by the merciless English.”98 In another long (240 lines) leaﬂet in poetic form, Winkler appealed to Egyptian students and youth to awaken and unite against the English. Once upon a time, the youth and students gathered in front of the universities. They were full of rage. The wide plaza was like a red sea. . . . The sea became larger and larger, with larger waves and then ﬂowed like the overﬂowing Nile into the streets of the city where the English tyrants had their seat of government. Egypt’s youth mixed together with the young people of the university, the rich and the poor, the clever and the simple. All were united. Just as the ﬁngers of the hand unite to make a ﬁst, so the men of the people united. They awoke, the sons of Egypt. And in the face of their unity, their anger, their power and their will, the English tyrants gave up and obeyed their command. . . . But this is not a history from our own days. Then, Egypt’s soul was awake. Where has it gone? Is it possible for a people to forget? Is it possible that a people falls asleep? And sleeps when all are awake?

The text directs its appeal to “Oh Cairo. Oh place of the Azhar and the university.” Was it possible, the text asked, “that a strong people sleeps, sleeps in the hour of its liberation? Sleep, my sons, sleep.”99

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Yet in the eighteen additional texts he sent to Berlin in April 1942, Winkler showed he could also be a man of fewer words. Some referred to English or Jewish misdeeds: “Why is the girl in the meadow crying? She is crying because the Australians stole her sheep.” “The English club and the Jews’ synagogue are close to one another. They are talking to one another on the street: ‘How [they are thinking] can we take the Egyptian’s property away from him?’” Other texts called on Arabs to engage in sabotage: “Abu Zed puts a needle into the enemy’s camel’s hoof. It paralyzed the camel and he escaped from the enemy. Dschocha threw a handful of sugar into the gas tank of the English so his car was stuck in the desert and could not move forward or backward.” He suggested some of the hazards the English might face: When the Australian killed the female camel, Dschocha tied a rock on the tail of the dead dog and threw him into a well. There the Australians died like the mare. Sleep, English, sleep. Dschocha comes in the night. Dschocha comes like a fox. He takes your weapons, that you stole from the Egyptian army. Oh, English. Make a phone call. In the night Dschocha came with a scissors and cut your line. You telephone and no one hears you. Oh, English, write your letter. Dschocha threw glowing coals into the mail box. You write your letter but no one will receive it. Oh, English, drive, Dschocha reversed the signs. You will drive the whole night and not come to your goal. Oh, English, give orders. You made yourself the master in Egypt. With your army, you want to take the last piece of bread from the Egyptians. Orders are only orders. Dschocha has hidden the wheat and mutton very well. Command, Oh English, give orders. You forced Dschocha to obey your orders. Dschocha obeys, but his car had a breakdown, his donkey has collapsed, his boat has a leak. Command, Oh English, command. Dschocha obeys but he delays all of your plans.100

One text combined an appeal to the Arabs to “awaken, sleeping ones” with anti-English and anti-Jewish themes and a not-so-subtle reference to Hitler. The English, it asserted, had allied with the Jews. Both prayed to God, but money was closest to their hearts. They used their hands to shackle other nations. It continued: “Mohammed, God’s prophet, God bless him and praise him, was an enemy of the Jews. He grasped their cunning and evil. Have you forgotten that the Jews persecuted God’s prophets, that they attacked him and wanted to kill him? Have you forgotten that the Jews cursed the prophet Mohammed?” The text then alluded to Hitler: “Look, a man has arrived to purify the world. The chains that shackle the nations, both the chains that are felt and those that are not felt, will be broken. A sword has been sent into the world with the command: Destroy evil, the hypocrites, the selﬁsh, so that the world can

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again breathe freely and be pure. Awaken, oh Arabs. Evil has also placed your people in shackles of both mind and body. Free yourself when the strength shatters the chains of this world.”101 In Germany, the Nazis had presented Hitler as a prophet who had broken “the chains” of the “Versailles Diktat.” This text presented Germany and Hitler as harbingers of freedom from a world enslaved by the English and the Jews. As we will see, Himmler and the SS also became interested in evoking Islamic traditions and myths to present Hitler as an avenging prophet sent by Allah to ﬁght the evil Jews. In the pages of “The Oasis: Field Newspaper for German Troops in Africa” (Die Oase: Feldzeitung der Deutschen Truppen in Afrika), the German military in North Africa sought to convince its soldiers that Arabs and Muslims were likely allies.102 Its pages were ﬁlled with descriptions of the course of the war, as well as the geography, politics, and economics of the Middle East.103 Occasionally, as on July 6, 1941, in “The Moslems and Their Doctrine: Today 200 Million Men Are Believers in Islam,” the paper gave the troops a lesson in this foreign culture. This article began by asserting that the conventional view of Islam in Germany—which saw Islam, in contrast to Christianity, as a “culture-destroying force” because Mohammed and his successors had sought to spread their doctrine “with ﬁre and sword”—needed to be corrected. A deeper understanding of the Orient’s history indicated that “the foundations of Islam are the same as those of European civilization of the Middle Ages,” although they were “created by peoples of other nations and races.” Hence “the old doctrine of the Church of Rome that Mohammed was the anti-Christ and enemy of culture is no longer tenable.” Die Oase presented an idyllic historical interpretation of Islam, evoking themes drawn from German nationalism and its Protestant, antiJewish, and anti-Catholic currents: The Arabs’ triumphant advance in the Middle Ages was nothing other than the last great migration of Semitic peoples. As was the case with the wanderings of the Germanic peoples, raw necessity, the need for land and hunger, forced the Arabs to seize the richer, fertile land of their neighbors. The Prophet’s conquering successors did not at all think of taking the religion of the conquered peoples away from them and force them to adopt Islam. The criticism along these lines of the Muslims made by Rome [the Roman Catholic Church] applies far more to Rome itself. One need only to think of the violent conversion of the Nordic peoples, the tortures of the Middle Ages, as well as of the Spaniards’ didactic rage [Belehrungswut], ﬁrst in Spain itself and then in Central and South America, as a result of which old and high cultures were destroyed to be replaced by ossiﬁed

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cultures. . . . With the Arabs [by contrast], the subordinated people only had to pay tribute, which ceased if the people voluntarily converted to Islam.104

The Arabs, the article continued, had not attacked Christianity in North Africa but rather incorporated it into “Arabic spirit” and traditions. Islamic culture was not only Arabic but “from the beginning was a fusion culture [Mischkultur]” that now included 200 million believers in North Africa, the Near East, India, and the Balkans. As part of these labors of cultural fusion, Mohammed had taken from the Jews “what was useful for him while rejecting the Jews’ repulsive doctrine about God (Jehovah).” He incorporated the prophets —Abraham, Moses, and Noah—“but placed Christ above them all.” Mohammed’s “paradise, like that of the Germans, was only for the brave. He knew hell and the purifying ﬁre of purgatory.” The core Islamic formula—“there is no God except God and Mohammed is God’s messenger”—was “the paradigm of simplicity.” Yet in Islamic doctrine, man was not master of his own destiny because everything had been foreordained by God. This was “certainly a great contrast to the Faustian striving of Nordic men and to the Greek legend of Prometheus!”105 Despite this difference, so evident in the fact that the Germans were ﬁghting in North Africa, the Oase essay stressed the commonalities between the Germans and Muslims, which, it seemed, exceeded those of the Germans with the fellow Europeans, including Spanish, French, and Italian Catholics. Many troops may have been uninterested or cynical about such arcane reﬂections. Yet the fact that the military leadership allowed such arguments to appear in the newspaper read by its troops indicates that at least part of it looked favorably on this effort to connect National Socialism and the history of the Germans to that of the Arabs and Islam. With Rommel’s advance into Egypt, the Germans and Italians agreed that the right time had ﬁnally come to issue the Joint Declaration in support of Arab independence, and to do so on the Axis Arabic-language radio stations and with leaﬂets dropped by the Luftwaffe over Egyptian cities.106 From the end of May through mid-June a force of Italian but mostly German forces commanded by Rommel laid siege to the British base at Tobruk, then succeeded in penetrating its defenses and defeating the British Eighth Army. On June 21, the Africa Corps recaptured Tobruk, in the process seizing 28,000 mostly Australian and British soldiers as well as large quantities of supplies that could be used for an advance into Egypt. By the end of June, Axis forces had invaded Egypt and reached a point sixty miles west of Alexandria with the way now open to Cairo.107 On July 1,

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1942, VFA announced that “the Middle East is preparing for revolution.”108 On July 3, 1942, at 7:30 p.m., Radio Berlin (what the Americans called “Berlin in Arabic”) broadcast the following “Joint German-Italian Declaration in Respect of Egypt.” The government of the German Reich, and the Government of H.M. the King of Italy, declare the following: At this moment, when the troops of the Axis powers are victoriously advancing into Egyptian territory, the two said Governments emphasize their resolve to guarantee Egypt’s independence and sovereignty. The Axis forces are entering Egypt, not as an enemy country, but to dismiss the British from Egyptian territory, and to continue war operations against Britain in order to liberate the whole of the Near East from the British yoke. The policy of the Axis powers is inspired by the principle “Egypt for the Egyptians.” The emancipation of Egypt from the chains which have linked her with Britain, and her security from the risks of war, will enable her to assume her position among the independent sovereign states.109

Berlin in Arabic then broadcast a “second declaration” by Husseini, now described as the Grand Mufti of Palestine (no longer only of Jerusalem), read by “one of our valiant Arab strugglers”: The Glorious victory secured by the Axis troops in North Africa, has encouraged the Arabs and the whole East, and ﬁlled their hearts with admiration for Marshall Rommel’s genius, and the bravery of the Axis soldiers. This is because the Arabs believe that the Axis Powers are ﬁghting against the common enemy, namely the British and the Jews, and in order to remove the danger of communism spreading, following the aggression on Iran. These victories, generally speaking, will have far-reaching repercussions on Egypt, because the loss of the Nile Valley and of the Suez Canal, and the collapse of the British mastery over the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, will bring nearer the defeat of Britain and the end of the British Empire.110

Husseini continued by afﬁrming that these Axis victories would “mean the liberation of Egypt and . . . the Arab countries from the British yoke.” Egypt had suffered under the British for sixty years. Now she had “received with utmost joy the news of the Axis victories, for she knows that the moment has come to get rid forever of the Imperialists, and secure the independence and freedom of the Nile Valley.” The statement stressed Egypt’s military, geographical, economical, cultural, and social position in the Arab world. Its future concerned “the Islamic countries in general, and the Arab countries in particular.” Husseini was conﬁdent that the Axis would respect Egypt’s independence and sovereignty. An Egypt in possession of the Suez Canal would have friendly relations with the

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Axis powers, would guarantee freedom of navigation in the Canal, and would “play an important part in the security of Arab countries which have suffered under the yoke of British Imperialism.” The Egyptians were not scared of Britain or the Jews. They had “fought both of them bitterly and daringly, thus manifesting the Arab spirit of struggle, and thereby infuriating the British Imperialists, whose Empire is based on tyranny and violence.” Husseini referred to “the Arab nation” which saw “in the Axis forces, now advancing on Egypt, allies who will cooperate in breaking the chains and ridding her of her enemies” and bringing “true sovereignty and true independence” to Egypt and Arab countries in general.” By breaking the chains of British imperialism and “ridding her of her enemies,” the Axis powers were Egypt’s allies.111 Fifteen minutes later, the Americans in Cairo recorded a transmission from the Free Voice of Egypt pretending to be broadcast from within the country. It welcomed the Axis declaration “with the greatest joy. . . . Today we know who our friends are. The Axis Powers are our allies and we stretch out the hand of friendship. We are ready to give them all the support in our power. . . . We are joined together by one aim, the desire to destroy our common enemy, the British, and to secure the independence of Egypt. Long live our friends, the Axis, the friends of Egypt: Long live Egypt! Long live the King!”112 On July 5, Radio Bari announced that the Italians “are trying to liberate you and give you back the freedom you deserve. We undertake to free the Middle East, the Near East and all Mediterranean nations from British inﬂuence.”113 On July 6, Rashid Ali Kilani, speaking on Berlin in Arabic, announced:“The hour of liberation has come and the sons of Egypt have the fate of the nation in their hands. They must not let the opportunity pass them by, but must do all in their power to restore the glory of the Arabs and of Islam. It was Egypt’s misfortune to be the ﬁrst of the Arab countries to know the bitterness of British imperialism and it will be their good fortune to be amongst the ﬁrst to taste the sweetness of living free of that imperialism. . . . I am glad to be able to tell my Egyptian brothers that the Axis powers wish Egypt no harm. I trust their pledged words and their promises. Egypt will be for the Egyptians and her freedom will be to the advantage of other Arab countries.”114 At 8:00 p.m. that evening, Bari in Arabic announced that “the hour of British doom has come. Woe to the British, to traitors and to puppets in Britain’s pay.” It falsely asserted that the British ﬂeet in the Mediterranean had been “torn to pieces” and that British supremacy on the sea “has been lost everywhere.” “Victorious Axis

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forces” had in fact captured British bases at Tobruk, and the defeated British army had been forced to retreat into the interior of Egypt. In one of many efforts at creating self-fulﬁlling prophecies, the broadcast asserted, “The Arab world is following the movements of the glorious Axis forces with great eagerness, and it sincerely prays that God will give his support to the Axis forces. . . . Valiant Arabs, the hour of your independence has come and now is the time for the realization of the unity of the Arab nations, so do not hesitate, but seize the opportunity accorded you. Put words aside and take action beside your leaders, who are expecting you to follow immediately the orders given you.” In this “portentous hour” the Arabs should “unite and rise against the weakened British, proclaiming: ‘Long live the Grand Mufti, the leader of Arabism; Long live H.M., the beloved leader, Rashid Aly el-Kilani, and long live the valiant Iraqi Army, the liberator of the Arab Nation!”115 At 8:15 p.m. on July 7, 1942, in these days of Axis euphoria following the capture of the British base at Tobruk, VFA sent a broadcast of unprecedented hatred and fanaticism. Behind the Eastern Front in Europe, the German Einsatzgruppen and police units were engaged in shooting operations. The death camps in Poland were in full operation. Deportation of Jews from Western Europe to Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau were just beginning. Hitler and Goebbels assured their audiences in Germany and Europe that the Nazi regime was “annihilating” and “exterminating” the Jews. The broadcast on July 7 had the title “Kill the Jews before They Kill You.” It repeated earlier pleas for audience participation that were every bit the equal of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s anti-Semitic radicalism. It began by reporting that “a large number of Jews residing in Egypt and a number of Poles, Greeks, Armenians and Free French, have been issued with revolvers and ammunition” to “help them against the Egyptians at the last moment, when Britain is forced to evacuate Egypt.” It continued as follows: In the face of this barbaric procedure by the British we think it best, if the life of the Egyptian nation is to be saved, that the Egyptians rise as one man to kill the Jews before they have a chance of betraying the Egyptian people. It is the duty of the Egyptians to annihilate the Jews and to destroy their property. Egypt can never forget that it is the Jews who are carrying out Britain’s imperialist policy in the Arab countries and that they are the source of all the disasters, which have befallen the countries of the East. The Jews aim at extending their domination throughout the Arab countries, but their future depends on a British victory. That is why they are trying to save Britain from her fate and why Britain is arming them to kill the Arabs and save the British Empire.

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You must kill the Jews, before they open ﬁre on you. Kill the Jews, who have appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for? The Jews are planning to violate your women, to kill your children and to destroy you. According to the Moslem religion, the defense of your life is a duty which can only be fulﬁlled by annihilating the Jews. This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race, which has usurped your rights and brought misfortune and destruction on your countries. Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism.Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.116

Here, applied to the Arab and Muslim context, was the same logic of projection and paranoia that was the deﬁning feature of Nazism’s radical anti-Semitism. It was impossible to be more blunt. The broadcast combined the political accusations of Nazism with an evocation of the religious demands of Islam and the tactical use of propaganda to aid in the conventional war with incitement to mass murder that would extend the Final Solution to North Africa and the Middle East. Three days later, the Americans in Cairo recorded another broadcast with similar evocations of Jewish menace and conspiracy. It came from the Arab Nation station and was intended for listeners in Palestine as well. In the ubiquitous and menacing passive voice, the station stated that “it was known that at a recent meeting of the Zionist Committee, it was decided to arm as many Jews in Palestine as possible.” Now that the Jews saw danger looming, “they wish to defend the land which they have obtained by treachery from the Arabs” and to “defend Palestine as if it were their own country whereas all know it belongs to the Arabs.” Arabs, do you not know that the British are the servants of the Jews? Once these men have been recruited, armed and trained, their bayonets will be turned against you. They will attack you, your women and your children. They will plunder your wealth. Will you stand by with folded arms in the face of this great rising danger? You must start your ﬁght and stop them short. Unite, close your ranks and work for the future of your country and nation. We must wait for the call of our leaders. When the time comes we will rise and save our country. Allah is with us and he will protect us.117

Although this broadcast did not include speciﬁc incitements to murder the Jews, the logic of the accusation was identical. The powerful Jews were about to attack the innocent Arabs. Now the Arabs, with the help of the Germans, Ital-

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ians, the great leaders Husseini and Kilani, and not least of all, Allah himself, needed to rise up to protect themselves against the Jewish threat. Axis radio repeated the Joint Declaration every day for the following week at the same hour. It continued to do so many times during the summer, accompanied by fervent assertions that “the hour of deliverance is at hand. The liberation of which we have dreamed is near.”118 But in July, in the ﬁrst battle of El Alamein, sixty-six miles west of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, British forces fought Rommel’s Panzerarmee to a stalemate, thus preventing it from driving to the Suez Canal and putting a damper on Berlin’s expectations for a quick and decisive victory in North Africa. In August, Bernard Montgomery became the commander of the Eighth Army. Reinforcements and supplies arrived from Britain and the United States, but the Germans and Italians could send only limited reinforcements due to the demands of the ﬁghting on the Eastern Front in Europe.119 Alexander Kirk wrote to Cordell Hull on July 17 that “in the event that the tide of battle moves to the east,” Axis broadcasts “would probably drop into the limbo of abortive propaganda efforts with a withdrawal of the Axis forces.”120 Conversely, a German-Italian victory in Egypt would lend credibility to its message. He, too, believed that the success or failure of propaganda was inseparable from the outcome of the battles. Following the British disaster at Tobruk, Roosevelt decided to send tanks and other military supplies to aid the British; in spring and summer 1942, defeating the Axis in North Africa became an American priority as well. The more the United States entered the fray, the more Axis propaganda linked its two favorite American targets, Franklin Roosevelt and the Jews. On July 2, Grobba in Berlin wrote a directive entitled “The Jews Are the Wire-pullers of the Americans.” Now, more than in the past, German propaganda in Arabic needed to stress that every American who “comes to the Orient comes in service of the Jews. He is sent here by the Jews, even if he does not know it. The Jews are the wire-pullers of the Americans.”121 His memo called for diffusion into Arabic propaganda of the anti-Semitic interpretation of Franklin Roosevelt that had been standard fare in German-language propaganda. This propaganda began with Roosevelt’s New York roots and his supposed indebtedness to the Jews. It continued by listing the usual suspects among his supporters: Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Baruch, Samuel Irving Rosenman, Herbert Lehman, Benjamin Cohen, Chaim Weizmann, and (Catholic mayor) Fiorello La Guardia.122 The report included two- or three-page biographical sketches of

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the people who had become the poster boys of the regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda at home. The Grobba directive and its inclusion of Weizmann were examples of the Foreign Ministry’s effort to adapt the general propaganda line to the particular circumstances of the Arab, Persian, and Muslim worlds. This adaptation was evident in a July 18 broadcast by Berlin in Arabic. It referred to a meeting between Roosevelt and Chaim Weizmann. According to the broadcast, the meeting went very well because “they are the two outstanding persons who instigated the war.” Although Roosevelt insisted that all decisions about a Jewish state had to be postponed until after the war, Berlin in Arabic claimed that he shared Weizmann’s goal of creating a Jewish National Home— and one not only in Palestine. According to the broadcast, both agreed that “the welfare of the Jews means the expulsion of the Arabs from Syria, Palestine and Lebanon. May God curse them both.”123 In fact, Roosevelt consistently insisted on postponing a deﬁnitive American decision regarding the possibility of supporting a Jewish state in Palestine until after the war had been won. Throughout the war, neither Weizmann nor other Jewish and Zionist leaders nor proZionist politicians in the United States Congress were able to bring about a change in FDR’s policies. Roosevelt’s reticence made no difference to the Nazi propagandists. On July 20, the Arab Nation’s evening broadcast on “U.S.A. and Jews versus Arabs” returned to the issue. It added that “the Jew Roosevelt” cabled a Zionist congress to express “all his sympathy to the Jews.” Roosevelt’s meeting with Weizmann showed that the two were “working in the dark and planning secretly against the Arabs. Should Bolshevism and Democracy be victorious, the Arabs will be dominated forever and all traces of Islam will be wiped out and Islamic civilization will crumble.”124 A meeting between the president and Weizmann was presented as evidence that the United States wanted to wipe out “all traces of Islam.” The speciﬁcally Islamist tone of German broadcasts was evident on the evening of July 29. Berlin in Arabic chose to comment on the Koranic verse: “Call the name of God whenever you meet evil.” The Prophet, in the verse referred to above, calls on the name of Allah, so that evil may be kept away in whatever form it may appear. It may be in the shape of the sinful Jew, of destructive bombs or prevailing intrigues, for God alone is able to meet such evils and destroy them. It is the duty of Moslems, whenever the British exaggerate in their evil doings and oppressions, to invoke the name of Allah to ﬁght them. It is their duty whenever the Jews carry on their misdeeds, plundering our wealth, exploiting our resources, to call upon Allah to defeat them. It is the

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duty of Moslems, when bombs fall causing ﬁres and destruction and harming people, to ask for the help of God. For God is omnipotent. He can defend us from evils, can defeat our enemies and oppressors.

Immediately following, the station broadcast a “Warning to Egyptians” to “get away from British fortiﬁcations, do not stay near their camps, their aerodromes, their living quarters. Keep away from them.”125 The same station that was bringing the Koran to bear on contemporary events was also offering practical advice about saving one’s life in a potential coming battle for Egypt between the Axis and the Allies. Appeals to Muslims as Muslims continued. On August 4, Bari in Arabic praised “His Grace Sheikh Mustapha El Maraghi, the rector of the Al Azhar University and the great popular Moslem leader,” who had issued a declaration urging all Muslims to “adhere to the teachings of their religion and to act for the welfare of the Moslems, so that Moslems’ aspirations may be realized, and the glory of Islam may be restored.”126 Bari in Arabic implied that Islamic glory would be served by the cause of the Axis. The following evening, Berlin in Arabic spoke about “The Axis and the Moslems.” In contrast to the Soviet Union, the Axis countries “respect the Koran, sanctify the mosques and glorify the prophet of Islam.”127 On August 10, Bari in Arabic stated that “all faithful Moslems should be united. God, Majesty of Majesties, said: ‘Fight the unfaithful in mass as they have fought you in mass.’ The Arabs lost Spain through their dissension, but the call of the faithful should be answered by all Moslems throughout the world. . . . Oh Arabs, rise up as one man for Jihad. The blood already shed for these high ideals calls out to you to ﬁght. Cling to your convictions, the unity and independence of the Arab nation, which by the grace of God, will triumph. The chosen of God will triumph.”128 Axis propaganda attacked the British not only for their sins of secular politics but also, as VFA put it on July 29, for being, together with the Jews,“enemies of Arabism and Islam.” In that broadcast, VFA reported that “Arab youth shout daily,‘The British are our enemies, let us ﬁght them. The Jews are foes, let us kill them. Life without liberty is worthless, let us have liberty or let us die.’” Such slogans would resound throughout the Arab world “until the day when the British and the Jews are crushed and until their puppets, including those of the B.B.C, are punished.”129 On August 6, VFA, in a broadcast on “Britain and Islam,” called the BBC “this Jewish station” and the “Jewish broadcasting station in London.” It added that it “must never be forgotten” that “the latest enemies of

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Islam are the British, even if they suddenly professed to be the most faithful friend of Islam.”130 The bizarre premodern category of an “enemy” or “friend” of Islam had a certain parallel with Nazi and fascist political categories of friend and enemy in modern politics. Britain’s vigorous efforts during the period of the White Paper to prevent more Jewish immigration to Palestine in the hope of not antagonizing the Arabs made not a whit of difference to Axis propagandists. They constantly associated Britain and the United States with the Jews and described all three (as well as the Soviet Union) as enemies of both the Arabs and of Islam. The Atlantic Charter signed by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941 asserted “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”131 Axis propaganda in the Middle East attacked the United States and Britain for hypocrisy in light of the existence of the British Empire. VFA went further in a broadcast of August 15 when it explained that the Jews were “ﬁghting this war to abolish Nazism and Fascism only to restore in their place the world-domination of the British.” The “whole world” was convinced that the Atlantic Charter was “merely another Jewish scheme” no better than the Versailles settlement by the League of Nations, which had “rendered the life of the Arab people intolerable.” The Americans, the British, and the Jews had waged “this war,” that is, World War II, “to satisfy their imperialistic aims.”132 Just as Nazi propaganda in Europe held the Jews responsible for the war in Europe, so the Arabic-language broadcasts blamed the Jews and British imperialism. Though the logic of radical anti-Semitism in both cases was identical, the Arabic radio broadcasts adapted the general conspiracy theory to the speciﬁc features of modern Middle Eastern history. In every instance, Goebbels’s main point in the German context matched that made in the Arabic propaganda: the Jews were guilty. The German leaﬂet offensive continued in July 1942. On July 15, following the orders from the Army High Command and the Foreign Ofﬁce, the Luftwaffe ﬂew 760,000 additional leaﬂets to North Africa intended for distribution in varying numbers in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and unspeciﬁed other parts of the Middle East. They included 200,000 copies of an appeal by Husseini and Kilani to support the Axis; 100,000 copies of the leaﬂet “Awaken, You Who Are Sleeping” (“Erwache, oh Schlafender”); and 60,000 colored postcards entitled “Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Arabs” (“Roosevelt, Churchill und die

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Araber”).133 In August, Ribbentrop was informed that the Italians had agreed with the distribution of the following 1.3 million Arabic language leaﬂets: an “Appeal to Arab Youth” (“Aufruf an die arabische Jugend”) intended for Egypt and Syria (144,000 copies); “Egypt for the Egyptians” (“Ägypten den Ägyptern”) for distribution only in the event of a German victory in El Alamein (300,000); “The New Jewish Kingdom” (“Das neue jüdische Königreich”) for Syria (296,000); “Oh Egyptians” (“O Ägypten”) for Egypt (300,000); “The Partition of Palestine” (“Die Teilung Palästinas”) for Palestine, Syria, and Iraq (100,000); “Reception for Rashid al-Gailani” (“Gailani Empfang”), showing a photo of Kilani with Hitler intended for North Africa and “all of Arabia” (100,000); and a postcard showing King Abdullah of Jordan on the Dead Sea to be distributed in Palestine (60,000).134 On June 30, 1942, four Luftwaffe planes ﬂew this material to North Africa.135 The “Appeal to Arab Youth” was directed to “all young men of the Arabian tribes, whom English propaganda and English military ofﬁcials are trying, with the use of deception, to convince to join the [British] army; to the Arab volunteers in Palestine; to the Libyan ﬁghters; the indigenous troops for the various Syrian districts; to all youth organizations in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan.” England needed soldiers “to defend its colonies and its ‘empire,’ an empire that is dissolving and disappearing. It needs ‘armies’ to defend its policy of occupation, colonization, and tyranny and to do so under the same ﬂag with the Bolsheviks and the Jews. It wants to drag you into the slaughter so that you will bleed for it and the blood of your youth will be sacriﬁced. Arabs, stay away from these British maneuvers. Don’t believe a word you hear from British ofﬁcials who are colonizing your country. Don’t believe what their slaves and dependents tell you. And rest assured that Germany as well as its allies wish only the best for you and your country.” The English “will send you to the front lines to sacriﬁce you as it has already done with the Palestinians who were sent to Greece and who were abandoned by their soldiers as they retreated.” They “sacriﬁced the French in Dunkirk and they were best of friends. Just as they have sacriﬁced the Greeks, Serbs, Chinese, Dutch-Indies Indians in Singapore, and the Canadians in Hong Kong.” England had “already lost the war, even on the seas, which it claimed to control. Its most recent ally, the U.S.A. with its Jewish government follows it [on the path to defeat]. Do not work for England’s colonial policy. Do not sacriﬁce yourself for an already lost cause. En-

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gland’s allies are only the Bolsheviks, who are mistreating your Iranian brothers, and the Jews, who have caused so much Arab blood to ﬂow in Palestine. The hour of liberation approaches.”136 The almost 300,00 copies of “Borders of the New Zionist Kingdom” included a color map with a ﬂag with Stars of David planted on Jerusalem, Beirut, Amman, Damascus and Aleppo, Mosul and Baghdad, and Alexandria and Cairo. The caption read: “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chaim Weizmann divide the Arab countries for the Jews.” A dotted red line indicated “the borders of the new Zionist kingdom.”137 The text of “The New Kingdom” (“Das Neue Königreich”), apparently identical to the text labeled “The New Jewish Kingdom,” accompanied the image and was distributed in Syria in July 1942. It included a heavy dose of anti-Jewish themes. Arabs, do you recognize this ﬂag? We don’t think so because it is a new ﬂag. It’s the ﬂag of the new kingdom of the Jews that will consist of the countries of Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This new kingdom is supposed to be established according to agreements between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chaim Weizmann in the Middle East with . . . [cooperation from] King Abdullah of Transjordan—this traitor to the Arab cause. The American-English-Jewish statisticians have already ﬁgured that one could bring 17 million Jews from all over the world to this new kingdom. Who cares that millions of Arabs already live in these areas and that they inherited the land from the fathers and forefathers? The occupants of the countries will be driven out with the well-known Jewish methods! The New York Jews made Roosevelt the president of the United States. He has become their strongest tool. Two long-sought goals will be accomplished with the foundation of a new Jewish kingdom: The Jews will have a large national state. The English and the Americans will have a secure fortress, from which they can oppress and exploit the Islamic countries as well as India. Every American who comes to the Arab countries, goes there for the interests of the Jews, whether he knows it or not. While England promises the Arabs freedom and independence after the war, the Jews from all over the world wander [to Palestine] in ever greater groups. Ever larger parts of the fertile soil go into Jewish hands with the help of money from American Jews. In the last three months alone, 23,045 dunom [a quarter of an acre] of fertile soil have gone over to Jewish ownership! Arabs, do you grasp the complete duplicity of the English and Americans in the difference between their promises and their actions? But this time, the deception of the Arabs of 1918 will not be repeated because all the plans of the English, Americans, and the Jews can only be implemented if England wins the war. And this time, England, with God’s help, will not win! For already General Rommel at the head of the brave Axis troops is shaking the last doors of English power!

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arabs! Help your friends achieve their goals: the destruction of the EnglishJewish-American domination. arabs! out with the english, jews, and americans from your countries!138

The themes of the inherently expansionist character of Zionism as well as the intimate connection between the Americans, the English, and the Jews remained major themes of Axis propaganda throughout the war. Conversely, a widely distributed photo of Rashid Ali Kilani being greeted by Hitler in the presence of Foreign Minister Ribbentrop underscored the links between Nazi Germany and this representative of one current of Arab politics.139 The leaﬂet “Egypt for the Egyptians” read as follows: Egyptians! The hour of freedom is here. Your friends are near. They have come to bring an end to your suffering. They have come to confront the common enemy, the oppressors of the Egyptians and enslavers of the Arabs. There is only one enemy, the English and the hordes they have compelled to their side and their groups of homeless thieves. They are paid by England to devastate your country, oppress and misuse you. They say they are defending your country but they really want your food and your cotton. This is about the whole theft [of Egypt’s] goods by the English. You can ﬁght against them, these homeless riffraff and the bandits that England has sent to your country. Think of your glorious past. Think of the early years of your thousand-year-old culture. Think of Mehemet Ali and Zaghlul Pascha. The Egyptian soul is not dead. It lives and it will give your land new blood, just as the water of the Nile gives fertility and prosperity to your soil. Now is the time. Leave the ranks of the English. Refuse to serve them. Drive them out of your cities. Destroy their weapons. Hide your food—for yourself. Protect your houses—for your women and children. Guard your supplies of water—for you and your animals. Keep an eye on bridges and dams—for your future. Call for the withdrawal of your oppressors from Cairo and your other large cities. Make Cairo an open city so that it does not serve as a base for the English, and so that you will not be destroyed when the English are destroyed. Greet the Axis soldiers as friends. Protect them in danger just as they will protect you. Help them with all your power, so that they can help you. Thereby you will achieve Egypt’s political freedom and independence. The governments of the Axis powers have declared that they respect and will secure the independence and sovereignty of Egypt. The soldiers of the Axis will shorten the era of suffering and terror. They will restore order and peace so that the common enemy will be destroyed. They ﬁght with you and for you. They ﬁght for the future of your Egyptian nation. egypt for the egyptians!140

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The 300,000 copies of “Oh, Egypt” distributed in Egypt in summer 1942 denounced “British injustice and its unjust, violent, criminal empire” and announced that the English were now ﬂeeing and receiving “the destiny which their guilt merits.” It recounted a long list of “many English crimes” beginning in the late nineteenth century. England is breaking apart. The English have been pushed out of all of Europe. The British cannot stand on European soil. They have been driven out of Burma and Singapore. Their Bolshevik allies, their ﬁnal illusion, will be defeated, as if they were worm-infested palm trees. The hour has arrived for the English have been driven from Europe. All that remains is their ugly history and an evil memory, their empty promises, breaking of treaties and crimes that will endure in time. England’s collapse does not mean the liberation of Egypt alone but, God willing, of all the Arab countries. England’s fall will bring an Arabic Egypt into the circle of the Arab world where it will receive respect and an important position. Arab unity will be restored. England’s ruin will mean that the price of cotton will return to its old standard. The peasant will be able to earn his bread and have the necessary medicines. In short, it means the liberation of Egypt from its chains. egyptians, what are you waiting for?141

In other words, Nazi propaganda presented World War II as the war that would bring about Egypt’s national liberation from British imperialism. Over the course of the summer, as American supplies and reinforcements continued to arrive in North Africa, Axis broadcasts intensiﬁed their attacks on the Jews and the United States. On August 27, Bari in Arabic falsely asserted that Roosevelt stated “that one of his reasons for entering the war was to support and strengthen Judaism. There is nothing strange about this, since the highest American ofﬁcials are puppets of the Jews. They have reached their high places of ofﬁce through Jewish money and thus the Jews are able to dominate public opinion through them. A colloquial proverb says: ‘Who eats the Sultan’s bread, will wear the Sultan’s sword.’ Roosevelt has not only eaten the Jewish bread, but has gorged himself with it. Therefore it is natural he will wear their sword.”142 The Jews were a danger for the Arabs. “A Jewish victory is a defeat for us. There are three kinds of enemy: ﬁrstly, your enemy; secondly, the enemy of your friend; thirdly, the friend of your enemy. Roosevelt is all three.”143 On September 11,VFA announced that the Jews’“only hope” lay in an Allied victory. Thanks to Roosevelt, the United States was “governed by a handful of Jews against the wishes of the American people,” most of whom opposed American intervention because they considered the war “a Jewish-Imperialistic war” and hate “the Jews who are living as parasites on the nation’s wealth.”144

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Rommel’s last major offensive took place from August 30 to September 5 in the battle of Alam el Halfa. Aided by the arrival of 200 American tanks along with knowledge of German military communications gathered by the Allies’ ULTRA code-breaking operations, the British Eighth Army was able to vanquish Rommel’s forces. In the wake of this defeat, German Arabic broadcasts intensiﬁed attacks on “the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews” while Ribbentrop tried to accentuate the positive. In a memo to Hitler of September 7, Ribbentrop wrote that the mood in Iran was “on our side.” Further, the Foreign Ministry intended to call for a general revolt against England in the whole Arab sphere with the help of broadcast and print appeals from the Grand Mufti and Kilani. If the Germans succeeded in Egypt, Ribbentrop was “certain that such appeals will contribute to making the English position in Palestine, Transjordan and Syria untenable.”145 But Ribbentrop did not seem to understand or admit that with Rommel’s military setbacks the hopes for an Arab revolt were diminishing. In its 7:30 p.m. broadcast of September 16, Berlin in Arabic reported, “The Jews, the Americans and the British work hand in glove.” Their cooperation was demonstrated by American and British leaders speaking of “the ties of friendship existing between Anglo-Saxons and the Jews.” Typically it gave no source for these assertions. The station warned of a “plot which the Americans and the British are trying to put into operation in order to give the Jews control of the Suez Canal.”146 Three hours later, the station returned to the subject of the Jews with an example of how Nazi propaganda commented on American government statements. On September 3, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had condemned the Vichy regime’s participation in the deportation of French Jews.147 Perhaps with Hull’s statement in mind, Berlin in Arabic attributed to him the following message on the occasion of the Jewish New Year: “In this grave hour the Jews of the world do not stand alone without a friend. America stands beside them.” The broadcast continued: “We are indebted to Mr. Hull for this statement as it reveals something which the Allies have for so long tried to keep secret. It is true that the Jews are not alone. They are surrounded and helped by the Americans and by the other Allies. Each of them has found a sincere friend and each has helped the other. The American Jews control industry and commerce and they depend on Roosevelt for the building of their great Jewish nation. America is run by the Jews.”148 Nazi propagandists seized on any and every expression of anger, sympathy, and solidarity with the Jews of Europe expressed by anyone in Britain or the United States as evidence in support of their claims about Jewish domination

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of those countries. These anti-Semitic outbursts took place too frequently and were too pervasive to be understood primarily as a tactical riposte to speciﬁc statements. On September 30, the VFA returned to the subject of “the Jews.” It stated that “a Jewish paper entitled Economist issued in London and directed by Jews” had “revealed the main object of the Jews in this war.” The broadcast did not reveal what that object was other than to say that the Jews were not willing to ﬁght. It asserted that “this war should be called ‘the Jewish war,’ because this war is really a Jewish one which has been waged by them and from which they alone will proﬁt if Britain is victorious.”149 Just as Nazi propaganda in Germany and Europe was doing, the German Arabic-language broadcasts accustomed listeners to a wide range of unsubstantiated assertions merely placing the adjective “Jewish” before a variety of nouns. On August 19, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, of the Foreign Ofﬁce’s Political Intelligence Department, conveyed the main lines of the British propaganda response. Following a summary of the region’s strategic importance for the outcome of the war, and of the themes of German propaganda and developments in Egyptian domestic politics, Lockhart made the following recommendations. It was crucial to convince the Egyptians that the Allies were going to win the war. Germany’s reputation for invincibility, which had been established by its victories in Europe, by Rommel’s achievements in Libya, and “by German radio propaganda, which is widely listened to in Egypt,” needed to be undermined. British broadcasts should exploit the Egyptians’ hatred of the Italians for their actions in Ethiopia in order to foster hatred for the Germans and Japanese as well. The Egyptians knew little about the Germans but tended to regard them “with admiration and awe.” The best way to rouse antipathy to the Germans was by associating them with the Italians and by “showing that they possess all the qualities, in an even more unpleasant form” which “inspire hatred of the Italians in Egyptian minds.” The Egyptians and the Arabs were “likely to be tempted by German promises, because they have never had any direct experience of German rule as they have had of British.” Therefore it was “important to bring home to them what has happened to other peoples who believed in German promises, and what the New Order would mean in practice in Egypt in terms of forced labor, transportation, destruction of religion and family life.”150 Indeed, the “most effective way of implementing this objective” could be to “describe to the Egyptians how the Nazi policies here enumerated would actually be applied in practice in Egypt if the country were to fall under Nazi domination.” It was

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also important to emphasize that “Nazi race theory classiﬁes the Egyptians as a ‘non-Aryan’ and therefore inferior race, to whom all the privileges of the ‘Aryan’ race, and notably that of higher education, are to be denied.”151 While all of this made eminent sense, Lockhart did not speciﬁcally refer to the fate of the Jews who had fallen under “Nazi domination.” Instead he stressed that Britain should convince the Egyptians that their future “and the ideals in which Egyptians believe are inseparably bound up with the victory of the United Nations. . . . The interdependence of Allied victory and Egyptian independence should be the main theme of British propaganda in this matter.” The British should try to convince the Egyptians that it was in their national interest that Britain remain strong in Middle East so that Egypt could secure independence after the war. The respect of democratic traditions among educated Egyptians formed a “bond with English speaking peoples” and was “a reason why Egyptians should wish for an Allied victory over the anti-democratic Axis powers.” Encouraging belief in democracy also strengthened the hand of the Wafd Party, which Lockhart described as “the upholder of the Egyptian democratic tradition” in contrast to “the Palace,” that is, King Farouk and his advisers, “with its anti-constitutional tendencies and its readiness to listen to the anti-democratic propaganda of the Germans and Italians.”152 The Germans were also playing on the fear of Bolshevization of Europe and the Middle East. In response, Lockhart advocated that the British exercise caution when dealing with the Anglo-Soviet alliance and the success of Russian armies. British propaganda should assert that the Russians were ﬁghting a national war and had no imperialist ambitions, and that “the best safeguard against extremist tendencies in Egypt as elsewhere lies in a progressive social policy designed to remove the conditions in which discontent and extremism ﬂourish.”153 The British message should stress the way American and British political institutions as well as French culture could contribute to a free, independent, and democratic Egypt. Yet in this impeccably liberal, enlightened, and long memo, Lockhart said nothing about how Britain should respond to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. His silence suggests that British intelligence ofﬁcials and diplomats believed that a frontal challenge to Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda would only conﬁrm in Arab minds the truth of Berlin’s efforts to link “Britain and the Jews.” This British reticence was profoundly ironic for in summer 1942, it was the forces under Montgomery’s command that alone

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stood in the way of Rommel’s victory. Again it is important to note, as Klaus Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have demonstrated, that had the German military been victorious in North Africa, SS units were prepared to travel to the region to murder the Jews in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East.154 American intelligence ofﬁcials were also trying to assess the impact of Axis propaganda in the region and to determine how best to respond. On August 15, 1942, Colonel Frederick O. Sharp and Captain Lawrence C. Thaw sent a report to the New York ofﬁce of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division for the Near and Middle East, North Africa, and India about the “Attitude of the Moslem World toward the United Nations.” Sharp and Thaw drew on the views of Francis Kettanch, the Chrysler Corporation’s representative in the Middle East. They wrote, “It may be safely stated that upwards of three-fourths of the Moslem world are in favor of the Axis.” They had that view because “the great majority of the Moslems believe Germany will win the war, and they wish to take the side of the winners.” Sharp and Thaw advocated a “complete overhaul of American propaganda which to date has been very poor, in contrast to the German propaganda which has been excellent.” Whereas the Muslims distrusted the British, French, and Italian propaganda, “strangely they believe the only truthful sources of information are the German and American.” German propaganda had been “well organized to inﬂuence Moslem mentality throughout the world,” but American radio signals were hard to receive, came at inconvenient hours, and were poorly advertised. They called for a new transmitter in the region, more reports about American production ﬁgures to convince the Muslims that the United States could outproduce “any possible Axis combination,”as well as “a certain amount of Mohammedan religious propaganda.”“Incredibly depressed standards of living”were one source of the willingness of the “Moslem masses” to consider a change “from British to Nazi masters.”155 Thaw and Sharp wrote that “one of the major reasons for Islam’s hostility to the United Nations” was what Muslims and especially Arabs “term the betrayal of Palestine by the British Government in the introduction and encouragement of a Zionist home in Palestine.” Along with this anti-Zionist view, one shared by some other American military intelligence ofﬁcers, Thaw and Sharp offered a sober view of “Pan-Islamism.” “Pan-Arabism,” they wrote, was “probably a dead issue” because the Arabs could not agree among themselves. “Pan-Islamism is quite another matter. Due to the fanatic religion of the Moslems, it is a

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very live, although dormant issue, that needs but a spark to send it ﬂaming in rebellion against Britain. The best proof of the widespread danger of the ArabJewish problem is the fact that the Indian Moslems, who are not Arabs and have no Jewish question, contributed funds and propaganda in behalf of their Moslem brothers in Palestine. This at a time when the Arab King Ibn Saud maintained a detached neutrality.” The Arab-Jewish problem in Palestine had “attained its present urgency with the penetration of German forces into Egypt” combined with other possibilities of German activity into the region. The general situation was “heavy with the threat of open revolt with its stab in the back danger to a retreating Allied force.” Further, “the problem has been intensiﬁed by radio talks from the Grand Mufti and Younus [sic] Bahri urging the Arabs to rise, murder the Jews and seize their property.”156 The Thaw-Sharp memo depicted a region brimming with hostility to the Jews. The Persians, “deeply resentful of the Jews,” had murdered some and forced others to leave the country. Iraqi Muslims were “strongly anti-Jewish, anti-British and anti-foreign” despite the presence of a pro-British government in Baghdad. Thaw’s and Sharp’s views of Iraqi Jews echoed local prejudices. “It must not be lost that the Iraqian Jew is rather well off. They control the small banking, money lending, commerce and import-export business in the country, as well as owning large blocks of desirable real estate in the cities. It is not difﬁcult for German propaganda to convince the Iraqian [sic] of the desirability of killing the Jews and seizing their property and business.”Their assessment of Palestine was even more sober: “The majority of the Arabs in Palestine are ﬁercely anti-Jewish, generally distrustful of Great Britain and deeply resentful of the Balfour Declaration. While the moderates agree that the present is hardly the time to quarrel over the Jewish question, the radicals, who form a majority, see in the approach of General Rommel an ideal opportunity to murder all Jews and seize their property. Tales are current throughout Palestine of the planned division of Jewish property.” They wrote that “the Egyptian Moslem is less fanatic than his brothers to the North and East” but anti-British and anti-foreign sentiment existed. The royal family was pro-Italian and the “upper class of Egyptian Moslems leans more toward the Germans, whom they admire, than the Italians, whom they despise.”157 Thaw and Sharp concluded, “The generally pro-Axis sentiments of the Moslem world, accentuated by the Arab-Jewish problem, and the German successes in the Caucasus and North Africa, has created an explosive situation of

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grave danger to the Allied cause.” Muslim views of Great Britain ran “from suspicion to open hatred.” Britain’s “conﬂicting commitments” to Arabs and Jews made it difﬁcult for it to take the initiative. Hence an American commission should be sent to the region to assure the Muslim world that the United States had no imperialist ambitions and that it and the United Nations “had only the friendliest sentiments for Islam,” favored “complete freedom for each of the Moslem states within the limits of their territorial and ethnical [sic] boundaries,” and had “nothing against” formation of a Federation of Arab States. The United States would also “lend its services to a round-table settlement of the Arab-Jewish problem in Palestine along cantonal, federal or other lines agreed to by both parties.” Adoption of such policies would “have an immense effect on Moslem opinion throughout the world, and would probably bring it behind the cause of the United Nations.”158 This memo by Thaw and Sharp lacked diplomatic niceties and social scientiﬁc sophistication. It contained prejudices of the time regarding the Jews and commerce in Iraq. Its use of the singular “the Moslem” to refer to human plurality was offensive. Yet there was candor in their observation of the political importance of Islam, of the depth of Muslim antagonism to the Jews, and of the support for the Germans that they and Francis Kettanch were observing. They believed that German propaganda was striking a chord, in no small part due to its appeals to Muslims as Muslims and to its attacks on the Jews. The ThawSharp memo stands out for its willingness to refer frankly to “Pan-Islamism” at a time when most diplomatic dispatches were focusing on Arab politics more narrowly construed. It was one of the earliest reports about the impact of “PanIslamism” on the course of the war. In early October Alexander Kirk again stressed the close interaction between the war and the political and propaganda battles. For the Allies, the situation in June and July had been grim. The British ﬂeet was withdrawn from Alexandria on June 30. In the ﬁrst week in July, refugees were allowed to take trains to Palestine without the need of tickets or a passport. American Embassy personnel, the Middle East Supply Center to Palestine, and prisoners of war were also transferred to Palestine. Preparations for the defense of Cairo and Alexandria began. Ofﬁcers’ wives were evacuated from Suez. Crowds gathered at the British Consulate seeking travel documents. Axis radio repeated the Joint Declaration by Germany and Italy daily, and its endorsement by the ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem “was not without a certain effect.” Yet “as the imminence of

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the Axis threat decreased[,] it ceased to attract any particular attention.” Aside from the theft of material left on trains and careless handling of cargo at airports, Axis appeals to the Arabs to engage in sabotage against the British had not produced signiﬁcant results.159 The Egyptian government had interned some persons for pro-Axis activity or under suspicion of such activity, but the number “was and is small, and persons so interned are said to be comfortably housed.” The Egyptian calm in the crisis was “to a large extent a reﬂection of apathy on the part of the lower property-less classes who felt they had little to gain nor lose however the situation developed.” With the Axis setbacks in late summer, Axis Arabic broadcasts stopped their predictions of imminent victory. Kirk concluded that the combination of British power, Egyptian government cooperation, and Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein precluded the possibility of an Egyptian revolt against the Allies. 160 In fall 1942, Nazism’s Arabic radio propaganda increased its Islamist appeals. On the evening of September 18, the Arab Nation station claimed that the appeal by the rector of Al Azhar University to Muslims to adhere strictly to the principles of Islam had “been welcomed and accepted with rejoicing by all Moslems.” The announcer expressed sadness that “some Moslem rulers have adopted European principles and have appealed to Moslems to follow these democratic principles from which Islam is far removed. Democracy has nothing in common with Islam which has no connection to any European principles.” The Arab and Muslim countries had a duty to adhere to their own traditions and customs “and not to follow European customs and principles which have nothing to do with Islam.” Unnamed Europeans in Muslim countries wanted to exploit these countries and enslave their peoples. That state of affairs “will last as long as the Moslems do not keep to their creed” and remain uniﬁed following “Mohammed, the Prophet of God,” who said “One Moslem is to another Moslem as the buildings standing close to each other, one supporting the other.”161 Later that same evening, VFA congratulated Al Azhar University on the celebration of its one thousandth anniversary. The Azharists were right to celebrate because the university had “remained for all these centuries a mosque in which prayers were held and in which the temporal and the divine met.” Its many “eminent” Muslim graduates included “His Eminence Haj Mohamed El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine and the great Arab leader.” He was “a son of El Azhar. . . . We pray to God that El Azhar may continue to be the guiding star of Moslems.” Indicative of Axis efforts to woo the Egyptian monarch, the

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broadcast concluded with these words: “We also pray to God that he may grant long life to Farouk who has supported, as his late father did, Azhar and the Azharists.”162 The appeal to Islam continued the following evening in a Berlin in Arabic report about a meeting of the Islamic Society held in Berlin to commemorate the “memory of the martyrs who fell and are falling in this Holy War against Britain.” Rashid Ali Kilani, a more secular ﬁgure than Husseini, struck a distinctively Islamist tone in his remarks.163 The “Semitic countries” took a great interest in the conﬂict between “two worlds—one shaken and declining” and another “just and happier” one that was arising because “the future of the Islamic world” depended on its outcome.” Kilani said that England stood for “principles of imperialistic exploitation of Moslem peoples.” The British “disregarded the sanctity of our religion” and had “tried to make of Palestine a Jewish country and change it into a weapon threatening the whole East.” As Muslims, the Arabs wished the Indians success in their effort to gain freedom and independence from Britain. The Axis would try to deliver both Arabs and India “from their slavery.” Kilani was conﬁdent that “all signs” indicated that Britain and her Allies were “heading for destruction” and that the “era of oppression will end in defeat.” All of this was “a great omen for the weak nations, and for the Moslems. Our bitter enemy is [sic] Britain and Bolshevism, which aim to destroy everything sacred in humanity. The British know that they cannot exist with a ﬂourishing Islam. They want therefore to exterminate this religion from the world. The reign of evil will disappear, the reign of Justice and Truth will prevail.”164 This was one of many occasions on which Arabic-language broadcasts expressed solidarity with Muslims in India and with the pro-Nazi Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who had also been in Berlin since 1941.165 On September 25, Berlin in Arabic went even further in associating Nazism with Islam and both with opposition to British imperialism. The broadcast attributed to Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to Spain, the view that “the danger of Nazism is more menacing than the danger from the heathen of the Middle Ages.” In stating this, Hoare “openly slandered Islam and the Moslems. He called Moslems heathens.” The station found it rather signiﬁcant that Hoare “classed Nazism and Islam together as a menace.” It assured Hoare that Islam would “remain a menace to Britain as much as it was in the time of the Caliphs of the Middle Ages.” Moreover, Britain regarded “any country ﬁght-

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ing for independence” as a menace to her. “We share the opinion of Samuel Hoare that both Nazism and Islam are a menace to the British Empire because the British Empire is based upon exploiting, enslaving and robbing other peoples.”166 The broadcast assumed that the linkage between Nazism and its understanding of Islam was a point of pride. On October 13, the Arab Nation stressed that there could be “no cooperation between Arabs and Jews” in Palestine. “The difference between the Arabs and the Jews is not a superﬁcial one, it is a deep-rooted difference in the aim of each. Therefore, there is no hope of cooperation between Jews and Arabs.” The Arabs had been “the real owners of Palestine . . . for thousands of years.” If Jewish claims in Palestine were “well founded, then the Arabs can claim that they have a right to Spain and the Red Indians to America.” The Arabs would refuse any sort of cooperation with the Jews, “the parasites who have been expelled from their own countries.” In their continuing “ﬁght and struggle to get rid of the Jews,” they would “not hesitate to use every means at their disposal.” Further, “the Arabs despise every person making propaganda for Arab-Jewish cooperation. They consider him a traitor to the cause and to the fatherland.”167 Refusal of any compromise on the Palestine issue was another logical outcome of the intertwining of political and religious themes in Axis propaganda. Throughout October, Axis radio continued to pour forth a ﬂood of anti-Semitic and anti-American vitriol. On October 14, Berlin in Arabic discussed “America and Imperialism.” It asserted that: America was the “fatherland of the Jews” and “the classical country of capitalism”; Moscow was “a Jewish center”; “London, Moscow, and Washington” were “helping the Jews in Arab countries”; and U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was “the Jewish agent at the White House.”168 On October 19, Berlin in Arabic attacked Chaim Weizmann: “Perhaps this despicable usurer is hoping that the Arabs of Palestine will leave their country to the Jews. But just wait, dirty Jew, Palestine will remain a pure Arab country as it has always been. It is you and your dirty relatives who will be kicked out, and this will come about by the grace of God.”169 At 10:15 p.m. that same evening, VFA broadcast “The Jewish Threat.” Weizmann was still “living in his old dream of establishing a Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic countries.”A victory in the war by the Bolsheviks, Americans, and British would “mean a Jewish victory which will be disastrous to the world.” The Jews were “hoping for an Allied victory to realize their claims on other countries. They are even serving the British as spies.” Fortunately, the Allies were suffering

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defeat after defeat. “The ﬁrst result of defeating the Imperialists will be the liberation from Jewish atrocities. We are sure that all Arabs realize that by destroying the Bolsheviks, the Americans and the British they are extirpating the supporters of the Jews.”170 These linkages between Jew-hatred and anti-imperialism remained an enduring theme of German broadcasts throughout the war. On the following evening, VFA, in a commentary on “American Greed,” simply stated that America was “a Jewish country.” It referred to the BBC as “the London Jewish broadcasting station” and informed its audience that the “Almighty has inspired the whole world to stand ﬁrm and united against your [British and American] tyranny and he will stop you and your friends the Jews, your Bolshevik beasts and your American idiots from making the world suffer.” Moreover, something called “the whole Arab nation” was united against the Allies.171 On October 22, VFA concluded that “the Americans are worse than the British.” It regretfully noted that there were still some Arabs who believed that the Americans were just and peaceful, respected the rights of smaller nations, especially the Arab nations, and would offer the Muslims freedom and sovereignty if they won the war. “In fact, the Americans are not only as dangerous as the British but even more so.” Listeners needed to remember that “the Jews have a big inﬂuence in American circles, even more so than in the case of the British Empire.”Roosevelt was their tool. Cordell Hull had “dared to threaten the Vichy Government for the severe measures which it has taken against the Jews, who were the cause of the collapse of France.” In fact, “the Americans regard with deep sympathy the cause of the Jews.” The Arabs must not be deceived by British promises or “American intrigues.” Rather they needed to keep in mind that if the democracies, including America, were to win the war, it would “mean the victory of the Jews and the annihilation of the Arabs.”172 The specter of “annihilation” as a result of a “victory of the Jews” was an echo in Arabic of a constant refrain German propaganda aimed at its home audience. Axis radio was pleased to report good news, yet it was silent about Axis defeats. On October 2, 1942, Berlin in Arabic reported that General Erwin Rommel’s presence during a speech by “the Führer” in Berlin had “created a great wave of pleasure amongst all classes of the Egyptian population” who could hear “the ovations by which Rommel’s entrance was met.”173 But Axis radio had little to report on the events of late October when the British Eighth Army launched a surprise attack on the German base at El Alamein and, after twelve days of heavy ﬁghting and losses, crushed the Panzerarmee. Only a small pro-

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portion of Rommel’s forces were able to escape capture, and they were pushed back toward Tripoli. By late January 1943, the Eighth Army entered Tripoli, one thousand miles to the west of El Alamein. The Axis threat to Egypt was over. Italy lost the last parts of its African empire, and, in Gerhard Weinberg’s laconic phrase, “the Mufti could no longer expect to return to Jerusalem in Rommel’s baggage car.”174 On November 8, 1942, American and British troops participating in Operation Torch surprised the Germans and Italians when they landed on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of French Northwest Africa and overcame initial resistance from forces loyal to Vichy France. On November 10, German forces landed in Tunisia. The focus of attention shifted away from Egypt to a looming battle for Tunisia.175 Axis Arabic radio said nothing about the defeat at El Alamein and precious little about the Allied landings in Northwest Africa. In lieu of hard news, Axis stations continued to broadcast inﬂammatory stories. On October 27, Athens in Arabic attacked America in “Imperialist and Dollar America.” America was “the country of the dollar and is dominated by the Jews” who gave orders to the president, dominated the press, and were the cause of World War II. Their aim was “to dominate the world.” They made Roosevelt do what they wished. All of Roosevelt’s diplomats in the Middle East were Jews. “The victory of Washington means the victory of the Jews and the crushing of the Arabs.”176 On October 30, Bari in Arabic reported that Jews in Palestine “welcomed the American forces with joy and enthusiasm.” At a reception near Jaffa, they entertained 500 American ofﬁcers.“Whisky was plentiful as water in a river. After the ofﬁcers had indulged in drinking, speeches were made stressing the ties existing between the people of the U.S.A. and the Jews.”A message from Roosevelt himself, expressing his appreciation for the help the Jews had given the Allies, was read. “No wonder the Jews make so much fuss of the Americans because this is really a Jewish war. In this war there are two camps, the British and the French, who let the Jews play fast and loose in their own countries, and the Germans and Italians who revolted against Jewish domination.” The United States, which “had no reason whatsoever to get involved in this war was ﬁnally driven to it by those hirelings of the Jews.”177 That same evening, the Arab Nation devoted a broadcast to a denunciation of the Balfour Declaration.178 A program on VFA expressed worry because the Jews were receiving support not only from Britain, but from the Americans and the Bolsheviks as well. Unfortunately, the Americans and Roosevelt were “more capable than the British in realizing the demands of the Jews, and the American dictator

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Roosevelt proved to be most interested in the ambitions of the Jews. In regard to the Bolsheviks, it sufﬁces to mention that the Jews are the real controllers of Russia.”179 In November, Axis radio’s response to the Allied landings in Africa was to attack the Jews. On November 8, the Arab Nation denounced “New Aggression by the Anglo-Saxons on the Arab Moslem Countries” and offered a Nazi interpretation of recent German history. Germany, with a population of 80 million, was “not able to cope with Jewish treachery during the last great war [World War I]. The Jews were responsible for the German defeat.” After Germany “got rid of the Jewish inﬂuence,” it was able to “live freely” and “became a leader of the great nations.” The broadcast then asked what would happen to Algiers and Morocco. “How will they cope with the Jews?” Fortunately, “God is quite near, so prepare yourselves for ﬁnal victory.”180 On the evening of November 11, Bari in Arabic called for “Arab Unity against the Anglo-Saxons.” It obliquely referred to the Allied landings when it acknowledged that “Roosevelt’s new campaign in North Africa has a dangerous signiﬁcance [which] every Arab should recognize.” By helping the Axis, the Arabs would be gaining “independence and freedom from the Anglo-Americans and the Jews . . . the common enemy.”181 Later that evening, Bari in Arabic carried a report about a speech that Husseini delivered at the German Embassy in Rome to commemorate Arab martyrs and appeal to Arabs to take a “stand in this war against the British and the Jews.” British victory, he was reported to have said, would mean “defeat of the Arabs but also destruction of Arabism because the Jews intended to establish their National Home not only in Syria, Lebanan, Transjordan and Egypt but also throughout all the neighboring Arab countries.” That was why “the Arabs must struggle against the British and the Jews, the deadliest enemies of Islam, shoulder to shoulder with the Axis.”182 On November 14, Bari in Arabic broadcast a speech by Husseini. The Mufti pointed with pride to the fact that “before this war broke out and before the Axis had risen against British and Jewish greed . . . the Arab nation” had “struggled against greed for over twenty years.” He recalled the martyrs who died “in the battles of glory.” Though recalling them “brings pain to our hearts,” he said, their blood “is like the water which gives life to the dead plants.” The result of the war meant a great deal to the Arabs. If Britain were to win, “the Jews will rule our countries and will deprive the Arabs of their freedom and independence. The Allies will hand over many of our lands to the Jews.” Palestine would be “only a ﬁrst step to the formation

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of a Jewish nation” that would include Jordan “and all the other Arab countries as far as Morocco.” Conversely, if Britain were defeated, “the Jewish nation would be thwarted, and this means that we should be relieved of the biggest danger which threatens us.” With the invasion, the Americans had “brought many troubles to the Arabs of North West Africa,” including “the Jewish danger.” For Husseini, World War II was a continuation of the struggle in the Arab countries that long preceded its outbreak.183 Following the Allied landings, Hitler was still hoping to drive the Allies out of North Africa, ideally with the help of anti-Jewish sentiment among the Arab population.184 On November 16, Berlin in Arabic reported that the “chief rabbi of the Jewish community in Egypt” had “given orders to all Jews to celebrate the victory of the British and Americans in North Africa. Parties have been held and Jewish songs sung.” It claimed that Jews in North Africa were the ﬁrst to celebrate the American landings. They knew “that the Americans invaded North Africa chieﬂy to help the Jews and to give them new territories.”185 On November 18, Berlin in Arabic asserted that Jews oppressed North Africa’s Arabs. The Jews “welcomed Allied aggression even more than the Americans and British themselves,” for the “Jewish aim is to encircle the Arabs. The real danger of the Allied aggression is the Jews. All the Arabs should know that the victory of the Allies means the victory of the Jews, and that the defeat of the Allies means the defeat of the Jews. He who wants to defeat the Jews should ﬁght the Allies and defeat them.”186 On November 21, VFA asserted, “Since the days of Mohammed, the Jews have been hostile to Islam. The Arabs know what they did to the Prophet and they know that God saved him from their evil works. . . . Hatred of Islam and of the Arabs is the main reason for the desire of the Jews to have Palestine for their own and if they take Palestine they will be in a good position to secure dominion over the other Arab countries.”The Jews, it continued, wished “to wipe out the Arabs and Islam.” Unable to do so on their own, “the Jews became the Allies of Britain.”187 German propaganda presented Zionism as the most recent chapter in a supposed ancient Jewish animus against the religion of Islam. On November 25, Bari in Arabic reported that Husseini, always referred to as “the Grand Mufti” or “the Grand Mufti of Palestine,” had said that the “invasion of North Africa by the Anglo-Saxons was the forerunner of Jewish domination of the country,”and that “the Jews were the prime movers of America’s entry into this war.” The Algerians, he continued, understood that “the present calamity to

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their country,” that is, the Allied victories over German and Italian forces, “was brought about by the Jews whose only desire is to extort all the wealth of the countries.” Husseini emphasized that “the Arabs should do their utmost to ﬁght the Jews who are helped by the Anglo-Saxons.”188 The next evening, Husseini spoke on Berlin in Arabic to say that “American aggression in North Africa did not come to us as a surprise. In carrying it out, they were only providing the Jews with fresh pastures.” The Jews had “wanted the world war so they could proﬁt from it.” The Americans would “try to make the Arabs the slaves of the Jews.”189 The following evening, VFA returned to one of its favorite themes, “Roosevelt and the Jews. The president had “thrown off the mask and proved beyond any doubt that he is a toy in the hands of the Jews by his collaboration with the Jewish element in his aggression in North Africa.”190 On November 29, the Arab Nation reported that North Africa would be “a bridge between two Jewish capitals, Jerusalem and New York.” New York was “the center of the Jews”; they hoped to make Jerusalem another. Yet Jerusalem would “never be Jewish” because it was a “Moslem center” for more than 400 million Muslims and 80 million Arabs. It was and would remain Arab. Conversely, “Jerusalem will be the tomb of the Jews of the world. In it, the Arabs will bury the greediness of the Jews and British imperialism.” The Arabs of North Africa were currently “suffering from British, American, French and Jewish imperialism.” The broadcast urged Arabs to “rise up against them when the right time approaches.”191 On December 11, VFA ran another variant of “Roosevelt and the Jews.” It had often said that Roosevelt was “the donkey on which the Jews ride with spurs.” The American invasion of North Africa was one result. Yet no one could “wipe out the spirit of Arabism and Islam. As long as our religion guides us to ﬁght against Jewry and imperialism, it is certain that the Arabs will seize the opportunity before it is too late, because prevention is always better than cure.”192 On December 12, VFA, in a broadcast entitled “Jews,” gave the ﬁrst thinly veiled acknowledgment that the Axis in North Africa had suffered a setback. The announcer found it “shameful that an Arab leader like [Egyptian Prime Minister] Nahas Pasha” had sent a message to “Roosevelt, the servant of the Jews, congratulating him on his victory. Roosevelt and his soldiers took part in preventing the Axis from advancing into the Arab countries, purely because they realize that an Axis advance means the liberation of the Arab countries and expulsion of the Jews. Roosevelt is the leader of gangsters pledged to destroy Arabism and the Axis are struggling against these gangsters.”193

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Like the press and radio Germany, the Nazi Arabic broadcasts never responded to Allied claims about crimes begin committed against the Jews in Europe. On December 17, the Allies issued a declaration that condemned “in the strongest terms” the “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination” of European Jews by the Nazi regime.194 That evening, in a broadcast entitled “The Jews Give Orders and the Allies Obey,” VFA stated, “London and Washington are carrying out an extensive propaganda campaign for the help of the Jews who are suffering in Europe.” (Actually eleven governments signed the declaration.) One can assume that the editors and announcers of Axis Arabic stations were as well informed as anyone else reading the German press and listening to the radio about Hitler’s intentions to exterminate the Jews and Goebbels’s boasts that the policy was being implemented.195 Dismissing the assertions of the Allied declaration as a propaganda campaign was standard practice for the entire Nazi propaganda machine. Like their British allies, American ofﬁcials responsible for political warfare in the Middle East refrained from directly confronting the anti-Semitic barrage. In a “Weekly Propaganda Directive” of November 14, 1942, the Overseas Operations Branch of the Ofﬁce of War Information” established the following guidelines for Voice of America broadcasts for Palestine. The Voice of America must speak to the people of Palestine with greater tact and caution than elsewhere in the Middle East. 1. Spoken and written words must alike be guided by an honest acceptance of the fact that the subject of Zionist aspirations cannot be mentioned, inasmuch as any serious outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling which might result among the Arab peoples in this area would jeopardize our strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean. 2. Equally taboo, at present, is any mention of a Jewish army. 3. It must be remembered that, as a whole, the Jews are staunchly supporting the cause of the United Nations: the Arabs are not. Therefore, our words must be addressed primarily to Moslem and Christian Arabs, especially in view of the effectiveness of enemy propaganda. 4. Quote Hitler’s own observations in regard to alien races and cultures, and hold them up to ridicule and scorn. Stress the Paganism of our enemies and embroider our comments with biblical and Koranic phrases of denunciation.

The directive added that Allied propaganda should contrast accounts of German occupation policies in Europe with beneﬁts that would emerge from an Allied victory and should “point out that Moslem and American culture re-

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spect a common tradition of religious toleration. We can build our best propaganda upon this common heritage.”196 In short, in order to win and sustain Arab and Muslim support for the Allied cause in Palestine, it was important not to directly challenge the anti-Zionist—and anti-Semitic—radio barrage arriving on a regular basis on Axis shortwave radio. Doing so would undermine support for the Allies in the region and could be used by Nazi propagandists to conﬁrm that the Allies were indeed handmaidens of the Jews. Throughout the war, the Allies’ most damaging counter to Nazi propaganda in the Arab world was to point to Nazi claims that Aryans were part of a superior master race. As German ofﬁcials had understood during the discussions surrounding the Nuremberg race laws and the Berlin Olympics, the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority undermined the Third Reich’s efforts to present itself as an ally of the Arabs and Muslims. On October 23, Berlin in Arabic broadcast a public letter Rasihid Ali Kilani had sent to Walter Gross, the director of the Nazi’s Ofﬁce of Racial Politics (Rassenpolitisches Amt). The Axis enemies in their propaganda state that the Germans consider the Arabs among the lower castes. In my capacity as the Premier of Iraq I can give an assurance that the Arabs do not give this claim any importance after what they have seen and felt Germany’s treatment and help to them. But as the enemy propaganda goes on repeating these lies I should like to receive an answer from an ofﬁcial source regarding the German consideration of the Arab race. I should be very grateful to get from you a reply on the opinion of Germany on the subject. Rashid Ali el Kilani.197

The broadcast continued with Gross’s reply to “The Prime Minister of Iraq.” (This title was a ﬁction as British intervention in spring 1941 had ended Kilani’s coup attempt and he was now in exile in Berlin.) In answer to your Excellency’s letter of 17 October 1942, I have the honor to give you the racial theory regarding the Arab caste. The racial policy has been adopted by Germany to safeguard the German people against the Jews who, biologically, are different from the Middle East races. Accordingly, Europe has been opposing the Jews for decades. The Germans do not ﬁght the Jews because they are Semitic or because they come from the East, but for their character, egoism and their hostility to society. . . . While Germany forbids the entrance of the Jews into her territory, she welcomes all Arabs of Semitic origin and cares for them. The attitude of the Germans for the Arabs is that of respect. Not a single ofﬁcial German source ever stated that the Arabs originated from a lower caste. On the contrary, the racial theory of National Socialism considers the Arabs of a very high caste.

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The oppression of the Arabs of Palestine is being followed in Germany with great interest and Germany conﬁrms [i.e., supports] the demands of the Arabs.198

After reading both letters, the announcer attacked British claims of sympathy for Islam and Muslims. The British, in fact,“have shown their hatred for Islam” by allegedly preventing Indians from traveling to Mecca, attacking mosques in the Arab world, destroying many mosques in Palestine, and “encouraging Jews to stay in Islamic countries because they know that they are the enemies of the Moslems and the Koran. . . . Every Moslem should know that an Allied victory will mean a victory for the Jews and the destruction of the Moslems, but God will never allow the ﬁre of faith to be extinguished by the enemies of Islam.”199 The following evening, Berlin in Arabic added that this “ofﬁcial statement” by the Nazi Party had “put an end to the weak British propaganda which was trying to cause animosity between the noble Arabs and the great German nation.”200 In his reply, Gross depicted Nazism as a kind of racist or at least anti-Semitic internationalism bound together by hatred of the Jews and, in this instance, also the British. Compared to Communism and liberal democracy, Nazism was certainly a form of particularism.Yet, as we have seen, Nazi ofﬁcials claimed that the regime’s racial hatred was limited to the Jews whereas nonJewish “Semites,” that is, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Indians, and Muslims in general, were simply different but not necessarily inferior. Gross’s statement reiterated the clariﬁcation of Nazi racial ideology that had taken place in Berlin in the months preceding the 1936 Olympics. Then and again in the midst of the war in North Africa, that reinterpretation of the meaning of Nazi racism was an essential precondition for alliances with non-Germans in Europe, as well as in Latin America, Japan, and the Middle East. All were supposed to be bound together by their common hatred of Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and of the Jews who allegedly controlled the Allies. These arguments were a necessary precondition for the diffusion of anti-Semitism to these other parts of the world. In fact, in wartime Germany, love affairs, sexual relations, and marriages between Arab men and German women within Nazi Germany aroused the hostile attention of the Ofﬁce of Racial Politics. Its ofﬁcials sought to prevent such bonds and if necessary to imprison or deport the “offending” Turkish or Arab man.201 Such episodes caused problems for German diplomats and soldiers trying to convince Arabs and Muslims that Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were their friends and allies. In May 1942, a writer in the journal Neues Volk (New People) of the Ofﬁce of Racial Politics, replied to a father who sup-

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posedly asked whether racial differences between Germans and Turks meant that they should not marry. A marriage or similar connection between your daughter with a Turk is out of the question. A Near Eastern blood element [Bluteinschlag] predominates among the Turks, among whom, alongside Oriental and Western racial components, mongoloid racial elements also enter. The Near Eastern and Oriental races are alien [artfremde] races. The same is true of the mongoloid [Mongolide] races. Moreover, in such cases, even when such racial considerations are not present, marriages of German young women with foreigners are not desirable. If your daughter does not want to listen to you, she faces the danger of being placed in protective custody. We emphatically point out to you and to your daughter the serious consequences of this behavior, one that obviously does not possess the slightest feeling for the honor of the Volk [nicht das geringste völkische Ehregefühl besitzt].202

Upon being informed of this text, Franz von Papen, the German ambassador to Turkey, informed the Foreign Ministry in Berlin that the publication of such a comment in a German magazine “has serious foreign policy considerations.” It caused “irritation and insult” in Turkey and would aid “our AngloSaxon opponents” in their “propaganda against us.” He asked the Ofﬁce of Racial Politics not to publish such things in the future.203 On May 16, 1942, Franz Rademacher, director of the Ofﬁce of Jewish Affairs in the Foreign Ministry, wrote to Gross that he “had no objection to the content of the information from a racial-political viewpoint. . . . The fact however that it appears now and uses the example of Turkey is, from a foreign policy standpoint, really clumsy” and would have “embarrassing and awkward foreign policy implications.” It was a “political blunder” that should not happen again.204 Although the Ofﬁce of Racial Politics generally kept its actions out of the press, Nazi policies contradicted the claims Gross made on Arabic radio. University ofﬁcials in contact with Gross’s ofﬁce were determined to prevent “racially alien” students from Arab countries from continuing personal relationships with German women, if necessary by withdrawing permission to study at German universities.205 On July 24, Grobba agreed with Kilani that expelling Arab students during the war was out of the question. Deportation would have to be to a neutral country where the students “would fall into the hands of hostile intelligence services.”206 Despite the fact that he had detailed knowledge about cases of Nazi disapproval of intimate relations between Germans with Arabs and Turks, Kilani did his best to convince his Arab and Mus-

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lim listeners that the National Socialists were not the racists the Allies claimed they were. On December 23, the Arab Nation broadcast the text of Haj Amin el-Husseini’s speech on the occasion of the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin. In it, the Mufti made emphatically clear that his hatred of the Jews was deeply rooted in his understanding of Islam. The speech, repeated in fragments in other broadcasts and leaﬂets, became a canonical statement of the connection between National Socialism and Islam during the war. The key paragraph reads as follows: Of those who hate the Moslems most, have declared their animosity from ancient times and those who still persist in it are the Jews. Every Moslem knows that Jewish animosity to the Arabs dates back to the dawn of Islam. Every Moslem knows how they opposed and hurt the Prophet as well as creating endless difﬁculties for him. . . . So that the Koran says: “You shall ﬁnd that the most hostile people are the Jews.” The Jews are the same whether during the era of the prophets or in succeeding eras. They never waver from their policy of intrigue and evil doing. They spread their venom in the Islamic countries for their ambitions and of late these ambitions have been clear in Palestine, the Holy Land, which they want to make a center for the extension of their domination. On the occasion of the North African campaign, their leader Weizmann stated that Algeria will be the bridge linking two Jewish centers, New York and Jerusalem.207

Husseini then denounced Zionism and its “evil intentions” toward the Muslims before returning to the Koranic roots of his hatred of the Jews. 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

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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-

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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 Führer 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 Führer and thus in Germany rescuers from all distress and suffering.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 Jewry in 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 Führer’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

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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 attaché 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

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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 Germans.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-

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cember 1942 alone, the Axis sent 50,000 German and 18,000 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.1 But the propaganda offensive continued with radio broadcasts from Germany and Italy and leaﬂets distributed by intelligence units in the armed forces and from diplomatic posts in Tunisia and Morocco. Between January 1 and February 18, in Tunis and Tangier alone, German intelligence agents and diplomats distributed approximately 400,000 Arabic-language leaﬂets and pamphlets.2 Among these was “Facts,” 25,000 copies of which were divided equally between Tunis and Tangier. The pamphlet warned that the fate of Arabs in Palestine could be a harbinger of things to come in North Africa. The North Africans know that a large number of the Jews who live in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco have acquired foreign citizenship, and they know the effects of this on the Arab-Jewish relationship. . . . [T]he North Africans understand that the Jews living in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco do not cultivate land, do not repair the roads, do not build houses, and pursue Jewish vocations. They specialize in deception and grabbing money. So what will be the fate of North Africa if this situation continues? Will the Jews become the friends of the kings while the Arabs become servants? Something like this already happened in Palestine. . . . Will the children of the Jews go to school while the children of the Arabs are removed [so they can] polish shoes and pick up cigarette butts? Something resembling this happened in Palestine. Will Muslim girls become servants in the houses of Jews? That really happened in Palestine under the auspices of the English.3

“Who Are the Arabs’ Real Allies?” (5,000 copies distributed in Tunis, 4,000 in Tangier) asserted that the English and the Americans were “attacking Islam in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco by means of their missionaries. Have you seen the Germans do something like this?” The English had interfered in the affairs

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of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq and opposed nationalist movements and killed their leaders.“Have you heard of the Germans trying something like this? And you’ve heard that the English and the Americans think about establishing an ethnic nation for the Jews in North Africa on the model of Palestine. Could you imagine the Germans doing something like this?” The English and Americans defended “the old system of colonialism,” but the Germans and their allies “call for a new system, a system of cooperation. So then who are the true allies of the Arabs?”4 Some cartoons and texts distributed by the Axis attacked American politicians who supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and others called on Arabs to engage in sabotage or to awaken from a political slumber.5 Yet in Berlin, at a meeting on March 16, ofﬁcials in Ribbentrop’s ofﬁce acknowledged that German propaganda in North Africa was “running into difﬁculties because leading Arab circles are hostile only to Britain. Yet as in the past they still trust the Americans. Therefore, we should again stress the necessity of using all relevant materials about Zionism. In particular, we should point to the Jews’ desire to establish boundaries [in Palestine] rooted in the Old Testament, that is, [boundaries that extend] to the Euphrates River. This material can be used to gradually shatter the Arabs’ conﬁdence in the Americans’ promises.”6 Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism were used to fan hostility to the United States. During the ﬁghting in Tunisia in spring 1943, Rudolf Rahn, the head of the German Consulate in Tunis, called for appeals to Arabs and Muslims with antiJewish, anti-capitalist, and anti-Bolshevik motifs. Arabs and Muslims should be assured that Muslims would gain equality under German inﬂuence and that Jews would be “made to do forced labor” and their property would be distributed to Muslims.7 As the American presence in the Middle East expanded in summer and fall 1942, ofﬁcials at the Ofﬁce of War Information (OWI) in Washington continued to assess how best to respond to Axis propaganda. A “Summary of the Subversive Situation in Middle East: Analysis of Muftist Propaganda in Egypt” written by the OWI Overseas Branch ofﬁcials in Cairo was sent to military intelligence ofﬁcials in Washington on January 28, 1943. The OWI ofﬁcials in Cairo argued that to gain support for the Allied cause in Egypt, the United Nations needed to convince listeners and readers that it would “ultimately be victorious, as a result of the preponderance of our men and resources over those of the Axis.”8 With a blend of conﬁdence and cultural condescension, OWI ofﬁ-

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cials in a report of October 15 had written that “Egyptians, like all Moslem peoples, will be impressed above all else by military might.” America’s “vast potentialities” should be underscored and the enemy’s strength should be minimized. “Tales of Axis atrocities will carry no weight.” As “Egyptians admire wealth,” news items should feature American afﬂuence. The place of Egypt as a “center of cultural guidance” in the Muslim world should be acknowledged. As nationalism was important, the Allies should stress that their postwar policy would rest on the “four freedoms”articulated by Roosevelt. As the Egyptian upper classes were “more inﬂuenced by Western civilization than any other similar group in the Middle East,” they would “demand a sophisticated attitude in our broadcasts and publications.” Axis propaganda in Egypt found “fertile ground” among its Italian population, German women married to Egyptian men, and advocates of Vichy France. Among the Egyptians, it received a positive reception from Ali Maher Pasha and his supporters; the rector of Al Azhar, El Maraghi, who was close to the king; and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Young Egypt Party led by Ahmed Hussein and the Young Men’s Muslim Association. “All of these organizations are to some extent used as organs of subversive propaganda.” In the present circumstances some were “a serious threat to our interests. . . . In the face of an Allied reverse they would immediately become centers of dangerous disaffection.”9 An OWI “Basic Directive” of January 30, 1943, stressed the importance of putting the United States in a sympathetic light and convincing the Egyptians “of our respect and understanding of their problems and attitudes.” The Egyptians should be informed about the physical size and wealth of resources in the United States, and its accomplishments in irrigation and reclamation projects involving hydraulic engineering as well as in transportation and communication. Egypt’s pioneering accomplishments in those realms should be acknowledged. American broadcasts should stress the melting-pot nature of the United States. Although the United States had not always lived up to its ideals, it aspired to be tolerant of all races and creeds. American material should “show familiarity with Egyptian and Arab-Moslem prejudices and predilections” but “must not cater to them.” The Basic Directive was emphatic about the need to “avoid all discussion, for the present, of those fundamental political problems which have so inﬂamed the Middle East in recent years. Speciﬁcally these are three: Zionism, Pan-Arabism, and Pan-Islamism. Never take sides in these matters, but preserve absolute detachment as tacit evidence that we favor a policy of

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‘Egypt for the Egyptians.’”10 The directive said nothing about reports about the mass murders of Europe’s Jews or about the torrent of anti-Semitic incitement coming from Nazi radio and print propaganda.11 Some American ofﬁcials did express gratitude for the depth of insight into Nazi policy and propaganda offered by Kirk’s dispatches.12 Ironically, the more pessimistic American ofﬁcials became about pro-Axis sentiment among Arabs and Muslims, the less willing they were to directly challenge Nazism’s anti-Semitic interpretation of the course of events. Propaganda from Berlin continued unabated. On the occasion of the opening of the Islamic Institute in Berlin, Husseini sent a telegram to Hitler to express his thanks for his support. On Janauary 2, 1943, Berlin in Arabic’s feature on the “Berlin Islamic Institute” broadcast Hitler’s reply: “To the Great Leader, the Grand Mufti of Palestine, I present to you my thanks for your kind telegram and I wish you complete success for you in your participation in the tasks of the future.”13 On January 11, VFA’s comment on “The Jews” falsely reported that in gratitude for the American landings in North Africa, the Jews had given General Dwight Eisenhower the title of ‘The Glittering Sword of Israel.”‘ It sarcastically sent Eisenhower its congratulations. Echoing the blend of appeal to nationalism and to Islam of the summer and fall broadcasts, it added, “We Arabs all know an American victory would mean a Jewish victory and this in turn would mean an Arab defeat. This is why the Arabs should ﬁght against the Americans and realize that this war is a war for the survival of the Arabs and Islam.”14 After their military victories, the Allies were able to abolish the antiJewish laws that the Nazis had brought to North Africa. On January 13, Berlin in Arabic reported that Roosevelt ordered Eisenhower “to abolish all anti-Semitic restrictions in North Africa and to give them [the Jews] privileges in this area. . . . The Jews have contrived to control both Britain and America politically because they are in command of the major economic concerns of these countries.” It asserted that this was “the truth of the present situation and anyone who attempts to deny it is a liar!”15 On January 13, Bari in Arabic repeated now familiar claims and threats: “The Jews provoked this war to loot the world and destroy it but Bolshevism, Judaism and Democracy will be annihilated by the will of God.”16 If Nazi radio had offered news of the military setbacks in North Africa, the American Embassy monitoring operation in Cairo would have recorded it. Nothing of that sort appeared in the Kirk dispatches. On January 16, the Arab

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Nation cryptically reported that the “situation in North Africa is still confused and the Allies are undecided. . . . London and Washington both insist on holding their ground.”17 According to an American Embassy report, there were 450 newspapers in Egypt in 1943, publishing in Arabic, English, and French.18 The BBC and the Voice of America were also on the air with Arabic news broadcasts. With a multiplicity of print and radio sources, Egyptians, both the literate and illiterate, had access to reasonably accurate reports about the course of the war. Radio Berlin and the Voice of Free Arabism did not offer that to their listeners. Instead they preached to the converted, reinforced their beliefs, and sought to attract converts through their vehemence, certainty, and ideological clarity. Husseini’s talent as a demagogic speaker served him well on the radio, where his ideological pronouncements and denunciations of his enemies did not delve deeply into the details of actual events. Rashid Ali Kilani, on the other hand, offered long, detailed, and tedious recitations of the details of events surrounding the Iraqi coup of 1941. Kilani was a good soldier on the radio, but there was something pathetic about his January 20, 1943, statement from Berlin:“I hereby declare . . . in the name of the Iraqi people . . . Iraq remains in a state of war with the British.” The Axis powers, he announced, were “faithful friends” who offered the best chance for the “the Arab Nation” to realize its “freedom, independence and unity.”19 He made the statement soon after the actual government of Iraq in Baghdad had declared war on the Axis powers. German Arabic broadcasts took greater liberties with facts than did the German-language stations. Within Germany, radio and press propaganda on the whole did not assert that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. Instead it generally claimed that he was the Jews’ tool and stooge. In late 1942, Nazi Arabic radio announced that the president of the United States was indeed Jewish. On January 18, 1943, Berlin in Arabic ran another piece about “Roosevelt the Jew.” It began with the standard argument that “the American nation” had been pushed into the war by “a certain class,” which did not care whether America won or lost. Its intention was simply “to push as many people as they can into it.” It claimed that Roosevelt was the head of this class. Some of its members were Jews, while others “had been enticed by Jewish money.” Hence the Americans had become “victims of those Jews, or perhaps it is more correct to say that they are the victims of Roosevelt. No wonder that Roosevelt and his friends direct the war according to Jewish intentions and interests since Roosevelt and some of his assistants are of Jewish origins.” The broadcast then referred to “some historical

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facts” that proved Roosevelt’s Jewish descent from a Spanish family that emigrated from Spain in 1620. Berlin in Arabic told its listeners that Roosevelt’s mother was of “Italian-Jewish origins” with the family name “Ilano, a name which has been modiﬁed to Delano.” Further, “Roosevelt’s wife is also Jewish.” Having mentioned these “facts,” the station was sure that “no one will have any doubt regarding Roosevelt’s origins as being Jewish, or of his feelings towards the Jews, facts which have been proved by Roosevelt’s support to the Jews.” Now “Jewish America” was trying to win the Arabs’ friendship and support in the war. Berlin in Arabic warned its audience,“America is the greatest danger to the Arabs and Arabism since she is a friend of the Jews, and, to use the correct words, a Jewish organization.”20 In its domestic German-language propaganda, the Nazi propagandists had described elective afﬁnities between English Puritanism and Judaism.21 On January 30, in a broadcast on “Britain and the Jews, the Arab Nation went further: the British monarchs and the Anglo-Saxons were also Jewish. The broadcast claimed that the Times (London) had stated that “the Jews and the AngloSaxons are descended from the same family. That is to say, the British throne is the throne of Israel and the person who sits on it is the descendent of David.” Anglo-Saxons were the sons of the biblical Isaac. Abraham had a son from a second wife whose descendants “some people claim” migrated to Europe and England. “Therefore,” the broadcast continued, “it can be proved that the sons of Isaac are the inhabitants of Britain and the British throne is the throne of David.” Actually, it continued, “the British are in fact the shadows of the Jews and the British tendency to dominate the world is a Jewish one.” The broadcast then combined conspiracy theory and logical incoherence in a manner that only a direct quote can capture. The Jews aim to rule the world in the future. If Britain wades through a sea of blood it is in order that the Jews may rule the world undisputed, for the Jews are not content with Palestine, Syria and Transjordan, nor even with Morocco but desire the whole world. They show great cunning however by not seeking to obtain this domination all at once and that is why they have created the myth that the British are of Jewish origin in order that they may realize their ambitions. America on the other hand would like to inherit the British Empire. But the Americans are Anglo-Saxons and thus they are the sons of Isaac which means of course that they are Jews. Thus the British Empire will inevitably be the Empire of Isaac, in other words a Jewish Empire. Gigantic forces are now ﬁghting against each other, countries disappear, thrones crumble, just because the Jews want to rule the world. A Jewish victory would mean the disintegration of the

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whole world and the degeneration of humanity and civilization’s return to the stone age. May God forbid.22

A careful listener could have been excused for being confused as to whether it was a fact or a myth that the British were or were not Jews, though the weight of the argument seemed to suggest that they were. He or she might also conclude that now all Americans, that is, not just Franklin Roosevelt, were Jews. This remarkable broadcast assumed only some knowledge of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which when combined with the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of twentieth-century Europe offered a full explanation of Allied actions during World War II. Radical anti-Semitism was also Nazism’s opiate. The more the Americans and British succeeded in defeating Axis forces in North Africa, the more Nazi Arabic radio resorted to its ultimate ideological weapon: it simply stated that the Allies were identical with the Jewish enemy. From its earliest months and years, Arab and Muslim anti-Americanism included strains of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.23 When American politicians began to express more support for a Jewish state in Palestine, Axis radio saw further evidence that Washington had “openly declared its hostility to Arabs and Islam.”24 Allied military victories in North Africa brought about an expansion of American intelligence and political activities in the region and thus a modest expansion of reports about the impact of Axis propaganda. As Joseph Bendersky has documented, some leading ofﬁcers of the “G-2” staff of the Military Intelligence Division (MID) responsible for examining such trends were themselves advocates of anti-Semitic and certainly anti-Zionist sentiment.25 Nevertheless, as the MID ﬁeld agents were concerned above all with winning the war, their reports did not shrink from reporting anti-Semitic or pro-Axis sympathies in the Middle East. On January 10, 1943, George Wadsworth, the general consul of the American Legation in Beirut, sent the ﬁrst of ten weekly military intelligence reports to American military intelligence ofﬁcials in Cairo. “Notes on the Situation in Syria and Lebanon” were authored by a certain “Gwynn.” In addition to reports on the local political scene, they included a section on “Subversive Activities.” For the week of January 1–7, Gwynn reported that “enemy propaganda has been as virulent as usual, the usual hackneyed themes being harped upon: American imperialism, American sympathy with the Jews, the emptiness of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms, and divergence between American and British war aims. An especially effective theme was underscored in a Bari broadcast of December 29 where the former Mufti of Jerusalem

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was quoted as declaring that ‘The Arabs hope with all their heart for Axis victory which alone can assure their liberty ‘from Anglo-Saxon yoke.’”26 The following week Gywnn reported that “the fundamental themes of enemy radio propaganda have undergone little change.” The Axis station from Athens asserted that “if the United States and England come out of this war victorious, which God forbid!, they will repudiate all promises and will colonize all the Arab countries of the Near and Middle East.” Gwynn reported that “the appeals to the Arabs to rise up against the Jews and their protectors, the British and the Americans, have been particularly strident this week, in the hope, doubtless, of leading to further demonstrations.”27 On February 17, Secretary of State Hull requested that Wadsworth “telegraph immediately your estimate of the efﬁcacy of Ofﬁce of War Information activities in your area,” including its “effect on local population in terms of American prestige and United Nations’ war effort.”28 In his reply of February 19, Wadsworth noted that American efforts, which consisted of a “weekly halfhour English musical record and quarter-hour Arabic specialty programs,” were modest compared to the Italian and German broadcasts. Axis radio was on the air several hours every day and evening.29 (In June, another OWI ofﬁcial in Beirut estimated that the 10,000 shortwave radio sets in Lebanon created a potential audience of 25,000 listeners.)30 Wadsworth added that U.S. news bulletins, leaﬂets, posters, and pamphlets were circulated to the local press. Yet Wadsworth doubted that OWI efforts could “ever harvest more than a fraction of their merited effort so long as American leadership at home is tarred, in the Arab view, with political Zionism. This more than ever before means, always in the Arab view, extension of Zionist inﬂuence into this and neighboring countries.”31 Wadsworth, like OWI ofﬁcials in the United States, viewed an American association with Zionism as a political albatross limiting Allied efforts to win and sustain Arab and Muslim sympathy. A February 13 memo from George Britt of the OWI ofﬁce in Beirut conveyed this sentiment. OWI could “talk about the horrors of Axis conquest,” but conquest did not ﬁll the Lebanese and Syrians with dread.“Against our story of evils under the Axis heel and the perﬁdy of Adolf Hitler, they have their own notions about who is perﬁdious and a documented conviction that at least they can trust Hitler to eliminate their pressing immediate irritations.”32 The “natives” wanted to get rid of French rule and expected the United States to help in doing so. The question of Jewish immigration to Palestine was equally serious.

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After the Republican leader Wendell Wilkie as well as two hundred senators and congressmen had expressed support for Jewish immigration to Palestine, Britt noted “Axis radios screamed about it all day Sunday, two days after Christmas, with repetitions since.”As a result of the expression of such views, Britt thought that in Lebanon and Syria,“probably the Americans are viewed with more hostility and misgiving on the Zionist issue than even the British.” To be sure, things looked better than in summer 1942 as “the whole face of the war began its rapid change” from possible victory by Rommel to “Montgomery, Eisenhower, Stalingrad, ﬁnally [Allied victory in] Tunisia.”33 In June, Britt wrote that Allied military victories were “the greatest of all propaganda elements here.” Nevertheless, “a constant Axis propaganda is at work here, centering on superbly skilled Axis radio broadcasts, the whole purpose of which is to deceive. Hearing the conﬁdent tone of Axis announcements, watching their selection, distortion and fabrication of news, one cannot remain blind to their powerful persuasive possibilities. This inﬂuence uncorrected could preserve on ice the illusion that the Axis was unbeatable and that it was ﬁghting for the rights of these people here. OWI has been a daily corrective.” When the OWI agents arrived in June 1942, “the people were saturated with Axis talk.” The Lebanese and Syrians “loathed the French” and “distrusted the British, fear their Zionist connections, [and] discounted what they said.” A “word from American lips had an effect enjoyed by no other agency.” OWI in Beirut hoped to draw on the “substantial latent popularity of America” to “supply a positive element to United Nations appeal.” In September 1942, that meant impressing the local population “with our determination and bigness, and with our certainty of winning.” By February 1943, in part thanks to the efforts of OWI,“the whole country knows America is in the war and that is the most convincing fact they could hear.”34 But “as the Zionist problem has entwined the Americans in its tentacles, the Ofﬁce of War Information has kept silent.” Those in Syria and Lebanon who were opposed to the Axis and favorably disposed to the Allies had “difﬁculty in remaining pro-American in view” due to the expression of pro-Zionist statements in the United States Congress. Rather than attempt to explain the basis for such sentiment, Britt thought silence was “much more effective than preaching tolerance to agitated Arab nationalists—who are the largest and most cohesive group here—who have witnessed a minority being built up into a political majority by external stimulation and subsidy for the purpose of taking the rule

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of their own country away from them.” Given Britt’s framing of the Palestine conﬂict in this way, he was unlikely to use the OWI to attempt to present another side of the issue. The Arabs were asking American ofﬁcials if the United States endorsed the British White Paper or if the Zionists would succeed in shaping American policy. United States “silence and evasion” about the issue of further Jewish immigration to Palestine would “make no converts to our side in the war.”35 In Britt’s view, Nazi Germany’s primary advantage in the propaganda war in the Middle East lay both in its opposition to Zionism, which resonated with the great majority of Arabs and Muslims, and in its anti-Semitism, which also found support from a smaller but still substantial group. The Axis swam with these currents. The Americans and British swam against them. Anti-Zionism was much broader than support for Nazism, but all supporters of the Axis were anti-Zionists. Indeed, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism were among the sources of the appeal of the Axis whereas those Arabs and Muslims who supported the Allies did so, often, in spite of American and British support for some kind of Jewish presence in Palestine. In February and March, the Mufti was again on Axis radio. On February 8, he was interviewed on Berlin in Arabic. He said that all Arabs wanted “to be free and to rid Islam of appendages which are foreign to its speciﬁc rules. They want Islam to be pure as at the beginning and the Moslems once again to be master.” Muslims could be inﬂuential “in the organization of the new world” as a result of “fuller cooperation between the Arab world and Europe.” Europeans needed to work to understand Arab civilization. When they did, the Arab world’s geographic position and the progress of communication would produce “better and fuller cooperation.” Asked what part Islam should play “in resisting International Jewry,” Husseini replied that “Islam realized the danger of Judaism from its very birth. In periods when Islam was weak, the Jews took the opportunity to combat it. However, the Moslems were successful in resisting the Jews and in reducing to nought their attempts.” The Palestine Arabs now were in the forefront of resistance to the Jews. Asked for recommendations for shaping “an independent Islamic policy against Bolshevism,” he replied that “the teachings of Islam” laid the basis of an economic, political, and social system that was “in sharp contrast to Communism. . . . Every Moslem must resist such a destructive movement.” He warned the audience in Morocco and Algeria that the Jews wanted to “Zionize” their countries, which they viewed as a “bridgehead between New York and Jerusalem.”36

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The association of the United States with the Jews that became important in German Arabic propaganda in spring and summer 1942 remained a constant theme of broadcasts of winter and spring 1943. On February 11, the Arab Nation declared that American propaganda was more powerful than the British or Bolshevik variety. President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles had “stated quite openly that they are going to help the Jews. As the Jews are the most ardent enemies of the Arab countries, those who help them are also our enemies.” Moreover, statements sympathetic to the Jews coming from American politicians in Congress and by American businessmen “have roused the fury of Arabs in Palestine.” With their landings in North Africa, the Americans had “strengthened and consolidated their own imperialistic policy.”37 On February 25, the Arab Nation attacked “the Jewish newspaper, the New York Times” for its support of a Jewish national home in Palestine. It referred to “dirty Jews” who “amass money through their greed” and who were crying “crocodile tears.” It extended its sympathy instead to “poor Palestine, Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq,” countries that were “all suffering from the Jews and their servants.”38 On March 6, Athens in Arabic described World War II as one “which was kindled by the Anglo-Saxons” and was “a Jewish one.” The Arabs had to be on guard “against that arch-criminal Roosevelt.” Should he succeed, the “heritage of Islam and Arabism will vanish with the wind.”39 On March 15, the Arab Nation repeated the assertion that World War II was “a Jewish war and that the Jews started it to defend their low race.” The station attributed to the leader of Free French Forces in North Africa at that time, General Henri Giraud, the hope that Jews and Muslims would be able to establish good relations. In fact, the Jewish danger to the Arabs was “becoming acute. We who have lived in Europe have known the Jews and know their intrigues. It may not appear dangerous to you at present, but wherever Jews set foot they bring misery to the people of the country.Your duty as Arabs is to unite in your struggles against these enemies. You will experience for yourself the Jewish system which will abolish Arab traditions and Islamic beliefs.” The Jews realized that “so long as Islam exists they will not be in peace, as they are aware that the Prophet Mohammed fought the Jews and called upon Moslems to continue the struggle. Mohammed chased the Jews from the Arab land and ordered Moslems to ﬁght until they are extinct. The Jews therefore wish to ﬁght; the Arabs will not remain with folded arms. They will rise against the Jews and ﬁght them as they have already done in Palestine.”40

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Nazi Arabic propaganda repeatedly asserted that Islam—not fundamentalist Islam or political Islam but simply the religion of Islam—constituted a non-Western ally in Nazism’s war with the Jews: the conﬂict between Islam and the Jews was as total as that between the Jews and Nazi Germany. On March 19, Berlin in Arabic broadcast a speech by Husseini on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday. “The Grand Mufti of Palestine” again connected his interpretation of Mohammed’s struggles with the Jews to contemporary events. On this day of celebration, he said that there was “hardly one Moslem country that is spared the control and tyranny of aggressive enemies, be it directly or indirectly.” The Jews had “control over England and the U.S.A.” and were taking advantage of the war “to lay their hands on the Holy Land.” The Arabs would resist “till doomsday.” The Jews were intending to turn Arab countries into “a refuge for the millions of Jews who were driven out of Europe.” Mohammed “drove the Jews completely out of the Arab countries.” In so doing he “gave us a great example.” On the occasion of his birthday, it was “the duty of all the Arabs in particular and the Moslems in general to take an oath in front of God to destroy Jewish aspirations completely and demolish that imaginary bridge between New York and Jerusalem, thus proving for all times that faith is more powerful than money and the devilish and dirty conspiracies plotted by international Jewry.”41 The Arabic-language text of the speech was printed as a pocket-size thirty-one-page pamphlet.42 On February 2, German agents distributed 4,000 copies in Tunis, 4,000 copies in Tangier, 2,000 copies in Ankara, 500 copies in Zagreb, 500 copies in Soﬁa, and 500 copies in Bucharest.43 Following Axis setbacks, the declarations Husseini had made in July 1942 that “the hour of liberation is near” gave way to grim predictions of what would happen if the Allies won the war. They could then “determine the fate of the world” and were “controlled by the Jews.” Thereafter “the Jews and their allies would be able to give vent to all the traditional hatred, the hatred on which they have been brooding for generations.” Then “the world would be a veritable hell.” But as God was “too merciful and too just to give victory to those tyrants and criminals,” Husseini was certain “beyond all doubt that victory will be for us and our friends,” and that as a result “the Arabs and Moslems will then be free and independent in their own countries. God helps those who conform to his commandments. God is great and He is all powerful.”44 Husseini’s contribution to Nazi propaganda was to incorporate into it a war of religion between Islam and the Jews. From his perspective, World War II was a twentieth-century

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chapter of a much longer history of what he depicted as an ineradicable MuslimJewish conﬂict.45 The anger of the radical Arabs in Berlin often turned on fellow Arabs who entertained the possibility of coexistence with Jews in Palestine. On April 30, the Arab Nation expressed rage at Arab political leaders in the Jaffa municipality who organized athletic contests with Jewish athletes. This was “a very dangerous tendency.” The Arabs could not “maintain their integrity without the decision to avoid the Jews and never go near them.” The tendency toward friendship had to be resisted, for the Jewish danger remained. Force was the only solution. Arabs must refuse to share Palestine “with any other people. . . . Noble Arabs! You should maintain your policy of boycotting the Jews. You should punish those who ignore the boycott. All Arabs who collaborate with the Jews should be destroyed before they help the Jews destroy us.”46 Kilani’s speeches on Nazi radio were generally long-winded denunciations of Britain’s military intervention, which had brought his coup to an end. Yet his remarks on the evening of May 2 on Berlin in Arabic also reﬂected the ﬂood of anti-Jewish messages of spring and summer 1943. He denounced Britain and the Bolsheviks, the Gaullists and the Americans, bound together as they were by “Jewish imperialistic intentions.” He informed his listeners that “the Jews are the lowest of mankind” and offered a standard Nazi tale about the Jews in modern European history. Although they lived in Europe for centuries, “they did not improve in any way. Europe was disgusted with them. Nevertheless, the Jews were able to attract the sympathy of many British, Russian and American leaders and to incite them to wage war against Germany, merely in order that the Jews might take their revenge.” Iraq knew the Jews “very well” as “its history is full of Jewish treachery.” Yet he was conﬁdent that the Axis forces would win the war and as a result the Arabs would see all their hopes fulﬁlled. The station read congratulatory messages to Kilani from Mussolini and Ribbentrop, both of whom praised his ﬁght against the British.47 Several days later Bari in Arabic read a message from Mussolini extolling Kilani’s struggle against British imperialism.48 On May 21, a certain anxiety was apparent on VFA. An evening broadcast alleged that Africa was now “under British control.” It followed with anti-British and anti-Semitic formulas.“The British and the Jews waged the present war” in order to spread imperialism. British control meant “enslavement and the exploitation of the people.” Churchill was alleged to have said that “Africa had

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been cleared of Nazism and Fascism.” Again, striking a very new and now defensive tone, the VFA announcer stated: We never asked for Nazism or Fascism but when we saw them coming to us we thought it an opportunity to throw off British control which signiﬁes humiliation and brutality. Nazism and Fascism came to us as enemies of our enemies and this is why we welcomed them. . . . We welcomed Fascism and Nazism because Italy and Germany ofﬁcially declared on numerous occasions that their only purpose in coming to our countries was to expel the British and the Jews and to enable us to be independent and free. . . . It is true that the war is not yet over and that surprises may be expected at any time. The British have not won the war yet; but we must confess that we have to prepare ourselves for the obscure future awaiting us, should the British, the Jews and their Allies emerge from the war as victors. It is our duty to prepare for the future and to be ready to ﬁght those imperialists who would make of man, animals, and of life, a hell.49

This broadcast preﬁgured postwar justiﬁcations. The true believers, who had spewed forth hate every evening on the radio and in print, now presented themselves merely as allies of convenience who favored the Axis only because they had common enemies. They suggested that their alliance was born of political convenience, not ideological compatibility, as if choosing the Jews as an enemy and rejecting any compromise with them was not itself a consequence of political and religious beliefs. The apologia lay in retrospectively deﬁning themselves as clever Machiavellians, not the ideological soul mates that they in fact also were. Now that the future looked “obscure” and the “hour of deliverance” was not imminent, German Arabic radio repeatedly warned Arab and Muslim audiences of the terrible consequences of an Allied victory. Along these lines, Berlin in Arabic of May 25, in a broadcast entitled “The Kingdom of Judas,” asserted that “international Jewry” was intending to establish a “Kingdom in Palestine that will include Iraq and Egypt.”50 That same evening, VFA’s piece “Tunisia and the Jews” reported, “Jews have become the masters [over Arabs] thanks to support from the British and American forces.”51 On May 7, Robert Murphy, Roosevelt’s minister to French North Africa, along with a British counterpart, penned a memo on “Propaganda to the Arabs in North Africa.” Its purpose was to assist American military ofﬁcers now occupying Morocco as they sought support for the Allies. In preparing such propaganda materials, he wrote,“political and ideological themes should be avoided. The themes to be used should be primarily Allied power and the certainty of victory, with its corollary of enemy weakness, and secondarily, the material

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beneﬁts likely to follow from the victory of the United Nations and the necessity for making an individual contribution in order to share in them.”52 Given that World War II was the product of intense political and ideological passions, Murphy’s was a peculiar admonition. Yet it was one in tune with overall Allied propaganda policy in the region. In order to win the propaganda battle in the region, Murphy thought it best to avoid a battle of ideas but instead to adapt to existing popular mentalities. In Berlin, the response to setbacks was to reassert ﬁrst principles. On May 22, Berlin in Arabic discussed “Islam and National Socialism.”“Islam,” not fundamentalist, conservative, political or orthodox Islam but simply “Islam,” was “a strong and generous religion”that had connections to Persian literature, Greek mythology, Roman law, and contemporary Europe. The broadcast mentioned some similarities between it and National Socialism. “The miracle of National Socialism is indeed order,” which was “evident in all German life and industry.” Many verses in the Koran also referred to order. National Socialism admired strength. So did Islam, evident in Mohammed’s statement,“‘A strong believer is better and more esteemed than a weak one.’” Islam’s belief in strength enabled it to spread to many countries. Through the same conviction, National Socialism became a great power in Europe. Such beliefs were not “barbarous” for “the Moslem believes that strength is derived from God.”53 Following the Allied victory in Tunisia, VFA on May 29 observed only that villages and towns in North Africa were “now full of American troops.” The Americans were intent on building an empire with the Arab countries as its center. The cause of that policy was obvious. America today is a Jewish country and it is the Jews who direct this policy. It is therefore impossible for the Arabs to cooperate with a country whose policy is handled by the Jews. We know that the Jews hate nobody more than they hate the Arabs and that the Arabs hate nobody more than the Jews. As we have said in the past, there is no room on earth for both Arabs and the Jews. Their hate for one another dates back to ancient times and references to it are found in the Koran. Does America believe that the Arabs will ever be the slaves of the Jews? We struggle against the British because they have occupied our country and robbed us of the right to live. We struggle against the Jews because they are our enemies. In the same way we will struggle against the Americans if they try to violate the integrity of our land.

The Arabs were too intelligent to believe “American Jewish propaganda,”that is, the idea that the United States entered the war to defend nations attacked by

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Nazism and fascism. “The truth is that the Jews pushed Britain into the war and that, realizing that she was on the point of collapse, they then turned their efforts to America, not to save Britain but to save themselves. Therefore, America is ﬁghting to defend the Jews and their interest. In return the Jews have promised the Americans that they will be heirs of the disintegrating British Empire. Whether this happens or not, the outcome will be the same for us, for both in America and in Britain the Jews are the masters and the cause of all trouble. . . . The truth is that Britain like America, and vice versa, is dominated by the Jews.”54 As with Nazi propaganda in Germany, radical anti-Semitism in the Arabic radio broadcasts was both an explosion of hatred as well as an interpretative framework. In this instance, it offered an explanation as to why the United States entered World War II. At a time of obvious Jewish powerlessness in Europe, Nazi propaganda in German and Arabic stressed the Jews’ enormous power. The above assertion that “there is no room on earth for both Arabs and Jews” was a not so subtly coded message to VFA’s regular listeners that the Nazi regime was determined that there would be no room on earth for the Jews, and that it was in the process of trying to murder them all. Conﬁdent that Jewish power behind the scenes was the driving factor of contemporary history, Nazi propaganda at home and abroad sought to convince its listeners to dismiss any alternative explanations as to why American and British troops were now in towns and villages in North Africa. In Germany, Goebbels tried to solidify the home front with predictions of the catastrophe to come should Germany be defeated. In the same months, Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda stressed a Middle Eastern version of the coming catastrophe in the form of Jewish mastery and enslavement of the Arabs. In spring 1943, predictions of doom replaced the euphoria of summer 1942. On May 31, Berlin in Arabic asked its listeners, “Haven’t you heard that in America, the Jews rule the roost?” This broadcast offered an added insight. The Jews’ horrible actions could be traced back to the Talmud, which, the broadcast falsely asserted, instructed them “not to take part in any war” and stated that “should a Jew be forced to take part in a war he should be in the rear in order to return ﬁrst from the battleﬁeld.” The Jews were “the deadliest enemy of humanity.” They were “responsible for the present war which they waged in order to assert their mastery over the other peoples.” Characteristically they “then stood in the rear to witness the destruction they cause.” All of this took place “accord-

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ing to the dictates of the Talmud.”55 The following month, Ribbentrop sent a memo to all ofﬁces in the Foreign Ministry engaged in propaganda activities stating that the German message should be adapted to “the mentality and national characteristics” of the country in question so that it attains the required resonance”56 Berlin in Arabic’s lessons on the supposed implications of the Talmud for the Jewish role in World War II offered an example of the kind of adaptation Ribbentrop had in mind. In June and July 1943, the ﬂood of anti-Semitic abuse continued unabated. On June 8, Berlin in Arabic reported that “the Jews aim at monopolizing all the economics of the Arab countries surrounding them,” that is, that the Jewish threat was to the entire Middle East, not only to Palestine.57 On June 11 it warned Arabs and Egyptians not to fall for American promises of assistance in the event of Allied victory. “How can Egyptians believe in American promises when they see that America supports the Jews, the enemies of Islam throughout the world?”58 The same evening, the Arab Nation claimed that Chaim Weizmann had territorial ambitions outside Palestine and that “a few thousand Jews . . . control the ﬁnances and fate of Iraq. The same thing is happening in Egypt, and also in Syria and North Africa.” It denounced cooperation between Jews and Arabs. “The Jews are the enemies of Islam. If Mohammed and the Caliphs could not live with the Jews in one country, how can we do so today? No, we shall never live in peace with the Jews. They will never be our masters, they will never be our partners. Either Palestine will be liberated or all Arabs will perish to the last man in our ﬁght for freedom. We shall live an honorable, free life, or die an honorable death—for then we can meet our God as martyrs.”59 On June 26, an Arab Nation broadcast asserted that “the Jews want the whole of Palestine exclusively for the sons of Israel without a single Arab remaining in the country.” Yet even if the “Jews had all of Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and Lebanon,” they would not be satisﬁed because Palestine was densely populated. The “sixteen million . . . Jewish pests scattered all over the world” would spare no effort “to inﬁltrate into all the Arab countries.” For good measure, the announcer proclaimed: “God curse you contemptible Jews.”60 On June 17, VFA again wove together Koranic and modern secular arguments and repeated the theme of Jewish expansionism into the Arab world. The Jews intended to “spread their inﬂuence to all the Arab countries, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Tigris and Euphrates.”In Algeria and Morocco,“thanks to

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the efforts of Roosevelt’s troops,” the Jews had gained “concessions,” including being tried in Jewish courts so that the Jews there had “become a state within a state.” In Palestine, the Jews could not “claim any rights.” The broadcast cited support in the Koran for the notions that “the Jews would be humiliated for ever” and that “the Arab nation” of “almost 100 million men, the Moslems of the world amounting to 400 million men, and the Europeans amounting to 250 million men” were “all the enemies of the Jews” and were “resolved to ﬁght against them until the Jews are suppressed.” In the broadcast VFA reminded its listeners of “the historic enmity between the Jews and Islam.” The Jews know “that all their hopes will crumble should the Anglo-Saxons be defeated,” which was why they were “spending their money to aid the Allies.” Only Arabs who were “blind to the plain facts” claimed that a victory for the democracies would be a victory for the Arabs.”61 Three days later, in its “Weekly Talk” on “Jewish Preparations for the Future,”VFA reported that “a number of Jewish documents have been found dealing with the Jewish plan to control public opinion throughout the world.” It claimed that one of the documents, about which no speciﬁc information was given, asserted,“We [Jews] must dominate all the governments of the world secretly by means of controlling public opinion.” This goal would be achieved “by controlling the press.” Yet a far more dire fate was in store for Arabs and Muslims: “The Jews are preparing death for us at the hands of the Americans.” In case Arab rulers did not do so, it was “the duty of the Arabs to ﬁght against this Jewish menace. If we have continued to exist up till today, it is because of the virility of the Arabs.” Fortunately, Islam had “taught us how to ﬁght the Jews. We hope to see that the Jews in our countries will ﬁnd every Arab crying for the victory of Islam and Arabism.”62 The parallels between Nazi propaganda in Germany and its Arabic-language radio broadcasts went beyond a common indictment of the alleged Jewish domination of the United States. Goebbels and others fanned the ﬂames of German hysteria about the coming “extermination” of the Germans by “international Jewry.” The Arabic-language broadcasts sent additional warnings that the Jews were intent on killing the Arabs. Mention of nonexistent documents that referred to previously hidden conspiracies was a commonplace both in the Nazi’s daily newspaper in Germany, Völkischer Beobachter, and on Arabic radio. Although the Nazi regime occasionally evoked Christianity on its behalf, the focus of its propaganda was a secular cult surrounding Hitler. The Arabic-language programs gave Islam a signiﬁcantly more

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important role in political propaganda than Christianity possessed in propaganda aimed at Germans and Europeans.63 Although up through 1943, the attentive reader of the American press was informed of Hitler’s and Goebbels’s declarations that they were in the process of exterminating Europe’s Jews, the fate of the Jews remained a secondary issue in the press coverage of the war.64 This relative lack of focus on the Final Solution in the American media did not prevent the Arab Nation broadcast of June 22 from attacking efforts by American Jews to draw attention to the Final Solution in Europe. The Berlin announcer said that a conference of Jews in Philadelphia “revealed the lies,” that is, descriptions of Nazi crimes in Europe, “of the Jews who are trying to gain the sympathy of the world through their tears. However, let the Jews cry and talk as much as they like, the Arabs will not answer them verbally, but they will use the sword, riﬂes, bombs and even stones to reply to the Jews’ cursed lies.” The broadcast suggested the motive for such “lies.” The Jews believed that they would not “be able to take Palestine” unless they made “the world believe that they are worthy of sympathy.” The broadcast was an early example of what would later be called “Holocaust denial” and of anti-Zionism resting on the claims that the Holocaust was a myth used to justify a Jewish state in Palestine. On June 27, Bari in Arabic, in “The Jews and Their Ravings,” warned Muslims again of “the Jewish menace” and held the Jews responsible for provoking and spreading the war “throughout the world” in cooperation with the “Jewish countries” of the Anglo-American alliance.65 The ﬂood of anti-Semitic propaganda on Germany’s Arabic-language radio in the ﬁrst six months of 1943 caught the attention of the Middle East desk of the U.S. Military Intelligence Division. Its summary of themes from Axis broadcasts issued in June 1943 suggested that the anti-Semitic offensive was even greater than that recorded by Kirk’s staff in Cairo. The MID reported that the broadcasts repeated the following points: Only Axis victory would prevent the Jews from realizing their ambitions. Jews were the prophets of Bolshevism. The Arabs would be impoverished living under the British and Americans. The Jews needed to be suppressed. All Arabs who failed to boycott Jews should be destroyed. The Jews were demanding the annexation of certain Syrian territories as a reward for their sacriﬁces during the present war. North Africa was the bridge for Jews from New York to Palestine. The United States was completely dominated by the Jews and was interested in a Jewish homeland because it did not want Jews in the United States. The United States was also planning a Jew-

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ish homeland in Morocco, Tunisia, and Eritrea. President Roosevelt promised to expedite the formation of a Jewish state and the immigration of Jews to Palestine. The United States had granted 500,000 visas to Jews for Palestine.66 This military intelligence summary conﬁrmed what ofﬁcials in Washington who had been reading the Kirk dispatches already knew: the fusion of antiSemitism with anti-Zionism was the key ideological weapon of the Nazi regime in its efforts to win support from Arabs and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East. On July 10, the Arab Nation asserted that “the most serious problem in Arab life is the Jewish problem.” The danger resulting from it would not pass unless it was “solved in a drastic way. . . . If this Jewish problem is solved drastically and energetically . . . the seven heads of the Jewish snake will be chopped off.” Half measures and half-hearted solutions were “futile” and did “more harm than good.” It did not specify what it meant by drastic and energetic measures, though it did say that “the future of the Arab countries for many centuries to come will depend on the outcome of the solution of that question.”67 The following day, Berlin in Arabic attacked American efforts to appeal to Arabs. “All this pseudo friendship is nothing other than a Jewish manoeuver based on lies and hypocrisy.” The Arabs were convinced that their interests were “absolutely opposed to those of the Americans because the latter care only for the Jews, the mortal enemies of the Arabs and of Islam.” American policy had “become a purely Jewish policy.” The Arabs’ duty was to do what they could to “speed the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons.”68 On July 15, VFA repeated the claim that the United States was replacing Britain as the major foreign power in the Arab countries. The Americans’“ﬁrst task” was “to place Africa at the disposal of the American capitalists, another name for the Jews.”69 On July 26, Berlin in Arabic asserted that when American leaders, such as Secretary of State Hull or Republican leader Wendell Wilkie, expressed sympathy for the Jews, they did “not take into consideration the possibility of hurting the feelings of the Arabs and Moslems and making them turn against them.” In fact, despite the well documented reluctance of the U.S. State Department and the Ofﬁce of War Information to give the fate of Europe’s Jews a prominent place in American political warfare, Nazi Arabic propaganda hammered away at the links between Jews and the United States and described the latter as “a strong Jewish fortress.”70 On July 30, Berlin in Arabic broadcast a speech by the Mufti in which he

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again placed the Arab cause in Palestine in the continuity of the history of Islam. We thank the Lord and we ask for His help. We worship the Lord faithfully and are strong in belief in his religion. The Lord is one and Mohammed is his Prophet. May the blessing of the Lord be upon Mohammed, his people and his friends. On this day for over thirteen centuries we have celebrated the journey of the Prophet from the Mecca Mosque to the Omar Mosque, the principal mosque of Islam. On this day also, the 27th Ragab, Sultan Salah el Dine el Ayoubl threw Crusaders out of Holy Jerusalem and drove them away from the Omar Mosque [in Jerusalem]. Moslems all over the world celebrate this day. The Moslems have sacriﬁced their most precious possessions since the beginning of their history to restore their rights in Palestine because of the presence of the Omar Mosque. The Moslems ﬁght for Palestine because it is a sacred piece of Islam. At the same time the Jews plot against the Arabs and Palestine and claim that the Omar Mosque is on the site of their ancient temple. In this they depend on the support of foreign powers. Their actions do not weaken the determination of Moslems but give them more conﬁdence in their struggle. The entire Moslem world supports the Arab cause in Palestine, particularly the Moslems of India.

Extending his gaze beyond Palestine, Husseini stressed that “all believers are brothers” who, like parts of a building, depend on one another. Unfortunately, he continued, some Muslims had not done their duty to engage in mutual support. “May Moslems on this occasion swear to cooperate. May all Moslems— kings, lenders, individuals, take the oath on this sacred occasion and undertake to struggle so that the Omar Mosque is not controlled by the Jews” and that the Jews instead are expelled from the Holy Land.71 As the tide had turned against the Axis and their Arab allies in North Africa and the Middle East, Husseini reiterated the speciﬁcally Islamic dimension of his politics. In so doing, he deepened his ties to the most hard-line elements of the Nazi regime. The radio broadcasts of late summer and early fall 1943 hammered away at the theme of Jewish menace and domination. On August 5, VFA attacked the United States and the Soviet Union for “helping the Jews who still constitute the most deadly threat, casting their shadow over our future. The Jews are our mortal enemy and the victory of the Reds or their allies will mean a victory for the Bolsheviks and the realization of Jewish imperialistic domination throughout the world.”72 On August 10, VFA in its broadcast “Why Did the Jews Increase Their Activities Recently?” drew on the conspiracy theorist’s stock in trade, namely, the spurious connection between unrelated events. First it asserted that Jews had held meetings in Palestine and the United States to discuss “the Jewish

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cause in Palestine.” Then it stated that “it was not a coincidence” that these meetings took place at the same time that the Arabs were seeking to realize Arab unity. “To put it more clearly, the Jews have been active because they found that Nuri El Said [the Iraqi prime minister] had left his Arab country for another Arab country in order to confer with the Arab leaders regarding an Arab union.” During this time, which was never precisely speciﬁed, Chaim Weizmann was said to have met with President Roosevelt to discuss a Jewish national home in Palestine, the same Roosevelt who “has become a tool in the hands of that race,”that is, the Jews.73 For VFA, the causal links were clear. Weizmann met Roosevelt because Iraq’s prime minister traveled to other Arab countries to discuss Arab unity. It offered not a shred of evidence to demonstrate that Jewish political activity in the United States had anything to do with the comings and goings of Arab political leaders. Moreover, the obvious, plausible alternative explanation for American Jewish political activism lay readily at hand: it was a desperate effort to stop the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. The broadcast was a lesson in conspiracy thinking and a demonstration of how one could take events with no causal connection to one another and weave them into a seemingly coherent narrative that narcissistically revolved around the Arabs as victims and the Jews as the driving force of world events. “The American Mission Is Jewish,” the August 14 broadcast of a rarely heard station called Independent Egypt, illustrated another feature of Nazi broadcasting: the invented quotation attributed to unnamed persons which was said to prove the truth of anti-Semitic stereotypes. A Jewish writer addresses non-Jews as follows: “Now you unbelievers, time will teach you how to fear the Jews. They constitute a great danger for you. The opposition of the Jew is taking an effective turn. We Jews are a people of destruction because we are a people without a home and Jews will ever remain people of destruction and will never desist from their demands.” It is thus admitted that the Jewish message is that of destruction; it is the message of [Bernard] Baruch, [Felix] Frankfurter and [Henry] Morgenthau. It is never the message of peace and justice. The alluring words, the enticing projects are meant to trap their victim and we Arabs are their greatest prey. We must beware of them! Every other country has awakened but we, we are still deep in slumber. We do not move. Our brethren are being killed, we are surrounded by snakes which try to strangle us. America is spreading her net over the oil of Arab countries. She has entangled Iraq in the Lend Lease Act. Her troops are spreading over Egypt and other Arab countries yet we are asleep. The fatal danger threatens not only our wealth or our property, it threatens our very existence.74

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The broadcast was an education in sloppy thinking. It did not reveal the identity of the speaker or offer evidence that such a comment had ever been made. It assumed what remained to be demonstrated, namely, that there was such a thing as a unitary Jewish message of any kind, not to mention one about destroying unbelievers. The connection to three oft-mentioned but probably vaguely known persons with the last names of Baruch, Frankfurter, and Morgenthau remained unproven. In August 1943, in the main death camps and in villages and towns all over Eastern Europe, Jews were being massacred in a murderous spasm of unprecedented speed. They were in no position to threaten anyone in any way. Their powerlessness could not have been more evident. Yet the message of Nazism’s Arabic broadcasts was that these very Jews threatened “the existence” of the Arabs. The projection and paranoia that was central to Nazi propaganda at home found expression in these messages aimed at Arabs and Muslims, whom they depicted as the primary victims of the era. In Germany, Goebbels’ “Do You Want Total War?” speech of February 18, 1943, set the tone for Nazi propaganda in the aftermath of the German defeat at Stalingrad. Although he expressed conﬁdence in victory in the longer term, Goebbels turned to increasingly vivid descriptions of the disasters to befall the Germans should they lose the war. The Arabic-language broadcasts also focused on the awful plans the Jews had in store for Arabs and Muslims. On September 8, Berlin in Arabic described “The Ambitions of the Jews.” The Jews would not be satisﬁed until they made “every territory between the Tigris and the Nile Jewish.” Their goal was to “remove the Cross and the Crescent from all Arab countries.” If they succeeded “there will remain not a single Arab Moslem or Christian in the Arab world. Arabs! Imagine Egypt, Iraq and all the Arab countries becoming Jewish with no Christianity or Islam there.”75 On September 24, VFA continued this line of attack when it asked “What Are the Aims of International Zionism?” The Jews did not only want Palestine. Rather, they sought “possession of all Arab countries in the East and the West” up to the Atlantic Ocean. In the west they sought Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and in the east they wanted to connect Syria to Lebanon and then add both to Palestine. This “Jewish plan” was the “greatest danger” that would face the Arabs and Muslims if “our enemies the British, Americans and Bolsheviks emerge victorious.” It was the “sacred duty” of Arabs to unite in order to “repulse this Jewish menace” and prevent “Jewish imperialism” from being established with the assistance of the British. The broadcast expressed concern that the Arab world

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was not rising up against this menace. It warned Arabs not to be deceived by British efforts to befriend them. They should not be “negligent” or “inactive.” Yet the Arabs and Muslims did not appear to be rising up against the looming danger. Presumably, if they failed to act now,“when the great catastrophe”came the Arabs would “meet it only with their tears and laments, with their suffering and regret.” Either they would have freedom and independence or a “life of servility, drudgery—a life ﬁt for cattle only.”76 On September 26, VFA announced that the Jews intended to “seize all the Arab countries and settle Jewish communities in them” and claim Palestine as “not only as a home but as a base to ride roughshod over the other Arab countries.” A British and American victory would enable the Jews to realize these dreams and to force the Arabs “to live as nomads.” Predictions of catastrophe if the Allies and “the Jews” won the war remained a key theme of Nazi propaganda and Nazi Arabic-language propaganda until the war’s end.77 The changing tone of the propaganda was understandable when set against the background of Axis military and political disasters.78 In June and July 1943, with Tunis as their base of operations, British troops captured Axis-held islands south of Sicily. On July 10, 1943, Allied forces landed in Sicily. After a month of heavy ﬁghting, the German army was forced to withdraw. In late July, the king dismissed Mussolini. On September 8, 1943, the new Italian government led by Marshall Pietro Badoglio surrendered to the Allies. On October 13, the new government of Italy declared war on Germany. In spring 1943, the Axis forces were driven out of North Africa. Hitler had lost his Italian ally. The AngloAmerican bomber offensive was destroying German towns and industries along with the German air force. In the battle of Kursk, the Red Army decimated German tank divisions. The momentum of World War II had turned against Nazi Germany. Visions of Arab independence brought by victorious Axis forces were a distant memory. The Allied invasion of Italy also had a direct impact on Axis Arabic broadcasting. On October 1, the Allied (American and British) Theater Monitoring Service reported that following the Italian surrender, Bari in Arabic, Arab Nation, Independent Egypt, and Young Africa were no longer on the air. Berlin in Arabic, the Voice of Free Arabism, and the Station of the Free Arabs were the only remaining Axis stations broadcasting in Arabic.79 On October 1, a speech by Husseini in the Berlin mosque was broadcast on Berlin in Arabic. He said that “a dangerous program had been formulated for the North African Moslem countries.” The Allies intended to create a Jewish

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home there to which “they will transport the Jews of Europe and [from] the United States, the Negroes of the U.S.A.” North Africa was to be made into a “Jewish bridge linking New York with Jerusalem, as though the Jewish problem which the world has failed to solve for thousands of years could be solved at the expense of the Arabs and the Arabs alone. This is injustice and betrayal. . . . The Arabs and the Moslems will never accept this—they will never accept any unity which does not include Palestine.” America, “more so even than Britain,” had become a “plaything in the hands of the Jews. . . . This Jewish pressure is ominous, it is fraught with great danger.” In this period of Axis setbacks, Husseini again spoke of faith. Arabs and Muslims should defend the Holy Land “with their blood and their wealth.” He worried that some were not heeding his call. “Woe to the wavering, the feeble in faith! Woe to him who is as a feather in the breeze! Woe to him who is unstable, irresolute! Arabs and Moslems, fortify yourselves with your faith! Faith is a fundamental element of victory. Sacriﬁce for your God and your country.”80 On October 2, an address by Kilani was broadcast on Berlin in Arabic. By comparison with Husseini, Kilani’s address to “Arabs, my brothers” was the voice of a more secular anti-imperialism. The aim of the imperialists, by which he meant Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Jews, was “to drug the Arab nation” with illusory promises about postwar Arab unity with the intention of diverting the Arabs from their struggle against Britain’s “tyrannical imperialist policy.” It was a time of mourning for the forces of Arab anti-imperialism, yet Kilani expressed “no doubt that Germany and her allies will level a deadly blow at its enemies.” He was “fully convinced that ultimate victory” would be won by “our faithful friends, the Germans” and that “this victory will be a victory for our cause.”What he called “the Arab nation” should continue to resist Anglo-Saxons, Bolsheviks, and “the evil ambitions of the Jews.”81 Yet appeals to faith and the Arab nation had a growing air of unreality in the face of Axis setbacks. The German documents generally do not disclose if particular broadcasts were a response to speciﬁc actions of the Allies. On November 1, 1943, the foreign secretaries of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States issued a “Declaration of German Atrocities,” which warned German ofﬁcers and members of the Nazi Party that they would be “taken back to the countries in which their abominable crimes were committed to be charged and punished according to the laws of those countries.”82 An annex to the declaration written by Churchill

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and only slightly amended in Moscow made reference to diverse crimes, such as those committed in the Soviet Union; shootings of Italian ofﬁcers; executions of French, Dutch, Belgian, or Norwegian hostages and of peasants in Crete; and slaughters in Poland.83 Yet despite numerous press reports about the mass murder of Jews by fall 1943, the declaration made no mention of them, perhaps in order not to play into the hands of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.” As a by now very extensive scholarship has conﬁrmed, for a variety of reasons, saving the Jews of Europe was not the ﬁrst priority or rationale for going to war for Britain, the Soviet Union, or the United States.84 By October 1943, Hitler’s speeches had made the word “extermination” familiar to millions inside and outside Germany. On November 3, a VFA broadcast, “Palestine between the Bolsheviks and the Jews,” attacked the Jewish Agency, the executive arm of the World Zionist Organization charged with assisting Jews in the settlement of Palestine, because it urged the Allies to support a Jewish state in Palestine. It then broadcast an appeal to exterminate the Jews: “Should we not curse the time that has allowed this low race to realize their desires from such countries as Britain, America and Russia? The Jews kindled this war in the interests of Zionism. The Jews are responsible for the blood that has been shed. Despite this, Jewish impudence has increased to such an extent that they claim that they alone are the sacriﬁce of this war and that they alone are tasting bitterness. The world will never be at peace until the Jewish race is exterminated. Otherwise wars will always exist. The Jews are the germs which have caused all the trouble in the world.”85 Not only did these assertions ﬂy in the face of common sense and wildly exaggerate the power of the Jews, they also vastly exaggerated the global signiﬁcance of the conﬂict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine. In World War II, especially after the Allied victory in the battle of Tunisia, the conﬂict over Palestine was a sideshow in the global panorama of events that constituted the world war. Yet with this broadcast, VFA adapted the general threats of exterminating the Jews coming from Nazi propaganda in Europe to the inclinations of its regular listeners in the Middle East. It found the cause of World War II as a whole in the Zionist aspiration for a Jewish state in Palestine. Hence the only way to establish world peace, and also prevent the establishment of such a state, would be to exterminate “the Jewish race.” In using such terms, and not only shouting to “kill the Jews,” VFA mimicked the vocabulary used by Hitler, Goebbels, and the main organs of Nazi propaganda in Germany and Europe.

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The hatred that drew on religious passion merged with Nazism’s modern racist rhetoric. Not just murder but calls for genocide were literally on the airwaves. On November 5, VFA reported on an important address that Husseini delivered at a meeting in Berlin of “all the Moslems of Germany and Europe” to protest the Balfour Declaration.86 The Islamic Institute in Berlin published a German text of Husseini’s speech, thus making his views more accessible within Germany.87 As the speech expressed his fundamental views, which were repeated in shorter form in leaﬂets and broadcasts, it bears examination. In Husseini’s view, the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which supported a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, was “the result of a Jewish-English conspiracy in the last war.” The declaration gave Palestine, “an Arab-Islamic country” of great importance to Muslims, to the Jews and in so doing broke a promise made to Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, of independence to the Arabs. He recounted a story of British injustice to and oppression of the Arabs and the Jews. Husseini then poured forth his intense hatred of the Jews. He referred to the “overwhelming egoism” that was part of their character, and to their “contemptible belief that they were God’s chosen people, their claim that everything had been created for their sake”and that “other men are animals which could be used for their own purposes.”88 As a result of these characteristics, the Jews could not be loyal to anyone or integrate into another nation. Rather, “they lived like a sponge among peoples, sucked their blood, seized their property, undermined their morals yet still demand the rights of local inhabitants. They want every advantage but they won’t assume any obligations! All of this brought the hostility of the world down on them and nourished the Jew’s hatred against all the peoples that had been burning for two thousand years.” He believed that “God’s anger and the curse on the Jews mentioned in the Holy Koran” was due to these Jewish characteristics. The Jews, who had “tormented the world for ages[,] have been the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: ‘You will ﬁnd that those who are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.’ They tried to poison the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to them, and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For all that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs and Muslims.”89 Husseini’s hatred of the Jews was an ineradicable component of his understanding of Islam. In his interpretation, Islam as rooted in the Koran was an in-

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herently anti-Semitic doctrine. He placed the efforts of Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Balfour, Lionel Rothschild, and Nathaniel Rothschild to establish a Jewish home in Palestine into this long continuity of Jewish-Moslem enmity. Indeed, he called the Jews “the driving forces of the destruction of the regime of the Islamic Caliphate” in the Middle East. The Jews used their power in ﬁnance, politics, and the press to this end. The Arabs and Muslims all knew of the “Jewish desire” to seize the Islamic holy sites. He claimed that such intentions extended to the Al Aksa Mosque and “to build a temple on its ruins.” Many “ofﬁcial documents and statements of responsible Jewish leaders” conﬁrmed these plans. A Jewish “kingdom” in Palestine would “double the Jewish danger” and would give them an excellent geographical position at the meeting point of three parts of the world from which they could exert ﬁnancial, political, and propagandistic inﬂuence. Though a Jewish state would be a great danger for all of humanity, it would be even more dangerous and important for Arabs and Muslims. Such a state would be a barrier between the Arab-Islamic countries in Asia and those of Africa. It is a bloody stab in the heart of the Arab fatherland! The establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine would subject the Arab countries and all the countries of the Middle East to the danger of Jewish economic exploitation and to the Jewish world conspiracy. In addition, it would make this country [i.e., the resulting Jewish state] a center that any foreign state could exploit to colonize and occupy the neighboring countries. Secret Zionist documents had proven that the Kingdom of Israel would encompass the space between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. In addition to Palestine, [such a kingdom would include] Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, a part of the Saudi Arabian Kingdom, and a part of the Egyptian Kingdom. The Jews place the holy sites of the Hadj in greatest danger and rob the Arabs and Islam of the fruits of their land, which they have defended for thirteen centuries with the blood of their martyrs.

This ancient Jewish yearning was intertwined with the contemporary goals of British imperialism. The “Anglo-Jewish conspiracy” envisaged a Jewish state in Palestine as an important base for Britain in the Middle East, from which Arab efforts at unity could be defeated. Husseini extolled Arab revolts against “this devilish project” in Palestine. Palestine’s inhabitants would receive help from other Arabs and Muslims because their country was “part of the Arab fatherland and a holy site of the Islamic religion.” The Palestinians struggled against both the Jews and the British.90 Husseini stated that Arab unity could not be attained without the inclusion of Palestine. “America, which now carries the Jewish ﬂag, wants to create a sec-

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ond Jewish homeland in the Islamic Maghreb and in North Africa, one in which the Jews driven out of Europe and a part of the Jews and Negroes from North America would ﬁnd refuge.” The Americans were trying to deceive the Arabs so that they could exploit them with the Jews’ assistance; they, like the English, were serving the Jews’ effort to create a Jewish state. The conspiracy against the Arabs and the Muslims is completely obvious. It is evident from the statements of the leaders of the Jews and their allies. For while the Jews state that a victory of the Allies is their victory and means the realization of their aspirations, the English and Americans . . . see in the implementation of Jewish plans a guarantee of their own economic and political interests. . . . The bonds between the Jews, the English, and the Americans are very deeply intertwined with one another. They cannot be weakened. For a long time they have been bound together by common interests, the unity of their plans and goals, the similarity of their characteristic assessments, the similarity of their wealth, and the common participation in ﬁnancial and economic establishments.”

These afﬁnities went so far that some Englishmen saw themselves as one of the lost tribes of Israel and called themselves “Israeli British.” Whereas the British called on the Arabs to tolerate the Jews, doing so would only make the Jews more arrogant. Therefore, tolerance toward the Jews was a “stupid plan and a shameful crime against the fatherland. Whoever engages in it will be called to account by the nation and will be severely punished. Can iron be made into something else that is not iron?” Arabs and Muslims must pursue a different goal, namely, the “expulsion of all the Jews from all Arab and Muslim countries. This is the only remedy. It is what the Prophet did thirteen centuries ago.”91 Given the bonds between the Allies and the Jews, an Arab and Muslim agreement with them was an illusion. Indeed, the Jews and the Allies were conspiring against the Arabs and Muslims. Husseini then turned to recent history. “The shame of Versailles” was a disaster for both Germany and the Arabs, “but National Socialist Germany knew how to save itself from the Jewish disaster.” He recalled the grounds for German-Arab friendship. Germany had not colonized any Arab or Islamic country and was ﬁghting against “the same enemy which oppressed the Arabs and Muslims in their different countries.” Moreover, the Germans had “decided to ﬁnd a deﬁnitive solution to the Jewish danger.” This “common battle against the Jewish danger” bound the Arabs and Muslims to Germany. Hence “our friendship with Germany is not at all one of opportunism that rests only on contemporary circumstances. Rather it is the result of common interests of both nations and

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of their uniﬁed stance toward a common enemy in a battle.”92 Among Britain’s “greatest crimes” was its effort to encourage the Arabs to ﬁght against Germany and Japan, two states that had never invaded Arab or Islamic countries. Both had always shown sympathy to Muslims. Equally terrible were Britain’s efforts in Palestine to support the Jews against the Arabs and, according to him, arrest “tens of thousands” of Arabs. Husseini stressed that Arabs and Muslims could not trust states—England and the United States—that “supported the Jews and helped them tear the home of the Arabs and Muslims away from them.” He concluded: Arabs and Muslims, be careful not to lose this opportunity. Be on guard so you do not succumb to the Allies’ deception in order that holy Palestine can be freed from colonization and Jewiﬁcation. Have no fear of your enemies and their propaganda. Keep in mind that never in history have you contended with the Jews without the Jews being the losers. God has decided that there will be no ﬁrm order for the Jews and that no state will emerge for them. Perhaps you have been called to see that it does not happen. Have no doubt that we will gain victory against the Jews despite the strong help they are receiving from the cruel and awful Allies. God helps those to victory who help him! We will win and our countries will be liberated from the Allies’ claws.93

On November 7, Berlin in Arabic reported on an exchange of telegrams between the Mufti and Kilani and Ribbentrop in which they celebrated “the bonds of friendship linking Greater Germany with the Arab people.”94 Yet exchanges of congratulatory telegrams were not a substitute for military victory. The general tone of the Berlin broadcasts remained grim. On November 17, Berlin in Arabic announced that the Arab cause had “entered a new phase.” It was facing “a crisis more serious and more acute than was ever produced by imperialism.” This crisis had been caused by “a conspiracy in London, Moscow and Washington, in which the plotter proclaimed that they were laying the foundation of a new regime, a new regime evolved by the English, the Americans, the Bolsheviks and the Jews! This new regime encompasses all the continents of the world, engulfs both land and sea.” The place of the Arab cause in this new regime was “nil!” Demonstrations and protests were “worn out weapons . . . like the sword and the spear compared with heavy guns and tanks in modern warfare.” As a result of the American presence in North Africa and the Middle East, the Arabs faced “a new foe which must be fought with new weapons.” The British, too, were no longer inﬂuenced by Arab protests and demonstrations. The Jewish question in the Middle East had been “a local

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problem with hope of a solution, but today the Jews work with the support of the British, Americans and Bolsheviks all combined.” So it was now “futile to attempt to solve the Jewish problem with old methods or to consider it a local problem.” Words alone would not succeed in the ﬁght against “the devil of the Jewish press.”95 As a result of the success of the Allies on all fronts in the war in 1943, the Arabic-language propaganda broadcasts argued, the balance of power between Arabs and Jews was shifting in favor of the latter. In these broadcasts, the turning of the tide against Nazi Germany was synonymous with the growth of the power of international Jewry and its ability to achieve its goals in Palestine. This conspiratorial explanation of the shifting balance of forces in the war offered an answer to a question posed by the pro-Axis Muslims, namely, how was it possible for the Jews in the Middle East to become powerful enough to establish a state in Palestine? The answer lay in the Nazi interpretation of World War II as “the Jewish war.” It was the war and the anti-Hitler coalition supposedly controlled by the Jews that made it possible for them to achieve what they could not have achieved on their own. The ironic corollary of this view was an underestimation of the actual political and military abilities of the Jews living in Palestine. From November 28 to December 1, 1943, in Tehran, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met together for the ﬁrst time. On December 5, VFA voiced the argument, common in Nazi propaganda in Germany, that the Jews brought these seeming political opposites together.“Had it not been for the Jews, neither London, Washington nor Moscow would have been linked together. The British imperialists would never have agreed with the Bolsheviks and the American capitalists would never have been friendly with the Allies or Bolshevist Russia.” Without offering any explanation of how or why it would come about, the broadcast asserted, “The day will come soon when Britain, America, the Jews and the Bolsheviks will be completely wiped out and then every country will have her freedom, prosperity and independence.” The Arabs should “support the countries which will save the world from the tyranny of the democracies and the evils of Bolshevism,” that is, Nazi Germany, Japan, and their remaining allies.96 In “The Jews,” a further comment about the signiﬁcance of the Tehran conference, the Berlin in Arabic broadcast of December 8 stated that it was learned “in Berlin from Jerusalem” that “Churchill and Roosevelt, on their way back from Tehran stayed in Palestine to confer with Jewish leaders.” There they supposedly “agreed to realize demands presented by American and British

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Jews, which aim at spreading Jewish inﬂuence in the Arab countries.” Indeed, “the basic topic of discussion in Tehran was the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine.”97 Every one of these assertions was false. Roosevelt and Churchill did not travel to Jerusalem after the Tehran conference. The main topic of discussion in Tehran involved plans for an invasion of Europe from the west in spring 1944. The subject of a Jewish state in Palestine was not discussed in Tehran or immediately afterwards. Of course, if it had been, it would not have constituted evidence that the Jews were the glue of the anti-Hitler coalition any more than the fact that issues regarding Turkey and Yugoslavia were discussed proved that they were in charge. Indeed, the fact that the issue of a Jewish state in Palestine was not discussed in Tehran indicated both that the Jews had little power to put it on the agenda and that it was peripheral to the primary concerns of the Allied leaders at that point. Although the establishment of a Jewish state may have been peripheral to the Allied leaders, the issue remained foremost in Husseini’s mind. On December 9, he spoke on Berlin in Arabic, saying that “the wiping out of what is called the ‘Jewish National Home’ and the freeing of all the Arab countries from the tyranny and exploitation of the Moslem countries is a principled [sic] part of the policy of mighty Germany which cannot be changed.”98 From its beginnings in the 1920s to the end, Nazi propaganda included falsehoods about its adversaries and remained silent about its setbacks. The combination was evident in anti-Communist broadcasts in late December 1943. On the twenty-second, Berlin in Arabic updated the traditional anti-Semitic myth that Jews kidnapped Christian children to reenact the cruciﬁxion at Easter time. The Nazi version charged that “Jews in Southern Italy are collecting children and sending them to Russia.” These children were “literally snatched from their mothers.” The British and Americans had taken away men, and “the Russians kidnap the children.”99 On December 29, VFA warned that Russian success in Egypt would mean “torture, poverty, loss of public security, and famine all over the country.” Indeed, if VFA “had the power, we would have ordered the death and the slaughter of every Bolshevik and everything Bolshevik in Egypt because these Bolsheviks wish us evil.”100 While full of lurid details about events that had not happened, the VFA broadcast of December 25 used one short paragraph to review the military events of 1943. It told its listeners: “German and Japanese forces adopted defensive tactics while the Allies took the offensive hoping to destroy the strength of

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Axis forces. They were unsuccessful in these efforts, both in Europe and the Far East,” and were now undertaking “extensive air raids on civilians in Germany.”101 This was not the kind of radio journalism that inspired conﬁdence among sophisticated, well-informed, moderate listeners in the Arab countries. Arab listeners knew that the Germans and Italians had been driven from Northern Africa, Mussolini had been deposed, Italy had surrendered, the Red Army had won enormous battles in Stalingrad and Kursk, and that the tide of the war had turned against Japan in Asia and the Paciﬁc. Yet they did not learn any of that from Nazi Arabic radio. These broadcasts featured passion, partisanship, solidarity, simplicity, and hatred over objectivity, complexity, and factual reporting. If they swayed the undecided at all, it was by appealing to their hatreds and passions. Their main purpose was to reinforce the already convinced, whether victory or defeat appeared imminent. The VFA broadcast of December 28 struck an Islamist note. It expressed disappointment that its message had not found greater resonance among Arabs and Muslims. The coming of the New Year evoked “glorious memories of our forefathers who, through Islam, taught the world the ﬁnest principles of humanity, civilization and greatness.” Though the great powers were ﬁghting “to secure their future position,” Muslims had been “to a great extent stagnant and apathetic.” The broadcast admonished its listeners: “Moslems had become so confused” that many “no longer know their friends from their enemies.”Worse, “many Moslems have helped their enemies and have become hostile to their real friends, and this is unfortunate.” Believers should take Mohammed the Prophet as their model. On the eve of Islam, he was deserted by “sly enemies who had been waiting to seize an opportunity to destroy him and his message.” He did not fear them but “continued to struggle to impart the teachings of God to his fellow followers, and God gave him victory over his enemies.” Mohammed’s example demonstrated that arms and force were not the only important factor. Rather,“faith, determination and perseverance are the main factors of victory.” For the New Year, Muslims should remember their “glorious past” and seek “cooperation among all the Moslem nations so that a real Islamic world-unity may be realized for the good of the Moslems.”102 The broadcast implied that Arabs and Muslims had strayed from Mohammed’s example and failed to display unity. The following evening, Athens in Arabic attacked the Egyptian prime minister for fostering disunity. According to the broadcast, Nahas Pasha called for

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toleration of the Jews. Drawing on quotations from the Koran, the broadcast summarized Mohammed’s attitude toward the Jews and asserted that while Islam had treated the Jews “with tolerance and leniency . . . the Jews fought Islam secretly, till Mohammed lost all patience with them and expelled them from Arab countries, openly ﬁghting them.” In modern times, the Jews had lived peacefully with Arabs, “but now Jews have again become hostile to the Arabs.” Nahas Pasha’s words were “not compatible with the doctrines of our religion.” That is, Islam properly understood did not favor toleration of the Jews.103 On the same evening, VFA also attacked Nahas Pasha. For a station that regularly obliterated the distinction between politics and religion it made the odd argument that Nahas Pasha had “no right” to talk about such issues “because such religious speeches should be given only by those of Al Azhar [University].” He had made “several mistakes in speaking on religion,” for example, saying that “the Jews have their religion and that the Moslems have theirs,” thus implying that the two religions and peoples could coexist. Where, the VFA announcer wondered, did Nahas Pasha get an idea like that? “Neither Mohammed nor the Koran said anything like this. On the contrary, the Koran cursed the Jews for their evils. Mohammed also hated them because they wanted to kill him. They also wanted to poison him and actually put poison into his food, but they did not succeed.” It concluded that the British had ordered Nahas Pasha to make the statement and regretted that he was “lowering himself to the extent of helping the Jews who are the worst enemies of the Moslems.”104 The VFA ended 1943 on this note of Islamist militancy, drawing a straight line from the Koran to modern anti-Semitism and support for Nazism. In so doing it expressed a core element of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda: it found in its interpretation of Islam a common ground based on hatred of the Jews. In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and the United States joined the Jews as primary hate objects of Nazi propaganda. The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory within Germany presumed to explain why the Americans and British continued to persist in an alliance with the Soviet Union. In the propaganda aimed at the Middle East the fantasy of the Jews as the power behind the scenes was presented as the reason why Franklin Roosevelt had decided to intervene militarily in North Africa to help thwart Axis plans there. The debate over Zionism remained a marginal element in propaganda aimed at the German audience. In adapting the core elements of Nazism’s anti-Jewish conspiracy theory to the circumstances of the Middle East, the print and radio Arabic-language propa-

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ganda transformed several thousand Zionists in Britain and the United States and the small Jewish community in Palestine into powerful players in the global drama of World War II and, indeed, one of the driving forces of the Allied war against Nazi Germany. Here, too, radical anti-Semitism was a blend of hatred and political interpretation of ongoing events.

chapter 7

“The Americans, the British, and the Jews Are All Conspiring against Arab Interests” Propaganda from 1944 to Spring 1945

lthough the military battles of World War II in North Africa had ended in 1943, Nazi Arabic-language propaganda continued with unabated intensity. The Germans, as well as the Americans and British, knew that their attacks on Zionism were popular among a broad segment of the Middle Eastern public and that their explicit attacks on the Jews were ﬁnding a positive reception among a smaller audience that shared their radical anti-Semitism. Judging from the content of the last year and a half of their broadcasts, the Nazis also believed that their most fervent supporters in the Middle East were the Islamists, who accepted the idea that there indeed was an elective afﬁnity between National Socialism and the Islam of its imaginings. At modest cost and with a now-established staff, the regime took aim at what some American and British ofﬁcials believed was an, if not the, Achilles’ heel of Allied policy in the region, namely, the association of Britain and especially the United States with the Jews and with Zionism. Leading American military and diplomatic ofﬁcials also feared that this identiﬁcation carried with it the risk of offending the Arabs and Muslims to such an extent that added troops would have to be diverted from the war in Europe to Palestine and Egypt or that Allied pipelines might be sabotaged. Early in the war, Hitler had described the spread of anti-Semitism to other countries and regions as an important element in a strategy to win the war. If its purpose was to split the Grand Alliance, it failed. Its success lay in offering an explanation rooted in radical anti-Semitism about why the Allies were winning and why the Axis was losing the war and what the consequences would be for Arabs and Muslims.

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Berlin in Arabic began the new year with a completely uninformative “Commentary on the Events of 1943.” In place of an account of what had actually happened in the war, it offered these three points: “The events of the last year give us proof that the Allies have agreed to hand over Europe to the Bolsheviks. . . . The Jewish American capitalists now dominate India, South and North Africa and Southern Australia . . . Germany is ﬁghting to establish the right; but the Allies are ﬁghting to strangle right, abolish justice, and establish atheism.”1 On the same evening the VFA gloomily noted that the advance of Axis forces in Egypt had offered a possible “termination of the British occupation of Egypt and the Sudan.” The Egyptians were “surprised” at Rommel’s “withdrawal” but had “not lost hope in the ﬁnal victory of their friends the Germans.”2 In fact, the vast bulk of Rommel’s forces were defeated and captured and thus unable to “withdraw.” But for VFA, the broadcast was a rare acknowledgment that the war was going terribly badly for the Axis. On January 4, Berlin in Arabic asserted that after Germany had driven the British forces off the Continent in 1940, it wanted to end a war it had not sought. Alas, “international Judaism seized the occasion . . . to make money and to absorb the blood of the people.” Within two years, the Jews succeeded in compelling Russia to enter the war “in order to avenge themselves against the Germans who had deported them from their country and who had prevented their tainted blood from mixing with the pure blood of the German people.” This assertion failed to mention the minor detail of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, which was the reason the Soviet Union entered the war. Avoiding such an obvious and well-known fact underscored the distinctive purpose of the broadcast: to preach to the converted. That was evident as well in its remarkable assertion that “Germany has remained faithful to the strict rules of war. Indeed, nobody can accuse Germany of killing a child or a woman.” By January 1944, the world press and Allied radio, including the BBC, were ﬁlled with detailed reports of Nazi war crimes. But Berlin in Arabic denounced the Jews for urging the Russians, British, and Americans to be “brutal” toward German civilians. Germany’s enemies would “realize, as Adolf Hitler said, that the hour of vengeance will certainly come and that accounts will be settled.”3 On January 7, the Mufti returned to the airwaves to issue a warning and threat to Arabs who might be “deceived by Anglo-Jewish schemes” that would legitimate any sort of Jewish state in Palestine. All who showed “leniency towards the Jews” in this matter were “guilty of high treason against the Arabs,”

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undermined Pan-Arabism, and became “enemies of all Arabs and Moslems.” Drawing on his authority as Grand Mufti, he added that “any Arab assisting such a plan would be eternally damned and previous good deeds would be erased from the memory of us all, bringing nothing to him but disgrace.” The recognition of any rights for Jews in Palestine would amount to “the destruction of the Arab nation.” Husseini compared what he called “this British-Jewish plan” to reconcile a Jewish state in Palestine with Pan-Arabism to “giving a patient an anaesthetic before a limb is amputated; in this case Palestine is a limb.” If “any Arab” agreed to allow Jews to take part in pan-Arab talks or showed “leniency” to the Jews, he “would be a traitor and a destroyer of Pan Arabism [sic].” He warned “any Arab personality” who might entertain such thoughts “not to be deceived by the British and the Jews and thereby to contribute to the deprivation of the Arabs of their vital rights. The entire Arab nation would certainly disown such a man who permits himself to falter and will adequately punish him.”4 Given Husseini’s reputation for terrorist attacks on his Arab political opponents in Palestine in the 1930s, these were not idle threats. On January 8, Berlin in Arabic repeated a version of the assertion that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a “bridgehead” from which the Jews could enter other Arab countries. The announcer added that the Palestine issue should be understood as part of a Jewish plan to rule the world. If the Jews could establish a Jewish state in Palestine, they would “be able to control the three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa. Thus they will be able to rule the whole world and spread Jewish capitalism.”5 The following evening, VFA raised a similar warning about the Jews and the spread of Bolshevism. “We know that the Jews are the masters of the Americans, as they also are in Russia.” The VFA announcer knew that “the Jews are our most bitter enemies, according to the Koran, our history, traditions, the present and actual realities.”6 Two days later, Berlin in Arabic, in a talk entitled “God Forbid Any Compromise,” echoed the view that Islam precluded cooperation with the Jews “because the Arabs hate the Jews.” Indeed, Arabs had “been traditional enemies of the Jews since the dawn of Islam.” Any Arab who cooperated with the Jews contributed to the defeat of the Arabs of Palestine and must be “either mad or a traitor.” The opinion of such a person had “no importance whatsoever.”7 On January 12, Berlin in Arabic continued to attack Nahas Pasha in “Forgiveness in Islam.” According to the broadcast, the prime minister erroneously evoked the value of forgiveness in Islamic tradition as a reason to seek reconcil-

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iation with the Jews because to do so conﬂated forgiveness with weakness. The broadcast asserted that “the Jews are the worst enemies of Islam, and always have been.” It claimed that the Koran described the Jews “as being the worst enemies of Islam . . . because of the evils which the Jews tried to do to Islam.” Indeed, “the Jews boast of being the enemies of Islam,” something that was “most obvious in Palestine.” The broadcast conceded that “Nahas Pasha might have the right to support the Jews,” but he had “no right to alter the Koran” and would “never have the right to do so” even though he was “supported by the British, the Americans, the Bolsheviks and the Jews.” The broadcast concluded as follows: “Arabs, do not hesitate to continue your struggle against the Jews even though such statements [by Nahas Pasha] may be made by people who have no right to support the Jews. Arabs you have right on your side and you are going to win your case. Fear not because God is with you and the Almighty is the most just inﬂuence in this world.”8 On January 14, Berlin in Arabic kept up its attack, stating that it was rumored that Nahas Pasha would recognize a Jewish national home in Palestine, something that would threaten “one of the most sacred lands of Islam.” Mixing the language of racism with religious faith, it added,“The Arabs want a pure Arab country; we, the faithful sons of our noble ancestors, will not be humiliated and debased by accepting such a sacriﬁce and giving away our sacred heritage.” It warned Nahas Pasha that “the Arabs and the Moslems recognize a betrayal and know when you deviate from the path. . . . Allah is great! Glory to the Arabs; glory to Islam!”9 Nazism thus stood with the “faithful” and “noble” Muslims against traitors who deviated from the path laid down in the Koran. This broadcast illustrated, yet again, the centrality of its view of the teachings of the Koran and of Islam in Nazism’s Arabic programming: It was its reading of this work and this tradition—not citations from Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or speeches by Hitler or Goebbels—that served as the most important entry point to Arab and Muslim listeners. On occasion, German Arabic broadcasts departed from their running commentary about ongoing political events to make general statements about basic beliefs, such as “Arabs and Moslems at War with Jewry,” broadcast on January 29. It was an important mixture of racism, anti-Semitism, and religious fanaticism. Ethnologists tend today to consider the Arabs and the Jews as distinctly different races. To put it simply, they consider them as one old race which was divided into

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two distinctive branches. What makes them believe thus are the different characteristics of each. While the Arabs are lavishly generous, the Jews are meanly miserly. While the Arabs are courageous and warlike, the Jews are cowardly and fearful. The differences between the two races were the reason for the enduring enmity which has always existed between them. We therefore believe that this enmity and strife between the Arabs and the Jews will always be maintained until one of the two races is destroyed. This struggle or war between the Arabs and the Jews is based on beliefs and such conﬂicts cannot end other than with the destruction of one party. We must also admit that the responsibility for this racial war between the Arabs and the Jews lies on the shoulders of the Jews. The characteristics of the Arabs, their generosity, unselﬁshness and will to sacriﬁce cannot lead to war. Enmity has always existed between Arab and Jew, since ancient times. But it has been accentuated since the appearance of Islam. In Islam, the Jews found a danger to their beliefs. They fought the Prophet and his followers and when they found that the Moslems were gaining strength, they intrigued among them. They even tried to assault the Prophet. This enmity has existed from then till the present day, when Moslems realize that they must free their lands from the evils of the Jews. It is a fact that the Jews preferred paganism to Islam.”10

The announcer then read Sura 5, verse 82, from the Koran, which described the Jews as the most ardent enemies of the Muslims. He blamed the Jews for World War I, which he said they began in order to realize their dream of a state “in Moslem Palestine.” As the Arabs had been able to prevent the realization of the Balfour Declaration,“the Jews started the present war [World War II] to realize what they failed to achieve in the last.” But victory would go to “Moslems in general and the Arabs in particular,”and the Jews and their supporters would be defeated.11 This essay offers evidence of the way Nazi race theory became intertwined with fundamentalist Islamic hatred of the Jews based on religious arguments. Both the racial and religious arguments supported the proposition that a conﬂict between Arabs and Jews was total and must end in the destruction of one or the other. The anti-Semitism of the broadcast drew equally on an interpretation of Islam’s view of the Jews and on modern, secular, anti-Semitic arguments about the origins of the Balfour Declaration and of World Wars I and II. Its anti-Semitism was both ancient and modern, evoking a continuity that extended back to the founding of Islam and forward to the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitic interpretation of modern history. As his collaboration with Erwin Ettel in the Foreign Ministry had demonstrated, Husseini’s strongest supporters in the Nazi regime were among its truest believers, including the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. Indeed, by

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early 1944, one ofﬁcial in the Foreign Ministry contacted Himmler’s ofﬁce to inform him about leading ofﬁcials in the Foreign Ofﬁce who placed “restrictions on anti-Jewish action” in propaganda activities.12 The Husseini-Himmler connection produced a remarkable chapter in the history of the Nazi propaganda offensive. On May 14, 1943, Himmler requested that the SS’s Reich Security Main Ofﬁce (Reichssicherheitshauptamt; RSHA) examine “themes in the Koran that lead the Muslims to the view that the Koran predicts and assigns to the Führer the mission of completing the Prophet’s work.” The RSHA should examine the issue because “we can very probably use this idea in the Muslim population, above all among our own Muslim troops.”13 Over the summer and fall, the RSHA learned from German Orientalists that although the Koran did not offer such a prediction, there was, especially among the Shi’ites in Iran, a belief in the return of the Prophet that could be applied to Hitler. On September 11, 1943, Himmler’s aide Rudolf Brandt told SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger in Berlin to “use your connections with the Grand Mufti” to see if this direction should be pursued.14 On September 13, Sturmbannführer von Kilepinski in the RSHA’s Ofﬁce III C4 sent a memo to Himmler about the matter. Ofﬁce III C4 was responsible for cultural research with a focus on Jewish matters. Its director, Otto Ohlendorf, was the former commander of Einsatzgruppe D on the Eastern Front, under whose command more than 90,000 executions took place. The RSHA had learned that although the Koran did not predict a prophet such as Hitler, “in all Islamic eschatology, the belief in the Madhi stands in the foreground. The Mahdi should appear at the end of days to help the believers and make justice triumphant.”15 On December 6, 1943, following a series of memos and consultations, ofﬁcials in the RSHA’s “Research Ofﬁce Orient, Ofﬁce VI C 13” in the Foreign Intelligence Division, headed by Walter Schellenberg, wrote to Himmler. He reported that its investigation of the question whether “religious reverence for the Führer” could be fostered among Muslims by using quotations from the Koran led to the following results. The Führer can neither be presented as a prophet nor the Mahdi but rather as Jesus (Isa) who the Koran predicts will return and, as a knight . . . defeats giants and the king of the Jews who appear at the end of the world. Along these lines, the Orient Research Ofﬁce has written an Arabic leaflet. . . . The Koran quotation at the beginning and end of the leaﬂet refers to the return of the messiah who will kill the false messiah Dadjdjal before the Mahdi returns. The text [of the leaﬂet] suggests in the same way as the Koran quotation

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a conﬂation of the Führer with the messiah while it presents Dadjdjal as the embodiment of Jewish world capital. The distribution of the leaﬂet may not only have a favorable impact on the views of the Muslims in southeastern Europe. Rather, it should be effective above all at the right time in Palestine, because there the civil peace between Arabs and Jews is rapidly coming to its end. We therefore request permission for a massive printing and distribution of the leaﬂet.16

By 1944, Husseini’s relationship with Heinrich Himmler was cordial. In November 1942, after a group of Bosnian Muslims had written to Hitler to offer support and cooperation, Himmler decided to establish an SS division from their ranks. Recruitment began in February 1943.17 As it was the ﬁrst military organization resting on cooperation between National Socialism and Islamist groups, Husseini understandably played an important role in its development. Husseini and Himmler agreed that the ideological development of the troops would be left in the hands of Imams selected by Husseini’s representatives and approved by him. They would receive orders from Husseini and the SS. Hitler decreed that the division’s name would be 13th Waffen SS Mountain Division “Handschar.”18 On January 11, 1944, Himmler addressed the Austrian and German commanders and the Bosnian members of the division in Neuhammer, Germany. In the course of a long (more than 3,000 words) speech, Himmler argued that the bond between Nazism and Islam was built on enduring common values as well as on shared enemies in the war. He also presented Hitler as a gift sent from God—and Allah. It was clear: what should separate the Muslims in Europe and the whole world from us Germans! We have common goals. There is no more solid foundation for cooperation than shared goals and shared ideals. For 200 years, Germany has not had the slightest points of friction with Islam. In the past two centuries, Germany, its government, and leaders were friends of Islam on the basis of convictions, not opportunism or political expediency. Today, we Germans and you in this division, you Muslims, share the feeling of thankfulness to destiny that almighty God—you say Allah, it is of course the same thing—sent the Führer to the tortured and suffering people of Europe. It was the Führer who ﬁrst freed Europe and later will free the whole world from the Jews, this enemy of our country who took victory from our hands in 1918 and so that sacriﬁce of two million dead turned out to be for nothing. They [the Jews] are also your enemies for the Jew has always been your enemy.19

After the cooperation between Germans and Arabs in the propaganda ofﬁces in Berlin, the Bosnian SS division was the second locus of ongoing interac-

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tion between National Socialism and ideologues of radical Islamism during the war. In April, Husseini, in cooperation with the SS, opened an “Imam-Institute” to train clerics for the troops. In an address at the opening of the institute, he spoke of “the success of cooperation between Muslims and the Great German Reich.” The Islamic clerics working with the division worked closely with German ofﬁcers on ideological issues. Indeed, the division’s commander, KarlGustav Sauberzweig, reported that the Muslim recruits gladly adopted Nazi doctrine and even that “the Muslims, SS men in the Division, and the civilians are beginning to see in our Führer the mission of a second prophet,” that is, one following Mohammed. The political education of the troops included listening to lectures on “National Socialism and Islam,” “The Life of Our Führer,” and “The Meaning of This War.” Husseini and the SS Main Ofﬁce agreed that, rather than work toward a synthesis of National Socialism and Islam, the foundation for ideological education of the troops would be that “National Socialism will be conveyed as a völkisch-deﬁned German world view while Islam will be presented as a völkisch-deﬁned Arabic world view of the Muslims.” Both had common enemies: ﬁrst Jewry, then the Anglo-Americans, and third Communism.20 Yet in a speech of October 4, 1944, to ofﬁcers and imams associated with the division, Husseini stressed that “the parallels between National Socialism and Islam had become ever closer. These included: monotheism, deﬁned as obedience to one spiritual, political, and military authority; an emphasis on obedience and discipline; and the celebration of battle and of labor.” Islam and National Socialism, he continued, had also “moved very close to one another” regarding the need to ﬁght against Jewry. In the war, “a victory for the Allies would constitute a victory for Jewry, and thus a great danger for the Muslims and for Islam in general. Cooperation of four hundred million Muslims with their real friends, the Germans, can have a great inﬂuence on the war. It is very useful for both.”21 The division went into action in February 1944 and soon became known for its brutal and bloody methods of warfare against Jews, Communists, and partisans. By October 1944, as the tide of the war turned against the Germans, about 2,700 members of the division had deserted and joined Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslav artisans. In December, Himmler decided to dissolve the Bosnian SS division and send those volunteers still willing to ﬁght among other units of the Wehrmacht or to be laborers in Germany. The SS admitted to the Foreign Ofﬁce that there were, in fact, only 300 Arabs willing to serve in the “Arabic-Is-

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lamic army” that Husseini and the SS hoped to create.22 Though a military failure, the Bosnian SS division produced photo opportunities for leaﬂets showing “the Grand Mufti” with the troops. In 1944, the Germans used their clandestine courier networks of ﬁshing boats in the Mediterranean and railway employees in the Middle East to distribute thousands of copies.23 Himmler’s remarkable effort to associate Hitler with divine intervention was an idea that had been percolating in the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce. The institution that directed and implemented the Final Solution was heavily staffed with university graduates in law, the humanities, and social science. Its Orient Research Center (Forschungsstelle Orient) in Ofﬁce VI (Amt VI) was located at the University of Tübingen and was directed by Walter Lorch. There, Otto Rössler, who had a doctorate and habilitation in Orient studies, cooperated with the SS on this project.24 On January 26, 1944, an RSHA ofﬁcial, Hauptsturmführer Zeischka, wrote to ofﬁcials in the Propaganda Ministry about “the publication and distribution of leaﬂets in Arab countries.” Himmler had requested research to determine “whether certain religious ideas of the Muslims regarding the Führer can be connected to predictions in the Koran.” The initial research had attributed “extraordinary importance” to religious ideas that could offer further detail to Himmler’s comments about God’s decision to send Hitler to Europe. Zeischka attached the text of a leaﬂet to be translated into Arabic and distributed. If the Propaganda Ministry and the Foreign Ministry were willing to produce the leaﬂet, the RSHA was ready to have its intelligence service connections in the Arab world distribute the leaﬂet “so that a mass action essential to achieve the desired propaganda impact can be accomplished.” Zeischka continued, noting that a “rapid decision is requested” because the political situation in the Middle East, especially in Palestine, was “becoming increasingly tense” as the period of Jewish immigration allowed by the British White Paper of 1939 was coming to an end. Ofﬁce VI thought this was a propitious moment to engage in this kind of leaﬂet propaganda. The memo from the RSHA research staff read as follows: The people in the Orient often actually believe that the Führer is a Nebi (Prophet). The admiration for his personality is expressed in this naive form. However, we cannot make further use of the fact that [Hitler is called the prophet] because to do so would bring us into conﬂict with ofﬁcial Islamic theology, according to which another prophet cannot exist following Mohammed, who was called the “seal of the prophet.” In the [Islamic] literature as well as in popular custom the idea of a superhuman form who will appear at the end of

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days to free the world from horror and to help Islam to ﬁnal victory is widespread. Such belief refers to the idea of the Mahdi, whose roots are in the Koran, though the name “Mahdi” is not expressly used there. The Mahdi comes from the Prophet Mohammed’s family to help bring about the victory of belief and justice and to dominate the Islamic empire. This idea . . . is particularly popular among the common people and comes to the foreground especially in difﬁcult times. Therefore, in the course of Islamic history, men have repeatedly come forward claiming to be the Mahdi. However, for our purposes the idea of the Mahdi is not usable because it is essential that the Mahdi descend from the Prophet. A non-Arab [such as Hitler] cannot be such a descendant. However, the Muslim’s mythic images of the future also include other details to which we can certainly connect. At the time of the Mahdi, Isa (that is, Jesus) will also appear and with his spear kill the awful Dadjdjal (the great liar, the Antichrist), symbol so to speak of the suffering of the last days. According to the famous Muslim historian Tabari, Dadjdjal is a giant and the king of the Jews who dominates and oppresses the whole world. It would not be difﬁcult to identify today’s Jewish-capitalist world power with the mythic Dadjdjal who is overcome by Isa (Jesus), whom the Koran predicts will return. In this regard, it’s also interesting that the North African Arabs play a word game with Rommel’s name and render it as “spear.” From our perspective, it is admittedly odd to identify the Führer with Isa-Jesus. However, for the Muslims, who have a completely different image of Jesus than ours, and for whom the returning Isa is more like an Arab knight, there is nothing odd about such an identiﬁcation. It would be best to express this identity only indirectly. It would come from the Muslims themselves if we succeeded in popularizing the idea among them that world Jewry is the Dadjdjal. It is highly probable that this view would be well received not only among the common people. It would also be well received among the educated strata and the theologians or at least would not arouse disagreement and contradiction from them.”25

On February 7, 1944, Dr. Schmidt-Dumont replied for the Foreign Division of the Propaganda Ministry, writing that its ofﬁcials agreed with the suggestion from the SS. The Arabic text should be read by “Dr. K. E. Galal,” that is, Kamal ad-Din Galal, the editor of Barid al-Schark (Orient Post) for its adequacy in Arabic. Schmidt-Dumont would seek approval from the Foreign Ministry.26 By mid-March, Zeischka reported that Goebbels had approved publication of one million Arabic-language leaﬂets. The decision of the Foreign Ministry was pending. Galal read the initial draft and reported that it had “no content or meaning” and was composed of “disconnected sentences that . . . belong in the wastebasket.” Zeischka requested a new translation of the text.27 On April 6, 1944, Schmidt-Dumont reported that the Foreign Ofﬁce agreed with distribution of a million copies of the revised text.28 In late June, the Propaganda

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Ministry paid 1,650 reichmarks to print them for distribution in the Arab countries.29 The German Federal Archives hold the German and Arabic texts of the leaﬂet but do not indicate whether it was distributed, though the fact that a million copies were printed suggests that it was. In any case, the correspondence surrounding the leaﬂet vividly documents the efforts of the Research Ofﬁce of Himmler’s RSHA, of the Arabic-language propaganda divisions of the Foreign Ministry, and of the Propaganda Ministry to connect Hitler to Islamic traditions.30 The translation of the Arabic text reads as follows: We know that the Antichrist will appear at the end of days and he will enter and deceive . . . and this time will be a time of great oppression for the believers. Abu Jaafar Mohamed bin Jabir al Tabri, the famous Arab historian said that the Anti-Christ is a tyrant and Jewish king who will possess the whole world— Mohamed bin Ismail Abu Abdallah al Jaafar al Bukhari said that the Antichrist is fat with curly hair. Oh Arabs, have you seen that the time of the Antichrist has come? Do you know him? This the fat [curly-haired] Jew that deceives the whole world and who lords over the whole world and steals the land of the Arabs. He is the ally of the devil. We know that the kingdom of the Antichrist is not eternal. Abdallah bin Masr al Bidawi said that God sends his servant, and he will kill the Antichrist with his lance and ﬁght his palaces. Oh Arabs, do you know the servant of God? He has appeared in the world and turned his spear against the Antichrist and his allies and has injured them deeply, and he will kill the Antichrist as it is written and will ﬁght his palaces and his allies will fall into hell.31

In addition to the above effort to identify Hitler as “God’s servant” now on earth to “kill the Dadjdjal,” the RSHA also intended to distribute a series of ﬁfteen photos showing Husseini with the Bosnian Muslim soldiers of the SS Mountain Division Handschar through its network of agents in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine.32 Husseini’s involvement with the Muslim SS division, and the division itself, became a point of pride in German Arabic leaﬂets distributed in the Middle East. The following text was aimed directly at the Muslim soldiers ﬁghting in Yugoslavia in 1944. “Go forth lightly armed and heavily armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of God. That is best for you if you but knew the Quran al Karim, the struggle against the enemies of Islam who act brutally against Muslims, and who follow . . . Judaism, is a duty of all Muslims. ‘You will ﬁnd the most vehement of mankind in hostility to the believers to be the Jews,’ the Quran al Karim.”33 In the face of setbacks on various battleﬁelds,

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the German propaganda offensive on the radio continued unabated. On the evening of January 31, Berlin in Arabic commented on Hitler’s speech of the previous day. Rather than translate the speech, which focused on events in Europe, the broadcast stated that the war would end either in a German or Bolshevik victory. “In the former case, the Arabs would have complete freedom and would be masters of their own destiny; in the latter, the Jews would master the world.” In the same broadcast, the station attacked Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri El Said, for supposedly agreeing to open Iraqi markets to Jewish citrus fruits. It reported, typically without offering a source, that “the Jews regard Nouri El Said as their ﬁrm friend who helps them in all their difﬁculties.”34 The guilt by association in that statement was clear to the station’s regular listeners. On February 3, Berlin in Arabic reported that the United States Senate had approved the abolition of restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine established in Britain’s White Paper and had “opened the gates of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration.”35 The following evening, Berlin in Arabic reported that the German press “repudiates the demands of Weizmann the Jew for sending two million Jews more into Palestine.” It quoted the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party and regime’s ofﬁcial newspaper, that Germany’s stance on Palestine was “very clear and unalterable. . . . Palestine must enjoy her full freedom and sovereignty after the German victory.”36 In the course of the war, American and Soviet power grew both absolutely and relative to that of Britain. Nazi propaganda, which noted the shift beginning with the American landings in North Africa in fall 1942, continued to do so in early 1944. On February 6, Berlin in Arabic discussed a speech about “Arabism” by Alfred Rosenberg, a leading anti-Semitic ideologue and the editor of the Völkischer Beobachter. The British, he said, were now “uncertain and fearful” of what to do in Palestine because they realized “that the existence of their Empire depends on Zionism and the Jews.” Yet, if they ignored “Arab rights,” there would be “no end to their troubles.”Therefore, the Jews had “turned to the United States and the Bolsheviks” to aid them in realizing their “illegal aims . . . directed towards the usurpation of Arab rights in Arab countries.” Rosenberg stated that it was “obvious that the United Nations [that is, the Allies] had become toys in Jewish hands and were completely under the inﬂuence of Jewish parasitic organizations.” Yet he was conﬁdent that “the persistent Jewish parasitical demands would be checked so that humanity could rid itself completely of the Jewish plague.” As Ribbentrop had stated, supporting Arab indepen-

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dence remained “a vital factor in German policy.”37 The following evening, Berlin in Arabic attacked another apparent sign of American support for the Jews when it reported that William Green, president of the American Federation of Craftsmen [i.e., American Federation of Labor], said that the “British government” should acquiesce to Jewish demands because Jews are more important than Arabs.”38 On the fourteenth, VFA repeated a familiar theme in “Jews Dominate Anglo-Saxons.” America was “under the thumb of the Jews . . . Roosevelt and his collaborators are the servants of the Jews.” Along with Churchill, Roosevelt had fabricated a conspiracy to cancel the White Paper’s restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, but this was in vain because “Arabism will defeat the Jews whether the Anglo-Saxons desire it or not.”39 Nazi broadcasts sought to accustom listeners to habits of thinking or rather, nonthinking. They strung together one false, undocumented assertion after another about the power of the Jews that were supposed to prove the truth of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that then culminated in a prediction of Arab victory. In addition to providing various interpretations of the course of events, the broadcasts indicated an inclination to think in conspiratorial terms about political events, as has been noted by scholars of postwar Arab politics.40 German Arabic-language propaganda, no less than German propaganda in Germany and Europe, included a massive assault on Communism. But while the anti-Jewish themes were important in both campaigns, the racist attacks on “Slavic subhumans” that were important in Europe did not play a prominent role in the Middle East. Rather, Arabic-language radio stressed the antagonism between Bolshevism and Islam. On February 12, VFA stated that the Bolsheviks planned “to erase Islam from the hearts of the Moslems and pave the way for Bolshevism.” The Bolsheviks were “enemies of religion and of capitalism.” Hence it was “our duty to oppose” them. With stunning logic, it concluded that “the Jews are the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks are the Jews and the Jews are our enemies.”41 On February 27, Berlin in Arabic again underscored the religious foundations of its anti-Bolshevism. Hatred of Bolshevism was “quite strong among the Moslems who followed the principles of Mohammed.” In a conﬂict between the Egyptian government and Al Azhar, “the great Moslem University,” the station stood ﬁrmly on the side of the latter.42 On May 12, Berlin in Arabic reported about the “Agreement between Bolshevism and Zionism.” “Political circles in Lisbon” had “reliable sources” who

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indicated that “Dr. Wise, the Zionist leader” [Rabbi Stephen Wise, a leader of Reform Judaism in the United States], had met the Soviet ambassador in Washington and “suggested that the Headquarters of world Zionism should be transferred from New York to Moscow.” The Bolsheviks were “joining hands with Zionism.”A Jewish state in Palestine would be “a Bolshevik Republic overlooking the Mediterranean.” Such a “rapprochement between the Jews and the Bolsheviks is detrimental to the Arabs. These two evil inﬂuences have united to devastate the world. The transfer of the Zionist den brings it nearer to the Mediterranean and to the gates of the Arab countries. The Arabs should be careful and beware of the approaching menace. Should the Bolshevik-Jewish tempest rage over the Near East, one issue would remain only—struggle: death or life.”43 As with attacks on Britain and the United States, anti-Semitism connected the Nazi attack on European Communism to its policies in the Middle East. Although propaganda against Communism occupied a prominent place in the Arabic-language material, it was far less pervasive than was the assault on Britain and even more so than in the attacks on the United States. In the United States, reports of the massacre of European Jewry led to a growing public call for the government to do all it could to rescue Europe’s Jews, including lifting restrictions on Jewish immigration of Palestine. In January 1944, Resolutions 418 and 419 were introduced into the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in support of that policy.44 On February 1, Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat from New York, and Senator Robert Taft, a Republican from Ohio, introduced a resolution in the Senate advocating that the United States support “free and unlimited entry of Jews into Palestine for the creation of a Jewish commonwealth” and in so doing abrogate the limitations on such immigration imposed by the British White Paper of 1939. In addition to placing the Congress on record as favoring “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the resolution also stated that “nothing shall be done which shall prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected.”45 The solution was referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On February 7, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote to the chairman of the Senate committee as follows: “The subject of this resolution is a matter of deep military concern to the War Department. I feel that the passage of this resolution at the present time, or even any public hearings thereon, would be apt

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to provoke dangerous repercussions in areas where we have many vital military interests. Any conﬂict between Jews and Arabs would require the retention of troops in the affected areas and thus reduce the total forces that could otherwise be placed in combat against Germany. The consequent unrest in other portions of the Arab world would keep United Nations resources away from the combat zone. I believe therefore that our war effort would be seriously prejudiced by such action.”46 On February 9, Secretary of State Hull wrote to the committee chairman, “In view of the military considerations advanced in this regard by the Secretary of War, it is believed that without reference to its merits no further action on this resolution would be advisable at this time.”47 On February 14, L. Roy Henderson, the American ambassador to Iraq, cabled Hull to convey the views of Nuri Pasha, the Iraqi prime minister. Nuri thought passage of the resolution “would strengthen Axis propaganda” in the Middle East. He (Nuri) “pointed out that German radio broadcasts in the Arabic language were making wide use of this resolution in an endeavor to create a lack of conﬁdence among the Arabs in the sincerity of purpose of the Allies and of Allied expressions of friendliness toward the Arab world. He added that it would be extremely helpful in combating Axis propaganda and in stilling certain misgivings even among those Arabs most friendly to the Allied cause if assurances could be given that the Government of the U.S. would not decide on what its attitude on Palestine is to be until spokesmen for the Arabs are given a full opportunity to make clear the issues at stake.” Reports of intense opposition by Arab governments to passage of the Senate resolution also came to Hull from the American embassies in Egypt and Syria.48 On February 23, General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, testiﬁed against passage of the resolution before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in special executive session.49 In preparation for his testimony, Marshall asked John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, to prepare a memo for the hearing. Marshall told McCloy that he had followed “the general facts and tone of this memorandum.”50 The McCloy memo to Marshall is a key document of American thinking about the way to respond to the challenge of Nazi Germany in the Middle East during World War II. American military intelligence “G-2” reports that McCloy had read conﬁrmed what any newspaper reader already knew, namely, that there was a “high degree of tension in Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews,” and each side had substantial quantities of arms. McCloy concluded that “any action which would tend to increase this ten-

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sion or threaten an outbreak in this area would greatly compromise our [American] military capacities.” Troops badly needed in Europe would be needed for garrison duty. American troops were “in contact with the Moslem world not only in Palestine but throughout the entire Mediterranean area and in many places farther east.” The Palestine issue was “of more or less concern to all the Moslem population of the Near East and North Africa.” German agents were “active in the area and certainly will use the Arab-Jew issue to the limit in order to foment further disturbances if an opportunity presents itself.” American lines of communication throughout Africa were “to an important degree dependent upon the cooperation and goodwill of the Arab,” and “his willingness to supply goods and services in furtherance of the Allied effort is a matter of real military importance.”Supply routes to Russia via the Persian Gulf and to the Far East ran through “Moslem territory and would be subject to constant threat of sabotage and disruption in the event of any disturbances or hostilities.” Muslims were also ﬁghting with the Allies in Italy. Finally, the Middle East was an important supply base for American operations in Europe, especially oil supplies.“The existing pipeline from Iraq to Palestine could be cut or damaged as it has been in the past” with obvious effects on naval and military operations in the Mediterranean, which depended on the Haifa reﬁnery for their oil. The Abadan reﬁnery at the head of the Persian Gulf was “the only Allied source of aviation gasoline outside the Western Hemisphere.” Distances were great and supply installations “in many places are highly vulnerable.” Substantial numbers of troops would be required to protect them in the event of disorders. Therefore, McCloy argued, “from a military point of view we would much prefer to let such sleeping dogs lie.” That is, a decision about the Palestine issue should be postponed until “after the war when military considerations will be less acute.” McCloy also noted that the government of Iraq reported that German agents were using the existence of the Senate resolution in their propaganda against the Allies.51 On March 1, in response to the Wagner-Taft resolution, Berlin in Arabic unleashed a particularly vitriolic tirade against “criminal American senators.” It announced to “the Arab world, to the Islamic world, to the Eastern world, to all humanity” that a “great tragedy is about to be unfolded, a great massacre, another turbulent war is about to start in the Arab countries. Much ﬁne blood will be shed and many innocent and dear souls will be lost.” The American senators’ “vile intention towards Arabs and Islam is to erase Islamic civilization from the

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face of the world, to eradicate the Koran from the heart of men and to replace it by their atheism and immorality.”According to the broadcast, they want to “see blood ﬂowing all over the Near East.” Their decision to introduce the resolution for debate was “one of their most heinous crimes,” for they wanted to “force their will upon the followers of Mohammed . . . debase the religion of Mohammed. . . . It is a horrid and repulsive crime.” A Jewish country in Palestine would be “a horrible nation” and its creation would be “a shameful crime!” The meaning of the Wagner-Taft resolution was that “the Arabs and Arabism should no longer exist.” It would lead to “the eradication of the Mosque of Aqsa to which our Holy Prophet made his ﬂight” and its replacement with “Solomon’s Temple. This means the annihilation of all Arabs and Moslems.” The proposed Jewish country would colonize and plunder the Arab countries, undermine their religious sentiment, and disperse the Muslims. The broadcast repeated its long-standing mantra that the United States was “really a Jewish colony and that the 5 million Jews living there dominate the 140 million other Americans.” Although Berlin in Arabic “knew” that Jews controlled the major institutions of American society, “never did we dream that the Americans would become the slaves of the Jews, overridden by them, directed by them at their will.” The Americans and the Allies seemed “to care nothing for the 400 million Arabs and Moslems whom they consider as insects, ﬂies.”52 The concluding paragraphs of the broadcast predicted absolute catastrophe in tones of apoplectic rage and appeals to kill the Allies. Arabs and Moslems, sons of the East, this menace threatens your very lives, endangers your beliefs and aims at your wealth. No trace of you will remain. Your doom is sealed. It were better if the earth opened and engulfed everybody; it were better if the skies fell upon us, bringing havoc and destruction; all this, rather than the sun of Islam should set and the Koran perish. Kings of the Arabs and Moslems, princes of the Arabs and the Moslems, governments of the Arabs and the Moslems, let us hear your voices; let us hear your deeds; react against the horrible future which awaits you! Stir up wars and revolutions, stand fast against the aggressors, let your hearts, aﬁre with faith, burst asunder! Advance with your armies and tribes to drive out the menace. Men and women should ﬁght the Allies by all means. Kill them. Thus history will honor you, coming generations will praise you and you will have cleansed the stain which is intended to sully you. God will bring you victory.53

On March 3, Berlin in Arabic continued the denunciation of the “band of robbers in the American Senate.” Speaking directly to Palestinians, it stated,

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“You are now in the front line and when you win this battle you will have won the battle of the Arab countries and the battle of Islam.”God as well as “your sister Arab countries” Egypt, Sudan, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia supported them. In addition to the millions of Arabs and Muslims, there were “gigantic powers standing beside you including Germany and Japan, who will help you to exterminate the Jews and defeat the Anglo-Saxons. Rise with your power and determination as you did before.”54 Accusations of espionage were among the most dangerous of the various rationales offered for killing Jews in Arab countries. On February 27, Berlin in Arabic stated, “The British Secret Information Bureau is the foundation stone of the friendship between the British and the Jews.” Echoing Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at its domestic audience, Berlin in Arabic asserted that the British-Jewish friendship “started when Cromwell opened the doors of Britain to the Jews.” It continued in 1941 in Iraq, when “the Jews in Bagdad used to sneak to the British Embassy under cover of darkness to receive pamphlets” and then distributed them “so as to create panic in the hearts of the people.” The Iraqi Jews, it continued, gave the British Embassy information about the Iraqi army. When the British landed in spring 1941 to depose the Kilani government, “the Arabs revolted, but the Jews welcomed them and received them with ﬂowers. The Arabs attacked the Jews, many of whom were killed.”55 The broadcast thereby justiﬁed the anti-Jewish pogrom in Iraq in spring 1941.56 In addition, in Tunisia in 1942, the Jews had enthusiastically welcomed the British as their “faithful friends.” Had not the British and Americans “strengthened [the] inﬂuence of Jews in Algiers, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya? . . . The Arabs should know that every Jew living among them is a spy attached to the British with strong ties.” The assertion that “every Jew living among them” was a spy was a rationale for mass violence against those the broadcast called “your worst enemies and also the enemies of your religion, your country and your nation.”57 A telegram sent to Senator Wagner by Jamil al Madfai, president of the Iraqi Senate, and Muhammed Ridha Shabibi, president of its Chamber of Deputies, gives an indication of the impact Nazi propaganda was having in Arab countries. They repeated the view, widespread among Arab political leaders, that the plan to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine was “in sharp contradiction to the spirit of the Atlantic Charter.” In addition, such a plan “would strengthen the effort of Axis propaganda to persuade the Arab peoples that

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their great allies had not been sincere in the principles for which they are ﬁghting and that the American government and people have in reality no interest in or sympathy with the Arab peoples.”58 Worries about the resolution’s impact on the Allied position in the Arab world did not come only from abroad. On March 4, the New York Times reported that General George Marshall told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that military considerations, that is, the concerns expressed in the above-mentioned memo by McCloy, called for a postponement of the resolution. Committee member Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota said “it was obvious” that Marshall feared that passage of the resolution “might disturb relations with the Arabs.” In separate letters to the committee, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of State Hull also opposed action on the resolution at that time.59 This opposition to the resolution by leading American military and diplomatic ofﬁcials indicated that they believed that Nazi propaganda was having at least some of its desired effect in the Middle East. As a result of pressure that also came from the White House, the Wagner-Taft resolution was withdrawn. Yet on March 10 Roosevelt publicly assured American Jews that “full justice will be done [after the war] to those who seek a Jewish national home, for which our Government and the American People have always had the deepest sympathy and today more than ever in view of the tragic plight of thousands of homeless Jewish refugees.”60 The election platforms of both the Democratic and Republican parties in 1944 included such views. There was no mystery and certainly no conspiracy needed to account for American support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was a direct response to the voluminous and accurate reports of the genocide of Europe’s Jews and of their overwhelming helplessness in the face of the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Not a single one of the millions of leaﬂets and thousands of broadcasts produced by Nazi Germany and its Arab and Muslim collaborators during World War II and the Holocaust pointed out the obvious truth: if the Nazis had not carried out a genocide of Europe’s Jews, there would have been far less political support in the United States and elsewhere for realization of Zionist hopes in Palestine. On March 21, VFA drew a different lesson from the decision to table the WagnerTaft resolution and from Stimson’s and Marshall’s arguments that the resolution would run counter to American interests. On one hand, these reservations were merely a maneuver to “dope the Arabs” and “throw dust in their eyes.”Yet, the broadcast continued, the postponement was also a sign of American worry

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about “the impact of an Arab revolution at the present moment and its drastic effect on their war effort, especially at this fateful phase of the war.” That was why the U.S. government found it “wiser not to stir up the Arabs.”61 Perhaps occasioned by the discussion in Washington about the WagnerTaft resolution, Husseini repeated his earlier incitement to murder the Jews. On Berlin in Arabic on March 1, he stated that the “wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clearer, and there remain no doubts that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. More than 400,000,000 Arabs oppose this criminal American movement. . . . Arabs! Rise as one and ﬁght for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you ﬁnd them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor. God is with you” (emphasis in original).62 As noted earlier, the incitement to murder Jews in the broadcasts of July 1942 (there may have been others not recorded by the Americans in Cairo) was different from the Nazi genocidal threats and boasts aimed at the Germanspeaking audience in Europe. Whereas Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi ofﬁcials announced that the Nazi regime was exterminating the Jews of Europe, Husseini and other unnamed inciters used the Arabic radio broadcasts to appeal for audience participation in the killing of Jews “wherever you ﬁnd them.” Like other totalitarian leaders of the twentieth century, whether of the radical left or radical right, Haj Amin el-Husseini brought considerable political skills and ruthlessness to the task of mobilizing mass sentiment. An indispensable aspect of Husseini’s success lay in his ability to connect his political ambitions to the shared language, stories, myths, and emotions of religion as he interpreted it. His interpretation of Islam was as indispensable for his Arabic propaganda as Marxism-Leninism was for Lenin and Stalin and fascism and Nazi ideology were for Mussolini and Hitler. Marxism-Leninism, fascism, and Nazism all offered their believers the comforts, consolations, and conﬁdence of theodicy, that is, the conviction that their own political projects were in accord with the larger trends of history. The religious dimensions of secular theodicy, which were explicit in Hegel’s philosophy of history, receded into the background among the Communists and a bit less so among the fascists and Nazis. Though National Socialism selectively drew on Christian themes, it did not present itself ﬁrst and foremost as part of fundamentalist religious revival. In one sense, the historical importance of radical Islam in these and subsequent decades lay in its revival of the emphatically religious dimension of political theodicy.

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On March 7, Berlin in Arabic broadcast a speech by Husseini that addressed these themes. He spoke in Berlin on the occasion of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday. Arabs and Moslems! The whole Moslem world celebrates today the Prophet’s birthday. The Prophet who brought mercy to the peoples, who was the guide of the faithful, and who served the world, which was wandering in the dark and in the worship of idolatry. He set into the minds [sic] and preached peace and good, truth and sincerity, modesty and mercy, and all the supreme virtues. This guidance puriﬁed the souls and it overthrew tyranny. It was a system to guarantee the happiness of mankind to remedy the diseases and problems of the world. That system quickly spread to all parts of the world, spread with such a speed that a just historian said that history never knew worthier than that enunciated by the Moslem religion. This was the condition of the Moslems until they diverted from the dictates of God. Then their condition changed. God never changes people until they change themselves. The result was that they were punished. They were invaded by merciless tyrants because they shut their ears to the orders of Islam. Britain and her allies dominated the fate of millions of Moslems, occupied their countries and exploited their resources.63

Husseini’s view of causation put God’s will at the center of events. When he said that “they were invaded because they shut their ears to the orders of Islam,” he was obviously calling for a return to the faith. Yet his logic was also in the tradition of political theodicy by strongly implying that British domination over the Arabs was God’s punishment for having abandoned the faith. Lest anyone believe he thought this punishment just, he quickly turned his rage at the British and the Jews. The “most wicked of their [British] crimes was what they did to sacred Palestine, where they plotted with the Jews to dismiss the Arabs from their country and to establish there a Jewish State.” That was quite a breathtaking statement to make in spring 1944 in light of the crimes Nazi Germany was in the midst of committing and Britain’s efforts to prevent more Jews from ﬁnding rescue in Palestine. It was the statement of a remarkably provincial political ﬁgure who tried to place his small country of origin into global signiﬁcance. He did so by identifying his political goals with the demands of Islam as well as with the modern anti-Semitic attack on the Jews and America. He referred to the efforts by “the big number” of senators and members of the House of Representatives who supported an end to the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The effort was not surprising because “where the germs of Jewry live one must expect all sort of danger. This is the ex-

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perience of the whole world and of the Arabs in particular. America is full of those germs and she will suffer from the Jewish epidemic beyond all expectations.”64 Husseini reminded listeners that “we” had warned Arabs and Muslims not to trust the promises of the Allies, nations who were “directed by world Jewry.” This “we” had drawn attention “to the fact that the Jews dominate the destinies of the Allies in the present war, which was described by [Chaim] Weizmann as a Jewish war.” “We” said that there was “a conspiracy between the Jews and the Allies against our countries” and especially among “the British, the Americans and the Jews.” He referred to statements by American members of Congress or by Winston Churchill expressing outrage at Nazi crimes and support for Jewish emigration to Palestine. For Husseini, “all this proves that the whole cause is a conspiracy between the British, the Americans and the Jews.” It was, he said, “important to disclose this conspiracy, for the history of the Jews and the Allies is a long series of conspiracies.” Moreover, and very importantly, because Palestine was an “Arab and Moslem and a sacred country,” the challenge posed by the Allies was “directed to every Arab in every part of the world.” Arabs and Moslems! . . . Remember Palestine, to which the Prophet made his Holy Pilgrimage, which Omar Iman El Khatab [Ibn al Khatib] defended, which Saladin defended, and the blood of millions of martyrs irrigated its soil. You will not have an excuse. God, the Prophet, history, your grandfathers and your grandsons will hold you responsible if you fail to help Palestine. Any leniency with the tyrants signiﬁes that the rights of the Arab nation are wasted. It indicates high treason. Go on ﬁrmly and struggle to dismiss the Jews from Palestine and from all Arab and Moslem countries. Make every effort possible so that not a single Jew and not a single imperialist remains in the Arab countries.

Did history, he asked, ever record a “more wicked crime” than the proposal to establish a Jewish home in Palestine? Yet he expressed conﬁdence that “God will defeat these tyrants and will help us to win, together with our allies, the Germans and the Japanese. We will have an independent Arab state in which no trace of Jewry will be found.”65 Husseini’s invocation of “God, the Prophet, history, your grandfathers and your grandsons” expressed the deep connection between the secular and religious dimensions of his attacks and of their appeal. Indeed, their intertwining was the precondition for their effectiveness. Strictly secular arguments would have bypassed millions of devout Muslims, and strictly religious assertions would have lacked a seemingly worldly connection to ongoing events. The

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March 17 Berlin in Arabic broadcast on “Moslem India and Palestine” stated, “Today the Palestine question is not only an Arab question, but is a question concerning all Moslems” because the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was “bound to lead to a Jewish exploitation all over the Moslem world,” including India.66 The effectiveness of Nazism’s Arabic radio broadcasts lay partly in their ability to introduce a radical message in ways that resonated with, yet deepened and radicalized, already existing sentiments. The rage and hatred that envisioned “not a single Jew” remaining in the Arab countries was hard to imagine without the added venom inspired by Husseini’s version of Islam. That version received the beneﬁt of transmission from the shortwave radio transmitters outside Berlin; hundreds of thousands of reichsmarks in salaries for Husseini, Kilani, and their entourage; and the support and ideological cross-fertilization that occurred as a result of cooperation and contact with the staffs at the highest levels of the German Foreign Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry, Himmler, and the SS. None of that would have happened without the approval of Husseini’s admirer, Hitler himself. The scope of the Islamist message from Berlin was by no means limited to Husseini. Justiﬁcations for engaging in violence against Jews in the Arab countries came from unnamed announcers as well. On March 18, displaying the logic of projection and paranoia that characterized Nazism’s public threats to “exterminate” the Jews in Europe, Berlin in Arabic announced, “The Jews are armed.”67 In fact, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in wartime Palestine, had organized an armed force, the Haganah. It consisted of 30,000 members with arms for 50 to 70 percent of them. Twenty-six thousand Jews in Palestine had joined the British army to ﬁght against the Nazis. The purpose of these efforts was not to “exterminate” anyone but to fend off Arab attacks and to defend the entire community against the Nazis if the Panzerarmee should invade Palestine.68 For Berlin in Arabic, however, there could be “only one explanation” for this development, namely, that “the Jews are equipping themselves in preparation for the annihilation of all Arabs living in their neighborhood. . . . When the Jews discovered that it was impossible to expel the Arabs by peaceful means from Palestine, they equipped themselves in order to carry out a massacre aimed at the extermination of the Arabs. Afterwards the British would recognize Palestine as a Jewish state.” The shamelessness of the broadcast is stunning even in retrospect. The Nazi regime and its collaborators had murdered 5 million Jews in Europe in the previous three years and were implementing plans to

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murder 500,000 Hungarian Jews in the spring, summer, and fall of 1944. Yet Berlin in Arabic insisted that the issue “between ourselves and the Jews” was not merely one of religious toleration. Rather it was “a question of the whole nation which the Jews are trying to wipe out.” It called on the leaders of the Arab countries to “save Palestine before the Jews establish their ambitions and exterminate the Arabs.”69 In March and April 1944, Berlin in Arabic continued to broadcast a steady stream of anti-Semitic propaganda, hammering away at the numbingly familiar theme that America was “in the hands of the Jews.” American support, or rather support by some American political ﬁgures, for a Jewish state in Palestine was the result. Further, this plan was a core element of American imperialism’s aims in the region.70 On April 17, Kirk sent the last of his dispatches to Washington. It included the text of a Berlin in Arabic broadcast of April 14 that told its listeners that Bolshevism was “incompatible with the Islamic spirit and neither the Bolsheviks nor the Jews could be the friends of Islam.”71 On April 24, Berlin in Arabic falsely asserted that the British Labour Party proposed that Arabs be expelled from Palestine.72 That same evening it reminded listeners, “The Americans, the British and the Jews are all conspiring against Arab interests and are the real enemies of the Arabs. Needless to say the Jews are the real enemies of the Arabs and have been since the dawn of Islam.”73 No public statement or action by an American, British, or Jewish leader was too mundane to avoid placement within a sinister web of conspiratorial actions. No quotation was too obviously absurd and no lie too outrageous to be kept off the air. Listeners in the Arab countries may have been skeptical of Berlin in Arabic and the Voice of Free Arabism.74 Yet they often had no alternative account, as British and American ofﬁcials generally decided not to respond to anti-Semitic propaganda for fear that pointing out lies or challenging Nazi assertions about the Jews would only conﬁrm Nazi assertions that they were stooges of the Jews. The listeners of Berlin in Arabic and VFA would receive the impression that in the midst of the largest war in modern history, when millions of soldiers were engaged in huge battles around the globe, the primary preoccupation of leaders in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and expel the Arabs. The broadcasts displayed a striking narcissism and ﬂattery of their audience as if the world really did revolve around the fate of Arabs and Muslims. In fact, though the Allies did want to preserve Arab support or at least neutrality, following the defeat of the

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Axis forces in Tunisia in 1943, the Middle East remained a sideshow to the main events of the war. American and British efforts to understand the Arab and Muslim response to Axis propaganda were not nearly as comprehensive as were the efforts to monitor the broadcasts themselves. The Allies knew vastly more about what the Italians and Germans were conveying than they did about how the message was received. The public opinion poll of a representative cross section of foreign populations was not yet part of American intelligence gathering. Though knowledge of Arabic among the American diplomats was thin, native speakers played an important but difﬁcult to document role in following the Arabic-language press. The result was a dearth of synthetic analysis of the Arab and Muslim response to fascism and Nazism. That said, reports from agents of the OSS, American military intelligence, and British diplomats and intelligence agents offered policy makers in Washington and London many pieces of information about Arab and Muslim views and the impact of Allied and Axis policies and propaganda in the region. On March 7, two U.S. Military Intelligence Division agents in Beirut, Duncan McBryde and Virgil Jackson, wrote, “As far as German Arabic broadcasts to Moslems are concerned, America really ‘put its foot into it’ by releasing news of a Senate Committee [Wagner-Taft] resolution on ‘Palestine for the Jews.’ It is Axis propaganda departments’ practice to jump upon such chances and exploit them to the utmost.” That is, news about American support for a Jewish state in Palestine and for ending restrictions on Jewish immigration was grist for the mill of Nazi propaganda. McBryde and Jackson noted that a “small percentage” of Arabs had radios.Yet from “reliable sources in both Syrian and Lebanese capitals,” they learned that “practically all Arabs who have radios and listen to any variety of programs, listen to Berlin.” The Arabs, they continued, did not “take German ‘news’ at all seriously,” and the effect of German news reporting was “practically nil.” Rather, Berlin radio broadcasts achieved their greatest impact through “the clever and full exploitation of half-truths, and occasional events.” Berlin broadcasts seized “the curiosity, the credulity, the avarice, the aspirations, the religious instincts or the racial prejudice, etc., of the Arabs” to fan their antagonism to the Jews and the Allies. “The most recent and one of the most effective tirades the Germans have delivered deals with the American Senate resolution on ‘Palestine for the Jews.’ It is difﬁcult to estimate how much of the effect is caused by enemy radio as over against regular press dispatches, but

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the effect has been tremendous. Aroused public indignation has successfully demanded protests from the Arab countries to the United States. As this report is being written, Germany has already hailed Roosevelt as the ‘Modern Moses’ who will ‘lead the children of Israel out of the wilderness.’ No imagination is required to picture the inevitable effectiveness of this type of propaganda on the anti-Jewish Arab populace.”75 In the same weeks, an unsigned and undated “Weekly Review of Foreign Broadcasts” done for the U.S. Military Intelligence Division concluded: “the anti-Jewish theme has in the past constituted a good half of the German propaganda directed toward the Near East. Constant viliﬁcation of the Jews in terms calculated to make them repugnant to the Arab mind have included alleged attempts by the Jews on the life of Mohammed and their imputed domination of the Allied policies in the Near East (the Allied Nations in these Berlin broadcasts are referred to as ‘Allied Jewish Nations’). In recent weeks the Arabic voice in Berlin has surpassed all its previous records in inciting violence in Palestine. The culmination of this crescendo was Haj Amin’s call to arms.”76 The report was referring to Husseini’s March 1 appeal to “kill the Jews wherever you ﬁnd them.” The “constant viliﬁcation” continued in April. On the fourth, Berlin in Arabic announced that “every free Arab is boiling with rage and indignation at London’s plans against the Arabs and we all feel that an Anglo-Saxon victory would mean the loss of Palestine by the Arabs and the strengthening of Jewish domination. On the other hand, the Germans are our natural and staunch allies whose victory will mean our complete independence and liberation.”77 On the sixteenth, it counted among the advantages of the National Socialist regime the fact that the world had “beneﬁted” because the Nazis brought “the Jewish danger to the world’s notice.” This danger was destructive not only in Germany but in other nations as well. It was a “glory for Germany that the other nations support her in the struggle against the Jews.” The announcer noted that “the purging campaign which the National Socialists carried out attracted the attention of the Arab countries, thus linking them with Germany in their struggle against the Jews.”78 In what McBryde and Jackson described as an “anti-Jewish populace,” reports of Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews constituted a signiﬁcant aspect of Nazism’s appeal to its Arab and Muslim supporters. On April 22, Berlin in Arabic attacked both Britain and Russia. “The Jews are the biggest enemies of the Arabs. Bolshevism is mere Judaism. Therefore the Bol-

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sheviks are the enemies of the Arabs and Moslems.”79 The evidence for both assertions lay in Jewish immigration to Palestine and plans for a Jewish national home. Rashid Ali Kilani was heard less frequently on Nazi radio than Husseini, the more talented radio personality. Yet on May 3 he again spoke about Iraq’s battle against British imperialism and also denounced Zionism and Bolshevism. “It is,” he said, “with pride that I speak of the alliance between the Arabs and the Axis, quite conﬁdent that the Arabs will be able, through their Ally, to realize their aspirations.”He was “ﬁlled with admiration for the patriotism and courage of the Germans” and was “embued with conﬁdence that Germany will win victory.” This generally secular nationalist concluded as follows: “God said: Be not weakened, be not grieved. You are predominant.”80 On May 9, an exchange of cables between Kilani and Ribbentrop was read on Berlin in Arabic. Ribbentrop’s read: “Your Excellency, my sincerest congratulations on your successful struggle against the common foe, on the occasion of the third anniversary of the rising of the brave Iraqi people under your leadership in face of the British tyrants. I staunchly believe that the struggle will terminate in victory and will bring about liberty to our peoples including the people of Iraq and the other Arab nations.” For his part, Kilani replied: “I thank Your Excellency greatly for your cable on the occasion of the third anniversary of Iraq’s rising in the face of British tyranny. I thank Your Excellency for your sincere greetings and the joining of the German people in the celebration of this historic day. Your Excellency’s cable both strengthens the Arabs in their struggle and assured them of the splendid future which awaits the Arab countries when victory is won. This victory will be the greatest in history, and Germany will achieve it through the splendid struggle of her people who have shown a magniﬁcent spirit of sacriﬁce.”81 During the ﬁghting in Italy, the Luftwaffe dropped thousands of copies of a leaﬂet aimed at Arab soldiers ﬁghting alongside Allied forces. On May 18, Berlin in Arabic broadcast the text of “Allied Lies.” Arab soldiers! Among the organs of propaganda of the Allies against the Arabs is the method of creating an atmosphere of hatred among the Arabs and the Germans. You must know that Germany ﬁghts the Jews and ﬁghts all the enemies of the Arabs. The object of Allied propaganda is to send you to Italy to die for a cause which will do you no good. On the other hand, Germany has always proved that she is the staunch friend of the Arabs. This was clearly manifested during the

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recent [1942] battles in North Africa where the Germans have proved their love and respect for the Arab countries and Moslem civilization. Arabs! You all know that Germany concluded a pact with Amin El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was chased out of the Arab countries and who was welcomed in Germany, against the Jews and the Allies. Needless to say, the Allies and the Jews are the people responsible for all the catastrophes that were inﬂicted on the Arab countries and on Arabism. Germany is ﬁghting to prevent the menace of Jewry from harming her, and this is the common interest of both Arabs and Germans.82

Following the arguments of German diplomats and propagandists since 1936, when they convinced the Egyptian Olympic team that it would be welcome at the Berlin Olympics, the leaﬂet sought to reassure Arab soldiers that Nazi Germany’s policies were directed against the Jews, not the Arabs. The leaﬂet assumed bedrock hostility to Jews among its Arab recipients. It was, like all of Nazi antiSemitic propaganda, both a tool of warfare intended to encourage defection among the enemy armies as well as an expression of ﬁrmly believed ideology. Almost none of the Nazi propaganda in Arabic was directed at women. The broadcast of May 20, during the ﬁghting in Italy, was an exception, with Berlin in Arabic announcing that the “Anglo-American and de Gaullist traitors send the Arabs of North Africa to their death” in “the Jewish war.” Moslems and Arab mothers and women of North Africa! [Charles] de Gaulle, the French traitor, has driven your men to Italy in order to have them die as prey in the Jewish war which was started by Churchill and Roosevelt. Do not let a single Moslem or a single Arab die for the sake of your enemy. Fight against your real enemy and thus you will be revenging those who have died on the Italian front. Do not ﬁght for the enemy who has always been against you and who has always tried to destroy your religion. . . . The German soldiers are not their enemies but it is the British, the Americans and the French who are the enemies of the Arabs. . . . Arab men in Italy! Help the Germans against your joint enemy! We appeal to the women of North Africa to let their men know that they must desert the Allies and ﬁght side by side with the Germans, and they will be welcomed by the German forces. The Arabs of the whole world must all ﬁght against their traditional enemies the British, Americans, French, the Jews and the Bolsheviks.83

Amid the blizzard of mutual congratulations, predictions of victory, and appeals for greater militancy, the reality of some events was too great to be ignored. On June 6, 1944, VFA acknowledged that the Allied invasion of France had begun. In a stunningly uninformative broadcast it reported, “This war on

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the Northern coast [of France] is a real war which will decide the fate of the world, which either will be dominated by the various powers of international Jewry or will lead to the victory of Germany—the victory of liberty and justice to the whole world.”84 The following evening, VFA assessed Arab reaction to the news. It claimed that the invasion was “a great shock to the people of Palestine” and that “the Arabs” believed that a success for Britain and America would be a success for the Jews and would “strengthen the Jewish aims in Palestine.” The news “disturbed the Arabs very much and made them once more fearful of their future.”85 On June 8, VFA predicted that if the Allies were to win the war, Egypt and the other Arab countries would lose their independence. Indeed, the Arabs would be even worse off than after World War I because this time “the Bolsheviks will share the Arab countries with the British.”86 In contrast to the lack of detail in its reporting on the Normandy invasion, Berlin in Arabic on June 24 informed its audience of a remarkable aspect of auto accidents in Palestine. Though car accidents happened all over the world, “it is noted that these accidents in Palestine always involve the Arab people” as victims. Information at Berlin in Arabic’s disposal “shows that the Jews are running down the Arabs with their cars. . . . These car accidents were not the only methods used by the Jews to exterminate the Arabs. We must not forget that in Haifa and Jerusalem the Jews threw bombs at the inhabitants.”87 This, too, was part of the worse future that the Arabs might have to confront. The likelihood of a grim future loomed large in the broadcasts of summer 1944, and as had been the case since the war began, the standpoint from which everything was judged in Nazi propaganda was the fate of Palestine and the role of the Jews in the Middle East. On August 1, Berlin in Arabic declared,“Imperialist and Jewish ambitions in the Arab countries will shake the pillars of patriotism and will help the Bolsheviks to consolidate their footing and their domination over the Arab countries.” The Jews of Palestine would receive “great military help from Moscow” in addition to the help “they already receive from the British and the Americans.” Russia would “strengthen the power of the Jews” and “help them against the Arabs.” So the Arabs needed to be aware of the “evils of the Jews and the Bolsheviks!”88 In fact, during the war, the United States and Britain imposed a weapons embargo on Palestine. In a year of bad news for the Nazis, Rommel’s death in October added to the somber mood. On the sixteenth, Berlin in Arabic recalled his “smashing successes.” They were “marked with his typical brilliance of execution in Cyre-

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naica, Tobruk, Maran Matruh, and Alamein.” Those events “still echo in our ears.” His memory would “always inspire the Arabs who are oppressed by foreign interference to achieve their independence of which Rommel was champion.”89 By contrast, on October 21, Berlin in Arabic reported that it was “true that Roosevelt is insane and daft. This has been proved since Roosevelt tried to include America in this war while she had nothing to ﬁght against, or for. . . . We warn our listeners to treat Roosevelt as a completely mad person; even the Americans believe that Roosevelt is not sane.”90 In the absence of any good news to report, Berlin in Arabic reported that Ribbentrop and Husseini, that is, “the Grand Mufti of Palestine,”exchanged congratulatory greetings on November 5. Ribbentrop was “sure” that ﬁnal victory, “which Palestine is ﬁghting for under your leadership,” would arrive and with it the abolition of the “so-called Jewish national home.” Husseini expressed “great conﬁdence” in Germany’s ﬁnal victory, which “will undoubtedly destroy the Jewish nation and will accordingly help to maintain the freedom and independence of Palestine and the Arab countries.”91 Contrary to his tale of suffering, Husseini received a regular salary from the Nazi regime. German ofﬁcials became exasperated with his constant requests for more funds. He was housed in a comfortable villa in an afﬂuent section of Berlin. He regularly met with high-ranking ofﬁcials in the Foreign Ministry and had access to Himmler and high-ranking ofﬁcers in the SS. His entourage had jobs working on German Arabic-language print and radio propaganda. Nazi radio and newspapers spread his fame far beyond what it had been when he led the Palestine national movement and then was a coup plotter in Iraq. His voice was heard on the radio, and his words and photo appeared on thousands of leaﬂets distributed in Arab and Muslim countries. He became “world” famous. He did not suffer. Rather, this man of small, cramped, and violent hatred found a place on the world stage due to the contingencies of time, geography, and his own political skills. He used those opportunities to facilitate one of the most important cultural exchanges of the twentieth century in merging the sentiments of hatred and destruction that were part of the traditions of Europe and of Islam into an ideological brew that caused immense suffering during and after his life. Husseini, however, was not alone. A focus on him can divert our attention from the broader cultural traditions, radical anti-Semitism in Europe, and antagonism to the Jews in some of the traditions of Islam that made his emergence and prominence possible. Without this context and back-

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ground, his message would not have resonated. Indeed, he would not have had a message to convey. In October, McBryde in Beirut reported that Nazi Arabic broadcasts continued to denounce Jews, Bolsheviks, British, Americans, and the French. “Moslem Nationalists” were urged, “purge your native lands of the microbe of Communism.” Yet McBryde thought that the propaganda was producing “diminishing returns” as the tide of the war continued decisively against Germany. He observed two contradictory factors. On the one hand, there had been a “long-term conditioning of the Arab mind by deliberate German propaganda which has created an ingrained pre-disposition to favor Germany.” On the other hand, he was impressed with “the profound degree to which the Arab mentality is impressed by show of force and strength in arms.” The ﬁrst trend nourished “established fears, suspicions and prejudices” to “poison Arab relations with the Allies” so that “intensive post-war educational effort will have to be made to remove many barriers.” The second trend, however, produced “diminishing returns” for the Germans because “continued Allied successes and increasing Allied strength are showing the Arab which side his bread is buttered on . . . and he is adjusting his thinking accordingly.”92 In early December, Joseph Cassoun, another U.S. military intelligence ofﬁcer working in Beirut, reached similar conclusions. He reported that the “tirades against Jews” continued, but that aside from celebrating the might of secret weapons, the “Germans no longer brag of military might but concentrate on economic and political propaganda.” He thought both the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda and the size of its listening audience were declining as Germany’s defeats multiplied. The most obvious trend in November had been “the reluctance of the Germans to discuss the military side of the war.” Rather than boast about their strength and eventual victory, the German broadcasters were “emphasizing the Jewish threat to Arab unity” and “were trying to make the Arabs believe that the Jews intend (with the help of the Allies) to take over the entire Middle East.” Like McBryde, Cassoun observed “a sharp decline in both numbers of listeners and the number of people who take much stock in what the Germans are trying to make them believe.” They were less the topic of conversation than in previous months. Allied victories “and the reluctance of the Germans to discuss them is having the effect of debunking everything else that the Germans might say.” With the unfortunate use of the singular noun to refer to a multitude of people, Cassoun concluded that “the Arab is like the sand on which he lives. He will follow the strongest wind.”93

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In World War II Arabs were hardly alone in following “the strongest wind.” Themes of de-radicalization and disillusionment after the loss of the battle of Stalingrad ﬁgure prominently in historical scholarship about the Nazi regime.94 McBryde’s and Cassoun’s point about the impact of the course of the war on the degree to which Arabs and Muslims responded positively to Axis propaganda was one that the British and American ambassadors to Egypt, Miles Lampson and Alexander Kirk, had also made, albeit with more nuance and diplomacy. The key point was that the outcome of the battles was a decisive factor in the effectiveness of propaganda efforts of all the warring powers. An Axis victory at El Alamein might have set off an Arab and Muslim revolt against the Allies all over the Middle East at a time when American forces had not yet arrived in force. Yet for the hard core of its supporters in the Middle East, Nazi Germany’s propaganda, even in retreat and then defeat, offered a way of thinking about politics and a set of predictions about the consequences of Allied victory that resonated with Arab and Islamic radicalism in the postwar period. From the beginning of the war, British and then American diplomats in Cairo had their eye on the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin). It was at the center of their concern about pro-Axis ﬁfth column activity. On February 25, the British Political Intelligence Centre Middle East (PICME) issued an extensive report about its goals. The Brotherhood wanted to establish a government based on pure Koranic principles and sought to counter reliance on Western culture, which it regarded as having brought about an “abasement of morals, conduct and character, for having increased the complexity of society and for having exposed the people to poverty and misery.” It advocated a view of Islam that did not tolerate domination by people of other religions. It sought to rid Egypt of foreign inﬂuence. It also organized social, educational, and charitable work among Muslims in Egypt. The report was uncertain about the size of the membership, estimating it as between 100,000 and 500,000 persons who came mostly from the working class; small towns; educated elements of the lower middle class, “especially schoolteachers” attracted by its ideals and social and educational work; and a small section of the student population.95 The Brotherhood’s founder and leader, Hassan al-Banna, had “made a careful study of the Nazi and Fascist organizations. Using them as a model, he has formed organizations of specially trained and trusted men who correspond respectively to the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts (Hitler’s bodyguard).” The organization claimed 500 branches in the country with groups of varying levels of commitment.96

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As leader of the Brotherhood, al-Banna was in contact with the Egyptian political leader Ali Maher and with King Farouk and his palace advisers “almost from its inception.” Farouk gave the organization “protection and ﬁnancial help.” An uneasy truce persisted during the war between the secular nationalist Wafd Party and al-Banna and the Brotherhood. In 1942, al-Banna declared loyalty to the government and the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. However, the PICME analysts thought that “his sincerity to either has yet to be proved. . . . The militant and xenophobic character of the Ikhwan and the fact that there are throughout Egypt a large number of arms that could be brought into use should feeling be sufﬁciently aroused make the Ikhwan a potential danger that cannot be discounted.” Its weakness lay in the fact that Hassan al-Banna was both its only undisputed leader and “its only outstanding personality.” Were he to be removed, the Ikhwan “in the absence of any successor of comparable driving force and inspiration, might easily crumble away.”97 Two months later, J. E. Jacobs, the chargé d’affaires of the American Embassy in Cairo, sent a report to Washington,“Fanatical Moslem Society: Ikhwan al-Muslemin (Moslem Brotherhood),” occasioned by a letter from al-Banna to the embassy protesting the American policy in Palestine. In his report, Jacobs noted that al-Banna was a graduate of Al-Azhar University and that the Brotherhood had politically prominent persons in Egypt who gave it protection and money, making low membership dues possible. He estimated membership at 75,000. Prominent members were associated with Al-Azhar University. Its danger lay in part in its “fanatical principles,” its aspiration to govern Egypt by Koranic law, and its antagonism to non-Muslim persons and culture. It also organized semimilitary groups; received training by retired army ofﬁcers; and deployed an array of uniforms, green banners, and political songs that were reminiscent of the politics of mass mobilization in Europe. It had also opened branches in Sudan, in Nablus and Jaffa in Palestine, as well as in Damascus and Beirut. Its fundamental tendency was Pan-Islamic rather than pan-Arab. It opposed cooperation with Christians or Jews. The organization, Jacobs concluded, could become dangerous “in view of its fanatical religious character.”98 American diplomats and intelligence ofﬁcers, of course, also paid close attention to the views of political elites. Few reports were more stunning than one sent by Nils E. Lind, the attaché of the American Legation in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, on October 30, 1944. Its subject was “King Abdul Azis al Saud’s Remarks about Jews,” delivered two days earlier after a dinner in the king’s palace in

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Riyadh. The king expressed appreciation for British and American help, hoped that his friendship with these “two strong friends” would continue, and thought Christianity and Islam had a great deal in common. It was a different story regarding the Jews. Lind reported that the king then said the following. And now let me tell you a truth: it is the Jews who have always stirred up the religious differences between us. Where there was no difference the Jews created one. They are a dangerous and hostile race, making trouble wherever they exist. Why do you British and Americans love them and always take their side? I assure you that they are not your friends, but they are using you to further their own selﬁsh aims. Wherever they go they make trouble and sow dissension and we Moslems are aware of their machinations and we hate them from the depths of our being. Our hatred of this sinful and evil race is growing day by day until our one ambition is to slay them all. Where we see them encroaching on us we Moslems will ﬁght them and butcher them until we have driven them from our lands. Allah be praised we have no Jews in our kingdom and never shall we allow one Jew to enter it. Do you Americans and British think that if Hitler should offer the Jews terms that they would not rush to him? And if they believed Germany and Japan would win the war, that they would not leave you and join them? Yes, I say, they have no love for you except as they can gain some advantage. That is why all we Arabs hate the Jews with loathing and we shall foster this hate in every Arab breast. I shall give you a parable that truthfully expresses the Jews. Once, they say, all the animals could talk. A lion was chasing a snake and as the snake ran it shouted for help. A king on horseback happened to be riding by and the snake ran to him and cried out to be saved from the lion at its tail. “Save me, O king,” it cried, “for I am weak against this beast.” The king took the snake and put it in his bosom. “Please,” the snake pleaded, “I am not safe in your bosom, put me in your mouth.” So the king put the snake in his mouth. Then the snake asked,“Is my enemy gone and are you sure the lion cannot harm me now?” “He is gone and you are perfectly safe,” the king replied. “Ha, ha,” laughed the snake; “did you remember that you and I are deadly enemies? Now where do you wish me to sting you, on the roof of your mouth or below your tongue?” Do you get my point? King Abdul Azis asked us. There is no salvation for any of us unless we learn to hate this race as we ought. We have the experience of the ages and we are fools if we do not take warning. You may tell your government what I said, and may Allah grant that you will believe me before it is too late. The King spoke these ﬁery words before all that crowd of fanatical Wahabi bedouin and his voice was loud and clear.99

American diplomats in the region and in the State Department in Washington now had compelling evidence of the depth of the king’s hatred of the Jews. Franklin Roosevelt’s famous meeting with Ibn Saud took place the following

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February. He too would have been informed about the king’s charming fable about the lion, the snake, and king as well as about his “one ambition” to slay all the Jews. Unfortunately, this provincial, reactionary bigot was sitting on top of oil that the Allies needed to win the war and keep the world economy functioning in the postwar years. The Roosevelt administration, including the president himself, understood that a man like Ibn Saud was not one whose views of the Jews would be changed by a slap on the back or a heart-to-heart conversation with the president of the United States. The Allies concluded that if they wanted the support or at least neutrality of men like Ibn Saud, it was best to say nothing about the Jews and certainly nothing in defense of what the monarch of Saudi Arabia called that “sinful and evil race.” In Washington, because of pressure from the State and War departments and the White House, the resolutions to lift restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine stalled in both the House and the Senate. In the summer of 1944, however, the Democratic and Republican parties both included similar resolutions in their party platforms in preparation for the fall elections. The Arab governments continued to inform American diplomats of their intense opposition to such a resolution. Roosevelt balanced the arguments of his diplomats with those coming from domestic politics. In a letter to Senator Wagner of October 15, the president wrote,“Efforts will be made to ﬁnd appropriate ways and means of effectuating this policy,” that is, lifting restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine,“as soon as practicable.” He wrote that if reelected he “shall help to bring about” the realization of “Palestine as a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth.”100 This was far more than Wallace Murray, the director of the Ofﬁce of Near Eastern and African Affairs in the State Department, wanted to see. In a memo of October 27 to Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, he wrote that it was “difﬁcult to see how recent developments,” that is, the pressures in American politics to lift restrictions on Jewish immigration and support establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, could “be taken by the Arab countries as showing anything but a lack of good faith and an intention on the part of this Government not to carry out its previous commitments when political expedience dictates otherwise. Such an impression, if not speedily and completely counteracted, would seriously prejudice our ability to afford adequate protection to American interests in the Near East.” American prestige had been declining in the region “as a result of recent pro-Zionist manifestations in this country” and would reach a new low if these efforts gathered

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steam. The American long-term economic interest in Saudi Arabia would “be seriously threatened or possibly jeopardized.”101 On December 13, Edward R. Stettinius, the newly appointed secretary of state, wrote the president that pro-Zionist activity in the United States had given “rise to a wave of shocked disillusionment and protest in the Near East.” If this domestic pressure continued, it would “seriously prejudice our ability to afford protection to American interests, economic and commercial, cultural and philanthropic, throughout the area.” It would also weaken the American position in the region compared to that of Britain and the Soviet Union. Stettinius noted that Averill Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow, was reporting that “Soviet Russia deﬁnitely opposes a Jewish state and is actively cultivating the goodwill of the ﬁfty million Arabs.”102 On December 23, Stettinius recommended that the president not take any action, namely, not voice support for establishment of a state because doing so “would endanger the war effort and jeopardize American interests in the area.” Rather, the United States should not take a ﬁrm position about the future of Palestine before the war was over without consulting both Arabs and Jews.103 The State Department Arab experts understood correctly that opposition to increased Jewish immigration and to the establishment of a Jewish state was a widely and strongly held view among the leaders of Arab governments and that this sentiment extended well beyond those who supported the Axis. German propaganda was effective in part because it agreed with this much broader Arabic and Muslim consensus, to which it had made important contributions. American diplomats in the region articulated the views of this consensus as voiced by the leaders of the governments of Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria. To the extent to which they either supported the Allied war effort or remained neutral, they did so in spite of American expressions of sympathy for Europe’s persecuted Jews and Roosevelt’s hints that he would support Zionist aims when the war was over. While anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism served as Nazism’s points of entry to some Arab and Muslim hearts and minds, leading American diplomats from the region, as well as decision makers in Washington, were convinced that support for Jewish aspirations was a barrier to, not an entry point for, the Allied and American case. President Roosevelt expressed his view of the situation in a striking letter to Senator Wagner on December 3. He wrote that “perhaps another million” Jews wanted to join the half a million Jews already in Palestine. Yet there were “ap-

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proximately seventy million Mohammadans who want to cut their throats the day they land. The one thing I want to avoid is a massacre or a situation which cannot be resolved by talking things over. Anything said or done over here just now would add fuel to the ﬂames and I hope that at this juncture no branch of government will act.”104 Of course, a massacre of Jews many times over was taking place in Europe. All the high-ranking ofﬁcials in the State and War departments, as well as the president himself, were under no illusions about the hostility of the Arab and Muslim countries to the possibility of a Jewish state in Palestine. They also thought that the declining inﬂuence of Nazi propaganda was due above all to Allied and, in particular, American military success. Perhaps they understood that nothing they did one way or the other about Jews and Zionism would affect Nazi propaganda. But Marshall, McCloy, Stettinius, Murray, and other State Department ofﬁcials believed that the support or benign neutrality of the majority of Arabs and Muslims could be endangered if the United States took a clear position in favor of Zionism during the war. They successfully argued that nothing should be done that might undermine the Allied military effort, which they believed was the decisive factor in reducing enthusiasm for Nazi Germany among Arabs and Muslims. Not offending “seventy million Mohammadans” took priority over supporting the aspirations of the persecuted, desperate, and “perhaps a million” of Europe’s still surviving Jews. Perhaps if Rommel had won the battle of El Alamein, seized Cairo, and conquered Palestine and if the Allies had to ﬁgure out how to ﬁght their way back into the Middle East as they had to do in Europe, British and American intelligence agencies would have devoted more resources to the question of the reception of fascism and Nazism in the Arab and Muslim world. As it was, in Egypt they kept a watchful eye on the Muslim Brotherhood, some faculty and students at Al Azhar University, King Farouk and his circle, Ahmed Hussein and the Young Egypt Party, and militant Egyptian nationalist military ofﬁcers such as the young Anwar Sadat. Yet by 1944, the Allied fear of Axis success in North Africa and the Middle East was a thing of the past. After the battle of Tunisia in May 1943, the military situation in the Middle East became a quiet sideshow to the vast military confrontations taking place on the European continent. Allied intelligence agents and diplomats concluded that Axis propaganda had struck a chord with an activist minority of secular nationalists and fundamentalist Muslims. Under these circumstances, devoting more resources to examining the residues left by Axis propaganda in the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims

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was an unnecessary luxury. The priorities of decision makers allocating scarce resources in wartime were quite different from those of the historian seeking to understand the short- and long-term impact of Axis propaganda. The Americans and the British had gathered enough information to know that a vicious brew of imported and indigenous Jew-hatred was embedded in at least parts of Arab and Muslim politics. As the apocalypse of total defeat descended on the Germans—450,000 soldiers died in battle in Europe in January 1945 alone—Nazism’s Arabic radio offered its listeners the now-familiar diet of rage and hatred and irrationality. It had nothing of value to say about the actual course of events. On January 13, Berlin in Arab stated that the Arab countries had suffered from “human insects,” which were “no less harmful than the locust.” Therefore it would “call these human insects ‘political’ locusts.” These unnamed persons lived in “luxurious palaces,” enjoyed an easy life, wore the best clothes, held tea and dancing parties but were also the “eyes of the imperialists which spy on the Arabs and tell the imperialists of their weak points,” making it possible for them to dominate the entire Arab world.105 On January 24,VFA indulged in Hitler’s fantasies about the tide-turning impact of revenge weapons, the V-1 and V-2 rockets. It informed its remaining audience that the Germans were establishing new bases on top of the Alps from which these rockets could be directed “at New York.” It was “unbelievable how much damage these bombs could cause to American cities.” Their “immediate effect” would be a demand by American public opinion to “force Roosevelt to retire from his present policy” and leave ofﬁce. In addition the Germans would be able to shell Rhodes, Malta, British military bases in Haifa and Alexandria, smash the oil ﬁelds of Mosul, and bring trafﬁc in the Suez Canal to a standstill.106 In these months, the “Jewish danger”loomed ever larger. On January 29, the “Station of Free Arabs” (probably another name for the Voice of Free Arabism) warned Arabs that “the Jews are trying to carry out a massacre.”107 On the thirty-ﬁrst, Berlin in Arabic asserted that it was “useless for Arabs to await the realization of their aims peacefully.” “Child actions” like peaceful political demonstrations “cannot frighten anyone.” The announcer asked if the Arabs had “become so stupid as to believe that their cause could be solved by logical arguments or that the Palestine question could be settled by speeches, statements and communiqués.” The clear implication was that the only way to “stop imperialist democracies from interfering in their internal affairs” was with

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force.108 On February 1, VFA reported that “the Jewish menace is more and more overshadowing the Arab world, and will not only threaten Palestine, but it will extend all over the Arab countries.” It could be overcome only by the use of “ﬁerce weapons.”109 The last report on Axis broadcasts monitored by the American Embassy in Cairo was sent to Washington on February 12, 1945. It covered the period from February 2 to 8. One broadcast warned that “Bolshevism is starting to ﬁlter through to cultured Arab persons.”110 Neither the German nor American archives indicate the exact date when Nazi Arabic shortwave broadcasts ended, but it was most likely in February or March 1945. It was fully in character with its record of mendacity and paranoia that in the same months during which the Allied armies were arriving at the Nazi extermination and concentration camps and thus revealing the full extent of the destruction of European Jewry, Nazi Arabic radio warned Arab listeners of the growing danger and power of the Jews.

chapter 8

Postwar Aftereffects

n May 7, 1945, Haj Amin el-Husseini ﬂed Germany and arrived in Bern, Switzerland. Swiss ofﬁcials handed him over to the French, who housed him in a villa near Paris. The Mufti’s pro-Axis broadcasts in Arabic from Rome and Berlin were a matter of public record and, as we have seen, had been carefully monitored by American and British ofﬁcials. Nevertheless the British government did not seek to extradite him or to place him on trial for war crimes. The British concluded that placing him and other pro-Nazi Arab exiles on trial would undermine efforts to gain support in the Arab and Muslim world after the war. The government of Yugoslavia was interested in bringing Husseini and his associates to trial for their involvement with the Bosnian SS Division. Under pressure from the Arab League, it decided not to do so.1 In both cases, placating Arab and Muslim sensibilities in the Middle East took priority over efforts to bring Husseini to justice for actions equally and at times more inﬂammatory than those by German ofﬁcials, such as Otto Dietrich, who were brought to trial in Nuremberg.2 In Washington, preparations for the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg included the possibility of indicting the pro-Axis Arab exiles for participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. William Donovan, the director of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services (OSS), wanted to use the organization’s resources to support the effort.3 On June 23, 1945, as part of this effort, the OSS Research and Analysis Branch prepared a report titled, “The Near East and the War Crimes Problem.”4 Its twenty-eight pages contained a comprehen-

O

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sive summary of what the OSS had learned during the war about pro-Axis activities and personalities in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, and Afghanistan, as well as the attitude in these countries toward the prospect of putting these persons on trial as war criminals. It concluded: “In the Near East the popular attitude toward the trial of war criminals is one of apathy. As a result of the general Near Eastern feeling of hostility to the imperialism of certain of the Allied powers, there is a tendency to sympathize with rather than condemn those who have aided the Axis.” The Allies were loathe to make martyrs. In view of postwar “inter-Allied rivalry in the area, the past and potential political usefulness of most, if not all, of the Near Eastern supporters of the Axis will preclude their trial as war criminals.”5 It added that it was “unlikely that any strong action will now be taken anywhere in the Near East against former Axis collaborators or sympathizers. Popular feeling against these persons has never been strong, since they have generally been regarded as working for the freeing of their respective countries from British or French overlordship and the local population has had no direct experience with German occupation methods.”6 The Near East constituted “a prime example of an area where popular pressure for the trial of local war criminals is absent” due to “political considerations” of both “the local governments and the great powers. Under these circumstances it may be expected that the Near Eastern Axis collaborators will for the most part go unpunished and in so far as they have not already done so, will eventually return to the political life of their respective countries.”7 In short, the OSS concluded that bringing Husseini, Kilani, or such prominent announcers as Younus Bahri to trial would intensify antagonism to the Allies. What was true in summer 1945 would become even more the case as wartime cooperation between the West and the Soviet Union turned to cold war competition. The effort to gain Arab, Persian, and Muslim support in the cold war further diminished the prospects that Husseini and others would face charges for war crimes. The OSS analysts concluded that “among the numerous Arabs who are known to have been active in behalf of the Axis during the European war there are hardly any who are Egyptians by birth or nationality.” They did ﬁnd credible evidence that the Egyptian politician Ali Maher Pasha, as well as Muhammad Salih Harb Pasha and the former chief of staff of the Egyptian army, Aziz Ali al-Masri Pasha, had given British military plans to the Italians in 1940. In spring 1942, Maher and Salih Harb, “together with a number of other prominent Egyptian Axis sympathizers, were subjected to nothing more severe than

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house arrest.” In light of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, as a result of which Egypt became a nonbelligerent ally of Britain, the actions of Ali Maher and his colleagues “would appear to fall under the heading of crimes against the external security of the state” under Egyptian law.8 The author(s) of “The Near East and the War Crimes Problem”bluntly concluded that Egyptian popular opinion had always been in favor of Ali Mahir Pasha and his policies. Among Egyptian political leaders pro-Allied sentiments prevailed among those who had most to lose in the event of a British defeat; others were outspoken in their condemnation of Britain and in 1942 were prepared to welcome a German entry into Egypt. The politically unaware masses were either apathetic or opposed to the Allies, especially the British, who for years had been depicted to them as the oppressors of their country. To many Egyptians, Ali Mahir’s [Maher] attitude represented the correct solution to the problem foremost in their minds, namely how to eliminate British inﬂuence in Egypt. Moreover, he could rightly claim to have been the staunchest advocate of Egypt’s non-participation in the war. Under these circumstances, it is extremely unlikely that any Egyptian government would on its own initiative ever attempt to bring to trial prominent personalities who at one time actively supported the Axis. Nor would the British be inclined to urge the prosecution of any of these men; they in all probability suspect that the only possible result would be a considerable stiffening of the antiBritish attitude of the population and perhaps even a violent outbreak of nationalist feeling in the country.9

Furthermore, as the war receded from Egypt in 1944, “all pro-Axis political ﬁgures began to modify their attitudes in the realization that the Allies were winning the war.” As they were no longer considered dangerous, most whom the British had interned during the war were gradually freed. Upon release some who had been close to King Farouk, as well as Ahmad Husayn, the leader of the pro-fascist Young Egypt Party, “returned to political activities immediately after their release.” Muhammad Salih Harb was active in the “nationalist and pro-Islamic Young Men’s Moslem Association.” Ali Maher was “very busy repairing his political fences.” His supporters, including the king, were “many and very inﬂuential.” In fact,“the only obstacle” that might prevent his return to being Egypt’s prime minister appeared to be “British reluctance to forget his treasonable actions during the dark days of the war.”Yet “considerations of political expedience” might lead the British “not only to accept Ali Mahir but to attach more weight to the present and potential future attitude of former Axis sympathizers than to their past afﬁliations.”10 Rapid changes of political colors to suit

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the prevailing atmosphere was a common theme of the history of Germany and Europe after the war. Yet, in part for the reasons presented in this OSS report, the revulsion for fascism and Nazism that inﬂuenced much of postwar European politics was not nearly as widespread in Egypt and the Middle East. Just as the British opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine during the war, so after the war, the same desire not to offend Arabs and Muslims militated against a judicial reckoning with the fascist and Nazi collaborators. The British were also not likely to press charges “against former Axis agents,” among whom the report included Haj Amin el-Husseini. The report recalled that his involvement with the Axis preceded his radio career in Berlin. In Baghdad between 1939 and 1941, Husseini was in contact with Italian and German agents and pro-Axis Iraqi leaders who seized control of the Iraqi government in the coup of April 10, 1941. The OSS estimated that he received about $400,000 from Italy and Germany, more than $75,000 from the Iraqi government, and a monthly stipend of $4,000 from the Iraqi secret services. These funds helped him “to organize his Palestinian collaborators into an efﬁcient anti-Allied machine which helped foment, and actively participated in, the Iraqi revolt of May 1941.”11 The report discussed the participants in the 1941 coup. Some reached Axis territory and worked on Axis propaganda.12 Others escaped to neutral countries and were a liaison between the Mufti in Berlin and his supporters in Palestine. Six were arrested by the British in 1941 in Iran and deported to Southern Rhodesia because they were considered dangerous, the most important being Jamal al-Husayni. The British arrested seven others but considered them “harmless” and permitted them to return to Palestine on condition that they not “misbehave themselves.”13 In 1944, when conﬁdence in an Allied victory led the British Mandate government in Palestine to relax restrictions on political activity, some members of this group played key roles in the early days of postwar Palestinian politics. Musa al Alami had studied law at Cambridge University, had practiced law in Palestine since 1923, and was on friendly terms with leading British ofﬁcials in the Middle East. In 1944 he became the Palestine member of the Arab League Council and was charged by it to create Arab propaganda bureaus in Washington, London, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Also in the group was Tawﬁq Salih al-Husayni, who took the initiative to reorganize the Palestine People’s Party (PAP). He became its acting president until his brother Jamal was released from British interment in Rhodesia. The PAP put “constant

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pressure” on Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and other Arab countries to request that Britain release the ﬁve pro-Axis Palestinians interned in Rhodesia. The OSS ofﬁcials thought that neither the British nor the French were likely to indict Husseini on war crimes charges. Even in the early years of the war, when Palestine itself was threatened by invasion, British ofﬁcials did nothing to discredit the Mufti and his co-workers. This inaction on the part of the Government has given rise to the feeling among Palestine Arabs in general that nothing will be done in the future. Consequently, the Palestine Arab Party, which derives its political power almost exclusively by virtue of its association with Haj Amin, has been endeavoring to canonize him as a martyr among the masses. Nearly every public rally is made to assume the character of a demonstration demanding the Mufti’s return; even road gangs in Palestine are alleged to work to the refrain of “Haj Amin, sayf al-Muslimin” (Haj Amin, sword of the Muslims). Under these circumstances, it is hardly likely that, even if the British should be anxious to bring these former Axis agents to trial, they would care to risk antagonizing Palestine Arab public opinion by such a move. The probability, therefore, is that the Mufti will eventually be allowed to resume his pre-war status in Palestine. Since he is not likely to become less intransigent either toward the British or the Jews, his return may be expected to contribute nothing to the overall solution of the Palestine problem.14

This prescient OSS analysis underscored the continuity between wartime mentalities and the founding period of postwar Palestinian politics. For the Mufti’s followers in the PAP, his wartime activities remained a source of pride, not shame.15 The OSS report crisply synthesized developments in Iraq. Between March 1940 and January 1941, during the eleven-month premiership of Rashid Ali Kilani, the foundations were laid for the overthrow of the government. By May 1, Kilani had signed a secret treaty with Italy and Germany, declared war on Britain, and begun to expel the British from Iraq. Within a month, the British intervened and suppressed the revolt. Kilani, his cabinet, and leaders of the regime ﬂed to Iran, where they found refuge in the German Embassy. When the Soviet Union and Britain occupied Iran in August 1941, Kilani and some of his associates were able to escape to Turkey and then to Italy and Germany. The leaders of the revolt were tried in absentia by a court martial in Baghdad (November 1941 to January 1942), which passed death sentences on Rashid Ali, Ali Mahmud Al-Shaykh (minister of justice), Unis al-Sab’awi (minister of economics), three colonels of the “Golden Square” revolt, and Amin Zaki Sulay-

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man (former chief of the Iraqi General Staff ). In 1944, the Iraqi government sentenced one of the conspirators to death and four others to prison terms ranging from three months to ﬁve years. There was “no indication in Iraq of strong public feeling against” what the OSS called “the three leading Iraqi war criminals,” Kilani, Younis Bahri, and Salah al-Din al-Sabbabh. Bahri had been a newspaper editor before the war. He became the leading Arab announcer on wartime Berlin radio.16 The OSS report also described wartime support for the Germans among the “Mellium Iran” (Iranian Nationalists) movement, which included military leaders, members of parliament, and other prominent Iranians. In August 1943, the British arrested the principal Nazi agent in Iran, Franz Mayer, as well as 137 Iranians suspected of supporting the Axis powers. Those detained included three generals, an ex-prime minister, and a supreme court judge. In February 1945, 88 were still in custody. The OSS thought there was reliable evidence against most of the detainees. Both the British and Soviets thought that Iranian judicial ofﬁcials were corruptible and that many internees had inﬂuential relatives or patrons able to inﬂuence the verdict in favor of the accused. The analysts wrote that when the British and Soviets thought it was safe to do so, the internees would be released, presumably without trials.17 Public sentiment in Iran also presumed their innocence. In Iran as throughout the Middle East, the spectrum of opinion about the actions of pro-Axis Arabs and Persians ran from indifference and apathy to support. The German ofﬁcials who had worked with the pro-Nazi exiles in Berlin did not do too badly after the war. Indeed, they played key roles in the reconstruction of the West German diplomatic corps dealing with the Middle East. Wilhelm Melchers was asked to assist the Adenauer government in organizing and stafﬁng the new Foreign Ministry. In 1951, he became the director of its ofﬁce dealing with the Middle East. From 1953 to 1957, he directed the German legation in Baghdad and Amman and was the German ambassador to Iraq from November 1956 to May 1957.18 From 1946 to 1948, Kurt Munzel, the former director of the Orient Ofﬁce, completed a doctorate in Islam studies and Islamic and Semitic philology at the University of Erlangen, later teaching Arabic and Turkish there (1947–49); in 1949 he was an assistant at the Orient Seminar of the University of Cologne. In 1983, he published a phrase book for Arabic in Egypt. Like Melchers, he was called back to the reemerging West German Foreign Ministry in 1950. From 1951 to 1953, he worked in the ministry’s Ofﬁce III

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with responsibilities for the Near and Middle East. He worked in the German Legations in Baghdad (1953–55) and Amman, Jordan (1954–55), and returned to work in Cairo in the German Legation (1955– 61). He was promoted to the rank of German ambassador to the Congo (Leopoldville, 1961–64) and to Lebanon (Beirut, 1964– 65) before returning to the Foreign Ministry in Bonn in 1965.19 In the ﬁrst months after the war, it became clear that the revelation of the scope of the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was not bringing about a reassessment of the Palestine issue among Arab and Islamic radicals. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt took a leading role in articulating the continuing intransigence, promoting “Balfour Day,” which had become an annual occasion of protest in the region against the Declaration. Despite the efforts of Britain’s Royal Navy to prevent further Jewish immigration after the war, about 70,000 Jews managed to get to Palestine between August 1945 and May 1948.20 As the Jews sought to realize the dream of a state in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood took a leading role in opposition. On November 2, 1945, anti-Jewish riots took place in Alexandria, Cairo, Suez, and Port Said; 12 people were killed and 250 wounded. A U.S. Naval Intelligence ofﬁcial reported that the members of the Muslim Brotherhood had “scattered all over the town on Thursday night exciting mobs in cafés to participate in the rioting on Friday morning.” During the rioting, in the agent’s view, it was “deﬁnitely established that students and other members of the Akhwan el Muslemin [Muslim Brotherhood] headed the hooligans and professional burglars (who carried their tools) to pillage Jewish property. The mob carried out indiscriminate breaking and ransacking.” Government authorities received about one thousand complaints of theft and destruction from shop owners.21 The police were reportedly slow to respond to reports of rioting and destruction. On November 3, 1945, U.S. Naval Intelligence agents in Port Said, Egypt, dispatched to Washington translations of two statements by Ikhwan al-Muslimin, one of which had been sent to the governor of the Suez Canal, the other to Egypt’s prime minister. The ﬁrst statement, with 106 signatures, regarded “the Palestine problem as an Arab and Islam problem.” It noted “with extreme regret” the “unfair attitude now adopted by the United States of America as well as Great Britain siding with Zionism” although “they know exactly” that the Arabs “are the rightful side.” The statement denounced the Balfour Declaration and “Zionist immigration” to Palestine and afﬁrmed the Brotherhood’s support for Palestinian youth who were “sacriﬁcing their souls for the victory of

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the Palestine cause.” The second, with 120 signatures, was a “Protest against the Jewish imperialism” and the Balfour Declaration. Ikhwan al-Muslimin was launching a “protest against the Jewish efforts at colonizing Palestine.” Palestine was “an Arab state and should remain as such forever.” The British Mandate over Palestine should end and be replaced by “an Arab Democratic government.” Jewish immigration was to be “categorically prohibited and those who got into Palestine clandestinely to be evicted forthwith.” “Political prisoners” should be “released, especially the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin El Husseini, and other leaders in detention.” In addition, Jews should be prevented from entering Libya, Tunisa, Algeria, “and all Arab territories.”22 On November 6, Lieutenant Commander Bernard A. Facteau, working in Naval Intelligence in Egypt, wrote what may be the ﬁrst American assessment of Islamist violence and terror. His focus was on events taking place in Egypt, as well as in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, on that Balfour Day. “Anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic feeling ran particularly high in Egypt.” Mass meetings by Arab and Islamic organizations “rapidly degenerated into rioting and disorder.”He placed the number of total casualties at 9 dead and 520 injured. Property damage was especially heavy. Although the Egyptian prime minister deplored the violence and sought to minimize its importance, Facteau wrote, “The seriousness of these demonstrations must not be underestimated.” They indicated that “the Arab World” was “slowly but effectively organizing” and that more violence could be expected if changes, presumably in Palestine, were “in any way prejudicial to the Arab cause.”Yet Facteau also saw a wider signiﬁcance to the anti-Zionist uprisings in Egypt: “While they were no doubt precipitated by traditional Arab fear and hatred of Jewish encroachment in the Middle East, they are apparently also part of a general pattern of anti-foreign sentiment on the part of Moslems which has manifested itself in various ways within the past few weeks. The growth and development of this anti-foreign feeling, fundamentally based on religious principles, is a dangerous symptom, and if it continues to spread throughout the Middle East, may well threaten the peace of the world.”23 During summer and fall 1945 the executive committee of the Palestine People’s Party called for Husseini’s return to Palestine. The PAP claimed that the Mufti had not collaborated with the Nazis but had only sought concessions from them in the event they won the war. In November, the Arab Higher Committee was reestablished. Husseini was chosen to be its president upon his return. Ofﬁcials in the American Embassy in Cairo commented on the PAP’s

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prominence. They regarded the party as “the most active political organization in the country and [one that] retains the allegiance of the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs. There can be no doubt that the party machine continues to cultivate all of the contacts which were built up during the primacy of the Mufti and that its propagandistic activities show initiative and skill.”The PAP proﬁted from “the great respect and esteem which Hajj Amin al-Husayni enjoys in all levels of society” and gave no indication that it wanted or needed unity with other parties or factions. It continued to be “the most extreme of all parties in its uncompromising ﬁght against Zionism,” never accepted that Jews had any rights in Palestine, and was doing all it could “to have Jamal al-Husayni and Hajj Amin returned to lead the Arab cause.”24 In November 1945, Palestinian Arabs knew Husseini both from his activities in the 1930s in Palestine and from his speeches on Axis radio during the war. His actions and beliefs were a matter of very public record. Yet, far from bringing his political career to an end, Husseini’s wartime actions contributed to his appeal in the postwar years. In winter and spring 1946, Islamist political extremism took its toll on Egyptian political life. On January 5, the political moderate Amin Osman Pasha, minister of ﬁnance in the Wafd regime from 1942 to 1944, was assassinated. Miles Lampson wrote that his death meant “the disappearance of the only man who was in a position consistently to inﬂuence [Prime Minister] Nahas Pasha in the sense of moderation as regards Great Britain.” The murder was “a major misfortune for both countries.”25 On March 10, a grenade exploded in a Cairo cinema frequented by British soldiers and foreign and non-Muslim persons. Two people died and thirty-seven were injured.26 On June 12, assassins tried but failed to kill Prime Minister Nahas Pasha.27 Twelve students, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, were arrested and confessed to participating in the assassination of Ahmed Osman Pasha and the attempted murder of Nahas Pasha. That spring, demonstrators, including students from Al Azhar University and members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Young Egypt, attacked European shops and rioted against the British. An important indicator of Arab and Muslim views of wartime collaboration lay in the nature of the reception received by the pro-Axis exiles on their return. At the end of May 1946, under circumstances that remain murky but probably had to do with Saudi Arabian pressure and French acquiescence, Husseini “escaped” from France and was ﬂown to Cairo. There Prime Minister Sidky Pasha said that Egypt was honor bound to grant him exile. United States

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intelligence ofﬁcials reported that the Egyptian government provided two detachments of police and regular army guards at his residence, each with twentyﬁve men and three ofﬁcers, with orders to shoot any intruders.28 American Ambassor Pinkney Tuck observed that the warm welcome was “widespread and genuine.” The embassy monitored the response to his return in the Egyptian press. Enthusiasm came not only from the Muslim Brotherhood but also from “the usually staid and conservative” newspaper Al Ahram.29 “God preserved the Mufti for the Arab world. . . . God wanted to honor Egypt when he made the Mufti come to Egypt.” The Arabs had “never thought America would be guided by Zionists. America lost her reputation and prestige in the short period of one year by her foolish policy.”30 On June 12, 1946, Al Kutla, an organ of the more secular, nationalist Wafd Party, welcomed the Mufti “in the ﬁeld of Jihad. . . . The hearts of the Arabs palpitated with joy at hearing that the Mufti has succeed in reaching an Arab country. The news sounded like thunder to the ears of some American, British and Jewish tyrants. The lion is at last free and he will roam the Arabian jungle to clear it of all wolves.”31 On June 20, 1946, Al Misri wrote : “Every Arab will be pleased to know that the Mufti is safe in Cairo. Every Egyptian will feel proud that the Mufti has chosen Egypt as a sanctuary where he will be safe from the molestation of the enemies of freedom. Egypt, the believer, opens her arms and welcomes him to the dearest spot in Cairo. Today it must be clear how united the Arabs are in their defense of Palestine.”32 On June 20, 1946, Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin, the newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood, exceeded all others in its enthusiasm. Thank you, our Lord, for your mercy and generous disposition. Thank you for putting our mind at ease. Our hearts were pounding but may now rest. We can now breathe freely. The Arab hero and symbol of Al Jihad and patience and struggle is here in Egypt. The Mufti is among his friends. He is protected by our great King Farouk. So who can now harm him? We shall protect him with our very lives. He shall be our leader in struggle and Jihad. They wanted to harm him but the Lord saved him. They were cunning but the Lord was more cunning than they. The Lord always protects those who struggle for they will inherit the earth. The Mufti is here, oh Palestine! Do not worry. The lion is safe among his brethren and he will draw the plans of Al Jihad and struggle for you. We, here, shall be his soldiers and we shall not stop ﬁghting for you until you rid yourself of Zionism. Long live King Farouk and curse the tyrants!33

Four days later, Al Misri reported the following statement of Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin: “One hair of the Mufti’s is worth more than the Jews of the whole

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world: Yesterday’s telegrams stated that the Hagana [Haganah] society had passed the sentence of death on the Mufti. Our correspondents in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt asked high Arab sources what would be [the] Arab reaction if this threat against the Mufti’s life were carried out. They all agreed that should one hair of the Mufti’s be touched, every Jew in the world would be killed without mercy.”34 In reality, the Haganah had made no such threat. The pattern of invented threats leading to promises of genocidal retribution followed the format used by Nazi propagandists. By June 1946, the facts about the Nazi death camps and testimony about Nazi plans for mass murder had been in headlines around the world for almost a year. Celebrating Husseini in 1946 had a different meaning than it would have had when such advocates could claim they did not know what the Nazis had done to the Jews. Rather than denying that the Nazis had murdered the Jews of Europe, this praise, combined with the murderous threat to kill all the Jews, suggested approval of what the Mufti— and the Nazis—had done to the Jews of Europe. At the very least, such comments contained not a word of criticism of those deeds. The most remarkable statement to accompany Husseini’s arrival to Cairo came from Hassan al-Banna on June 11. An OSS report of July 23, 1946, documented his extensive praise. It is said that Al-Sayed Amin Al-Husseini has left France and arrived in an Arab country. Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimin and all Arabs request the Arab League on which Arab hopes are pinned, to declare that the Mufti is welcome to stay in any Arab country he may choose and that great welcome should be extended to him wherever he goes, as a sign of appreciation for his great services for the glory of Islam and the Arabs. The hearts of the Arabs palpitated with joy at hearing that the Mufti has succeeded in reaching an Arab country. The news sounded like thunder to the ears of some American, British and Jewish tyrants. The lion is at last free and he will roam the Arabian jungle to clear it of the wolves. The great leader is back after many years of suffering in exile. Some Zionist papers in Egypt printed by La Societé de Publicité shout and cry because the Mufti is back. We cannot blame them for they realize the importance of the role played by the Mufti in the Arab struggle against the crime about to be committed by the Americans and the English. The Americans tried to counteract the calamity by declaring that they were prepared to enforce the recommendations of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry. Such a threat is beneath the contempt of all Arabs who are determined to defend their rights at any cost.

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The Mufti is worth the people of a whole nation put together. The Mufti is Palestine and Palestine is the Mufti. Oh Amin! What a great, stubborn, terriﬁc, wonderful man you are! All these years of exile did not affect your ﬁghting spirit. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s defeat did not frighten you. Your hair did not turn grey of fright and you are still full of life and ﬁght. What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know what the Arab youth, Cabinet Ministers, rich men, and princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are going to do to be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle. He is but one man, but Mohammed was also one man, and so was Christ, and they achieved great results. Amin has a divine spark in his heart which makes him above human beings. God entrusted him with a mission and he must succeed. The armies of colonization occupied Germany and hoped to catch Amin, but he was too clever for them. He managed to escape to France and now he returns to his people to resume the struggle against the criminal British and against Zionism. The battle has begun and it is easy to foresee the result. The Lord Almighty did not preserve Amin for nothing. There must be a divine purpose behind the preservation of the life of this man, namely the defeat of Zionism. Amin! March on! God is with you! We are behind you! We are willing to sacriﬁce our necks for the cause. To death! Forward March. . . . . . . America traded on the San Francisco and Atlantic Charter but she has now been unveiled and we know her for what she really is. She used to talk about freedom when she herself was ﬁghting a wild beast. Now she attempts to throttle the Arabs, and adopts the Nazi methods!35

Although al-Banna understood that “Nazi” had become a pejorative term, he did not reject what National Socialism had stood for. On the contrary, to write that Germany and Hitler were gone but that Husseini would “continue the struggle” against “the criminal British and against Zionism” gave the impression that this was the same “struggle” as before. He called the victors in Europe “armies of colonization.” A plausible reading of al-Banna’s statement would be that Husseini was continuing the same struggle that Hitler and Germany—and Husseini himself—had been waging during the war. Indeed, for al-Banna, that war was to be continued and if so, who better to play a leading role than a political and religious leader with experience in ﬁghting the enemy? Far from criticizing him for having sided with “Germany and Hitler,” al-Banna expressed admiration for Husseini’s wartime activities. Living in wartime Egypt, al-Banna and the members of the Muslim Brotherhood would have been able to hear what the Mufti and others on Axis radio had to say about the Jews and the Allies. It was these words and actions that he found so admirable.

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Moreover, he viewed Husseini’s survival, “escape,” and arrival in Cairo as proof that God approved as well. In the United States, revelations of the scope of the mass murder of European Jews increased political support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Supporters included President Harry Truman, but as was the case during the war, the American military leadership remained unenthusiastic.36 In Washington these considerations, as well as the prospect of increased Jewish immigration to Palestine and of conﬂict between Jews and Arabs, led the Joint Chiefs of Staff to request an “Intelligence Estimate of the Moslem Situation,” called “JC355/1.” Speciﬁcally, the chiefs wanted to know what the consequences would be “throughout the Moslem world of introducing 100,000 additional Jews into Palestine and carrying out other actions recommended in the Report by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine.” The analysts were to assess “the possibility of a ‘Holy War’ against all Occidentals” and the effect of implementation of the committee recommendations on British and American oil interests, French and Spanish colonies, and Soviet efforts to align the Muslims toward the Soviets. On October 1, 1946, twenty-two copies of the ensuing report were circulated to high-ranking ofﬁcials in the Pentagon. Although the OSS formally had ceased to exist the previous October, a copy was also sent to the Washington ofﬁce of its former director, William Donovan.37 The report’s central conclusion was: “The introduction of 100,000 additional Jews into Palestine would cause serious unrest throughout the Moslem world. The entire Arab population of the Middle East, both Christian and Arab, is backing the Arab League in its ﬁght against the implementation of the Anglo-American report.” The anticipated repercussions would stem “principally from nationalism and anti-imperialism. Religious fanaticism would also be employed by the Moslems as an instrument of opposition.” Although the Anglo-American Committee had consulted Arabs and Jews and called for further discussions between them, JC355/1 referred to “an enforced solution of the Palestine problem,” which in turn “would in all probability eventually make impossible or seriously impair the functioning of British and American oil installations in the Middle East.” It would stir nationalism in North Africa, produce volunteers from those countries to wage guerilla war in Palestine, and “cause an inevitable trend towards Arab political and economic reliance on the U.S.S.R.” The report referred to the Haganah as “the illegal Jewish Army,” noting that it was “prepared for a short, defensive war with the British and a

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prolonged stand against the Arabs until overwhelmed by numbers.” “World Jewry” would support the Zionists in Palestine with money, smuggling of arms, attempts at illegal immigration, and “wide-spread propaganda to sway public and government opinion towards Zionist aspirations” in Britain and the United States.38 The authors added that in spite of disagreements between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims or jealousy between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, “the one thing the Arab states agree on is opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine.” The report listed a “summary of resentments” of Arabs and Muslims that echoed the Arab case against any Jewish state in Palestine, including the assertion that an effort to establish a Jewish state had been a component of British imperialism. An “effort to do so now without consent of locals” would constitute a “breach of the principles which underlie the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations.” Speaking of Arab sentiment, the authors wrote that any U.S. effort “to impose a Jewish settlement in the Near East is genuinely viewed as a complete negation of all moral principles upon which American reputation in the Near East has been established.”39 The authors of JC355/1 also foresaw a possible “holy war against all occidentals.” In fall 1946, there was “no leader for a holy war unless the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, or King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia assumes the leadership.” But a jihad “might be started by the Arabs in Palestine with the thought that, under Moslem law, it would become a Moslem duty to volunteer support.” That would lead to guerilla war and terrorism aimed at Jewish and Christian communities in Africa, the Middle East, and the Near East. In such a war,“every resulting Arab death would be utilized to create martyrs and thus to create throughout the Near East centers for the inﬂuencing of passions.” Moreover, “none of the native Governments in the Near East could long survive if they attempted to support British or American interests while the British or American governments were employing force to suppress the expression of Arab nationalist aspirations in Palestine. On the contrary, these Arab governments, in order to survive, would be forced to demonstrate their hostility to the Western powers in every possible manner.” This would eventually “make impossible or seriously impact” the functioning of British and American oil installations.40 While its references to the Arabs dwelt on their “legitimate nationalist aspirations,” JC355/1 had cold and harsh words for the Jews. In a discussion of “Jew-

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ish capabilities in Palestine” it referred to “the good organization of Jewish extremists” and the disciplined nationalists of “Palestinian Jewish colonists” who would be able to confront the British with “a greatly augmented campaign of terrorism.”41 In short, the “Intelligence Estimate of the Moslem Situation” concluded that fulﬁllment of Zionist aspirations would be a disaster for American interests in the Middle East. It contained not a word about the relation between the issues of the war the United States military had just fought and the emerging conﬂict in the Middle East. It said nothing about the explicit anti-Semitic and antidemocratic sentiments expressed by Muslim extremists, sentiments that American military intelligence and OSS operatives were reporting back to Washington. Written when the Nuremberg war crimes trials were taking place, it neither expressed empathy for the Jews nor placed Zionism in the context of the Holocaust. In Europe in the early years of the cold war, opposition to Communism offered an umbrella under which some former fascist and Nazi sympathizers succeeded in changing political colors by obscuring details of their biographies in order to be born again as Western democrats. In an intriguing conversation with Phillip Ireland, the ﬁrst secretary of the American Embassy in Cairo on October 21, 1947, Hassan al-Banna thought that the vehement anti-Communism of the Muslim Brotherhood might offer the possibility of a similar alliance of convenience with the United States.42 Al-Banna regretted that the Soviet Union has supported a partition proposal for Palestine. Given that both the United States and the Muslim Brotherhood fought Communism, he thought it would be a good idea for the Brotherhood, which he claimed had a membership of a million persons, to join forces with the Americans. Russian support for the partition plan had conﬁrmed al-Banna’s view that Russians were a menace to Arabs, but American support for the Jewish state was a great shock to him. Ireland turned down the offer.43 In doing so, he drew attention to an article, “America and the Arab World,” published the week before in Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin. The writer of the article observed that the Arabs were grateful to the Americans because “their wicked attitude towards Palestine,” that is, American support for a Jewish state and the U.N. Partition Plan, demonstrated the need for Arab unity. “The Americans committed a crime against peace when they declared their support for a few million Jews. They chose to plunge the world into another war and they must be held responsible before history, and made to

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pay a heavy price for this blunder. The East will clash with the West in a bloody battle and we are determined to ﬁght to the last man, woman and child.”44 For the Brotherhood, the dispute over Palestine was also a civilizational and religious conﬂict. Its anti-Zionism drew on opposition to a Jewish state that had long preceded a Palestinian refugee problem. It adamantly opposed compromise available in the two-state solution suggested by the U.N. Partition Plan. The Brotherhood explained Russian support for the plan with an anti-Semitic litany: the Soviets were “pleasing the Jews and rewarding them for supporting the Communist revolution against the Czarist regime and at the same time getting rid of the Russian Jews who will want to immigrate to Palestine.”45 The position of the Muslim Brotherhood, no less than that of the Mufti, was rooted in anti-Semitic arguments that emerged well before the establishment of the State of Israel. The previous month, American intelligence ofﬁcials in the Central Intelligence Group, successor to the OSS and precursor to the CIA, received a report about the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine from Alba M. Kerr, who was working as a research analyst in Beirut. Kerr’s sources reported that in Jerusalem, the Brotherhood met in Husseini’s home, where they read from the Koran, at times heard from Hassan al-Banna, prepared for jihad should the U.N. support establishment of a Jewish state, and were “arming by contraband sent by collaborators in Europe.” Kerr reported that the movement was young but spreading rapidly in Palestine due to its opposition to both Zionism and Communism. The conclusion is worth quoting at length. The signiﬁcance of this new development is two-fold, for this is the ﬁrst direct evidence of an organized Islamic movement and therefore it constitutes a threat to permanent peace, since no harmony can exist where political differences are based on sectarian differences. Already Maronites are pleading for protection against this absorption, and young progressive Arab nationalists here deplore the rapid growth of the Muslim Brotherhood because they realize the need for Arab unity and want to abolish sectarian bonds; so there is a strong possibility of a Holy War (Jihad). On 12 September 1947, the Muslim Brotherhood broke up a meeting in Dier Eszor. The Communist daily newspaper “Sent Bah Shaab” refers to them as “a fanatic group whose spiritual power is the Sword.” This Muslim Brotherhood appears to be as [sic] an offspring of the Mufti and his collaborators. Whatever complexion they now assume, they are anti-Occidental religious fanatics, thus powerful enough to arouse 70,000,000 devout Moslems in this part of the world. The one immediate measure to stem this tide is Palestinian independence.46

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Kerr’s analysis and conclusions were in tune with those of past American military and civil intelligence reporting. American agents were accurately observing the emergence and importance of Islamist ideology and politics and noting the fears it was arousing among secular Arab forces, yet in contrast to President Truman, they concluded that establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would only make a bad situation worse. The idea that Arab secular forces might defeat the Islamists and thus make possible compromises over land with the Jews was not one that Kerr’s report considered. It was yet another of the early and prescient American observations of the implications of the emergence of Islamist politics in these years. In February 1948, the Cairo Embassy sent an article to Washington from Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin about “The Jews and Communism.” The article claimed that “every Jew” was a Communist but somehow was simultaneously “against Communism.” The Jews were without principles. “It suits the Jews to convert the whole world into Communism, although they themselves may not believe in this destructive doctrine.” Russia intended to use Jews as a ﬁfth column in the Middle East. Russia had “already invaded the Middle East, dear Americans, but by way of Palestine which is already ﬁlled with its Fifth Column.”47 In other words, the Jews in Palestine were a tool of the Soviets. The style and logic of the argument was identical to the merging of Jews and Communism in the Nazi assault on “Jewish Bolshevism.” The Brotherhood’s resort to violence and its attacks on the Egyptian government made headlines in Egypt and aroused the continuing interest of American ofﬁcials in Cairo. Embassy personnel noted and recorded the text of the Brotherhood’s program published in its newspaper in September 1948. Showing striking similarities to Europe’s twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies, it called for “the dissolution of all parties and the direction of all the population’s political efforts towards one single aim.” Legislation was to be coordinated with “Islamic laws from all points of view.” The army and youth organizations should be organized on a “patriotic basis of Islamic nature.” All Islamic countries and especially Arab nations should address “the question of the Khalifate.” There should be no distinction between individual and public life. All government actions should be based on Islamic laws and justice. All celebrations, movements, public ceremonies, prisons, and hospitals were to be subjected to the Islamic doctrine. “Azharists,” that is, students and faculty of AlAzhar University, should be employed in military and administrative positions. Although its religious ground differed from fascism and Nazism, the Muslim

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Brotherhood shared their hatred of democracy and liberalism. It celebrated unity over division, was contemptuous of a multiplicity of political parties, sought one standpoint from which all matters should be judged, and favored a cult of youth and militaristic mobilization.48 The Brotherhood’s program was one of unbridled authoritarian moralism. It aimed to control culture and fostered nationalist xenophobia toward foreigners. It called for strict “public morality” and “severe punishment for any breach thereof.” Women were to be protected “in accordance with the Islamic spirit.” Prostitution would be abolished and adultery treated as a crime. Gambling, drinking, and narcotics would be prohibited. Women would not be allowed to use cosmetics. “The display of beauty” was not acceptable among female teachers, students, and doctors. Girls’ education would be modiﬁed to make it different from that of boys. Coeducation would be banned. “Any unlawful intimacy between a man and a woman” would be “a punishable crime.” Marriage and procreation would be encouraged “by all possible means.” Yet, like the fascists and National Socialists, the Brotherhood proposed a program of cultural repression and censorship. Cabarets and dance halls would be closed, and plays and ﬁlms would be censored. The wording of songs would be “improved” and “controlled.” Broadcasting would be used to foster “a good, patriotic and moral education.” An Islamic government would “conﬁscate all risqué and obscene plays and books and all those papers which encourage libertinism.” Café opening hours would be limited, and they would be used instead to teach illiterates how to read and write. Those who did not fast on Ramadan would be punished. Schools would be annexed by the mosques. Religion would be taught in all schools, including the universities. Learning the Koran by heart would be encouraged at the private schools. “Degrees having any connection with religion or language courses” would not be given “unless the candidate knows by heart the Koran or, in respect to certain schools, a part of it.” Special attention would be given to Islamic and national history, patriotic education, and the history of Islamic civilization. The learning of Arabic would be given priority. Further, such a government would “eliminate the use of foreign languages, foreign habits and fashions in the family and do away with the employment of foreign nurses and governesses and the like, by Egyptianizing them all, especially in the high class families.” The state would control the press. Writers would be encouraged to write about Islamic subjects and public health would be improved.49

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The economic program promoted by the Brotherhood was no less antimodern and illiberal. Interest would be forbidden. Foreigners working in Egyptian companies would be ﬁred. “Only local elements” would be employed. The public should be protected from “the despotism of monopoly companies.” Employees’ salaries should be raised and the pay of “High Ofﬁcials” reduced, yet employment should be expanded, the standard of living raised, and Egypt’s natural resources exploited. The program was an attack on capitalism from the right. From the standpoint of market economics, it was economic illiteracy. The program was profoundly and deeply antiliberal in politics, economics, and culture. These programmatic statements of the Muslim Brotherhood demonstrated again what had been obvious from the meeting of hearts and minds in Berlin that produced the broadcasts of Voice of Free Arabism and Berlin in Arabic: during and after World War II, Nazism and fascism found common ground with radical Islam. The collapse of fascist and Nazi ideology taking place in postwar Europe was simply not in evidence in the program of the Muslim Brotherhood. The discussion about the relation between radical Islam and National Socialism began in Cairo in the immediate postwar years. In their ongoing efforts to understand the Muslim Brotherhood, American diplomats in Cairo translated and sent to Washington “The Brotherhood and the Parties,” an article from Ikhwan Al Muslimin that responded to the question: “Is the Moslem Brotherhood an Islamic or a fascist organization?” Other political parties in Egypt had made that accusation in response to the Brotherhood’s argument that national “unity could not be realized without the dissolution of the various parties.” When it called for unity in the face of “foreign dangers,” the Brotherhood insisted it was only applying “the teachings of Islam,” which called for unity of followers. “The Koran says: ‘All the faithful are brothers’: God has said in this respect, ‘The faithful males and females are responsible for each other.’ He has also said: ‘Do not be in disagreement, otherwise, you will fail and be defeated.’” It added that the Prophet once said to his followers, ‘Do you want to know what is better than praying, fasting and alms giving?’ They said yes we do, then he said: ‘It is good harmony as discord is against the whole religion.’”50 The Prophet’s views about harmony had contemporary political implications. What, the article continued, was “the use of having so many parties in an occupied country?” The “hateful partisanship” between the parties had “done no good for this country” and had “only created corruption and immorality.” It

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claimed that the Koran prohibited partisanship yet “encouraged freedom of thought and opinion and imposes reciprocal advice and counseling.” In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood was “a democratic organization respecting and preaching for the respect of others’ opinions and freedom of thought, but, on the other hand, following Moslem doctrine, it ﬁghts partisanship, disunion and division. This is the reason why the Brotherhood calls for the dissolution of the parties.” It was a “Moslem consultative organization” but was “far from being a fascist or Nazi or any other dictatorial organization.” The Brotherhood appealed to the king to form a “national body” in which “all the parties forfeit their distinctive names and amalgamate in that ‘National Body.’” The Brotherhood’s antiparliamentary attitude in 1948 was the same as it had been in 1938, for “the words of God cannot be changed.” Yet in 1948, “more than ever,” Egypt needed unity to face its problems and those of Palestine, the Arabs, and Islam. “We must all insist upon requesting the dissolution of all political parties and struggle for the unity of the nation and gather all the useful elements under one ﬂag to lead the nation in this struggle for life or death against imperialism and Zionism.” This was a principle that the Brotherhood would adhere to and ﬁght for “until such time as God and right prevail over wrong.”51 After World War II, in the Middle East as well, no one, including the Muslim Brotherhood, wanted to be identiﬁed with fascism and Nazism. Yet the arguments it presented against partisanship, division, and differentiation were essentially the same as the antidemocratic and antiliberal indictment made in Italy and Germany after World War I. The idea that political parties were a source of national weakness in the face of foreign threats was a central aspect of the arguments made by Italian fascists and German National Socialists in their efforts to destroy democracy in the 1920s. The “reactionary modernists” in Germany argued that the truly modern form of government was a dictatorship that dispensed with political parties.52 Even in the face of the defeat of fascism and Nazism, the Muslim Brotherhood echoed those sentiments. On December 9, 1948, Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Nokrashi suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, saying its existence “constitutes a serious threat to public security and order.”The Egyptian government conﬁscated its funds and seized its archives and property. The Brotherhood, according to Sidky Pasha, was attempting to overthrow “the established order in Egypt” by force “under cover of helping the struggle against Zionism in Palestine.” It had turned “schools into battleﬁelds” and introduced “grenades and pistols even

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into secondary schools.” It extorted money from businesses and individuals. “Finally it embarked on a series of terrorist outrages, including the murder of the Vice-president of the Cairo court of appeal, who had convicted some of the brethren, the blowing up of the ofﬁces of the Societé Orientale de Publicité, the killing of Selim Zaki Pasha, commandant of the Cairo City Police, and numerous bombings.”53 In the course of the suppression of the Brotherhood, the Egyptian police seized “automatic weapons, grenades, gelignite with fuses and detonators packed in bags and crates, cordite, gun cotton, ammunition, bombs as well as forged car numbers.”54 The close ties between al-Banna and Husseini were a source of concern for American and British ofﬁcials in Jerusalem. By early January 1948, they knew that Husseini’s leadership role in Palestinian politics was ﬁrm and that the pro-Axis exiles were playing important roles in the emerging conﬂict in Palestine. One British ofﬁcer described the Mufti as “without the slightest doubt . . . the one hero in the Arab world” whose position with the Palestine Arabs was unchallenged. However, “if he were to disappear, the Palestine Arabs would produce someone in his place.”55 The American and British ofﬁcials also knew that Husseini and others who had supported the Axis during the war composed the leadership of the Arab Higher Committee.56 Moreover, on January 13, Edmund J. Doran, in the American Embassy in Baghdad, reported that an eightyman Iraqi contingent of volunteers to ﬁght in Palestine was led by one Abdul Hamid Baqir, who had been a follower of Rashid Ali Kilani in the 1941 coup. Doron added that “many of the non-commissioned ofﬁcers are also former Rashid-Ali troops, and are strongly anti-British.”57 On March 31, the U.S. Legation in Damascus informed Washington that the “Palestine Liberation Army” had established a radio station broadcasting news twice daily in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The director of the station was Sa’adi Basbous. Basbous had been an announcer on Damascus radio for the previous ten months. During World War II, he had “propagandized Islam world from Athens’ so-called ‘liberal Arab’ (i.e., Nazi) station.”58 For men like Basbous and for Husseini and his supporters, the war against the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine represented a continuation of their activities and beliefs during World War II. Opposition to Zionism extended far beyond those who had been drawn to fascism and Nazism during the war, yet some of the most militant and most prominent leaders of the anti-Zionist forces were former Axis collaborators.

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On April 30, Pinkney Tuck in Cairo cabled Secretary of State George Marshall (who had been appointed to that post in January 1947) that the previous day mullahs at Al Azhar University “called on all Moslem countries for immediate military and economic action to save Palestine.” Seventy thousand copies of the resolution were circulated to the press, Muslim representatives, the palace, and the cabinet. The Muslim scholars declared that “saving Palestine” was a “religious duty of all Moslems everywhere,” that Arab and Islamic governments “must cooperate decisively now and be supported by the people with lives and money.” They should aid and house displaced Palestine refugees. Further, this decision rested on obedience to the Koran’s statement: “He who dies ﬁghting for Allah will be greatly recompensed in life to come.”59 On May 15, Tuck wrote to Marshall about “anti-Jewish sentiment in Egypt.” While King Farouk was distinguishing between acceptable Jews and unacceptable Zionists and the government was promising to protect the lives and property of all who lived in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had engaged in an anti-Jewish press campaign in articles published on May 10, 11, and 14 in Ikhwan Al Muslimin. The series attacked “several Jews in the Egyptian administration” as well as the Jews who “control the ﬁnancial establishments in Egypt and a number of newspapers.” Tuck reported that the newspaper alleged that these people, who “employ former Cabinet Ministers and well-known Egyptians in order to execute their secret plans and satisfy their greed,” were “a real threat to our [Egyptians’] safety.” It noted, “We are called fanatics, but the successes scored by the Jews of Palestine, thanks to the help of Egypt’s Jews, should open the eyes of the Egyptians.” In the same issue it accused Jewish “spies” of mixing with the workers engaged on the Aswan Dam electriﬁcation project in order to engage in sabotage. According to the articles, Jews in Arabic and Islamic countries would be automatically deprived of nationality, have property conﬁscated, and be treated as enemies when and if a Jewish state was created in Palestine.60 The newspaper Al Misri, associated with the nationalist Wafd Party, endorsed Farouk’s distinction between Jews and Zionists. The distinction between Zionism as “a political doctrine which is based on seizing the land from its rightful owners by force, and Judaism as a religion, should be kept in view by the authorities in the Arab countries when they impose martial law. We, the Arabs, wish to appear before the world to be more civilized and to have better perception of affairs than the barbarous Zionists and those who supported them at the United Nations.”61 During the summer and fall of 1948, in periods

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of ﬁghting as well as truce in the war in Israel, these ﬁne distinctions between Jews and Zionists went by the wayside as the Egyptian government engaged in seizure of Jewish property in Cairo and Alexandria.62 An adequate and soundly documented history of the response to Nazism and fascism among Arabs, Persians, and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East remains a task for scholars who read Arabic and Persian and who will thus be able to take the evidence and arguments presented so far into account.63 Yet there is one author and one text of particular importance that fortunately has been translated into English. Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) is generally regarded as the most inﬂuential of the thinkers who inspired postwar Islamic extremism. Our Struggle with the Jews, which he wrote in Cairo in the early 1950s, became a key text, so much so that the Saudi regime published a new edition in 1970.64 I have indicated that Nazi wartime Arabic broadcasts fused modern European and German anti-Semitism with the anti-Jewish themes extracted from the traditions of Islam. Qutb, who was ﬁrst and foremost an Islamic fundamentalist intellectual, advanced this project of synthesis with his detailed knowledge of the relevant Islamic texts. After his execution by the Egyptian government in 1966, he became both a martyr and an ideological inspiration for such radical Islamist groups as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas.65 The title itself, Our Struggle with the Jews, evokes disconcerting comparisons to Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle). More important, in its views of the Jews and in its conspiratorial mode of analysis, the book displayed a striking continuity with the themes of Nazism’s wartime broadcasts, with the important difference that it was far more embedded in the Koran and Islamic commentaries. Qutb began by linking past and present. The “Muslim Community” continued to “suffer from the same Jewish machinations and double-dealing which discomﬁted the Early Muslims.” Regretfully it did not resort to “Koranic directives” and “Divine Guidance” as had its ancestors. Only by drawing on “Islamic sources” were “the Ancestors able to overcome the Jewish conspiracy and double-dealing in Medina. And thus did the Religion [Islam] arise; and thus was the Muslim Community born.” Through what he called their “wickedness and double-dealing,” the Jews were continuing to lead the “Muslim Community away from its Religion and to alienate it from its Qur’an.” Anyone who led this community away from its religion was a “Jewish agent.” Safety from the Jews required an end to the existing alienation from the Koran’s “unique Truth.” Qutb counted the Jews among “the enemies of Islam” who “fought it ﬁrst in the

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realm of Creed!!” by “conspiring, sowing doubt and confusion, and hatching plots.” Indeed, “the worst enemies of Islam” were those “who lead it away from the creed of belief, dissuading it from taking Allah’s way and path and deceiving it about the reality of its enemies and their ultimate goals.” Qutb asserted that a “struggle” was taking place between “the Muslim Community,” on the one hand, and “its enemies,” on the other. Above all, it was a battle about “this Creed,” that is, an ideological battle. Islamic belief was “the means through which the community remains cognizant of its enemies’ plot.”66 The Koran was the most important defensive weapon against the Jews’ efforts to sow confusion among Muslims. It “would ﬁrst always repel this poisoned weapon, . . . repudiate the suspicions and doubts which the People of the Book [the Jews] cast upon it, . . . warn the Community against the conspiracy of the conspirators, and unmask for the Muslim Community the hidden designs of its enemies, their dirty ways, their dangerous intentions and their hatred of Islam and the Muslims because of Islam’s uniquely great superiority.” It would also make clear “the weakness of enemies, their insigniﬁcance in Allah’s estimation, their blindness to Truth, their rejection of what Allah had previously revealed to them and their killing of the prophets.” Positively, it would afﬁrm the power and greatness of the Muslim community, remind them that Allah was with the Muslims, and “lead the ungrateful Jews to exemplary punishment.”67 Qutb’s Manicheanism was a religious counterpart to Nazism’s secular battle against the Jewish enemy. Whereas the Nazis depicted Jewry as obsessed with plans to destroy Germany, Qutb, as Nazi propaganda broadcasts had done, presented the Jews as preoccupied with an effort to destroy Islam. Where Nazism attacked the Jews for undermining the values of the nation and community with the solvent of rationalism, Qutb saw Jews as agents of confusion and doubt about religious belief. Where Nazism appealed to the authority of a secular prophet, Hitler, and the belief in him and his ideas, Qutb evoked the even more unshakable authority of the Koran and Allah himself. The pervasiveness of ideas about Jewish plots and conspiracies in Nazi ideology found an echo in Qutb. The Jews’ character was one of “deception and plotting.” Over the centuries they had “poisoned the Islamic heritage, . . . plotted against Islamic history, . . . conspired to distort the Islamic Oral Revelation, . . . conspired against and falsiﬁed the exegesis of the Qur’an.” Theirs “is a very dangerous conspiracy.” The Jews had “instilled men and regimes (in the Islamic world), in order to conspire against the Muslim Community. Hundreds,

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then even thousands, were plotting within the Islamic world” in the form of “Orientalists” and their students, who now played an important role in the intellectual life of the Arab and Muslim countries. As the conspiracy continued without interruption, rigorous adherence to the Koran alone offered a “source of security and salvation” in “this ﬁerce battle of so many centuries.”68 The Islamic world was threatened by “a massive army of agents in the form of professors, philosophers, doctors, and researchers—sometimes also writers, poets, scientists, and journalists—carrying Muslim names because they are of Muslim descent!” Yet they were attempting to “break the Creed of the Muslims” through “research, learning, literature, science and journalism.” These unnamed Muslim intellectuals thus became, willingly or not, “agents of Zionism.” They agreed on one issue, “the destruction of this (Islamic) Creed” at the ﬁrst opportunity. With arguments that recalled those of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Qutb wrote, “This Jewish consensus (on destroying Islam) would never be found in a pact or open conference. Rather it is the (secret) agreement of one (Zionist) agent with another on the important goal, as something fundamental (and unquestioned).”69 Qutb then turned to the Koran for an explanation for Jewish behavior.“The Qur’an,” he noted, “spoke much about its Jews and elucidated their evil psychology.” He then offered an Islamic version of the Christian attack on alleged Jewish murderousness. “No other group” was as merciless or ungrateful. The Jews “had killed, butchered, and expelled many of their prophets. This is the most disgusting act that has come out of any community which had sincere preachers of the Truth. The Jews perpetrated the worst sort of disobedience (against Allah), behaving in the most disgustingly aggressive manner and sinning in the ugliest way.” They had everywhere “committed unprecedented abominations.” Qutb found the source of this Jewish rage and misbehavior in the Jews’“jealousy” because Allah chose the prophet Gabriel rather than themselves to be his representative to Mohammed. As a consequence of their anger at Allah, the Jews had a “natural disposition” to selﬁshness and fanaticism. They live in “isolation,” bereft of “any larger human connection which binds humanity together.” Not surprisingly, they sowed dissension and fomented wars in which they cultivated hatred and destructiveness. All of this evil arose “only from their destructive egoism.” It was this “black hatred of Allah’s messenger, the Qur’an and Islam” that led the Jews to prefer polytheism to Islam. In the postwar years, they preferred Communism to Islam.70

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Drawing on this reading of the Koran, Qutb reached conclusions about the Jews identical to those of Europe’s radical anti-Semites in the twentieth century. Although European anti-Semitism was very old, it was the Nazis who ﬁrst claimed both that the Jews had launched an international full-scale war against their enemies and that therefore all the Jews should be murdered. Qutb, like Husseini and his associates broadcasting from wartime Berlin, claimed that the Jews had been waging war on Islam since its inception. “The Jews have confronted Islam with Enmity from the moment that the Islamic state was established in Medina. They plotted against the Muslim Community from the ﬁrst day it became a community. The Qu’ran (in fact) contained directives and suggestions concerning this (Jewish) enmity and plot. These directives were themselves sufﬁcient to portray this bitter war which the Jews launched against Islam, the Messenger of Allah and the Muslim Community during its long history. This is a war which has not been extinguished, even for one moment, for close to fourteen centuries, and which continues until this moment, its blaze raging in all corners of the earth.”71 In the postwar era, Qutb called the Jewish attack against Islam “a CrusaderZionist war!! How right was Allah, the most Mighty, saying:‘You will surely ﬁnd the worst enemies of the Muslims to be the Jews and polytheists.’”72 “A Jew” was behind various transgressions in the history of Islam. In modern times, it was the Jews who were behind efforts to remove Shariah from legislation or to introduce constitutions in the Arab world. “Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a Jew [Karl Marx]; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew [Sigmund Freud]; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society . . . was a Jew [Emile Durkheim].”73 Attacks on Durkheim, Freud, and Marx were also standard fare for European anti-Semites. Qutb’s explosion of hatred culminated in a call for war against the Jews in Israel. This was a war between Islam and the Jews.“The struggle between Islam and the Jews continues in force and will thus continue, because the Jews will be satisﬁed only with the destruction of this religion (Islam). Even after Islam had subjugated them, they continued to ﬁght against this religion through conspiracies, treacheries and activating their agents in evil-doing.” Now that the Jews had established the State of Israel, nothing would “curb their greed short of Islam’s defeating them.” This was another chapter in a long history of Jewish “evil-doing,” which Qutb documented with more selective quotations from the

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Koran. He summarized the history of the Jews as follows: “And the Jews did indeed return to evil-doing, so Allah gave to the Muslims power over them. The Muslims then expelled them from the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. . . . Then the Jews again returned to evil-doing and consequently Allah sent against them others of his servants, until the modern period. Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them. And once again today the Jews have returned to evildoing, in the form of ‘Israel’ which made the Arabs, the owners of the Land, taste of sorrows and woe. So let Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out the worst kind of punishment, as a conﬁrmation of His unequivocal promise: ‘If you return, then We return’; and in keeping with his Sunna, which does not vary. So for one who expects tomorrow, it is close!!”74 It is plausible that during World War II, Sayyid Qutb listened to Nazi broadcasts and traveled in the pro-Axis intellectual milieu of the radical Islamists in and around Al Azhar University. Perhaps he heard or read German propaganda that described Hitler as having been sent by Allah to ﬁght the evil Jews. All we can say now is that this idea emerged both from the ofﬁces of the SS in 1944 and again from the pen of Islam’s leading political fundamentalist in Cairo in the early 1950s. Our Struggle with the Jews was not a case of Holocaust denial. On the contrary, like the incitement that came over shortwave radio during the war, it constituted a justiﬁcation of an allegedly well-deserved punishment. Just as the Nazis had threatened the Jews with “punishment” for alleged past misdeeds, so Qutb offered a religious justiﬁcation for yet another attempt to “mete out the worst kind of punishment” to the Jews then in Israel. In terms that his audience understood, Our Struggle with the Jews was a call to massacre the Jews living in Israel. It is evidence of ideological continuity with the radical Islamist propaganda coming from wartime Berlin. Qutb fused the radical anti-Semitism of modern European history with a radical anti-Semitism rooted in a detailed reading of the Koran. Qutb continued and expanded on the project of cultural fusion and selective appropriation of the traditions of Islam that Husseini and his associates in wartime Berlin had performed. In so doing, he and others breathed new life into the anti-Semitic hatred that had only recently been defeated and morally discredited in Europe. The execution of Sayyid Qutb was a culminating moment in the violent conﬂict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime of Egyptian President Gamal Nasser. Yet though Qutb and Nasser became bitter enemies, it would be mistaken to ignore impressive evidence of their agreement on some

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fundamental issues. As the Israeli historian Yehoshafat Harkaby demonstrated almost forty years ago, Nasser and the Egyptian government’s public assertions also displayed ways of thinking that echoed themes of Nazi wartime propaganda. Nasser and his associates, the champions of secular Arab nationalism, based their hostility to Zionism and Israel on a mixture of twentieth-century anti-imperialism and references to anti-Jewish themes of an Islamic nature.75 In the 1950s, the Egyptian government published a complete edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as writings that claimed that Judaism fostered a conspiracy aiming at world domination.76 In 1958, Nasser told an interviewer that the Protocols proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt that three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continent.”77 In 1956, Nasser hired Johann von Leers, one of the Nazi regime’s leading anti-Semitic propagandists, to assist the Egyptian Ministry of Information in fashioning its own anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist campaigns. In wartime Berlin, von Leers wrote “Judaism and Islam as Opposites,” an essay in which he argued that Islam and National Socialism had a common bond forged by shared hostility to the Jews.78 In so doing, he shared in the effort by Himmler and others in the SS to ﬁnd common ground between National Socialism and Islam.79 As Nasser’s decision to hire von Leers indicated, the question of the aftereffects of Nazism’s Arabic-language propaganda during World War II concerned trends that encompassed but were also much broader than those expressed by Qutb and his fellow Islamist jihadists. For the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East in the wake of the war of 1948 following the founding of the State of Israel, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Middle East had ceased to matter. Most of the region’s 700,000 Jews ﬂed to Israel in the face of hostility in their own countries.

Conclusion

azi Germany’s Arabic-language propaganda during World War II was the product of a remarkable political and ideological synthesis that took place in wartime Berlin. Beginning in 1939 and with even greater intensity after fall 1941, ofﬁcials of the German dictatorship worked closely with pro-Nazi Arab exiles to produce leaﬂets that were distributed in the millions, and hundreds of thousands of hours of radio broadcasts. These materials displayed a synthesis of Nazism, Arab nationalism, and fundamentalist Islam. Just as National Socialism represented a radicalization of already existing and longheld anti-Semitic traditions in Europe, so the pro-Axis exiles in Berlin reinforced and radicalized an already existing antipathy to the Jews that had been a long-standing component of the traditions of Islam. Nazi Germany’s Arabiclanguage propaganda was neither an imposition of a set of hatreds previously unknown to the traditions of Islam nor a matter of simply lighting the match to long-standing but suppressed anti-Jewish hatreds. In this conjuncture of passions and interest, both the Nazis and their Arab collaborators engaged in the work of selective tradition, drawing on and accentuating the most despicable and hate-ﬁlled aspects of the cultures of Europe and of Islam. To be sure, the translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic were important sources of the diffusion of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking to Arab and Muslim intellectuals. Although both texts were available in various Arabic editions before the war began, they played little role in the Third Reich’s Arabic propaganda. Rather, it

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was the Koran and its selective appropriation and interpretation that was the most important text for Nazism’s point of cultural entry to Arab and Muslim readers and listeners. So it should come as no surprise that in this same climate, the Nazis would bring the anti-Jewish elements of the Koran to the fore. Like any major religious text, the Koran has been the subject of varying interpretations and receptions, including those which have deemphasized its anti-Jewish passages. Yet it was the interpretation and reception of this core text in wartime Berlin that mattered for the propaganda campaign documented in this book. These labors of selective tradition certainly did foreground those anti-Jewish elements in the Koran and in subsequent commentaries. The Koran offered sufﬁcient textual conﬁrmation of Nazism’s claims that the Jews were ineradicably evil and that they were determined to destroy Islam in the twentieth century just as they had supposedly been attempting to do for the past 1,300 years. In contrast to the canonical texts of Nazism and European anti-Semitism, the Koran was a text venerated by and familiar to the mass radio audience of Berlin in Arabic and the Voice of Free Arabism. At the same time, this speciﬁcally religious dimension was inseparable from the secular, political issues of World War II and opposition to British inﬂuence and to the Zionist project in the Middle East. The boundary between secular appeals to Arab nationalism and religious appeals to Muslims as Muslims was often blurred to the point of insigniﬁcance. At times the propaganda focused on the themes of secular anticolonialism and opposition to British, French, or American inﬂuence, and at other times it justiﬁed Jew-hatred on religious grounds. Often secular and religious themes were indistinguishable in the propaganda about the Jews, nowhere more so than in the convergence of wartime Jew-hatred with opposition to Zionism. The Nazis and their Arab and Muslim collaborators attacked Zionism both as a product of British, American, and “Jewish imperialism” and as the most recent chapter in a continuing Jewish hostility to Islam that they alleged to have begun with the Jews’ rejection of Mohammed’s call to convert to the religion of Islam in Medina thirteen centuries earlier. This propaganda was the classic case of convergence between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.1 Nazi propagandists adapted the central themes of Nazism’s anti-Semitic propaganda to the context of the wartime Middle East. At the center of the German-centered anti-Semitic narrative lay the paranoid delusion that a political subject called “international Jewry” had organized a conspiracy to seize power in the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union and had then launched a war

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intended both to destroy the Nazi regime and to exterminate the German people. As Hitler said on numerous public occasions, his response to this alleged threat was to “exterminate” and “annihilate” the Jews of Europe. The Nazis thus called World War II a “Jewish war” and viewed the victory of the Allies as a victory for the Jews. In its propaganda aimed at the Middle East, the Nazis claimed that an additional aim of international Jewry and its Allied stooges was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine that would expand and threaten the entire Middle East and Islamic world. At times, they also claimed that the Jews were intent on exterminating the Arabs and Muslims in Palestine and even on seeking to “destroy” Islam. In Europe, the Nazis presented their policy of “exterminating” and “annihilating” the Jews as a desperate and justiﬁed act of self-defense.2 In its propaganda directed at the Middle East, they urged Arabs and Muslims to take matters into their own hands and “kill the Jews” before the Jews were able to kill them. In both its European and Middle Eastern dimensions, the propaganda rested on the identical logic of paranoia and projection. That the North Africa campaign and propaganda aimed at the region as a whole failed to achieve its stated goals was not due to lack of effort or interest. To be sure, the primary focus of Nazi policy lay in the European continent. Nazi Germany’s economic and military power was no more able to match that of the Allies in North Africa and the Middle East than it could over the skies of Germany or on the Eastern Front. Yet as the evidence of millions of leaﬂets and thousands of hours of radio broadcasts indicates, Hitler and his leading associates in the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Propaganda, in the SS, and in the military leadership made strenuous efforts with the resources at their disposal to export the regime’s ideology in ways that they hoped would strike a nerve among Arabs and Muslims. Fortunately, the question of how Arabs and Muslims would have responded to an Axis military victory in the Middle East remained in the realm of speculation. Yet the German, British, and American intelligence services all found evidence that there were individuals, groups, and institutions from which the Axis could have expected strong support. Ambassadors Alexander Kirk and Miles Lampson expressed a consensus among the Allies that the success or failure of propaganda appeals in the Middle East was inseparable from the outcome of the battles raging in North Africa. Far from depicting an undifferentiated view of an “Arab” or “Muslim” mentality, both Kirk and Lampson and other American and British diplomats and intelligence analysts generally,

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offered a highly nuanced view of the Arab and Muslim responses to Axis propaganda. Their memos are devoid of generalizations about “Arabs” or “Muslims.” German ofﬁcials also avoided large generalizations about “the Arabs” or “Muslims.” Yet some thought that their anti-Jewish message struck a chord with particular audiences. After the war, the staff of the Historical Division of the U.S. Army requested that former General Helmut Felmy contribute to a report titled “German Exploitation of Arab Nationalist Movements in World War II.” He concluded that “the only real political rallying point among the Arabs was their common hatred of Jews.”3 With the exception of Rashid Ali Kilani’s short-lived pro-Axis coup in Iraq in 1941, no Arab government emerged that supported the Axis. Yet throughout the war, the Nazi regime’s ﬁerce and unwavering opposition to Zionism placed it ﬁrmly within an Arab and Islamic consensus on that issue. Those Arabs and Muslims who did support the Axis powers represented the extremist wing of a much broader anti-Zionist consensus. Although opposition to Zionism in the military and diplomatic establishment in the United States was intense, Franklin Roosevelt kept open the possibility of supporting a Jewish state when the war was over. Roosevelt’s supposed subordination to the Jews had been a key theme of Nazi propaganda in Germany since the early days of the war. When the German Foreign Ministry ofﬁcials discussed how best to stimulate anti-Americanism in the Middle East, they concluded that it could be done most effectively by associating Roosevelt with Zionism and the Jews. Those Arab political leaders who supported the Allies did so in spite of the Allies’ apparent support for a Zionist option after the war. As American ofﬁcials in the State Department and the Ofﬁce of War Information became more aware of the depth of hostility to both Zionism and the Jews, they eschewed any “war of ideas” against anti-Semitism in favor of propaganda appeals that avoided such “controversial” topics as Zionism, anti-Semitism, or the murder of Jews in Europe. Yet Allied reticence about discussing the mass murder of Europe’s Jews or even mentioning the subject of Zionism did not prevent Nazi propagandists from repeatedly seeking to discredit the Allied cause by associating it with the Jews. Nazi propaganda everywhere, including in the Middle East, was not only a set of assertions about events. It also offered daily examples of how to think about the world in a conspiratorial and paranoid manner. The international Jewish conspiracy became the deus ex machina that explained all of the events

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of contemporary history. In the aftermath of World War II, and then in the aftermath of Israel’s victory in the War of Independence in 1948, such leaders as Haj Amin el-Husseini and Hassan al-Banna could point to Israel’s emergence as conﬁrmation of Nazism’s wartime predictions. The Allies had won the war. The Jewish state had been established. Jewish sovereignty now existed in what the believers saw as exclusively Islamic territory. Did this not prove how powerful the Jews were? How else could one explain the astonishing fact of the existence of the State of Israel? As my brief examination of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Arab attitudes toward Israel in the 1950s indicated, continuity with the conspiracy theories that came daily from Radio Berlin extended beyond the Islamist fringe and included Egypt’s President Nasser and ofﬁcial publications of his and other Arab governments. The fact that Nasser hired the former Nazi propagandist Johann von Leers to work for Egyptian information agencies in the 1950s demonstrated his willingness to support ideas and ways of thinking about Israel and the Jews that had their roots in Nazi ideology and propaganda. An adequate examination of the impact, reception, and aftereffects of Nazism’s Arabic-language propaganda is beyond the scope of this work. In the decades since World War II, the passions of anti-imperialism have shifted attention away from the issue of the diffusion of elements of fascist and Nazi ideology beyond their European origins. The issue of the lineages between and diffusion of Nazism and fascism to the Middle East and the reception and intermingling of those ideas in postwar Arab secular and religious radicalism should be an important item on the agenda of scholars whose expertise lies in the study of Arab and Islamist politics. The present work, I hope, will contribute to advancing such research and writing. The history of Europe’s impact on the non-European world in the long era of colonialism and imperialism has been thoroughly examined. Though comparatively brief, the history of the impact of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism on the Arab and Islamic world as well as the history of its aftermath has received less attention. The need to do so in this case is particularly acute as the Nazis used the language of anti-imperialism in order to facilitate their own plans for military expansion, occupation, and imperialism.4 The Allied victories in Iraq in 1941 and in North Africa in 1942 and 1943 ended Nazi Germany’s armed presence in the Middle East and North Africa. They also prevented Hitler from implementing plans to extend the Final Solu-

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tion to the 700,000 Jews then living in the region. Yet despite military defeat, Nazism left traces behind, especially traces of hatred of the Jews that drew on the distinctly European traditions of radical anti-Semitism. The evidence of the immediate postwar years in the Middle East examined in this book lends plausibility to the thesis of continuity and lineages between Nazism’s Arabiclanguage propaganda, on the one hand, and radical Islam in the subsequent decades, on the other. The thesis of continuity does not mean that Islamism was (or is) identical to Nazism. It does, however, suggest that one chapter of its history was written in Nazi-dominated Europe and in particular in wartime Berlin. The diffusion of Nazi ideology and in particular of radical anti-Semitism struck a nerve because it expressed ideas that connected to the indigenous traditions being selectively received and accentuated by Arab and Islamist ideologues. Just as Nazism brieﬂy expanded beyond its Eurocentric origins, so militant Islam in the twentieth century should be understood as one result of the interactions of cultural and ideological traditions from different parts of the globe. In wartime Berlin, pro-Nazi Arab exiles worked together with ofﬁcials of the Nazi regime to rearrange and reinvigorate components of already existing elements of the religion of Islam and of Arab nationalism. As a result, hatred of the Jews, which was discredited in the mainstream politics of postwar and post-Holocaust Europe, found renewed life when embedded in very different cultural, religious, and political traditions and contexts of the Middle East. The Third Reich was short-lived. Tragically, traces of the ideological diffusion examined in these pages have had a much longer life.

Notes

Abbreviations AA ADAP BAB BA-MA DGFP FO FRUS MID NA NACP NARA OWI OSS PAAA RG RMVP RSHA VFA ZMO

Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Ministry) Akten zur deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (Documents on German Foreign Policy) Bundesarchiv Berlin (German Federal Archive, Berlin) Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (German Federal Military Archive, Freiburg) Documents on German Foreign Policy British Foreign Ofﬁce, London Foreign Relations of the United States Military Intelligence Division, U.S. War Department General and Special Staff National Archives, Kew, U.K. United States National Archives, College Park, Md. United States National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. Ofﬁce of War Information Ofﬁce of Strategic Services Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt (Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry, Berlin) Record Group Reichsministerium für Aufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Ofﬁce) The Voice of Free Arabism Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (Center for the Modern Orient)

Chapter 1. Introduction 11. Adolf Hitler, “Führerweisung, Weisung Nr. 30, Mittlerer Orient” (May 23, 1941), Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik (ADAP), 1918–1945, Serie D: 1937–1941, Bd. 12, 2, Die Kriegsjahre, Fünfter Band, Zweiter Halbband, 6 April bis 22 Juni 1941 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1969), 717–19.

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12. On the labor of selective tradition, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On the issue of reception and interpretation, see Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004). On the history of concepts in different contexts, see Melvin Richter, The History of Social and Political Concepts: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 13. On traditions, see Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 195–261. Also see Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1972). 14. For recent discussions of the impact of Nazism on the Middle East, see Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, trans. Colin Meade (New York: Telos Press, 2007); and Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conﬂict and Prejudice (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986 and 1999). On the anti-Jewish traditions within Islam, see Andrew G. Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008). 15. Herf, Reactionary Modernism. 16. Wolfgang Schwanitz, “The German Middle Eastern Policy, 1871–1945,” in Wolfgang Schwanitz, ed., Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945 (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004), 6 – 9; and “Djihad ‘Made in Germany’: Der Streit um den Heiligen Krieg, 1914–1915,” Sozial Geschichte 18, no. 2 (2003): 7– 34. Also see Donald McKale, War by Revolution: Germany and Great Britain in the Middle East in the Era of World War I (Kent, Ohio: Kent University Press, 1998); and Tilman Lüdke, Jihad Made in Germany: Ottoman and German Propaganda and Intelligence Operations in the First World War (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005). 17. On the limits of Nazi Germany’s economic and military resources compared to those of the Allies, see Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); and Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006). 18. Cited in Wolfgang Schwanitz,“Fritz Grobba and German Middle East Policy,”in Schwanitz, ed., Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945 (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004), 99. See “Grobba, Fritz,” in Gerhard Keiper and Martin Kröger, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871–1945, Bd. 1, G–L (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2005), 102– 3. Also see Francis R. Nicosia, “Fritz Grobba and the Middle East Policy of the Third Reich,” in Edward Ingram, ed. National and International Politics in the Middle East: Essays in Honor of Elie Kedourie (London: Frank Cass, 1981), 206–28. 19. Manuella A. Williams, Mussolini’s Propaganda Abroad: Subversion in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, 1935–1940 (London: Routledge, 2006), 63. Also see Nir Arielli’s even more detailed exploration of Italian propaganda in “Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1935–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, March 2008). On pan-Arab and pan-Islamic sentiment, see Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Israel Gershoni, “Arabization of Islam: The Egyptian Salaﬁyya and the Rise of Arabism in Pre-Revolutionary Egypt,” Asian and African Studies 13, no. 1 (1979). 10. For recent examples, see Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Horst Boog et al., The Global War: Widening of the Conﬂict into a World War and the Shift of the Initiative, 1941–1943, trans. Ewald Osers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). German original: Horst Boog et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg: Vol. 6. Der Globale Krieg: Die Ausweitung zum Weltkrieg und der Wechsel der Initiative, 1941–1943 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990). 11. Heinz Tillmann, Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Deutsche Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1965). 12. Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966).

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13. Philip Bernd Schröder, Deutschland in der Mittlere Osten im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Mustershmidt, 1975); and Robert Lewis Melka, The Axis and the Middle East, 1930–1945 (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1966); Josef Schröder, “Die Beziehungen der Achsenmächte zur Arabischen Welt,” in Manferd Funke, ed., Hitler, Deutschland und die Mächte: Materialien zur Außenpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1976), 365–82; and Wolfgang Schwanitz, Germany and the Middle East, 1871–1945 (Princteon: Markus Wiener, 2004). 14. Norman Goda, Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path toward America (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1998). 15. See in particular, “‘Exekutivemaßnahmen gegenüber der Zivilbevölkerung in eigener Verantwortung’: Das Einsatzkommando bei der Panzerarmee Afrika,” in Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 137–48. 16. Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust, trans. Ora Cummings (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 64–65. In a speech in Palestine in 1942, Ben Gurion said: “The Nazis are not far away, but we are being threatened not only by Rommel in North Africa. We are also in danger of invasion from Syria and even Iraq and Turkey” (64). On anti-Semitic persecution as a result of the policies of Vichy France in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia as well as due to the German occupation policies in Tunisia in 1942– 43, see Haim Saadoun, “North Africa,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., Judith Tydor Baumel, assoc. ed., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 444– 46; and Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Long Reach of the Holocaust into Arab Lands (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 17. On Haj Amin el-Husseini and Nazi Germany, see Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007); Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement, trans. David Harvey, ed. Shmuel Himelstein (London: Frank Cass, 1993); and Joseph B. Schechtman, The Mufti and the Führer: The Rise and Fall of Haj Amin elHusseini (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965); and Anthony De Luca,“‘Der Grossmufti’ in Berlin: The Politics of Collaboration,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 10, no. 1 (February 1979): 125– 38. Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayani and the Palestinian National Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), focuses on the periods before and after his years in Berlin. Husseini’s major speeches in wartime Berlin have been published in German in Gerhard Höpp, ed., Mufti-Papiere: Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amı¯n al-Husainı¯s aus dem Exil, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Schwarz, 2001). See my examination of some of his texts in Herf, Jewish Enemy, 172–74, 179–80, and 243–44. 18. On the central role of the German Foreign Ministry in producing foreign-language propaganda, see Peter Longerich, Propagandisten im Krieg: Die Presseabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes unter Ribbentrop (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1987). 19. Anne H. Fuller,“Memorandum on Radio Reception in the Near East and India” (August 18, 1941), U.S. National Archives, College Park, Md. (NACP), RG 208, Records of the Ofﬁce of War Information, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941– 46, entry 373, box 417. 20. Anne. H. Fuller, “Radio Reception in the Near East” (January 29, 1942), NACP RG 208, Records of the Ofﬁce of War Information, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941–46, entry 373, box 417. 21. See “Egypt” and “Libya,” in World Survey of Education, vol. 1 (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 216 and 424. On literacy in Palestine, see Ami Ayalon, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 16–17. By contrast, the literacy rates for Christians in Palestine in 1947 were 85 percent for men and 65 percent for women. 22. Alexander Kirk, Department of State (September 13, 1941), “No. 1361,” 1–3, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941– 47, 1941, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4.

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23. The State Department ﬁles do not disclose how the Americans in Cairo created the English-language transcripts. The embassy team of native Arabic speakers, Americans who knew Arabic, and stenographers skilled in shorthand dictation could have transcribed and translated the approximate hour or two a day of broadcasts. The ﬁles do not indicate if electronic recording technology used elsewhere in the American military in World War II was employed in this effort. On the communications operations of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, see Joesph E. Jacobs, “Report on Ofﬁce Organization and Administration at the Combined Ofﬁce, Cairo, Egypt as of November 1, 1943,” Cairo (September 27, 1943), RG84 Cairo Embassy General Records 1943: 121–124.6, entry 2410, box 85. The United States Navy was using steel wire recorders, the precursor to the tape recorder. On recording technology of the time, also see Martin Camras, Magnetic Recording Handbook (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1988), 8–10 and 658–70; and Robert Angus, “History of Magnetic Recording: Part I,” Audio 68 (August 1984): 27– 34. My thanks to Dr. Felix Roemer of the University of Mainz for sharing his research ﬁndings on the use of tape recording devices in American military interrogations of German prisoners of war beginning in 1942. On this, see the discussion of the “Memovax Recording Device” in NACP RG 389 (Records of the Provost Major General), entry 452, box 1395. 24. The most prominent announcer was Yunus Bari. For his memoir of the Berlin years, see Yunus al-Bari, Huna¯ Birlı¯n, hayy al-‘Arab (Beirut: Da¯r al-Nashr lil-Ja¯mi’ı¯yı¯n, 1955). 25. Richard Breitman, Ofﬁcial Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); and Shlomo Aronson, Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Joseph Bendersky’s work on anti-Semitism in the American military also makes excellent use of the relevant U.S. Army military intelligence division ﬁles. See Joseph Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Also see Richard Breitman et al., U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). This work is a product of the extensive declassiﬁcation of the ﬁles of the United States government intelligence agencies performed by the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. 26. For current examinations of the response, see Edmund Cao-Van-Hoa, “‘Der Feind meines Feindes . . .’ Darstellungen des nationalsozialistischen Deutschland in ägyptischen Schriften” (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1990); Israel Gershoni, “Egyptian Liberalism in an Age of ‘Crisis of Orientation’: Al-Risala’s Reaction to Fascism and Nazism, 1933–1939,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999): 551–76; and Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s (Florence, Italy: European University Institute, 2001). Also see Rene Wildangel, Zwischen Achse und Mandatsmacht: Palästina und der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2007). 27. Tillmann went so far as to state that the question of whether the majority of Arabs supported the Axis or Allied powers was “completely irrelevant” because “without an enduring demonstration of German military power in the Near East” the Third Reich had “no serious prospects of reaching a breakthrough into this important English-French sphere of inﬂuence” (Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 116–17). 28. These have been translated into English for me by Andrew Masloski. 29. On the relation between the Nazi regime, Zionist organizations, and Jewish immigration to Palestine in the years preceding the war, see Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). On the Nazi regime’s hostility to Zionist goals, see Herf, Jewish Enemy, and “Convergence, the Classic Case: Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and AntiZionism during World War II,” in Jeffrey Herf, ed. Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2007), 50–70. 30. On this, see Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); and Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, trans. Colin Meade (New York: Telos Press, 2007).

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31. Jeffrey Herf, “What Is Old and What Is New about the Terrorism of Islamic Fundamentalism,” Partisan Review 61, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 25 – 32; “Revolte gegen die Moderne,” Internationale Politik 60, no. 11 (November 2005): 6–13; and “Foreword” to Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred, vii–xvii.

Chapter 2. Deﬁning Anti-Semitism 11. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1943 and 1971), 658– 59. 12. See Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 29– 30. 13. Wolff to Auswärtiges Amt (AA), Jerusalem (March 31, 1933), Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt (PAAA) R78325 III, 1920–33, Bd. 1, L318926. 14. Wolf to AA, “Arabische Einstellung zur Lage der Juden in Deutschland,” Jerusalem, April 20, 1933. PAAA R78325, Ägypten, Politische Beziehung zu Deutschland, 1920–33, Bd. 1. 15. See Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 27. For the full texts of the laws also see Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman House, 1976), 40–42; and Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat (Heidelberg: Müller Juristischer Verlag, 1981), 12–13. 16. “Article 2, The Reich Citizenship Law of 15 Sept. 1935,” in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, eds. Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1992), 404. 17. Vückhoff to L. R. Pilger (December 20, 1935), PAAA R99173, Inland Partei, Zugehörigkeit der Ägypter, Iraker, Iraner, Perser und Türken zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 10. I. A. Richards, “Berlin, zu. 82– 35 B 20/12.35” (January 19, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, also supported the initiative. See “Der Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda an das Auswärtige Amt” (February 1, 1936); and I. A. Richards, “Berlin” (February 8, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 11. Walter Gross to AA (February 4, 1936),“Berlin 82-35B 4/2,” PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. On Globke, see Daniel Rogers,“Restoring a German Career, 1945– 1950: The Ambiguity of Being Hans Globke,” German Studies Review 31, no. 2 (May 2008): 303–24. 12. Walter Gross to AA (February 4, 1936),“Berlin 82-35B 4/2,”PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 13. Walter Gross to AA (April 4, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit der Ägypter, Iraker, Iraner, Perser und Türken zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. Approval also came from the Propaganda Ministry: “Der Reichsminister für Volksaufklarung und Propaganda an das Auswärtige Amt, VII 7083/17.1.36 (April 8, 1936),” PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 14. “Auswärtiges Amt, Nr. 82– 35, B 8/4, Berlin an sämtliche Reichsministerien einschließlich Reichskanzlei und Präsidialkanzlei” (April 30, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 15. Eberhard von Stohrer to AA (June 15, 1936), and Eberhard von Stohrer, Kairo, 20 Juni 1936, 21 Juni 1936, 22 Juni 1936, PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 16. Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, “An die Deutsche Gesandschaft in Kairo” (June 18, 1936). On the same day, Bülow-Schwante sent a similar, shorter telegram to the German Embassy in Tehran, PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 17. Ibid. Also “Abschrift zu 82– 35, 26/6, Berlin, 16.6.1936”; and Bülow-Schwante to Ägyptische Gesandschaft, June 13, 1936, PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36.

272

Notes to Pages 20–24

18. Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, “Telegram Teheran, zu. 82.35. 15/6,” Berlin ( June 18, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 19. Stohrer, “Betr. Jüdische Hetz gegen die Olympischen Spiele” (June 17, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 20. Stohrer,“Telegram”(June 17, 1936);“Präsident . . . Organisations-Komitee . . . XI. Olympiade Berlin 1936 to Legationsrat Hinrichs” (June 23, 1936); and “Anlage zum Brief an Herrn Legationsrat Hinrichs, Aus. Amt am 23. Juni 1936,” PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 21. “Dewald to Auswärtiges Amt,” and “Anlage zum Brief an Herrn Legationsrat Hinrichs, Ausw-Amt an 23 Junie 1936”(June 23, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 22. Stohrer, Kairo, “Angebliche Anwendung Nürnberger Gesetze auf Ägypter usw,” and “Öfﬁzielles Communique des Ägytpisches Aussenministerium von 21 Juni 1936” (June 22, 1936); and Von Bülow-Schwante, “An die Königlich Ägyptische Gesandschaft,” Berlin ( June 23, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 23. Stohrer, “Angebliche Anwendung der Nürnberger Gesetze auf ägyptische Staatsangehörige” (June 24, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 24. “Abschrift, AA, 82–35, 22/6, Verbalnote an die Königlich Ägyptische Gesandschaft” (July 4, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 25. “Mit anliegender Aufzeichnung Buro Reichsminister vorgelegt” (June 18, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935– 36. 26. “Nr. 82– 35, 20/5. Ang. II, Schnellbrief 22 Juni 1936,” PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 27. “AA, Schnellbrief, Kanzleinotiz” (June 22, 1936), PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 28. “Sitzung vom 1 Juli 1936 im Auswärtigen Amt zwecks Beantwortung der ägyptischen und iranischen Anfragen und Klärung des Begriffs ‘artverwandt,’” PAAA R99174, Zugehörigkeit der Ägypter, Iraker, Iraner, Perser und Türken zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 2, 1936– 40. 29. Bülow-Schwante, “Schnellbrief, 28 Juni 1936,” PAAA R99173, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 1, 1935–36. 30. “Sitzung vom 1 Juli 1936 im Auswärtigen Amt . . . ,” PAAA R99174, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 2, 1936–40, 1–2. 31. “Wilhelm Stuckart,” in Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003), 611–12. 32. “Sitzung vom 1 Juli 1936 im Auswärtigen Amt . . . ,” 2– 3, PAAA R99174, Zugehörigkeit der Ägypter, Iraker, Iraner, Perser und Türken zur arischen Rasse , Bd. 2, 1936– 40. 33. Wilhelm Stuckart, “Entwurf I, Sitzung vom 1 Juli 1936 im Auswärtigen Amt zwecks Beantwortung der ägyptischen und iranischen Anfragen und Klärung des Begriffs ‘artverwandt,’” 1–2, PAAA R99174, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 2, 1936– 40. 34. Wilhelm Stuckart,“Entwurf II, Sitzung vom 1 Juli 1936 im Auswärtigen Amt zwecks Beantwortung der ägyptischen und iranischen Anfragen und Klärung des Begriffs ‘artverwandt,’” 1–2, PAAA R99174, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 2, 1936– 40. 35. “An die Deutsche Gesandschaft Teheran, zu 82–35, 2/7” (July n.d., 1936); also “Deutsche Gesandschaft Teheran, Inhalt: Iran und die Nürnberger Gesetze” (July 18, 1936), PAAA R99174, Zugehörigkeit . . . zur arischen Rasse, Bd. 2, 1936– 40. 36. On Arabic translations of Mein Kampf during the Nazi era, see Stefan Wild, “National Socialism in the Arab Near East between 1933 and 1939,” Die Welt des Islams 25, no. 1 (1985): 126–73. 37. Ibid., 149–51. 38. Nicosia, “Fritz Grobba.” “Grobba, Fritz,” in Gerhard Keiper and Martin Kröger, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871-1945, Bd. 1, G—L (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2005), 102-3.

Notes to Pages 24– 30

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39. Cited by Wild, “National Socialism,” 154. 40. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 284–329. 41. Cited by Wild, “National Socialism,” 155. 42. Ibid., 159– 60. 43. Ibid., 160. 44. Otto von Hentig, “Pol. VII 1326/37,” Berlin (December 29, 1937), PAAA R104800, Arabien, Pol. VII. Also see discussion in Wild, “National Socialism,” 163– 64. 45. On Arslan, see William C. Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); and review essay by Martin Kramer, “The Nation of Shakib Arslan,” Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 4 (October 1987): 529– 33. 46. Wild, National Socialism, 164– 65. 47. Ibid., 168. 48. See Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (London: I. B.Tauris, 1985; 2nd ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999); and Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and “Ein nützlicher Feind: Zionismus im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1939,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 37, no. 3 (1989); and Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 62– 63. 49. Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 27, 33. 50. Nicosia, “Appendix 7: Jewish Legal Immigration to Palestine, 1933–1940,” in Third Reich and the Palestine Question, 212. 51. See Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 19197–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 52. Walter Doehle, “Abschrift Pol. VIII 309, Inhalt: Prüfung der Frage, ob unsere Palästina gegenüber bisher verfolgte Richtlinie beibehalten werden kann oder ob sie eine Anderung erfahren muß,” Jerusalem (March 22, 1937), PAAA R104785, Pol. VII, Politische Beziehung Palästina zu Deutschland, E019872–019896, E019872–E019873. 53. Ibid., E019872–E019873. 54. Ibid., E019877. 55. Ibid., E019878. 56. Ibid., E019879. 57. Ibid. 58. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, “Braune Afﬁnitäten: Sympathien für das Dritte Reich im Nahen und Mittleren Osten,” in Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina, 2nd rev. ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), esp. 49– 56. 59. Konstantin von Neurath, “Abschrift 83–21 A 25/5,” Berlin ( June 1, 1937), Büro UnterStaatsssekretär, Palästinafrage, Juni 1937–April 1938, PAAA R29899, 370141– 370142. 60. Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, “Deutsche Einstellugn zur Frage der Gründung eines Judenstaates in Palästina,” Berlin (June 22, 1937), PAAA R29899, Politische Beziehung Palästinas zu Deutschland R104785, 37033– 370138. Quotation from 370137. 61. “Aufzeichnung über die Palästina-Frage,” Berlin (August 7, 1937), PAAA R29899, Politische Beziehung Palästinas zu Deutschland, E019907–E019914; and “Deutsche Einstellung zum britischen Plan der Bildung eines jüdischen Palästina-Staates,” Berlin (August 7, 1937), PAAA R104787, Politische Beziehung Palästinas zu Deutschland, Pol. VII, 3. 62. Doehle to AA, Jerusalem (July 15, 1937), PAAA R104787, Politische Abteilung, Betr. Plan für Verteilung Palästinas . . . 1937. 63. Ernst von Weizsäcker to Generalkonsulate Jerusalem, Berlin ( July 20, 1937), PAAA R104787, Politische Abteilung, Betr. Plan für Verteilung Palästinas . . . 1937. 64. Herbert Dittman, “Inhalt: Politik der Mufti von Jerusalem und die arabischen Nation-

274

Notes to Pages 30–32

alkomitees,”Jerusalem (August 10, 1937), PAAA R104787, Politische Beziehung Palästinas zu Deutschland, Pol. VII, E019915–E019919. On the Peel Commission, see Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conﬂict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 138– 39. 65. Deutsches Generalkonsulat, “Nr. Polit. 4/38, Inhalt: Entscheidung darüber, ob unsere Palästine gegenüber bisher verfolgte Richtlinie Beibehalten werden kann oder ob sie eine Anderung erfahren muss,” Jerusalem (January 14, 1938), PAAA R104785, Politische Beziehung Palästinas zu Deutschland, Pol. VII, 1–3. 66. Fritz Grobba to AA, “Erklärungen islamischer religioser Führer gegen den palästinenischen Teilungsplan und gegen der Besteigung des palästinenischen Thrones durch einen Mohammadaner,” Baghdad (July 27, 1937), PAAA R104787, Politische Abteilung, Betr. Plan für Verteilung Palästinas . . . 1937. 67. The ﬁles of the German Embassy in Cairo for 1933– 39 probably contained important information about those individuals and groups, both religious and political, who expressed sympathy for Nazi Germany before the war began. Unfortunately, the ﬁles were destroyed or lost in Cairo sometime between 1939 and the years following the end of the war in 1945. 68. Hitler, referring to the Germans in the Sudetenland, said, “I am not at all willing to allow the emergence of a second Palestine in the heart of Germany. The poor Arabs are defenseless and perhaps abandoned. The Germans in Czechoslovakia are neither defenseless or abandoned.” For the German original, see Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, Bd. 1 Triumph, 1932–1938 (Neustadt: Verlagsbucherei Schmidt, 1962), 904– 5. 69. Grobba to AA, “Irakische Sympathien für Deutschland während der europäische Krisem” (October 4, 1938), and “Anlage zum Bericht der Deutschen Gesandschaft in Bagdad vom 1. Oktober 1938, No. 2471”; “Dr. Abdul Majid Qassab, ‘Hitler erinnert an das arabische Volk in der Angelegenheit Palästinas,’ in Al Akhbar Nr. 78, Bagdad, 16 September 1938,” Baghdad (October 4, 1938), PAAA R104785, Politische Abteilung, Politische Beziehungen Palästina zu Deutschland. 70. Grobba, “Deutsche Gesandschaft, Nr. 2037, Teilnahme irakischer Delegation am Reichsparteitag,” Baghdad (August 11, 1938), PAAA R98883, Büro Partei, Bd. 1, Jugendbewegung, Asien I, 1937. 71. Grobba, “Die irakische Jugendabordnung in Deutschland,” Baghdad (October 19, 1938), and “Anlage zum Bericht der Deutschen Gesandschaft in Bagdad vom 18 Oktober 1938, Übersetzung,” PAAA R98883, Büro Partei, Bd. 1, Jugendbewegung, Asien I, 1937. 72. “Die irakische Jugendabordnung in Deutschland. Einzelheiten, wie sie ein Mitglied sah, Al Iraaq, Nr. 5432, Bagdad,” in “Anlage zum Bericht . . . 18 Oktober 1938 . . . “ (September 15, 1938), PAAA R98883, Büro Partei, Bd. 1, Jugendbewegung, Asien I, 1937. 73. Ibid., 7– 9. 74. Ibid., 13–16; and “Anlage zum Bericht der deutschen Gesandtschaft, Nr. 2666, 18 Oktober 1938,” PAAA R99175, “Inland Partei Akten, Umgang fremdrassiger Ausländer mit deutschen Mädchen, 1941–1943.” 75. Francis Nicosia went further when he concluded that it was “certain that he [Hitler] did not seek the destruction of British imperial power by the budding nationalisms of Africa and Asia. To have encouraged Arab ambitions for national self-determination in Palestine and throughout the Middle East would have disrupted his plans for an Anglo-German understanding on Europe and would have violated the racial tenets of National Socialism.” The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin: University of Texas, 1985), 193–94. 76. Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, 41– 42. 77. Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 61–68. 78. Hans Piekenbrock to Wilhelm Canaris, “Vertagsnotiz OKW/Aus/Abw Iv., 18.6.1939,” IfZ (Institut für Zeitgeschichte), Nbg. Dok (Nurenberger Dokumente) PS-792; cited in Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 61– 62. 79. On German policy and support in the 1930s see Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 57–68; and Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, 43– 61.

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80. Dr. Pretsch, “Die Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung des Auswärtigen Amts,” PAAA R67482, Verbindungsmann RAM, Ausländischen Rundfunkwesen, Deutsche Auslandsrundfunkpropaganda, Bd. 1: Afrika-England, April–September 1941, Bde. 7– 8, 2. 81. Christian T. Steger,“Memorandum for the Counsel General,” Jerusalem, Palestine ( July 22, 1939), NACP RG 84, General Records, 1939: 805– 840.4, entry 2410, box 39. 82. Christian T. Steger, “Arabic Broadcasts from Berlin,” Jerusalem, Palestine ( July 22, 1939), 1– 3, NACP RG 84, General Records, 1939: 805–840.4, entry 2410 350/55/1– 6/2– 5, box 39. 83. Ibid., 2–3. 84. See Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007); and Zvi Epileg, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin Al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (London: Frank Cass, 1993). 85. On the White Paper, see Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; 2nd ed. London: Leicester University Press, 1999). On Arab rejection of Nazism and Italian Fascism, see Israel Gershoni, Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s (San Domenico, Italy: European University Institute, 2001). 86. Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, 50–53. 87. Ibid., 55– 56. 88. Ibid., 59– 61.

Chapter 3. Growing Contacts, First Broadcasts 11. Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 63–73; and Heinz Tillmann, Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg ([East] Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1965), 115. 12. See Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 64. Also see Seth Arsenian, “Wartime Propaganda in the Middle East,” Middle East Journal 2 (1948): 417–29; Neville Barbour,“Broadcasting to the Arab World: Arabic Transmissions from the B.B.C. and Other Non-Arab Stations,” Middle East Journal 5 (1951): 57– 69; and Callum A. Macdonald, “Radio Bari: Italian Wireless Propaganda in the Middle East and British Countermeasures, 1934–1938,” Middle East Studies 13 (1977): 195–207. 13. Werner Schwipps, Wortschlacht im Äther: Der deutsche Auslandsrundfunk im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Haude and Spenersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1971), 58; and “Kontakte zur arabischen Welt,” in Willi A. Boelcke, Die Macht des Radios: Weltpolitik und Auslandsrundfunk, 1924–1976 (Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1977), 405 –6. 14. Werner Schwipps, “Vorwart” to Schwipps, Wortschlacht im Äther, 9. Also see Gerhart Goebel, Fernkampfwaffen im Rundfunkkrieg also in Wortschlacht im Äther. 15. Schwipps, Wortschlacht im Äther, 16, 45-46, 58. 16. On the involvement of scholars in the radio effort, see “Martin Abel,” in Ludmila Hanisch, Die Nachfolger der Exegeten: Deutschsprachige Erforschung des Vorderen Orients in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowtiz Verlag, 2003), 177. 17. Ibid., 60. 18. Ibid., 58. 19. “Arbeitsabkommen zwischen dem Auswärtigen Amt und dem Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda,” NACP, Records of the German Foreign Ministry Received by the Department of State, microcopy no. T120, roll 396, 304653– 304666. On Ribbentrop, the Foreign Ministry, and Nazi propaganda, see Peter Longerich, Propagandisten im Krieg: Die Presseabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes unter Ribbentrop (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1987). 10. See “Melchers, Wilhelm” in Keipert and Grupp, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des

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deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871–1945, vol. 3, 219–20. Hentig was promoted, along with Kurt Prüfer, to a position of “special ambassador” in the Foreign Ministry. Their responsibilities included but were not limited to the Middle East. See ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, Bd. 8, 1 Oktober 1943 bis 30 April 1944 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), 622–23. 11. AA, Politische Abteilung, PAAA R67478, Referat Ru Pers. Ru Hs, Bd. 3: Haushalt, Personal (Handakte Bartsch), 1939– 43, Bde. 3–4. 12. “Haushaltsvoranschlag der Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes vom 1.4.1942 bis 31.3.1943,” PAAA R67477. Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung, Referate Ru Pers. Ru Hs, Bd. 1: Verwaltung Organisation 1941–43, Bde. 2– 3 13. “Anlage 1: Zahlenmäßige Übersicht über den Inlandspersonalbestand der Abteilung Ru, Stand vom 1.9.1942,” PAAA R67477, Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung. 14. “Personalbestand der Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung (Berlin, August 14, 1943), PAAA R67476, Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung, Referate Ru Pers. Ru Hs, Bd. 1: Verwaltung Organisation 1939–45, Bde. 1–2. On Kiesinger, see Philipp Gasser’s comprehensive study, Georg Kiesinger, 1904– 1988: Kanzler zwischen den Zeiten (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2006). 15. “Übersicht über die Arbeitsgebiete der Rundfunkpolitischen Abteilung und ihrer Referate, Anlage 6,” PAAA R67477. Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung. 16. “Abteilung Ru, Anlage 1a,” R67477; and “Anlage 1a, Abteilung Ru, Zahlenmäßige Übersicht über den Inlandspersonalbestand der Abteilung Ru., Stand vom 1.9.1942,” PAAA R67477 Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung. 17. “Munzel, Kurt” in Maria Keipert and Peter Grupp, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes 1871-1945, vol. 3 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2008), 332–33. Also see Ludmila Hanisch, Die Nachfolger der Exegeten: Deutschsprachige Erforschung des Vorderen Orients in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowtiz Verlag, 2003), 199. 18. “Übersicht über die Arbeitsgebiete der rundfunkpolitischen Abteilung und ihrer Referate, Ref. VII Orient,” 4; and “Rundfunkabteilung Inland, Personalstand 1.9.1942, Referat VII Orient,” 16, PAAA 67477, Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung. Kissling became a lecturer in history and culture of the Orient and of Turkey at the University of Munich. See, among others, his The Muslim World (1969), Handbuch der Orientalistik (1959), Islamistische Abhandlungen (1974). Also see Kurt Munzel, Ägyptischer-arabischer Sprachführer (Wiesbaden, 1958 and 1983). On Barid al Schark (also spelled as “Barid as-Sarq,” see the master’s thesis by Munir Hamida, “Amin al-Husayni in der deutschen Kriegspropaganda des Zweiten Weltkrieges—eine Studie zur arabischsprachigen Zeitschrift ‘Barid as-Sarq’” [Free University, Berlin, 2007]). 19. “Referat VII, Orient,” PAAA R67477, Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung. The High Command of the Army, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), issued biweekly reports on Allied and Axis propaganda efforts during the war. These “Wehrmacht Propaganda Lagebericht” are in the German Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, BA-MA, RW4/338. 20. Mehemet Amin El Husseiny (Haj Amin El-Husseini) to Adolf Hitler with von Papen ( July 6, 1940), “No. 125, The Ambassador to Turkey to Foreign Ministry,” Documents on German Foreign Policy (hereafter DGFP) 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 10, The War Years, June 23, 1940 to August 31, 1940 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1964), 141. 21. [Ernst] Woermann, “No. 200, Memorandum by the Director of the Political Department,” Berlin (July 21, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 10, 556 – 59. 22. Franz von Papen to AA, “No. 289, The Ambassador in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry,” Therapia (August 6, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 10, 415–16; Fritz Grobba, “Aufzeichnung des Gesandten Grobba,” Berlin (August 27, 1940), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie D: 1937– 1945, Bd. 11.1 Die Kriegsjahre, Vierter Band, Erster Halbband, 1 Sepember bis 13 November 1940 (Bonn: Gerbr. Hermes KG, 1964), 459–62. 23. Grobba, “Aufzeichnung des Gesandten Grobba,” Berlin (August 27, 1940), ADAP, 1918– 1945, Series D: 1937–1945, Bd. 11.1, 459– 62.

Notes to Pages 42 –49

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24. Ibid. 25. “Draft: Joint or Identical Declaration of the German and Italian Governments,” DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 10, 559–60. “Haddad’s Negotiations with the Germans,” Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, 82– 86. 26. “No. 35. Der Staatsekretär an die Botschaft in Rom,” (September 9, 1940), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie D: 1937–1945, Bd. 11.1, 38–39; also see “No. 35, The State Secretary to the Embassy in Italy,” Berlin (September 9, 1940), in DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, The War Years, September 1, 1940–January 31, 1941, 44– 46. 27. [Ernst] Woermann, “No. 127, Memorandum by the Director of the Political Department,” Berlin (September 28, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, The War Years, September 1, 1940–January 31, 1941, 220 –21. 28. Ernst von Weizsäcker, “No. 133, The State Secretary to the Embassy in Italy,” Berlin (September 30, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, 228. 29. Fritz Grobba, “No. 190, Memorandum by an Ofﬁcial of the Foreign Ministry,” Berlin (October 18, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, 320 –22. Haddad’s name on his Iraqi passport was Tewﬁk Ali al-Shakir. On this see Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007). 30. Grobba, “No. 190, Memorandum by an Ofﬁcial of the Foreign Ministry,” Berlin (October 18, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, 320 –22. 31. Ibid., 321–22. 32. On the pro-Axis Arabs residing in Europe before the war, see William L. Cleveland, Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 33. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient) Mn/P/B, “Ein Blatt über die Besetzung der Englander in Ägypten,” Kultureller Talk vom 3 Dezember 1940, Berlin (December 3, 1940), Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB) R901, R73039, Rundfunkabteilung, Ref. VIII Arabische und Iranische Sendungen, vorl. 39, Dez. 1940–Jan. 1941, p. 2. 34. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient) Mn/P/B, “Die Frommigkeit,” Religioser Wochentalk vom 5 Dezember 1940, BAB R901 R73039 1941, 4–6. 35. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 36. On the elective afﬁnity asserted by Nazi propagandists between English Puritanism with the Jews, see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Jews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 71–74. 37. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Scha “Dei Freigebigkeit,” Religiöser Wochentalk vom 12 Dezember 1940 (arabisch) broadcast on December 12, 1940, BAB R901 R73039, 14–16. 38. Ibid., 16. 39. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Scha,“Zur Regierungserklärung für die Araber,” Talk vom 12 Dezember 1940 (arabisch), BAB R901 R73039, 11–13. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 12–13. 42. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/B, “Kultureller Talk vom 19 Dezember 1940 (arabisch),” Berlin (December 19, 1940) BAB R901 R73039, 32–33. 43. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Scha, “Kultureller Talk vom 24 Dezember 1940 (arabisch),” Berlin (December 19, 1940) BAB R901 R73039, 35–36. 44. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Scha, “Religiöser Wochentalk vom 26 Dezember 1940 (arabisch),” Berlin (December 26, 1940) BAB R901 R73039, 38– 39. 45. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/R, “Die Wahrhaftigkeit und die Stärke des Glaubens,” Kultureller Talk vom 31 Dezember 1940 (arabisch), Berlin (December 31, 1940) BAB R901, R73039, 41– 42.

278

Notes to Pages 50– 58

46. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Seha, “Glückwünsche zum Briram-Fest,” Talk vom 8 Januar 1941 (arabisch), Berlin (January 8, 1941) BAB R901 R73039, 53 – 54. 47. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/E, “Der Dreierpakt Englands gegen die arabischen Staaten,” Berlin (January 14, 1941), BAB R901 R73039, 58– 61. 48. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/E, “Der deutsche Soldat von heute,” Berlin (December 31, 1941), BAB R901 R73039, 43. See, for example, Richard Weber and Carl Korbe, Kartenskizzen zum Weltkrieg und zum grossdeutschen Freiheitskampf für den Unterricht in Kriegsgeschichte (Frankfurt/ Main: Ravenstein, 1944); and Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Die Wehrmacht: Der Freiheitskampf des grossdeutschen Volkes (Berlin: Verlag “Die Wehrmacht,” 1940). 49. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/B, “Die Selbstsuch,” Talk vom 16 Januar 1941 (arabisch) broadcast (January 16, 1941), BAB R901 R73039, 62– 64. 50. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Ei, “Die Propaganda im Islam,” Berlin ( January 31, 1941), broadcast on February 1, 1941, and “Die Propagandamittel im Islam,” Berlin (February 4, 1941), BAB R901 R73039, 85 –87 and 88–90. 51. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/Ei, “Wachet auf!” Berlin (February 6, 1941) (arabisch), BAB R901 R73039, 94 –96. 52. Ibid. 53. For recent examples from a large literature, see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 54. On these now familiar themes, see George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: The Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998); and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889– 1936, Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 55. Kult.R.Ref. VIII (Orient), Mu/CB,“Neuerungen und Aberglaube im Islam,” Berlin (February 20, 1941) (arabisch), BAB R901 R73039, 122–24. 56. On anti-Jewish verses from the Koran, see “Qur’anic Verses,” as well as Andrew G. Bostom, “Islamic Antisemitism—Jew Hatred in Islam” and Haggai Be-Shammai, “Jew Hatred in the Islamic Tradition and Koranic Exegesis” in Andrew G. Bostom, ed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitis: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008), 209–20, 31– 56, 221– 35. 57. Wilhelm Melchers, “No. 481, Memorandum by the Head of Political Division VII,” Berlin (December 9, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, The War Years, September 1, 1940– January 31, 1941, 826–29. 58. Ibid., 828–29. 59. Melchers, “No. 496, Memorandum by the Head of Political Division VII,” Berlin (December 11, 1940), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, 846 – 47. 60. On Italian policy in this period, see Manuela A. Williams, Mussolini’s Propaganda Abroad: Subversion in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, 1935–1940 (London: Routledge, 2006); Nir Arielli,“Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1935–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, March 2008). 61. Mohammed Amin El Husseini,“No. 680, The Grand Mufti to Adolf Hitler,” Baghdad ( January 20, 1941), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, 1152, 1154, 1154–55. 62. Franz von Papen, “No. 722, The Ambassador in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry,” Ankara (January 28, 1941), DGFP 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 11, 1215.

Chapter 4. Propaganda and Warﬁghting in North Africa and the Middle East in 1941 11. “Directive No. 32, Preparations for the Time after Barbarossa,” Doc. no. 617, Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, The War Years, February 1–June 22, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1962), 1012–14.

Notes to Pages 58– 64

279

12. Ibid., 1014–15. 13. See Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), 99–101. 14. DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12. 15. [Ernst] Woermann, “Memorandum by the Director of the Political Department,” Berlin (February 4, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945) vol. 12, 18 –19. 16. Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, “Enclosure with No. 18, Memorandum by the Head of Political Division IM,” Berlin (February 5, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 30 – 32. 17. On the German military and anti-Jewish policies in Poland between 1939 and 1941, see Christopher Browning, “The Army, from Abdication to Complicity,” in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 72–81. 18. Woermann,“Memorandum on the Arab Question,” Berlin (March 7, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 235. 19. Ibid., 236. 10. Ibid., 237. 11. Ibid., 243. 12. “No. 293, The Foreign Ministry to the Embassy in Turkey,” and [Ernst von] “Weizsäcker to M. Haj Amin al Husayni,” Berlin (April 8, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 488– 90. 13. On developments in Iraq in 1941, see Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, 95–172. Other members of the secret committee that planned the coup were Salah ed-Din es Sabbagh, Fahmi Said, Mahmud Slaman, and Naji Shawkat. 14. Ibid., 146. 15. Joachim von Ribbentrop,“Memorandum by the Foreign Minister,”Vienna (April 21, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 592–94. 16. Ribbentrop,“Brief for the Früher,” and Hewel,“Brief for the Foreign Minister” Berlin (May 3, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 689–90. 17. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 80. 18. Adolf Hitler,“No. 543, Führer’s Directive, Directive No. 30, The Middle East” (May 23, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 862–64. 19. Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, 167–69. 20. Ibid., 172. 21. Gerhard Rühle, “Aufzeichnung betr. Die Rundfunkpropaganda in den arabischen Raum,” Berlin (May 5, 1941), PAAA R67482, Verbindungsmann Reichsaussenminister [Ribbentrop] RAM, Ausländisches Rundfunkwesen, Deutsche Auslandsrundfunkpropaganda, Bd. 1, Afrika-England, April–September 1941, Bde. 7– 8, 247211. 22. Ibid., 247212. 23. Ibid., 247212. He added that if the Kilani government in Baghdad had been kept in power, a Baghdad-based Arabic-language station would have been established. 24. Ibid., 247214. 25. Ibid., 24715. 26. “Aufzeichnung, Betrifft: Sondersendungen in hocharabischer Sprache für Ägypten,” Hauptquartier (April 18, 1941), PAAA R67482, 247108–247110. 27. Ibid., 247216. 28. See Miles Lampson Killearn, The Killearn Diaries, 1934–1946: The Diplomatic and Personal Record of Lord Killearn (London: Sidwick and Jackson, 1972); and M. E. Yapp, ed. Politics and Diplomacy in Egypt: The Diaries of Sir Miles Lampson, 1935–1937 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 29. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 1022,” Cairo (April 19, 1941), British National Archives (hereafter NA), FO 371/27430 Egyptian, 1941 Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 1061.

280

Notes to Pages 64– 72

30. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 1115,” Cairo (April 26, 1941), NA, FO 371/27430, Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 1158. 31. Lampson to Anthony Eden, “No. 388,” British Embassy Cairo (April 29, 1941), NA, FO 371/ 27430, Egypt and Sudan File “No. 18,” J 1509, 130, 134. 32. Ibid., 135. 33. Ibid., 136. 34. Ibid., 137. 35. Lampson to Eden, “No. 1468,” British Embassy Cairo (May 22, 1941), NA, FO371/27430, Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 1509, 130150. 36. Foreign Ofﬁce to Cairo, “No. 1711” (May 25, 1941), J1586/18/16, 156. 37. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 1526, Weekly Appreciation,” Cairo (May 26, 1941), NA, FO 371/27431, 1941, Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 1655, 12. 38. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 1532, Important,” Cairo (May 26, 1941), NA, FO 371/27431, J1646. 39. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 1848, Weekly Information,” Cairo ( June 14, 1941), NA, FO 371/27431, J1886, 67. 40. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 2884,” Cairo (September 15, 1941), NA, FO 371/27432, 18, J2949, 60. 41. Lampson to Anthony Eden, “No. 900,” Cairo (September 23, 1941), NA, FO 371/27433, 1941 Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 3265, 77–83. 42. Ibid., 82. 43. Ibid., 82. 44. Weizsäcker,“The State Secretary to the Legation in Iran,” Berlin ( June 1, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 959– 60. 45. Woermann, “Memorandum by the Director of the Political Department,” Berlin ( June 6, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 12, 972–73. 46. Rudolf Rahn, Nachlass im PAAA, Berlin. 47. Rudolf Rahn, “Report on the German Mission in Syria from May 9 to July 11, 1941,” Westfalen ( July 30, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, The War Years, June 23–December 11, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1964), 250– 51. 48. Alexander Kirk, to Department of State from Cairo Legation (September 13, 1941), No. 1361, 1– 3, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941–47, 1941, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4. 49. Kirk, “Subject: 2. Political Reporting,” Cairo (March 1, 1944), NACP RG 84, General Records, 1936–55, 1944: 124.6–124.7, entry 2410 box 104, 9. 50. Ibid., 9–12, 51. Anne H. Fuller, “Memoranda on Broadcasting to the Near East,” NACP RG 208, Records of the Ofﬁce of War Information, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941– 46, entry 373, box 417. 52. Anne H. Fuller, “General Argument Used in German Propaganda to the Near East” (September 29, 1941), NACP RG 208, Records of the Ofﬁce of War Information, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941–46, entry 373, box 417. Lord Haw-Haw was the nickname for William Joyce, the most prominent of the English-language speakers on Nazi Germany’s radio propaganda aimed at Britain during World War II. 53. Ibid., 2– 3. 54. Ibid., 3. Bahri wrote a memoir of his years in Berlin. See Yunis Bahri, Huna Birlin, hayy alArab (Beirut, 1955). On Lord Haw-Haw, see Martin Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord HawHaw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); and David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002).

Notes to Pages 72 – 76

281

55. Anne H. Fuller, “General Argument Used in German Propaganda to the Near East” (September 29, 1941). 56. Anne H. Fuller, “Strategy of Propaganda to the Near East” (November 3, 1941), NACP RG 208, Records of the Ofﬁce of War Information, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941–1946, entry 373, box 418, 1– 4. 57. Anne H. Fuller, “Anti-American Propaganda in the Near East” (October 25, 1941), NACP RG 208, Records of the Ofﬁce of War Information, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941–1946, entry 373, box 418, 1– 5. 58. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1361 (September 13, 1941), 1, 2. 59. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1483 (September 27, 1941), 1–2, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941–47, 1941, 820.02–830, entry 2412, box 4. 60. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1523 (October 6, 1941), NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941–47, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4. 61. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1570 (October 13, 1941), 1–3, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941– 47, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4. 62. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1623, Cairo (October 21, 1941), 1–2, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941–47, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4. 63. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1654, Cairo (October 28, 1941), 1–2, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941– 47, 1941, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4. On the Soviet regime and religion during World War II, see Steven Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 64. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1689, Cairo (November 4, 1941), 1–2, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941– 47, 1941, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4. 65. [Otto Graf von] Bismarck,“No. 399, The Chargé d’Affaires in Italy to the Foreign Ministry,” Rome (October 13, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, The War Years, June 23–December 11, 1941, 641–42. 66. [Hans Georg von] Mackensen,“No. 449, The Ambassador in Italy to the Foreign Ministry,” Rome (November 5, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 742– 43. 67. Grobba, “No. 452, Memorandum by Minister Grobba,” Berlin (November 6, 1941) DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 746–49. 68. Ribbentrop, “No. 468, Memorandum by the Foreign Minister,” Westfalen (November 13, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 775. 69. Ibid., 76–777. 70. Memorandum by an ofﬁcial of the Foreign Ministry’s Secretariat, “No. 514, Record of the Conversation of the Grand Mufti with the Foreign Minister in Berlin on November 28, 1941,” Westfalen (November 28, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 876– 81. Rashid Ali Kilani met with Ribbentrop on December 17, 1941. See Woermann, “No. 536, Memorandum by the Director of the Political Department,” Berlin (December 2, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 940– 41; and “26; and Aufzeichnung des Gesandten Grobba,” Berlin (December 17, 1941), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, Bd. 1, 12 Dezember 1941 bis 28 Februar 1942 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1969), 42– 48. 71. Memorandum by an ofﬁcial of the Foreign Ministry’s Secretariat, “No. 514, Record of the Conversation of the Grand Mufti with the Foreign Minister in Berlin on November 28, 1941,” Westfalen (November 28, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 876. 72. Ibid., 879. 73. Ibid., 880. 74. “No. 515, Memorandum by an Ofﬁcial of the Foreign Minister’s Secretariat, Record of the

282

Notes to Pages 77–86

Conversation between the Führer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on November 28, 1941, in the Presence of Reich Foreign Minister and Minister Grobba in Berlin,” Berlin (November 30, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 881–85. Also see Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, 218 –21. 75. “No. 515” (November 30, 1941), DGFP, Series D (1937–1945), vol. 13, 881– 82. 76. Ibid., 882–83. 77. Ibid., 881–82. 78. On Holocaust decision making and public pronouncements in summer and fall 1941, see Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska; and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), and Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); and Herf, Jewish Enemy. For argument and evidence that Hitler had already taken such a decision by spring 1941, see Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 79. “Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath,” PAAA, Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung, Personalia, Januar–Dezember 1942, R9011/48092, E309617; and NACP RG242, Records of the German Foreign Ofﬁce, T120, rolls 2337, 2338, for personal ﬁles of German diplomats in the Nazi regime. Also see Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schatten der “Endlösung” (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1987), 75–76. 80. “Hans Alexander Winkler,” PAAA R9011/48092, E310439–104444. Also see Horst Junginger,“Ein Kapitel Religionswissenschaft während der NS-Zeit: Hans Alexander Winkler, 1900–1945,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 3 (1993): 137–61; his The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2008); and his Von der philologischen zur völkischen Religionswissenschaft: Das Fach Religionswissenschaft an der Universitt Tübingen von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999), 99–113. 81. Hans Alexander Winkler and Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von Neurath, “Krieg und Hungersnot,” in Neurath to AA, “Vorschläge fuer arabische Flugblätter,” Verbindungsman mit der Panzergruppe Afrika (VAA Panzergruppe Afrika) (November 17, 1941), PAAA R60747, G. R. v. Neurath, Propagandaofﬁziere, 1941– 42, Bde. 1–2. 82. Ibid. 83. Winkler and Neurath, “II,” Neurath to AA, “Vorschläge fuer arabische Flugblättter” (November 17, 1941), PAAA R60747. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Winkler and Neurath, “Die Zukunft von Ägyptischen Wirtschaft,” Neurath to AA, in “Vorschläge fuer arabische Flugblätter” (November 17, 1941), PAAA R60747. 87. OWI, Overseas Operations Branch, Washington, D.C., “Weekly Propaganda Directive, Palestine” (November 14, 1942), NACP RG 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staff, Military Intelligence Division (MID), Regional File, 1922– 44, Palestine, entry 77, box 2719, folder 2930. 88. Ibid. 89. Shlomo Aronson, Hitler, the Allies and the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 90. Coordinator of Information, “Axis Propaganda in the Moslem World” (December 23, 1941), NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922– 44, Turkey, entry 77, box 3061, 1, 2. 91. Ibid., 3. 92. On anti-Semitism in the American military, see Joseph Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: AntiSemitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 93. Coordinator of Information, “Axis Propaganda in the Moslem World,” 4, 6. 94. Kirk to Secretary of State, Telegram 112, Cairo (January 20, 1942), NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept.

Notes to Pages 87– 93

283

of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 – 44, 740.0011/European War 1939, microcopy no. M982, roll 96, 18735, 2. 95. Alexander Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1935, Cairo (December 24, 1941), 1–3, NACP RG 84, Cairo Legation and Embassy, Secret and Conﬁdential General Records, 1939, 1941– 47, 820.02– 830, entry 2412, box 4.

Chapter 5.“Kill the Jews before They Kill You” 11. See Judith Tydnor Baumel, “Extermination Camps,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., Judith Tydnor Baumel, assoc. ed., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 174–79; and Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 139– 40. 12. The following draws on Haim Saadoun, “North Africa,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., Judith Tydor Baumel, assoc. ed., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 444– 46. 13. Ibid. Also see Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs, 2006). 14. [Fritz] Grobba, “Aufzeichnung des Gesandten Grobba,” Berlin ( January 16, 1942), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, Bd. 1, 12 Dezember 1941 bis 28 Februar 1942, 239– 42. 15. Grobba, “Aufzeichnung des Gesandten Grobba,” Berlin ( January 27, 1942), ADAP, 1918– 1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, Bd. 1, 12, 310–11. 16. On the role of the German Foreign Ministry in formulating Nazi propaganda, see Peter Longerich, Propagandisten im Krieg: die Presseabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes unter Ribbentrop (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1987). 17. On [Erwin] Ettel, see “Ettel, Erwin,” in Johannes Hürter, Martin Kröger, Rolf Messerschmidt, and Christiane Scheidemann, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871–1945, Bd. 1, A—F (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2000), 530; Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schtten der Endlösung (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1987), 168. On his work with Husseini, see Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007; rev. 1988). 18. Erwin Ettel,“Aufzeichnung” Berlin (June 26, 1942), PAAA R27324, Grossmufti, 1941–43, Ettel, 304324– 304328. 19. Ernst Woermann,“Standardthesen für Propaganda,”to German Embassy in Ankara, Berlin (February 7, 1942); and “Abschrift zu Pol XI 52, Zusammenfassung der von Herrn RAM angeordneten Standardthesen für die deutsche Auslandspropaganda,” PAAA Botschaft Ankara, Presse und Propaganda, 5167H, 6.7.1940 –1.8.1942. 10. Woermann, “Telegramm an Rom,” Berlin (February 12, 1942), PAAA Botschaft Rom, Bd. 160, E260586. 11. Woermann, “Thesen für Amerika Propaganda,” Berlin (March 24, 1942), PAAA Botschaft Ankara, Presse und Propaganda, 5167H, 6.7.1940 –1.8.1942. 12. “Nr. 23b, Amerikapropaganda: Thesen zur ausschließlichen Verwendung außerhalb der Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika,” Berlin (March 24, 1942), PAAA Ankara Botschaft, Presse und Propaganda, 5167H, 6.7.1940 –1.8.1942. 13. Ibid. 14. See Herf, Jewish Enemy. 15. Miles Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “Growth of Anti-Semitism in Egypt,” Cairo ( January 8, 1942), NA, FO 371/31576, Egypt and Sudan File No. 42, J 322. 16. On the British Foreign Ofﬁce during the Holocaust, see Bernard Wasserstein’s Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979; 2nd ed. New York: Leicester University Press, 1999).

284

Notes to Pages 93–101

17. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce: Growth of Anti-Semitism in Egypt,” Cairo ( January 8, 1942). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. On the relations between Farouk and the Nazis, see the documentary collection by the Nation Associates, The Record of Collaboration of King Farouk of Egypt with the Nazis and Their Ally, The Mufti (New York: Nation Associates, 1948). 21. For an account by Lampson (later Lord Killearn), see Miles Lampson, Politics and Diplomacy in Egypt: The Diaries of Sir Miles Lampson, 1935–1937, ed. M. E. Yapp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 22. Lampson to Mr. [Anthony] Eden, “No. 156, General Review of Political Developments in Egypt . . . 1941,” Cairo (February 12, 1942), NA, FO 371/31569, Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 1111/38/ 16, 34, 35, 36. 23. Hans Georg von Mackensen to AA, Rome (April 9, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163; [Hans Ulrich] Granow to Mackenson,“Auf Drahterlass vom 9 April,” Berlin (April 11, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163. 24. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce,“No. 43,” Cairo (February 24, 1942), NA, FO 371/31569, 18, J1107, 28. 25. Lampson to Eden (received March 10, 1942), “No. 156,” 38–39. Also see Lampson, “No. 795, Cairo to Foreign Ofﬁce” (March 12, 1942), NA, FO 371/31569, J1190, 84. 26. Lampson to Foreign Ofﬁce, “No. 815, Weekly Appreciation” (March 14, 1942), NA, FO 371/ 31569, J1239, 105; Lampson, “No. 876,” Cairo (March 22, 1942), NA, FO 371/31569, J1343, 116. 27. Lampson to Eden, “No. 19, Revised . . . List of Personalities in Egypt,” Cairo ( January 5, 1943, received February 3, 1943), NA, FO 371/35528, J546/2/16, 33–34. 28. Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) to Oberkommando der Panzerarmee Afrika (Rommel), Abt. Ic (April 8, 1942), PAAA R60747, Kult Pol, G. R. v Neurath, Propagandaofﬁziere, 1941– 42, Bde. 1–2. 29. Braunstumm to Rome Embassy, “Verhaftung Ali Maher Paschas,” Berlin (April 9, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163. On Ali Maher’s ties to the “green shirts movement,” that is, to Young Egypt, see Hans Georg von Mackensen to AA, Rome (April 9, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163. 30. Kirk to Secretary of State, Cairo (February 16, 1942),“Concern of the United States regarding effect of Axis military advance into Egypt; plans for evacuation of American diplomatic and consular personnel from Egypt,” Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Diplomatic Papers 1942, vol. 4, The Near East and Africa (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1962), 71–73. 31. Ibid., 73 32. Alexander Kirk to Secretary of State, Telegram 340, “General Summary of Tendencies in Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” Cairo (April 18, 1942), 1–2, NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 –44, 740.0011/European War 1939, Microﬁlm Records M982, roll 114, 21414. 33. Ibid., 2– 3. 34. See Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe. 35. Kirk to Secretary of State, Telegram 340, “General Summary of Tendencies in Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” Cairo (April 18, 1942), NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 – 44, 740.0011/European War 1939, Microﬁlm Records M982, roll 114, doc. P. 21414; text pp. 8–9. On Soviet policy toward Muslims, see Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001). 36. Kirk to Secretary of State, Telegram 340, “General Summary of Tendencies in Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” Cairo (April 18, 1942), NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 – 44, 740.0011/European War 1939, Microﬁlm Records M982, roll 114, doc. P. 21414; text pp. 9–10. 37. Ibid., 10–11. 38. Ibid., 11–13. 39. Ibid., 13–14.

Notes to Pages 101 – 8

285

40. Ibid., 16. 41. Herf, Jewish Enemy. 42. Kirk to Secretary of State, Telegram 340, “General Summary of Tendencies in Axis Broadcasts in Arabic,” Cairo (April 18, 1942), 15. 43. From Germany in Arabic, April 10, 7:30 p.m., “The British, the Jews and the Communists Are the Common Enemies of the Arabs,” Enclosure No. 1 in Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 339, Broadcasts in Arabic for the Period April 10–April 16, inclusive, Cairo (April 18, 1942), NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 –44, 740.0011/European War 1939, microcopy no. M982, roll 114, 21407. 44. Germany in Arabic, April 12, 7:30 p.m, “Bolshevik Threat,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 339 (April 18, 1942), 6. 45. Italy in Arabic, April 12, 8:00 p.m.,“The Arabs Are One Front with One Leader,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 339 (April 18, 1942), 13–14. 46. VFA, April 29, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “The Mufti,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic, Cairo (May 5, 1942), NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940– 44, 740.0011/European War 1939, microcopy no. M982, roll 116, 21731, text p. 20. The German title was Stimme des freien Arabiens. Though the Americans in Cairo translated it as “The Voice of Free Arabism,” it can also be rendered as “The Voice of Free Arabia.” See Werner Schwipps, Wortschlacht im Äther: Der Deutsche Auslandsrunkfunk im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Haude and Spenersche, 1971), 24. 47. Germany in Arabic, April 14, 7:30 p.m., “Egypt and Bolshevism,” in Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 339 (April 18, 1942), 16. 48. VFA, April 14, 8:15 p.m., “Britain and the Jews,” in Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 339 (April 18, 1942), 20. 49. VFA, April 25, 1942, 9:15 p.m.,“Britain and the Arab Volunteers,”“Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 7–8. 50. Germany in Arabic, April 24, 7:30 p.m., “Arab Unity,” Kirk to Secretary of State, Enclosure No. 1, No. 366. (May 5, 1942), 1–2. 51. Athens in Arabic, April 25, 8:00 p.m., “Jews in America,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 6. 52. Arab Nation, April 25, 9:00 p.m., “Japan and the U.S.,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 6 –7. 53. Athens in Arabic, May 27, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Roosevelt and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 405, Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 22 to May 28, 1942, Cairo (May 30, 1942), 12. 54. VFA, April 27, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 15. 55. The Arab Nation, April 29, 1942, 9:00 p.m., “Roosevelt’s Speech,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 18–19. 56. VFA, April 29, 1942, 8:15 p.m.,“The Interview between Nahas and Kirk,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 20. 57. From Athens in Arabic, April 30, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Churchill and Roosevelt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1952), 22. 58. VFA, April 30, 1942, 9:15 p.m.,“Makram Ebeid and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 366 (May 5, 1942), 22–23. 59. VFA, 8:00, p.m., J. E. Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 367, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 1 to May 7, 1942, Cairo (May 9, 1942), 9. 60. VFA, May 12, 1942, 8:15 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 384, Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 8 to May 14, 1942, Cairo (May 12, 1942), 14, NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 –44, 740.0011/European War 1939, microcopy no. M982, roll 118, 22047. 61. Athens in Arabic, May 10, 1942, 8:00 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 384 (May 12, 1942), 7. 62. VFA, May 10, 1942, 8:15 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 384 (May 12, 1942), 8– 9.

286

Notes to Pages 109–15

63. Bari in Arabic, June 1, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Islam and Anglo-Saxon Democracy,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 422, Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 29 to June 4, 1942, Cairo ( June 8, 1942), 9–10, NACP RG 59, U.S. Dept. of State, Central Decimal File, 1940 – 44, 740.0011/European War 1939, microcopy no. M982, roll 120, 22412. 64. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, Die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 84. 65. Adolf Hitler, “Führerweisung, Weisung Nr. 30, Mittlerer Orient” (May 23, 1941), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie D: 1937–1941, Bd. 12, 2, Die Kriegsjahre, Fünfter Band, Zweiter Halbband, 6 April bis 22 Juni 1941 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1969), 718. 66. Grobba, “253, Aufzeichnung des Gesandten Grobba,” Berlin (May 30, 1942), ADAP, 1918– 1945, Serie E: 1941–1945, Bd. 1, 1 März bis 15 Juni 1942, 434– 36. 67. Woermann to German Embassy in Rome, “Nr. 2263, Reichsaussenminister . . . ” Berlin (June 1, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163 68. VFA, June 13, 1942, 8:15 p.m.,“Libya,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 476, Axis Broadcasts for Period June 11–18, 1942, Cairo (July 4, 1942), 4– 5, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, box 77; and VFA, June 13, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “Jewish Propaganda,” Kirk, No. 476 (July 4, 1942), 6. 69. VFA, June 15, 1942, 8:15 p.m.,“The Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 476 (July 4, 1942), 9– 10. 70. Berlin in Arabic, June 16, 1942, 7:30 p.m.,“The Grand Mufti,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 476 (July 4, 1942), 14–16. 71. VFA, June 18, 1942, 9:15 p.m., “The British Defeat in Libya,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 476 (July 4, 1942), 18. 72. VFA, June 19, 1942, 9:15 p.m., “Jews in Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 479 (July 6, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 19 to 25, 1942, 5, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 1942: 815.4–820.02, box 77. 73. VFA, June 23, 1942, 7:45 p.m., “Egypt Today,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 479 (July 6, 1942), 12–14. 74. From Berlin in Arabic, June 24, 1942, 7:30 p.m., “Rommel, the Hero,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 479 (July 6, 1942), 14. 75. VFA, June 25, 1942, 9:15 p.m., “Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 479 (July 6, 1942), 18– 19. 76. The Arab Nation, June 26, 1942, 9:00 p.m., “The Jews in Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 492 (July 13, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 26 to July 2, 1942, 2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, entry 2410, 1942: 815.4–820.02, box 77. 77. VFA, June 28, 1942, 9:15 p.m., Untitled, Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 492 (July 13, 1942), 7. 78. VFA, June 29, 1942, 9:15 p.m., “The British and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 492 (July 13, 1942), 11. 79. Bari in Arabic, June 30, 1942, 8:00 p.m.,“Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 492 (July 13, 1942), 13. 80. VFA, “Egypt and the British,” June 30, 1942, 8:15 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 492 (July 13, 1942), 14. 81. On the assessment of German intelligence agencies, see Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 41– 57. 82. Ernst von Weizsäcker to von Neurath, Afrikakorps, Berlin “Pol VIII 6444g” (June 25, 1942), 4 pages, PAAA R60748, Kult Pol, Propagandaofﬁziere G. R. v. Neurath, 1942– 43, Bd. 2. 83. “Auswärtiges Amt, Inf. 7374,” to German Embassy in Rome, Berlin (May 21, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 161. Unfortunately, “Islam und die Juden” (Islam and the Jews) did not survive in the archives though its themes are evident in some of Husseini’s radio broadcasts. 84. “Der Bolschewismsus, die Pest der Menscheit,” in “Auswärtiges Amt, Inf. 7374” (May 21, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 161.

Notes to Pages 116– 22

287

85. “Die Geschichte des Könige George und seiner Minister,” in “Auswärtiges Amt, Inf. 7374” (May 21, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 161. 86. Kapp, “Ref. Inf. II d,” Berlin (June 26, 1942), PAAA R60748. 87. Wuster to Neurath, “Flugblätter für Agypten” (June 25, 1942), PAAA R60748. 88. Wuster to Neurath, “Nr. 60, Im Anschluß an Drahterlaß v. 25.8,” Berlin ( June 29, 1942), PAAA R60748. 89. Wuster to Neurath,“Im Anschluß an Drahterlaß Nr. 61 vom 30.6.42,” Berlin ( July 15, 1942), PAAA R60748. 90. “Entwurf zu einem ägyptischen Flugblatt Rommel, der Löwe des Sandes,” Berlin ( June 10, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163 91. Mackensen to AA, Berlin, “Nr. 2404,” German Embassy in Rome ( June 30, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163; and Mackensen,“Nr. 2439,” German Embassy in Rome ( July 1, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163. 92. Mackensen, “Nr. 2439.” 93. Hans Alexander Winkler to Informationsabteilung, AA, Berlin (April 3, 1942) Panzerarmee Afrika, “Flugblättentwürfe zur Ägyptenpropaganda,” PAAA R60770, Kult Pol, Winkler, Panzerarmee Afrika, 1942– 43, Bd. 1. 94. Neurath to AA, Ref. Inf., “Flugblattenentwurfe zur Ägyptenpropaganda,” VAA Panzerarmee Afrika (received May 22, 1942, in Berlin), PAAA R60650, Kult Pol, Inf. Deutsche Flugblätter, 1939– 43, Bd. 2. 95. Gerhard Rühle (1909–75) joined the Nazi university student organization in 1929 and the Nazi Party in 1930. He studied journalism at the University of Heidelberg and received a doctorate in 1934. In 1935 he took a position in the press ofﬁce of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He pursued an academic career as well and became a professor of political science at the University of Konigsberg in 1938. From 1939 to 1942 he had a staff position in the SS Reichsichherheitshauptamt. In 1940 he became a professor of international affairs (Auslandswissenschaften) at the University of Berlin. In 1941 and 1942 he was a commander of Einsatzgruppe. In 1948 he was convicted of war crimes in the Einsatzgruppen trial and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He served four years of the sentence and was released in 1952. See Hans-Jürgen Döscher, Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich: Diplomatie im Schatten der ‘Endlösung’ (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1987); and Berlin Document Center, SS-Peronal Akete; Fall 9, Das Urtel im SS Einsatzgruppenprozess, Berlin 1963, 159– 64. 196. Josiah von Rantzau to Winkler, Berlin (July 21, 1942), PAAA R60770. 197. Winkler to Rantzau, Vienna (August 3, 1942), PAAA R60770. 198. Winkler, “Durchschlag für Auswärtiges Amt: Flugblatt zur Sabotageverhinderung in Ägypten,” Panzerarmee Afrika (May 10, 1942), PAAA R60650. 199. Winkler, “Flugblätten entwurfe zur Ägyptenpropaganda,” Panzerarmee Afrika (April 14, 1942), 1– 6, PAAA R60650. 100. Winkler, “Flugblätten entwurfe zur Ägyptenpropaganda,” Panzerarmee Afrika (April 8, 1942), PAAA R60650. 101. Kapp, AA Informations-Abteilung to the German Embassy in Rome, “Abschrift, Inf. Nr. 5075” Berlin (May 14, 1942), Gerhard Hopp Collection, “Arabische Begnungen mit dem Nationalsozialismus,” 13, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. 102. “Die Oase: Feldzeitung der Deutschen Truppen in Afrika,” Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv (BA-MA), Amstdrucksachen , RHD 54/3. 103. “Afrika als Rohstoff-Resevoir: Der Siege der Achsenmächte wird eine Generalrevision bringen,” Die Oase (16 April 1941), 17, BA-MA, Amstdrucksachen, RHD 54/3, 104. “Die Mohammedaner und ihre Lehre: 200 Millionen Menschen bekennen sich heute zum Islam,” Die Oase (July 6, 1941), 7, BA-MA, Amstdrucksachen, RHD 54/3. 105. Ibid. 106. Joachim von Ribbentrop, “Nr. 2722 vom 2.7,” Berlin ( July 3, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163; Mackensen to AA; “Nr. 2502,” German Embassy in Rome (July 4, 1942), PAAA, Rom, Bd. 163.

288

Notes to Pages 122– 29

107. See Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 350–52. 108. VFA, July 1, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “The Middle East Is Preparing to Rise,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 492 (July 13, 1942), 16–17. 109. Berlin in Arabic, July 3, 1942, 7:30 p.m.,“Egypt: Ofﬁcial Declaration,” Kirk to Secreatary of State, No. 502, Cairo ( July 21, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 3 to 9, 1942, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 1942, 815.4–820.02, box 77. 110. Ibid., 1–2. 111. Berlin in Arabic, July 3,1 942, 7:30 p.m., “Second Declaration,” Kirk, No. 502, 1–2; and same text in “Statement by El Hag (Haj) Amin El Husseini in respect of Egypt,” in Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 497 (July 17, 1942), “Enclosure No. 1,” 1–2, NACP RG 84, Cairo Embassy, General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, box 77. 112. Free Voice of Egypt, July 3, 1942, 7:45 p.m., “Ofﬁcial Declaration by German and Italian Governments,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 502 (July 21, 1942), 2– 3. 113. Bari in Arabic, July 5, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Appeal to the Egyptians,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 502 (July 21, 1942), 7– 8. A similar message of liberation of the Middle East was broadcast on Ankara in Arabic, July 5, 1942, 6:30 p.m., “North Africa,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 502 (July 21, 1942), 8– 9. 114. Berlin in Arabic, July 6, 1942, 7:30 p.m., “A Declaration by Rashid Aly,” Kirk, No. 502, 9–10. 115. Bari in Arabic, July 6, 1942, 8:00 p.m.,“The Hour of Action Has Come,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 502 (July 21, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 3 to 9, 1942, 10 –11. 116. VFA, July 7, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “Kill the Jews before They Kill You,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 502 (July 21, 1942), 13–14. 117. The Arab Nation, July 10, 1942, 9:00 p.m., “Palestine,” in Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 514 Cairo ( July 27, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 10 to 16, 1942, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, box 77. 118. Berlin Radio in Arabic,“Joint German-Italian Declaration in Respect of Egypt” (broadcast July 3, 1942), Kirk, No. 497, July 17, 1942, 2– 3; The Voice of Free Egypt, Untitled, July 11, 1942, 7:45 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 514, Cairo (July 27, 1942), 4; and Bari in Arabic, July 17, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Note,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 529, August 4, 1942, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 17 to 23, 1942, Cairo, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 1942, 815.4– 820.02, box 77. 119. Weinberg, World at Arms, 351. 120. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 497 (July 27, 1942), “Joint German-Italian Declaration in Respect of Egypt.” 121. Grobba,“Juden sind die Drahtzieher der Amerikaner,”Berlin ( July 2, 1942), PAAA R60690, Kult Pol, Orient. Juden um Roosevelt, 1941–42, Bd. 1. 122. On the Nazi attack on Roosevelt, see Herf, Jewish Enemy. 123. Berlin in Arabic, July 18, 1942, 7:30 p.m., “Roosevelt and Weizmann Hold a Meeting,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 529 (August 4, 1942), 4. 124. The Arab Nation, July 20, 1942, “U.S.A. and Jews versus Arabs,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 529 (August 4, 1942), 9. 125. Berlin in Arabic, July 29, 1942, 7:30 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 537 (August 8, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 24 to 30, 1942, 14, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, box 77. 126. Bari in Arabic, August 4, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Russia,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 547 (August 16, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 31 to August 6, 1942, 14, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, box 77. 127. Berlin in Arabic, August 5, 1942, 7:30 p.m.,“The Axis and the Moslems,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 547, 16.

Notes to Pages 129– 36

289

128. Bari in Arabic, August 10, 1942, 8:00 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 559 (August 21, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . August 7 to 13, 1942, 9, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, box 77. 129. VFA, July 29, 1942, 9:15 p.m., “The B.B.C.,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 537 (August 8, 1942), 16–17. 130. VFA, August 6, 1942, 7:30 p.m.,“Britain and Islam,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 547 (August 16, 1942), 22. 131. “The Atlantic Charter,” on the Web site of the Avalon Project of Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/atlantic.htm. 132. VFA, August 15, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “Atlantic Charter,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 574, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . August 14 to 20, 1942, Cairo (August 27, 1942), 8, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936–55, 1942, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, box 77. 133. Wuster to Neurath,“Im Anschluß an Drahterlaß Nr. 61 vom 30.6.42,” Berlin ( July 15, 1942), PAAA R60748. 134. Generalkonsul Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 135. Kapp to Neurath, Afrikakorps, “Nr. 61, June 1942,” Berlin ( June 30, 1942), PAAA R60650. 136. “Aufruf an die Arabische Jugend,” in Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 137. “Grenzen des neuen zionistischen Königsreich,” Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 138. “Das Neue Königreich,” Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 139. “Hitler empfängt . . . Kailani . . . “ Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 140. “Ägypten den Ägyptern,” Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 141. “O Ägypten,” Wuster, Informationsabteilung, Berlin (August 12, 1942), PAAA R60650. 142. Bari in Arabic, August 21, 1942, “American Intentions,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 583, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . August 21 to 27, 1942, Cairo (September 1, 1942), 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936–55, 815.4–820.02, 1942, entry 2410 box 77. For a subsequent attack on “the old and sick Roosevelt,” see VFA, September 8, 1942, 8:15 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 604, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 4 to 10, 1942, 7, Cairo (September 14, 1942), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936– 55, 815.4–820.02, 1942, entry 2410, box 77. 143. Ibid. 144. VFA, September 10, 1942, 10:15 p.m., “Mr. Wilkie’s Speech,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 616, Cairo (September 22, 1942) Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 11 to 17, 1942, 20, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 145. “Aufzeichnung ohne Unterschrift: Notiz für den Führer,” Fuschl (September 7, 1942), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie D: 1937–1945, Bd. 3, 16 Juni bis 30 September 1942, 462– 64. 146. Berlin in Arabic, September 16, 1942, 7:30 p.m.“Marginal News,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No, 616, Cairo (September 22, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 11 to 17, 1942, 22, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936– 55, 815.4–820.02, 1942, entry 2410, box 77. 147. “Hull Scores Vichy Action: Vichy Action to be Sharply Condemned,”New York Times (September 3, 1942), 4. 148. Berlin in Arabic, September 16, 1942, 10:30 p.m.,“The Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 616, Cairo (September 22, 1942), 23. 149. VFA, September 30, 1942, 9:15 p.m., “The Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 643, Cairo (October 7, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 25 to 30, 1942, 20–21, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936–55, 815.4–820.02, 1942, entry 2410, box 77.

290

Notes to Pages 136– 44

150. R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Ministry of Information, Overseas Planning Committee, “Plan of Propaganda for Egypt, Appreciation. Paper 126” (August 19, 1942), NA, FO 371/31569, Egypt and Sudan File No. 18, J 3599. On Egyptian views critical of Fascist Italy, see Israel Gershoni, “Egyptian Liberalism in an Age of ‘Crisis of Orientation’: Al-Risala’s Reaction to Fascism and Nazism, 1933 – 39,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 31 (1999): 551–76; and Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s (Fiesole, Italy: European University Institute, 2001). 151. Lockhart, “Plan of Propaganda for Egypt, Appreciation. Paper 127,” n.d., J3599, 5. 152. Ibid., 2. 153. Ibid., 3. 154. See “‘Exekutivemaßnahmen gegenüber der Zivilbevölkerung in eigener Verantwortung’: Das Einstazkommando bei der Panzerarmee Afrika,” in Mallmann and Cuppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 137– 48. 155. Colonel Frederick O. Sharp and Captain Lawrence C. Thaw, Military Intelligence Division W.D.G.S, Report No. 5372, “Attitude of the Moslem World toward the United Nations” (August 15, 1942), NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922– 44, Egypt, entry 77, box 752, folder 3800. 156. Ibid., 2–3. 157. Ibid., 4. 158. Ibid., 4. 159. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 640, “Comment on Axis Broadcasts in Arabic with Particular Reference to Items Concerning Egypt,” 6, Cairo (October 3, 1942), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936– 55, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, 1942, box 77. 160. Ibid., 3. 161. The Arab Nation, September 18, 1942, 6:00 p.m., “Comments on the Rector of El Azhar’s Appeal,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 639, Cairo (October 3, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 18 to 24, 1942, 5, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936– 55, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, entry 2410, box 77. 162. VFA, September 18, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “El Azhar,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 639, Cairo (October 3, 1942), 2. 163. Kilani, like his comrade and rival Husseini, also met with Hitler but did so later, on July 15, 1942. See Ernst Woermann, “Aufzeichnung des Unterstaatssekretärs Woermann,” Berlin ( July 14, 1942), ADAP, 1918–1945, Serie D: 1937–1945, Bd. 3, 16 Juni bis 30 September 1942 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1974), 152–53. 164. Bari in Arabic, September 19, 1942, 8:00 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 639, Cairo (October 3, 1942), 5. 165. On this, see Milan Hauner, The Place of India in Axis Strategy: Germany, Japan, and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981); and T. R. Sareen, Subhas Chandra Bose and Nazi Germany (New Delhi: Mounto Pub. House, 1996). 166. Berlin in Arabic, September 25, 1942, 10:30 p.m., Kirk, No. 643 (October 7, 1942), 1. 167. The Arab Nation, October 13, 1942, 6:30 p.m., “No Cooperation between Arabs and Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 666, Cairo (October 27, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 9 to 15, 1942, 15–16, 21–22, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 1942, 815.4–820.02, box 77. 168. Berlin in Arabic, October 14, 1942, 7:30 p.m.,“America and Imperialism,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 666 (October 27, 1942), 23. 169. Berlin in Arabic, October 19, 1942, 9:30 p.m., “Speech of the Jewish Leader Weizmann,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 671, Cairo (October 31, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 16 to 22, 1942, 9, NACP RG84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936-55, 820.00-822.00, entry 2410, 1943, box 77. 170. VFA, October 19, 1942, 10:15 p.m., “The Jewish Threat,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 671,

Notes to Pages 144–48

291

Cairo (October 31, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 16 to 22, 1942, 10 –11, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, 1943, box 77. 171. VFA, October 20, 1942, 10:15 p.m., “American Greed,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 671 (October 31, 1942), 13–15. 172. VFA, October 22, 1942, 6:00 p.m., “The Americans Are Worse Than the British,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 671 (October 31, 1942), 19–20. 173. Berlin in Arabic, October 2, 1942, 7:30 p.m.,“Rommel,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 660, Cairo (October 21, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 2 to 8, 1942, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records 1936–55, 1942, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, box 77. 174. Weinberg, World at Arms, 361. 175. Ibid., 431– 47. 176. Athens in Arabic, October 27, 1942, “Imperialist and Dollar America,” 8:00 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 692, Cairo (November 11, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 23 to 29, 1942, 18–19, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records 1936– 55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, box 77. 177. Bari in Arabic, October 30, 1942, “Friday Talk: Zionism Welcomes the American Forces,” 8:00 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 699 (November 18, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 30 to November 5, 1942, 3, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, box 77. 178. The Arab Nation, October 30, 1942, 6:00 p.m. “The Twenty-ﬁfth Anniversary of the Balfour Promise,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 699 (November 18, 1942), 14. 179. VFA, October 30, 1942, 8:15 p.m., “Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 699 (November 18, 1942), 14–15. 180. The Arab Nation, November 8, 1942, 6:00 p.m., “New Aggression by the Anglo-Saxons on the Arab Moslem Countries,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 710, Cairo (November 21, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . November 6 to November 12, 1942,” 13–14, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, 1942, box 77. 181. Bari in Arabic, November 11, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Arab Unity against the Anglo-Saxons,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 710 (November 21, 1942), 26 182. Bari in Arabic, November 11, 1942, 11:00 p.m., “The Grand Mufti’s Speech,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 710 (November 21, 1942), 23. 183. Bari in Arabic, November 14, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “The Mufti’s Speech,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 722, Cairo (November 27, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . November 13 to 19, 1942,” 5 – 6, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4–820.02, 1942, box 77. 184. On the intersection of Hitler’s politics, strategy, and propaganda in North Africa, see Norman J. W. Goda, Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path to America (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1998). 185. Berlin in Arabic, November 16, 1942, 8:30 p.m.,“General Eisenhower and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 710, 15. 186. Berlin in Arabic, November 18, 1942,“The Jews and the Arabs of North Africa,”Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 710 (November 21, 1942), 24. 187. VFA, November 21, 1942, 8:15 p.m.,“The Arabs and the War,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 737, Cairo (December 6, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . November 20 to 26, 1942, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936– 55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, box 77. 188. Bari in Arabic, November 25, 1942, 8:00 p.m., “Grand Mufti of Palestine’s Declaration,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 737 (December 6, 1942), 20. 189. Berlin in Arabic, November 26, 1942, 6:30 p.m., “The Grand Mufti,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 737 (December 6, 1942), 23. 190. VFA, November 26, 1942, 6:15 p.m., “Roosevelt and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 737 (December 6, 1942), 24.

292

Notes to Pages 148–54

191. The Arab Nation, November 29, 1942, 6:00 p.m., “North Africa Will Be a Bridge between Two Jewish Capitals, Jerusalem and New York,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 751, Cairo (December 11, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . November 27 to December 3, 9, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, box 77. 192. VFA, December 11, 1942,“Roosevelt and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 773, Cairo (December 11, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . to December 11 to 17, 1942, 4, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, box 77. 193. VFA, December 12, 1942, “Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 773 (December 11, 1942), 8. 194. “Allies Condemn Nazi War Crimes on Jews, United Nations Issue [sic] Joint Declaration of Protest on ‘Cold-Blooded Extermination,’” New York Times, December 19, 1942, 1. 195. VFA, December 17, 1942, “The Jews Give Orders and the Allies Obey,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 773 (December 11, 1942), 8. 196. OWI, Overseas Operations Branch, Washington, D.C., “Weekly Propaganda Directive, Palestine” (November 14, 1942), NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922– 44, Palestine, entry 77, box 2719, folder 2930. 197. Berlin in Arabic, 7:30 p.m. (October 23, 1942),“Enclosure No. 1 to Despatch No. 692 of November 11, 1942 from the American Legation at Cairo, Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 692 (November 11, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 23 to 29, 1942, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936–55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, box 77. 198. Ibid., 2. 199. Ibid., 3. 200. The exchange of letters between Kilani and Gross was broadcast on Berlin in Arabic, October 24, 1942, 7:30 and 8:30 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 692 (October 23, 1942), 2– 3. 201. “Wetzel, Rassenpolitisches Amt an das Auswärtiges Amt, 10 Februar 1942,” PAAA R99175, “Inland Partei Akten, Umgang fremdrassiger Ausländer mit deutschen Mädchen, 1941–1943.” 202. “Völkische Lebensfragen: Das Rassenpolitische Amt gibt Auskunft,” Neues Volk: Blatter des Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, vol. 10, no. 5, PAAA R99175, Inland Partei Akten, Umgang fremdrassiger Ausländer mit deutschen Mädchen, 1941– 43. 203. Franz von Papen to AA (June 17, 1942),“Zeitschrift des Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP ‘Neue Volk,’” PAAA R99175. 204. [Franz] Rademacher to [Walter] Gross (May 16, 1942); also on same issue “Ges. Dr. Schwörbel, 30 Juni 1942,” PAAA R99175. Also see “Rademacher, Franz,” in Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich:Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag, 2003), 476. 205. “Dr. Wetzel, Rassenpolitisches Amt An das Auswärtiges Amt, Legationsrat Rademacher” (July 9, 1942), and “Dr. Astel, Rektor derFriedrich Schiller Universität,” Jena ( June 11, 1942), and “An dem Deutsche Studienwerk für Ausländer” (June 15, 1942) PAAA R99175. 206. Fritz Grobba to “D III 4267/42” (July 24, 1942), PAAA R99175. 207. The Arab Nation, December 23, 1942, 6:00 p.m., “The Grand Mufti’s Speech,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 782, Cairo (December 23, 1942), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . December 18 to 31, 1942, 13–15, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy: General Records, 1936– 55, entry 2410, 815.4– 820.02, 1942, box 77. Also see the discussion of the speech in Herf, Jewish Enemy, 179–80. The Koranic verse in question is Sura 5, verse (aya) 82: “You [Prophet] are sure to ﬁnd that the most hostile to the believers are the Jews and those who associate other deities with God,” in The Qur’an, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 75. Also see the selection of translations by Marmaduke William Pickthall, M. H. Shakir, and A. J. Arberry in Andrew G. Bostom, ed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008), 218. 208. “The Grand Mufti’s Speech,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 782, Cairo (December 23, 1942), 13–15, 209. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 155– 62

293

210. Deutsche Gesandschaft Teheran, “Propagandistische Möglichkeiten unter der iranischen Bevölkerung im Hinblick auf die religiosen Erwartungen der Schiiten,” Tehran (February 2, 1941), PAAA R60690, Kult Pol, Orient. Juden um Roosevelt, 1941–42, Bd. 1. 211. Ibid. 212. Hans Alexander Winkler,“Aufzeichnung den ehemaligen Kulturreferenten der Deutschen Gesandschaft in Teheran: Erfahrungen aus der deutschen Propagandaarbeit in Iran vom November 1939 bis September 1941,” Berlin (January 10, 1942), PAAA R60690. 213. Ibid.

Chapter 6.“The Jews Kindled This War in the Interest of Zionism” 111. This account draws on “The Allied Offensive in Africa” in Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 431– 47. 112. Langmann, “Aufzeichnung über die Propaganda nach Nordafrika,” Berlin (February 18, 1943), PAAA R102974 Pol. II, Richtlinien. B) Nordafrika: Propaganda 1943, 1942– 43, 5 –6. These materials included copies of speeches by the Mufti and photos of him speaking in Berlin and inspecting Muslim volunteers ﬁghting alongside the Germans in Europe. 113. AA Kult Pol VII,“Italienisches Propagandamateriel für Nordafrika” (April 15, 1943), PAAA, Rom 142, 481/43. Translation by Andrew Masloski. 114. Ibid. It is not clear if this is material written by the Italians or by the Germans to be sent to the German Embassy in Rome. The anti-Semitic focus suggests Nazi authorship. 115. Langmann, “Aufzeichnung über die Besprechungen betreffend die Koordination der Propaganda nach Nordafrika,” Berlin (March 11, 1943), PAAA R102974, Pol. II, Richtlinien. B) Nordafrika: Propaganda 1943, 1942–43. 116. Preikecher, “Aufzeichnung für die BFP im Stabe des Herrn Reichaussenminister, Herrn Dr. Magerle” (March 16, 1943), NACP RG 242, Records of the German Foreign Ofﬁce (microﬁlm), T120, roll 1015 117. Rudolf Rahn, “Propaganda in Nordafrika,” n.d. and n.p. (probably March 1943), PAAA R102974. Rahn’s career path was typical of the foreign policy elite. After serving a year in the army (1917–18), he studied sociology, political theory, and sociology of religion at the universities in Tübingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he received a doctorate in 1923. He joined the Foreign Ministry in 1928 and the Nazi Party on June 1, 1933. He was familiar with the region, having served in Ankara from 1934 to 1936. In 1940 he worked with the German military command in France and from May to September 1941 was in charge of German propaganda activities there. In 1941 he was appointed to Ribbentrop’s personal staff. From November 15, 1942, until May 10, 1943, during the battle for Tunisia, as German ambassador he coordinated propaganda activities with German and Italian military forces. Following the Axis defeat in spring 1943, he ﬂed to Italy, where he was appointed German ambassador in Rome and then to Italy’s fascist government in the north in 1943. 18. “Summary of the Subversive Situation in Middle East: Analysis of Muftist Propaganda in Egypt: OWI Directive, Overseas Branch, Egypt” (October 19, 1942), Egypt 2930, NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922–44, Egypt, entry 77, box 751, folder 3800. 19. OWI Appreciation, Overseas Branch,“Background Guidance on Egypt” (October 15, 1942), 5–6 Egypt 2930, NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922–44, Egypt, entry 77, box 751, folder 3800. 10. OWI, Overseas Branch, “Basic Directive for Egypt” (January 30, 1943), 2– 5, Egypt 2930, NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922–44, Egypt, entry 77, box 751, folder 3800, 6 –7. 11. In so doing, the OWI ofﬁcials offered another example of the “traps” to which Shlomo Aronson has referred in his Hitler, the Allies and the Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 12. W. A. Aiken to Cloyce Huston,“Concerning Reports on Axis Broadcasts in Arabic from the American Legation in Cairo,” Washington (April 27, 1943), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, 1943, entry 2410, box 93.

294

Notes to Pages 162– 66

13. Berlin in Arabic, January 2, 1943, “Berlin Islamic Institute,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 788, Cairo (January 11, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 1 to 7, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 14. VFA, January 11, 1943, “The Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 804, Cairo ( January 19, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 8 to 14, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 15. Berlin in Arabic, January 13, 1943, 6:30 p.m., “An American Senator and Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 804, Cairo (January 19, 1943), 24. 16. Bari in Arabic, January 13, 1943, 8:00 p.m., “Appeal to the Egyptians,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 804, Cairo (January 19, 1943), 25. 17. The Arab Nation, January 16, 1943, 6:00 p.m., “North Africa,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 817, Cairo (January 26, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 15 to 21, 1943, 6 –7, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 18. “Newspapers, Egypt Political,” and “Egypt: European Language Newspapers,” Cairo (November, 23, 1943), both in NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922– 44, Egypt, entry 77, box 751. 19. Berlin in Arabic, January 20, 1943, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m.,“Speech by Rashid Ali Kilani,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 817, Cairo (January 26, 1943), 20–23. 20. Berlin in Arabic, January 18, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “Roosevelt the Jew,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 817, Cairo (January 26, 1943), 13–14. 21. See Herf, Jewish Enemy, 63–64, 73–74. 22. The Arab Nation, January 30, 1943, 9:00 p.m., “Britain and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 848, Cairo (February 10, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 29 to February 4, 1943, 3 – 4, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 23. On the connection between the two, see Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 24. Athens in Arabic, January 31, 1943, 8:00 p.m., “The Jewish National Home,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 848, Cairo (February 10, 1943), 6. 25. See Joseph Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), esp. chaps. 2 and 9. 26. Gwynn, “Notes on the Situation in Syria and Lebanon for the Week January 1–7, 1943,” George Wadsworth to General F. M. Andrews (Beirut, January 10, 1943), NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, Classiﬁed General Records, 1936–61, 800, entry 2854A, box 8. 27. Gwynn, “Notes on the Situation in Syria and Lebanon for the Week January 8–14, 1943,” George Wadsworth to General F. M. Andrews (Beirut, January 16, 1943), NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, Classiﬁed General Records, 1936–61, 800, entry 2854A, box 8. Ten weekly reports came from Beirut to the G-2 staff in Cairo and were followed by biweekly reports. Wadsworth to Lt. Col. R. W. McClenahan, G-2, Cairo (Beirut, March 13, 1943). On McClenahan’s suspicions about Jews, see Bendersky, Jewish Threat, 146. 28. Cordell Hull to American Legation Beirut, “Circular, February 17, 1943,” NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, Classiﬁed General Records, 1936– 41, 110.2–891 entry 2854A, box 8. 29. (George) Wadsworth, OWI, Beirut to SecState, Washington (February 19, 1943), 2– 3, NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, Classiﬁed General Records, 1936– 41, 110.2–891, entry 2854A, box 8. 30. Charles C. Miller, “Radio,” Beirut (June 2, 1943), NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, Classiﬁed General Records, 1936– 41, 110.2 to–891, entry 2854A, box 8. 31. Wadsworth, Beirut to SecState, Washington (February 19, 1943), 2– 3. 32. George Britt, OWI, Beirut, “Political Notes on the Lebanon and Syria” (February 13, 1943),

Notes to Pages 167– 72

295

1, NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, 1936– 41, Classiﬁed General Records, 110.2–891, entry 2854A, box 8. 33. Ibid., 5. 34. George Britt, “Beirut September to June” (June 1943), 3, 4, NACP RG 84, Lebanon: U.S. Consulate and Legation and Embassy Beirut, 1936– 41, Classiﬁed General Records, 110.2–891, entry 2854A, box 8. 35. Ibid., 7. 36. Berlin in Arabic, February 8, 1943, “An Interview with H.E. the Grand Mufti of Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 869, Cairo (February 20, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . February 5 to 11, 1943, 8–9, NACP RG 84, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, 1943, entry 2410, box 93, 9. 37. The Arab Nation, February 11, 1942, 9:00 p.m., “American Propaganda in Arab Countries,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 869 (February 20, 1943), 17–18. 38. The Arab Nation, February 25, 1943, 9:00 p.m.,“They Say Sweet Words but Have Nothing in Their Hearts but Treachery,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 896, Cairo (March 6, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . February 19 to 25, 1943, 26–27, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. Also see VFA, March 6, 1943, 8:15 p.m., “Roosevelt Insists on Jewish National Home in Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 930, Cairo (April 5, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 5 to 11, 1943, 4, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00 –822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 39. Athens in Arabic, March 6, 1943, 8:00 p.m., “Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 930 (March 20, 1943), 3. 40. The Arab Nation, March 15, 1943, 6:00 p.m., “North Africa,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 944, Cairo (March 25, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 12 to 18, 1943, 8, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 41. Berlin in Arabic, March 19, 1943, 6:30 p.m., “Speech by the Grand Mufti of Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 961, Cairo (April 5, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 19 to 25, 1943, 1–2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 42. AA Kult Pol VII,“Italienisches Propagandamateriel für Nordafrika” (April 15, 1943), PAAA, Rom 142. 43. Langmann, “Aufzeichnung über die Propaganda nach Nordafrika,” 5 – 6, Berlin (February 18, 1943), PAAA R102974. 44. Berlin in Arabic, “Speech by the Grand Mufti of Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 961 (April 5, 1943), 4–5. 45. Broadcasts on similar lines were recorded from Berlin in Arabic, April 26, 1943, 8:30 p.m., “Talk: Look for the Jewish Deeds in Arab Countries,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1018, Cairo (May 12, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 23 to 29, 1943, 5–6, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 46. Arab Nation, April 30, 1943, 9:00 p.m.,“Has the Jewish Danger Passed?” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1047, Cairo (May 15, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 30 to May 6, 1943, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 47. Berlin in Arabic, May 2, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “Speech by Rashid El Kilani,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1047 (May 15, 1943), 6–10. 48. Bari in Arabic, May 6, 1943 8:00 p.m.,“Letters Exchanged between Mussolini and Rashid El Kilani,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1047 (May 15, 1947), 6–10. 49. VFA, May 21, 1943, “British Control,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1071, Cairo ( June 1, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 21 to 27, 1943, 3– 4, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 50. Berlin in Arabic, May 25, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “The Kingdom of Judas,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1071 (June 1, 1943), 13–14.

296

Notes to Pages 172– 78

51. VFA, May 25, 1943,“Tunisia and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1071 (June 1, 1943), 16–17. 52. “Propaganda to the Arabs in North Africa,” Robert D. Murphy (May 7, 1943), NACP RG 84, Morocco, U.S. Consulate Casablanca, Classiﬁed General Records, 1942– 64, entry 2998. 53. Berlin in Arabic, May 22, 1943, 10:30 p.m.,“Islam and National Socialism,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1071 (June 1, 1943), 6. 54. VFA, May 29, 1943, 8:15 p.m., “The Americans,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1095, Cairo (June 10, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 28 to June 3, 1943, 5 – 6, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 55. Berlin in Arabic, May 31, 1943,“The Jewish Heroes Day,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1095 (June 10, 1943), 10. 56. Joachim von Ribbentrop, “Grundsätzliche Weisungen für alle Stellen, die in Auslands-Informations-Dienst tätig sind,” Fuschl (June 19, 1943), 4, PAAA R102974. 57. Berlin in Arabic, June 8, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “The Arab Countries Are a Jewish Colony,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1116, Cairo (June 10, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 4 to 10, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 58. Berlin in Arabic, June 11, 1943, 7:30 p.m.,“American Propaganda,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1118, Cairo (June 24, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 11 to 16, 1943, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 59. The Arab Nation, June 11, 1943, 9:00 p.m.,“A Word to Weizmann,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1118 (June 24, 1943), 3–5. 60. The Arab Nation, June 26, 1943, 9:00 p.m., “The Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1151, Cairo ( July 6, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 24 to 30, 1943, 8– 9, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 61. VFA, June 17, 1943, 8:15 p.m., “Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1143, Cairo ( July 3, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 17 to 23, 1943, 2–3, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 62. The Arab Nation, June 20, 1943, “Weekly Talk: Jewish Preparations for the Future,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1143 (July 3, 1943), 12. For other denunciations of the Jews and the Americans in June 1943, see Berlin in Arabic, June 21, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “America and the Near East,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1143, 15; and Berlin in Arabic, July 4,1943, 7:30 p.m., “Roosevelt’s Designs on the Near East,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1157, Cairo (July 6, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 1 to 7, 1943, 13–14, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. On June 30,VFA again presented bogus statistics about Jewish inﬂuence in America. VFA, June 30, 1943, 9:15 p.m., “The London Jewish Broadcasting Station in Arabic,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1151, Cairo (July 6, 1943), 13–14, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 63. On Christianity and National Socialism, see Susannah Heschel and Robert P. Erickson, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); Robert P. Erickson, Theologians under Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 64. See Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986); and Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1999). 65. Bari in Arabic, June 27, 1943, 8:00 p.m., “The Jews and Their Ravings,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1151 (July 6, 1943), 10 –11. 66. “Subject Matter of Axis Broadcasts to the Middle East through June 1943,” 3, Evaluation Branch, CIG, MID 350.092 Middle East, NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922– 44, Palestine, entry 77, box 2719, folder 2930. 67. The Arab Nation, July 10, 1943, 6:00 p.m., “Saturday Talk about the Jews: Arab Unity Is Our Great Objective, and It Must Remain Intact,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1172, Cairo ( July 6, 1943),

Notes to Pages 178– 83

297

Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 8 to 14, 1943, 7– 8, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 68. Berlin in Arabic, July 11, 1943, 7:30 p.m.,“America Is Trying to Gain Arab Sympathy,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1172 (July 19, 1943), 9–10. 69. VFA, July 15, 1943, 9:15 p.m., “The Arab Countries,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1184, Cairo ( July 24, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 15 to 21, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 70. Berlin in Arabic, July 26, 1943, 10:30 p.m., “The U.S.A. and the Arabs,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1214, Cairo (August 9, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 22 to 28, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 71. Berlin in Arabic, July 30, 1943, 7:30 p.m.,“The Celebration of El Israa in Berlin,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1216, Cairo (August 10, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 29 to August 4, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 72. VFA, August 5, 8:15 p.m., “America Is Trying to Dominate the World,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1258, Cairo (August 20, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . August 5 to 11, 1943, 2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. On August 10, a clandestine, rarely heard station repeated the theme of Jewish control over the United States. See Independent Egypt, August 10, 1943, 9 p.m.,“Talk: The Allies and the War,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1258, Cairo (August 20, 1943); Voice of Free Arabism, September 15, 1943,“Roosevelt and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1313, Cairo (September 23, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 2 to 8, 1943, 7– 8, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 73. VFA, August 11, 1943, 9:15 p.m., “Why Did the Jews Increase Their Activities Recently,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1258 (August 20, 1943), 17–18. 74. Independent Egypt, August 14, 1943, 9:00 p.m., “Talk: The American Mission Is Jewish,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1280, Cairo (September 10, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . August 12 to 18, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 75. Berlin in Arabic, September 8, 1943, “Talk: The Ambitions of the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1313, Cairo (September 23, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 2 to 8, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. On Goebbels “Do You Want Total War?” speech, see Herf, Jewish Enemy, 192– 96. 76. VFA, September 24, 1943, 8:15 p.m., “What Are the Aims of International Zionism,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1325, Cairo (October 5, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 23 to 29, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 77. VFA, September 26, 9:15 p.m., “Jewish Aims in Arab Countries,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1325, Cairo (October 5, 1943), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 23 to 29, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box, 93. 78. For the following, see Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (New York: Hold, 1989), 437–70; and Weinberg, World at Arms, 596–601. 79. Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1325 (October 5, 1943). 80. Berlin in Arabic, October 1, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “Speech by the Mufti of Palestine, Sayed Amin El Husseini, on the Occasion of the Bairam Celebrations at the Berlin Mosque,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1325, Cairo (October 5, 1943), 2–4. 81. Berlin in Arabic, October 2, 1943, 7:30 p.m., “Talk by Rashid Aly Kilani, Ex-Premier of Iraq, on Bairam,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1325, Cairo (October 5, 1943), 4–5, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . September 30 to October 5, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 82. “Anglo-Soviet-American Communique on the Conference in Moscow of the Three For-

298

Notes to Pages 184– 92

eign Secretaries,” FRUS, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, vol. 1. General (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1963), 743–44. Also see Herf, Jewish Enemy, 234– 35. 183. “Annex 10: Declaration on German Atrocities,” FRUS, Diplomatic Papers, 1943, vol. 1, 768 – 69. 184. For excellent and substantial summaries of this extensive scholarship, see Richard Breitman, “American Policy,” and Michael Cohen, “British Policy,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., Judith Tydor Baumel, assoc. ed., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 7–16 and 90–97. 185. VFA, November 3, 1943, 8:15 p.m.,“Palestine between the Bolsheviks and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1410, Cairo (November 19, 1943), 6–7, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . November 3 to 9, 1943, 1–2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 93. 186. VFA, November 5, 1943, 6:30 p.m.,“The Protests of the Moslems of Europe against the Balfour Declaration,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1410, Cairo (November 19, 1943), 3 – 4. 187. Haj Amin el-Husseini, Rede S. Em. [Sein Eminenz] Des Grossmufti anlasslich der Protestkundgebung gegen die Balfour-Erklarung am 2. November 1943 (Berlin: Islamische Zentral-Institut, 1943), PAAA R27327, Grossmufti, 1942–44, 297878–86. 188. Ibid., 297878–79. 189. Ibid., 297880. 190. Ibid., 297880 –82. 191. Ibid., 297883. 192. Ibid., 297885. 193. Ibid., 297886. 194. Berlin in Arabic, November 7, 1943, 6:40 p.m., “Arab Leaders Thank Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs, Herr von Ribbentrop,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1410, Cairo (November 19, 1943), 8–9. 195. Berlin in Arabic, November 17, 1943, 6:30 p.m., “The Arab Cause in a New Guise,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1437, Cairo (December 2, 1943), 1–2. 196. VFA, December 5, 1943, “The Allied Conferences,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1475, Cairo (December 23, 1943), 8–9. 197. Berlin in Arabic, December 8, 1943, “The Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1506, Cairo (January 6, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . December 8 to 13, 1943, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00– 822.00, entry 2410, box 112. 198. Berlin in Arabic, December 9, 1943, “Excerpt from a Speech by the Grand Mufti of Palestine at Berlin on the Occasion of the Qurban Bairam,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1506, Cairo (January 6, 1944), 3–4. 199. Berlin in Arabic, December 22, 1 943, 6:30 p.m., “World Bolshevik Danger,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1517, Cairo (January 10, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . December 22 to 31, 1943, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.00–822.00, entry 2410, box 112. Also see Berlin in Arabic, December 29, 1943, 6:30 p.m.,“Bolshevism in Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1517, Cairo (January 10, 1944), 9. 100. VFA, December 29, 1943, “Bolshevism in the Near East,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1517, Cairo (January 10, 1944), 11. 101. VFA, December 25, 1943, 8:15 p.m., Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1517 (January 10, 1944), 5. 102. VFA, December 28, 1943, 8:15 p.m., “The Moslem New Year,” Kirk to Secretary of State No. 1517 (January 10, 1944), 5. 103. Athens in Arabic, December 29, 1 943, 8:15 p.m.,“The Jews and the Arabs,”Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1517 (January 10, 1944), 5. 104. VFA, December 29, 1943, “The Jews Have Their Religion and the Moslems Have Theirs,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1517 (January 10, 1944), 11.

Notes to Pages 195–200

299

Chapter 7.“The Americans, the British, and the Jews Are All Conspiring against Arab Interests” 111. Berlin in Arabic, January 1, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “Commentary on the Events of 1943,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1525, Cairo (January 14, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 1 to 7, 1944, 1, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, box 112, 1. 112. VFA, January 1, 1944, 8:15 p.m., “The Arab Countries during the Last Year,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1525 (January 14, 1944), 1–2. 113. Berlin in Arabic, January 4, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “‘These Are the Allies,’” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1525 (January 14, 1944), 4–5. 114. Berlin in Arabic, January 7, 1944,“Mufti of Palestine on Pan-Arab Talks,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1525 (January 14, 1944), 10 –11. 115. Berlin in Arabic, January 8, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “Britain the Treacherous,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1546 Cairo ( January 24, 1944), Enclosure No. 1, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 8 to 14, 1944, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records 1936– 55, 820.22– 822, box 112. 116. VFA, January 9, 1944, 8:15 p.m.,“Bolshevik Ambitions,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1546 (January 24, 1944), 3 –5. 117. Berlin in Arabic, January 11, 1944, 8:30 p.m.,“God Forbid Any Compromise,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1546 (January 24, 1944), 10. 118. Berlin in Arabic, January 12, 1944, 9:30 p.m.,“Talk: Forgiveness in Islam,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1546 (January 24, 1944), 12–13. 119. Berlin in Arabic, January 16, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “An Open letter to H. E. Nahas Pasha from an Arab Struggler,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1561 Cairo (January 31, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 15 to 21, 1944, 2– 4, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, box 112. 110. Berlin in Arabic, January 28, 1944, “Arabs and Moslems at War with Jewry,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1581 Cairo (February 6, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 22 to 28, 1944, 8,NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, box 112. 111. Ibid. 112. “An Standartenführer Dr. [Rudi] Brandt, Persönlicher Stab Reichsführer-SS: Hemmungen der antijüdischen Aktion in der deutschen Auslandsorganisation,” Berlin (November 20, 1944), BAB NS19/1497. 113. Heinrich Himmler “An das Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Berlin” (May 14, 1943), BAB (microﬁche) NS19/3544, 29. 114. “Der Reichsführer SS, Persönlicher Stab an den SS-Obergruppenführer Berger,” “Betr.: Koranstellen, die sich auf den Führer beziehen sollen” (September 11, 1943), BAB (microﬁche) NS19/ 3544, 25. See “Gottlobb Berger” and “Rudolf Brandt,” in Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, 41 and 71. 115. Sturmbannhührer v. Kielpinksi, “An den Reichsführer SS: Betr.: Koranstellen, die sich auf den Führer beziehen sollen” (September 13, 1943), BAB (microﬁche) NS19/3544, 23. 16. Der Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, VI C 13 AZ: Forschungstelle Orient, “An den Reichsführer SS, Feldkommandostelle, Betrifft: Koranstellen, die sich auf den Führer beziehen sollen,” BAB (microﬁche) NS19/3544, 13–14. The ofﬁce was staffed by SS Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Beisner and experts “Dr. Rössler” and “Dr. Lorch.” See “Beisner, Wilhelm” in Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, 37. After 1945, Beisner ﬂed to Tunis. 17. On the Bosnian SS Handschar Division, see “Appeals to the Italians and the Germans,” in Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 495– 501; “Muslime für das Dritte Reich: Der islamische Sektor von Wehrmacht, Sicherheitspolizei und Waffen-SS,” in Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wis-

300

Notes to Pages 200–204

senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 221– 36; and also see George Lepre, Himmler’s Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division, 1943 –1945 (Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer Military History, 1997). 18. See Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 497. The term “handschar” derives from the word Handizar (from the Turkish “scimitar”), a Bosnian version of a ﬁghting knife. 19. Heinrich Himmler, “Rede des Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler vor den Führen der 13. SS-Frchw. B.h. Goerings-Division (Kroatien) im Führerheim Westlager, Truppenübungsplatz Neuhammer am 11. January 1944,” BAB NS19/4012, 6–16; also available at NACP RG 242, T175, roll 94, frames 4877– 87, 13. 20. Cited by Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 231– 32. 21. Amin al-Hussainis,“Nr. 104: Rede vor den Imamen der bosnischen SS-Division, 4.10.1944,” in Gerhard Hopp, Mufti-Papiere: Briefe, Memoranden, Reden und Aufrufe Amin al-Husainis aus dem Exil, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2001), 219–22. Also see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 243 – 44. 22. See Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 499– 501; and Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 232–35. Though small in number, some of the Muslims who fought with the Nazis during World War II played a role in establishing radical Islam in post-1945 Europe. On this fascinating and little-known story, see Ian Johnson’s A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (New York: Harcourt, 2009). 23. On the courier network, see “Enemy Courier Systems in Turkey and Syria,” NACP RG 226, Records of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, Cairo SI/X-2, entry 172, box 4. 24. The Forschungsstelle Orient at the University of Tübingen was directed by Walter Lorch. Otto Rössler, Lorch’s most important colleague, was also afﬁliated with Amt VI C of the SS’s Reich Security Main Ofﬁce. On this, see Horst Junginger, Von der philologischen zur völkischen Religionswissenschaft: Das Fach Religionswissenschaft an der Universität Tübingen von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ende des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 242– 43. SS Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Beisner was also a staff member. Rössler had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1932. After completing his doctorate in Berlin in 1937, he came to the university in Tübingen to write his habilitation, which he completed in 1941. There he also worked for the Aryan Institute associated with the SS Ahnenerbe, and for the Reich Security Main Ofﬁce, for the Berlin Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage, and then with Amt VI, the Orient Research Center located at the University of Tübingen. On Amt VI, see Michael Fahlbusch,“Reichssicherheitshauptamt Abteilung VI G (Reichsstiftung fuer Laenderkunde),” in Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar, eds., Handbuch der voelkischen Wissenschaften (Munich: Saur, 2008), 545–55. On German Orientalists in the Nazi era, see Ekkehard Ellinger’s examination of the networks between scholars and various regime ofﬁces in Deutsche Orientlistik zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, 1933–1945 (Edingen-Neckarhausen: deux mondes, 2006). On the war years and connections with the Wehrmacht, intelligence services, the Foreign Ofﬁce, and the SS, see pages 231–76. Also see Ludmila Hanisch, Die Nachfolger der Exegeten: Deutschsprachige Erforschung des Vorderen Orients in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowtiz Verlag, 2003). 25. Zeischka, VI-Promi A, “Druck und Verbreitung von Flugblättern in arabischen Ländern,” Berlin (January 26, 1944), BAB R55/20712. 26. Dr. Schmidt-Dumont, “Druck und Verbreitung von Flugblättern in arabischen Ländern,” Berlin (February 7, 1944), BAB R55/20712, RMVP. 27. Zeischka,“Druck und Verbreitung von Flugblättern in arabischen Ländern,” Berlin (March 17, 1944), BAB R55/20712. 28. Dr. Schmidt-Dumont, “Antijüdische Flugzettel für den arabischen Raum,” Berlin (April 6, 1944), BAB R55/20712. 29. Dr. Schmidt-Dumont, Abteilung Ausland, to Klemm, Abteilung Haushalt, “Mittel für eine Flugblatt-Propaganda in arabischen Raum,” Berlin (June 29, 1944), BAB R55/20712.

Notes to Pages 204–7

301

30. Zeischka, “Druck und Verbreitung von Flugblättern in arabischen Ländern, Anlage 2, Übersetzung aus dem Arabischen,” Berlin (January 26, 1944), BAB R55/20712. The German text read as follows:“And look, truly it is wisdom for the hour”(Koran, XLIII 61).“We are taught that the Dadjdjal, a monster who deceives and cheats human beings will appear at the end of days. This will be a time of hard oppression for the believers. The famous Arabic historian, Abu Djacfar Muhammad b. Dja bfr at-Tabari said that the Dadjdjal was a monster and king of the Jews who will dominate the whole world. Muhammad b. Ismacll Abu c Abdallah al-Djucff al-Bukhari, [said that] the Dadjdjal was fat and curly haired. “Oh Arabs, do you see that the time of the Dadjdjal has arrived. Do you recognize him again, the fat, curly-haired Jew who deceives and dominates the whole world and steals the Arab’s land? Truly, he is a monster and his allies are satanic! We have been taught that the rule of the Dadjdjal will not last. Abdallah b. cUmar al-Baydawi said that God would send his servant to kill the Dadjdjal with his spear and will destroy his palaces. “Oh Arabs, do you recognize God’s servant? He has already appeared in the world, turned his spear against the Dadjdjal and his allies and inﬂicted severe wounds on him. He will kill the Dadjdjal and as it is written, will destroy his palaces and send his allies to hell. “ . . . and see, truly, this is wisdom of the hour.” 31. Zeischka, “Druck und Verbreitung von Flugblättern in arabischen Ländern, Anlage 2, Übersetzung aus dem Arabischen,” Berlin (January 26, 1944), BAB R55/20712. Translation by Andrew Masloski. 32. Zeischka, VI-Promi A, “Propaganda in arabischen Ländern,” Berlin ( January 27, 1944), BAB R55/20712. 33. “Flugblätter in arabischen Sprache,” BAB, R55/20712, 104. Translation by Andrew Masloski. 34. Berlin in Arabic, January 31, 1944, 6:30 p.m.,“Hitler’s Speech,”Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1609, Cairo (February 22, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 29 to February 4, 1944, 5, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, box 112. 35. Berlin in Arabic, February 3, 1944, 8:30 p.m., “Palestine and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1609 (February 22, 1944), 9. 36. Berlin in Arabic, February 4, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “German Press on Jews in Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1609 (February 22, 1944), 12–13. 37. Berlin in Arabic, February 6, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “Rosenberg Speaks on Arabism,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1617, Cairo (February 26, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . February 5 to 11, 1944, 1–3, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55: 1944, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 38. Berlin in Arabic, February 7, 1944, 9:30 p.m., “American Labor Wants to Reward the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1617, Cairo (February 26, 1944), 5. The attack on Britain did not, however, cease. See Berlin in Arabic, February 8, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “The Jews,” No. 1617, 5. 39. VFA, February 14, 1944, “Jews Dominate Anglo-Saxons,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1629, Cairo (March 1, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . February 12 to 18, 1944, 8, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 40. See Fouad Ajami, The Arab Perdicament: Arab Political Thought since 1967 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 1992), and Basam Tibi, Die Verschwörung: Das Trauma arabischer Politik (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1993). 41. VFA, February 12, 1944, 8:15 p.m., “Bolshevism and Islamic Countries,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1629 (March 1, 1944), 1–2. 42. Berlin in Arabic, February 27, 1944, 9:30 p.m., “The Danger of Bolshevism Threatens the Moslem Countries via Egypt,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1642, Cairo (March 7, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . February 26 to March 3, 1944, 1–2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 43. Berlin in Arabic, May 12, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “Agreement between Bolshevism and Zionism,”

302

Notes to Pages 207–15

J. E. Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1858, Cairo (May 20, 44), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 6 to 12, 1944, 11–12, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 44. For this and the subsequent State Department response, see “Palestine: Attitude of the United States toward the Arab-Zionist Controversy Concerning the Future Status of Palestine and the Question of Jewish Immigration into Palestine,” FRUS, Diplomatic Papers 1944, vol. 5, The Near East, South Asia and Africa, The Far East (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1965), 560 – 657. 45. “Ask U.S. Aid Jews in Palestine Entry, Wagner and Taft Offer Senate Resolution Seeking to Abrogate Terms of White Paper,” New York Times (February 1, 1944), 25. 46. “Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Connally)” (February 7, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 563. 47. “Secretary of State (Cordell Hull) to Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Connally)” (February 9, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 563– 64. 48. “The Minister in Iraq (Henderson) to the Secretary of State” (Baghdad, February 14, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 566–74. 49. “Meeting, February 23, 1944,” U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), RG 46, Records of the United States Senate, U.S. Senate, 78th Congress, Committee on Foreign Relations, Committee Minutes (March 2, 1943–August 24, 1944), box 4. 50. “The Assistant Secretary of War (John J. McCloy) to the Assistant Secretary of State (Long)” (Washington, February 26, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 574. 51. “Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of War (McCloy) to the Chief of Staff (George Marshall)” (Washington, February 22, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 574–77. 52. Berlin in Arabic, March 1, 1944, 6:30 p.m.,“Criminal American Senators, by an ‘Arab Struggler,’” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1642 (March 7, 1944), 8. 53. Ibid. 54. Berlin in Arabic, March 3, 1944,“Palestine Revolts against Decision of the Americans,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1642 (March 7, 1944), 15, 16. 55. On the theme of the “English-Jewish alliance” in Nazi propaganda, see Herf, Jewish Enemy, 71–74. 56. On the pogrom and Jews in wartime and postwar Iraq, see Esther Meir Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in an Arab Country (London: Routledge, 2004). 57. Berlin in Arabic, February 27, 1944, “Talk: The British Secret Information Bureau Is the Foundation Stone of the Friendship between the British and the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1642, Cairo (March 7, 1944), 1–2. 58. “Wagner Rebuffs Iraq on Palestine: Senator Tells Parliament Chiefs Congress Will Reach Own Decision on Jews,” New York Times (March 2, 1944), 4. 59. “Marshall Opposes Vote on Palestine, Nye Says General Urged Delay in Senate of Resolution for Jewish Immigration,” New York Times (March 4, 1944), 1. 60. “Roosevelt Backs Palestine Plan as Homeland for Refugee Jews,” New York Times (March 10, 1944), 1. Also see David Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 61. VFA, March 21, 1944,“The U.S. Congress and Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1711, Cairo (March 30, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 18 to 24, 1944, 12–13, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, box 112. 62. “Weekly Review of Foreign Broadcasts, F.C.C [Federal Communications Commission], No. 118, 3/4/44, Near and Middle East,” NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922–44, Palestine, entry 77, box 2719, folder 2930. 63. Berlin in Arabic, March 7, 1944, 6:30 p.m.,“A Speech by the Grand Mufti of Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1642 (March 7, 1944), 7–10. 64. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 215– 20

303

65. Ibid., 7–10, 9, 10. 66. Berlin in Arabic, March 17, 7:30 p.m., “Moslem India and Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1685, Cairo (March 20, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 11 to 17, 1944, 10, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, box 112. 67. Berlin in Arabic, March 18, 1944, 6:30 p.m.,“The Jews Are Armed,”Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1711 (March 30, 1944), 1. 68. See Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New York: Yale University Press, 2008), 28; Ronald Zweig, Britain and Palestine during the Second World War (London: Boydell Press for the Historical Society, 1986). 69. Berlin in Arabic, March 18, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “The Jews Are Armed,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1711 (March 30, 1944), 1, 2. 70. See Berlin in Arabic, March 25, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “Daily Commentary,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1726, Cairo (April 5, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 25 to 31, 1944, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112; Athens in Arabic, March 26, 1944, 7:40 p.m., “Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1726, 2– 3; VFA, March 26, 1944, 9:15 p.m.,“British Politicians Support the Jews,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1726, 3; Berlin in Arabic, April 1, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “The Day of Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1741, Cairo (April 12, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 1 to 7, 1944, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, entry 2410 box 112; Berlin in Arabic, March 12, 1944, 6:30 p.m., “The Jews, U.S.A. and Palestine,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1685, Cairo (March 20, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . March 11 to 17, 1944, 3, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 71. Berlin in Arabic, April 14, 1944, “Daily Commentary,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1755, Cairo (April 17, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 8 to 14, 1944, 11–12, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 72. Berlin in Arabic, April 24, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “Palestine and British Labour Party,” J. E. Jacobs (chargé d’affaires and interim) to Secretary of State, No. 1823, Cairo (May 9, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 22 to 28, 1944, 6–7, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. Attacks on the Labour Party for its support of a Jewish state in Palestine and claims that it was dominated by Jews and was hostile to Arabs were repeated in other broadcasts that spring. See Berlin in Arabic, June 13, 1944, 10:30 p.m., “British Labour Party and the Arabs,” S. Pinkney Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 17, Cairo (June 19, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 10 to 16, 1944, 4–5, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 73. Berlin in Arabic, April 24, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “Britain, U.S.A. and Arab World,” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1823 (May 9, 1944) 7. 74. VFA, March 14, 1944, “Rabbi Wise’s Answer to Nahas Pasha,” Kirk to Secretary of State, No. 1685 (March 20, 1944), 7–8. 75. Duncan McBryde and Virgil Jackson, “Enemy Broadcasts in Arabic Language (20 Feb–6 Mar 44), Military Attaché Report, Lebanon and Syria,” Report No. 355 (March 7, 1944), NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922–44, Palestine, entry 77, box 2719, folder 2930. 76. “Weekly Review of Foreign Broadcasts, F.C.C., No. 118, 3/4/44, Near and Middle East,” NACP RG 165, MID, Regional File, 1922– 44, Palestine, entry 77, box 2719, folder 2930. 77. Berlin in Arabic, April 4, 1944, “Resistance Is the Salvation of the Arabs,” No. 1741 (April 12, 1944). 78. Berlin in Arabic, April 16, 1944, 10:30 p.m.,“The Effect of Nazism on the Anglo-Saxons,” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1806, Cairo (May 5, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 15 to 21, 1944, 3 – 4, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 79. Berlin in Arabic, April 22, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “What Is the Anglo-Saxons’ Policy in Raising the Subject of Arab Unity?” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1823, Cairo (May 9, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in

304

Notes to Pages 220– 25

Arabic . . . April 22 to 28, 1944, 2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 80. Berlin in Arabic, May 3,1944, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m., “Speech by Rashid Ali El Kilani, Premier of Iraq on Anniversary of Iraq’s Declaration of War on Britain,”Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1843, Cairo (May 15, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . April 29 to May 5, 1944, 6 –9, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 81. Berlin in Arabic, May 9, 1944, 7:30 p.m.,“Germany and the Anniversary of the Iraqi Revolution,” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1858, Cairo (May 20, 44), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 6 to 12, 1944, 8, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55: 1944, 820.02– 822, entry, box 112. 82. Berlin in Arabic, May 18, 1944, 10:30 p.m.,“Allied Lies,”Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1878, Cairo (May 24, 44), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 13 to 19, 1944, 12, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 83. Berlin in Arabic, May 20, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “The Anglo-American and de Gaullist Traitors Send the Arabs of North Africa to Their Death,” to Secretary of State, No. 1898, Cairo (May 29, 44), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . May 20 to 26, 1944, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 84. VFA, June 6, 1944, 8:15 p.m., “The Invasion,” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1931, Cairo (May 29, 44), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 3 to 9, 1944, 6 –7, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 85. VFA, June 7, 1944, 8:15 p.m., “Effect of the Invasion News of [sic] the Arab Countries,” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1931 (May 29, 1944), 8–9. 86. VFA, June 8, 1944, 10:15 p.m.,“The Fate of the Arab Countries If the Allies Win the War,” Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1931 (May 29, 1944), 8– 9. 87. Berlin in Arabic, June 24, 1944, 10:30 p.m., “Talk on Palestine,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 17, Cairo (June 19, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . June 10 to 16, 1944, 2–3, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 112. 88. Berlin in Arabic, August 1, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “Bolshevik Aggression in Arab Countries,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 136, Cairo (August 7, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . July 29 to August 4, 1944, 4–5, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 89. Berlin in Arabic, October 16, 1944, 7:30 p.m.,“Talk on Rommel,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 294, Cairo (October 23, 1944), No. 294, Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 14 to 20, 1944, 2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 90. Berlin in Arabic, October 21, 1944, 7:30 p.m., “Roosevelt’s Insanity,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 304, Cairo (October 30, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . October 21 to 27, 1944, 1, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 112. 91. Berlin in Arabic, November 5, 1944, 9:30 p.m., “Message from von Ribbentrop the German Foreign Minister to H. Em. Sheik El Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 367, Cairo (November 23, 1944), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . November 4 to 10, 1944, 1, NACP RG 84, entry 2410, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–1955: 1944, 820.02–822, box 112. 92. McBryde,“Effect of Enemy Arabic Broadcasts on Arabs, Military Attaché Report, Syria and Lebanon, Sociological-Enemy Arabic Broadcasting Affecting Levant, Report No. 649: Signiﬁcant Examples of Enemy Propaganda, Month of September 1944,” Beirut (October 11, 1944), NACP RG 208, OWI Overseas Branch, Bureau of Overseas Intelligence, Central Files, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941– 46, entry 373, box 426. 93. Joseph R. Cassoun, “Military Attaché Report, Syria and Lebanon: Transmission for the Month of Nov 44 by Radio Berlin and the Voice of Arab Unity, R-97–715,”Beirut (December 8, 1944), NACP RG 208, OWI Overseas Branch, Bureau of Overseas Intelligence, Central Files, Informational Files on the Near East, 1941– 46, entry 373, box 426. 194. See Martin Broszat, Klaus Dietmar Henke, and Hans Woller, eds., Vom Stalingrad bis zur

Notes to Pages 225– 33

305

Währungsreform: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Umbruchs in Deutschland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1988); and Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 195. Political Intelligence Centre Middle East, “P.I.C. Paper No. 49, The Ikhwan El Muslemin,” Cairo (February 25, 1944), NA, FO 371/41329, 1944 Egypt and Sudan, File No. 31, J1880/31/16; also in NA WO201/2647. 196. Ibid., 2. 197. Ibid., 3. 198. Jacobs to Secretary of State, No. 1785 (April 29, 1944), “Fanatical Moslem Society: Ikhwan El-Muslemin (Moslem Brotherhood),” NACP RG 84, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55: 711–800, Egypt, entry 2410, box 108. 199. Nils E. Lind, “”Memorandum: King Abdul Aziz al Saud’s Remarks about Jews” (October 30, 1944), NACP RG 84, entry 1197, Damascus Legation, Conﬁdential File, 1944, vols. 3 – 4, 800– 891. 100. “President Roosevelt to Senator Robert F. Wagner” (Washington, October 15, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 615–16. 101. “Memorandum by the Director of the Ofﬁce of Near Eastern and African Affairs (Murray) to the Under Secretary of State (Stettinius) (Washington, October 27, 1944),” FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 624 –26. 102. “Secretary of State to President Roosevelt” (Washington, December 8, 1944), “Press Release by the Department of State, December 12, 1944,” FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 648– 49. 103. “Memorandum by the Secretary of State to President Roosevelt” (Washington, December 23, 1944), FRUS 1944, vol. 5, 655–57. 104. Franklin Roosevelt to Robert Wagner,“Memorandum for Senator Wagner” (Washington, December 3, 1944), NARA RG 46, Records of the United States Senate, 78th Congress, Sen 78A-F11, Committee on Foreign Relations, box 124, HM FY 2001. 105. Berlin in Arabic, January 13, 9:30 p.m.,“‘Political Locusts,’” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 512 (January 24, 1945), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 12 to January 18, 1945, 1–2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 134. 106. VFA, January 24, 1945, 7:15 p.m.,“Range of V-Weapons to Be Increased,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 529, Cairo (January 31, 1945), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 19 to January 25, 1945, 5, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02– 822, entry 2410, box 134. 107. Station of VFA, January 29, 1945, 7:15 p.m., “The Jewish Army,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 543, Cairo (February 6, 1945), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . January 26 to February 1, 1945, 4, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 820.02– 822, entry 24120, box 134. 108. Berlin in Arabic, January 31, 1945, 9:30 p.m., “Arabs, It Is Time for Action,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 543, Cairo (February 5, 1945), 6–7. 109. VFA, February 1, 1945, 7:15 p.m., “The Increase of the Jewish Danger,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 543, Cairo (February 5, 1945), 7. 110. Berlin in Arabic, February 2, 1945, 6:30 and 9:30 p.m., No. 561, Cairo (February 12, 1945), Axis Broadcasts in Arabic . . . February 2 to February 8, 1945, 2, NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, 820.02–822, entry 2410, box 134.

Chapter 8. Postwar Aftereffects 111. See Klaus Genscicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichebuchgesellschaft, 2007), 148. 112. On Dietrich’s actions and the postwar trial, see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 272–74. 113. James B. Donovan, General Counsel, OSS, to Colonel Edward J. F. Glavin, OSS, Caserta

306

Notes to Pages 233– 41

(Cairo) (May 24, 1945), “OSS War Crimes Program,” NACP RG 226, M1642, Records of the OSS Washington Director’s Ofﬁce, roll 121, 196–98. 14. “‘The Near East and the War Crimes Problem’: Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch, R and A, No. 1090.116, 23 June 1945, Situation Report: Near East, Analysis of Current Intelligence for the Use of OSS,” 1–28, in NACP RG 84, Syria: Damascus Legation, Conﬁdential File, 1945, vols. 1–2, 030– 800B, Classiﬁed General Records, entry 3248A, 350/69/5/6 –7, box 4, vol. 2, 711–800B. 15. Ibid., “Summary.” 16. Ibid., 1. 17. Ibid., 1–2. 18. Ibid., 5– 6. 19. Ibid., 6. 10. Ibid., 6–7. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. They included Shaykh Hasan abu-Sa’ud ( Jerusalem, 1900 –?); Sa’d al-Din Abd-al-Latif ( Jerusalem, 1899 –?), who was an announcer on Axis-controlled radio stations; Musa Abdallah al-Husayn, Haj Amin’s cousin, who worked on Arabic programs on the BBC before 1941 and subsequently took part in Arabic broadcasts from Axis stations; Safwat Yunis al-Husayni ( Jerusalem, 1900 –?), who had connections to the Arab Legion; and Salim al-Husayni ( Jerusalem, 1913 –?). 13. “‘The Near East and the War Crimes Problem’: Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch, R and A, No. 1090.116, June 23, 1945, Situation Report: Near East, Analysis of Current Intelligence for the Use of OSS,” 1–28, in NACP RG 84, Syria: Damascus Legation, Conﬁdential File, 1945: vols. 1–2, 030–800B, Classiﬁed General Records, entry 3248A, 350/69/5/6 –7, box 4, vol. 2, 711–800B, 9–10. 14. Ibid., 12. 15. The postwar governments in Lebanon and Syria were no more likely to bring former Axis supporters Shakib Arslan and Fawzi al-Qawuqji to trial. See ibid., 13–17. 16. Ibid., 9–10. 17. Ibid., 21–22. 18. “Melchers, Wilhelm,” in Gerhard Kieper and Martin Kröger, eds., Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871–1945, Bd. 3, L–R (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, forthcoming). Melchers was the German ambassador to India (1957–58), Nepal (1958– 61), and Greece (1961–65). 19. “Munzel, Kurt,” in Kieper and Kröger, eds. Biographisches Handbuch . . . Bd. 3. See Kurt Munzel, Ägyptisch-arabischer Sprachführer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: 1983). 20. See Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conﬂict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 176. 21. U.S. Naval Liaison Ofﬁce, Alexandria, Egypt, “Secret, 636-S-45: Egypt and Levant, Social Unrest,” Alexandria, Egypt (November 8, 1945), NACP RG 38 (Chief of Naval Operations), Intelligence Division Conﬁdential Reports of Naval Attachés, 1940 – 46, entry 98A, C-10-C 16322 to I-1-D 24376, box 346. 22. U.S. Naval Liaison Ofﬁce, Port Said, Egypt, “Serial # 72–75: Translation: In the Name of Merciful God to the Governor of the Canal, Enclosure A,” Port Said (November 3, 1945), NACP RG 38, Intelligence Division Conﬁdential Reports of Naval Attachés, 1940 – 46, entry 98A, C-10-C 24533–25640, box 461. 23. Bernard A. Facteau, “Arab Riots in Egypt, Intelligence Report, Intelligence Division, Ofﬁce of Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department,” Washington, D.C. (November 6, 1945), NACP RG 38, Intelligence Division, Conﬁdential Reports of Naval Attachés 1940– 46, C-10-C, 24533 to 25640, entry 98A, box 461. 24. “Recent Trends in Palestine Arab Politics,” Cairo (November 16, 1945), 3, NACP RG 84, Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936– 55, 820 –820.03, entry 2410, box 134.

Notes to Pages 241–47

307

25. Lord Killearn, “No. 30, Lord Killearn to Mr. [Ernest] Beven . . . Assassination of Amin Osman Pasha,” Cairo ( January 8, 1946), NA, FO 371/53341, Egypt and Sudan File No. 66, J 217/66/16, 1–2. 26. Lord Killearn, “Assassination of Ohmed Osman Pasha,” Cairo ( January 9, 1946), NA, FO 371/53341, Egypt and Sudan File No. 66, J 219/66/16. 27. Bowker,“No. 1267, Assassination of Ahmed Osman Pasha,” Cairo (November 30, 1946), NA, FO 371/53341, Egypt and Sudan 1946, File No. 66, J5195/66/16. 28. “Egypt, Mufti’s Activities in July and August, A-70730,” Strategic Services Unit, War Department, Alexandria, Egypt (August 19, 1946), NACP RG 226, OSS Washington Registry SI Intell Field Files Cairo G017, entry 108 A, box 15, folder 68. 29. Tuck to the Secretary of State, No. 1648, Cairo (June 24, 1946), Editorial Comment from the Cairo Press Concerning the Appearance of the Mufti in Egypt, NACP RG 84, entry 1197, Damascus Legation Conﬁdential File: 1946, vols. 3–4, 800–891, box 11. 30. “Al Ahram, June 21, 1946, In Farouk’s Castle,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 1648 (June 24, 1945), 2. 31. “Al Kutla, June 12, 1946,‘Welcome Mufti in the ﬁeld of Jihad,’”Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 1648 (June 24, 1945), 2. 32. “Al Misri, June 20, 1946,” Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 1648 (June 24, 1945), 2. 33. “You Arab Hero and Symbol of Jihad: We Are Proud to Have You Here,” Al Ikhwan Al Muslimin, June 20, 1946, translated in Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 1648. On the Muslim Brotherhood, see Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Moslem Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, 1993); and Brynjar Lia, The Society of the Moslem Brothers in Egypt (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1998). 34. “One Hair of the Mufti’s Is Worth the Jews of the Whole World,” Al Ikhwan Al Muslimun (June 24, 1946), Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 1648 (June 24, 1945). 35. “Hassan Al-Banna and the Mufti of Palestine” in “Contents of Secret Bulletin of Al Ikhwan al-Muslimin dated 11 June 1946,” Cairo (July 23, 1946), NACP RG 226 (Ofﬁce of Strategic Services), Washington Registry SI Intelligence, Field Files, entry 108A, box 15, folder 2. 36. On American intelligence assessments of the consequences of a Jewish state in Palestine, see Joseph Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics in the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 377– 87. On the American political response, see Benny Morris, 1948: The First ArabIsraeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 24. 37. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Memorandum for the Joint Intelligence Committee: Subject: Intelligence Estimate of the Moslem Situation” (Washington, May 29, 1946), NACP RG 226, Records of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, 1941–45, Washington Director’s Ofﬁce Administrative Files, microﬁlm 1642, roll 24, 1015–17. 38. Joint Intelligence Committee, “Intelligence Estimate of the Moslem Situation, J.I.C. 355/2” (October 1, 1946), NACP RG 226, Records of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, 1941– 45, Washington Director’s Ofﬁce Administrative Files, microﬁlm 1642, roll 7, 0495. 39. Joint Intelligence Committee, “Intelligence Estimate of the Moslem Situation, J.I.C. 355/2, Appendix: General Effect Throughout the Moslem World of Implementation of the Report by the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine” (October 1, 1946), NACP RG 226, Records of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, 1941–45, Washington Director’s Ofﬁce Administrative Files, microﬁlm 1642, roll 7, 0499. NACP RG 226, Records of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, 1941– 45, Washington Director’s Ofﬁce Administrative Files, microﬁlm 1642, roll 7, 0497. 40. Joint Intelligence Committee, “Intelligence Estimate of the Moslem Situation, J.I.C. 355/2, Appendix: 3. Possibility of a ‘Holy War’ against all Occidentals” (October 1, 1946), NACP RG 226, Records of the Ofﬁce of Strategic Services, 1941– 45, Washington Director’s Ofﬁce Administrative Files, microﬁlm 1642, roll 7, 0499. 41. Ibid. 42. Pinkney Tuck to Secretary of State, No. 2979, “Memorandum of Conversation between

308

Notes to Pages 247– 53

Sheikh Hassan Al Banna and First Secretary Ireland . . . ” Cairo (October 24, 1947), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 800, entry 2410, box 168, folder: Palestine 1. 43. Ibid. 44. “America and the Arab World,” Ikhwan Al Muslimin, October 15, 1947, “Enclosure No. 2 to Dispatch No. 2979” (October 24, 1947), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 800, entry 2410, 350/55/1/2, box 168, folder: Palestine 1. 45. “Recent Trends in Palestine Arab Politics,” Cairo (November 16, 1945), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy, General Records, 1936–55, 820– 820.03, entry 2410, box 134. 46. Alba B. Kerr, “Intelligence Report, Moslem Brotherhood Calls, Report No. 255– 47” Military Attaché, Beirut, Lebanaon (September 23, 1947), NACP RG 263, entry ZZ-18, box 96, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Second Release of Name Files under the Nazi War Crimes and Japan Imperial Disclosure Acts, 1936–2000, Husseini, Amin El, vols. 2– 4. 47. Pinkney Tuck to Secretary of State, “A-96,” Cairo (February 5, 1948), NACP RG 84, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, 800, Palestine, entry 2410, box 193. 48. Jefferson Patterson to Secretary of State, “Dispatch 947, Enclosure No. 1, Program of the Ikhwan Al Muslimun,” Cairo (November 22, 1948), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, Political Affairs, 800 C, Egypt, entry 2410, box 193. 49. Ibid. 50. Jefferson Patterson to Secretary of State, “Dispatch 947, Enclosure No. 2, The Brotherhood and the Parties,” Cairo (November 22, 1948), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, Political Affairs, 800 C, Egypt, entry 2410, box 193. 51. Ibid. 52. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On the intertwining of modern and antimodern elements in Arab and Islamist ideologies, see Bassam Tibi, Islamischer Fundamentalismus, moderne Wissenschaft und Technologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). On Arab responses to the ideas of German nationalism, see his Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry, ed. and trans. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); and Arab Nationalism: Between Islam and the Nation-State, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 53. “Banning of Muslim Brotherhood: Existence a Threat to Public Security,” The Times (London) (December 9, 1948), in “London Times Reports Suppression of Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt,” American Embassy, Cairo (December 28, 1948), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, Political Affairs, 800 C, Egypt, entry 2410, box 193. On this also see Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers. 54. Patterson to Secretary of State, “A-1002,” Cairo (December 16, 1948), NACP RG 84, Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936–55, Political Affairs, 800 C, Egypt, entry 2410, box 193; Jefferson Patterson to Secretary of State, No. 1032,“Continued Government Action against the Moslem Brotherhood,” Cairo (December 22, 1948), NACP RG 84, Egypt: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, Political Affairs, 800 C, Egypt, entry 2410, box 193. 55. “Memorandum of Conversation, Probable Future Trend of Events in Palestine” (January 2, 1948), NACP RG 84, Jerusalem Consulate, General Classiﬁed Records, 800 Iraq, 800 Palestine, entry 2778, box 3. 56. Tuck to Secretary of State (January 6, 1948), NACP RG 84, Palestine: Jerusalem Consulate, General Classiﬁed Records, 123– 320, entry 2778, box 1. Other members were: Jamal Al Husseini, Emile Al Ghoury, Hassan Abu Al Saoud, and Ishan Darwish. In May 1947, the editors of The Nation published documents detailing the Nazi past of Husseini and other members of the Arab Higher Committee. See The Nation Associates, The Arab Higher Committee: Its Origins, Personnel and Purposes: The Documentary Record Submitted to the United Nations (New York: The Nation Associates, May 1947). 57. Edmund J. Doran to Secretary of State, No. 311, Baghdad ( January 13, 1948), NACP RG 84, Palestine: Jerusalem Consulate, General Classiﬁed Records, 123– 320, entry 2778, box 3.

Notes to Pages 253–62

309

58. Meminger to Secretary of State, “A-164,” Damascus, Syria (March 31, 1948), NACP RG 84, Palestine: Cairo Embassy General Records, 1936– 55, Political Affairs, 800 Palestine, No. 2, entry 2778, box 188. 59. Tuck to Secretary of State, Washington (April 30, 1948), NACP RG 84, Palestine: Jerusalem Consulate, General Classiﬁed Records, 123–320, entry 2778, box 1. 60. S. Pinkney Tuck to Secretary of State, “Anti-Jewish Sentiment in Egypt,” Cairo (May 15, 1948), 2, NACP RG 84, Palestine: Jerusalem Consulate, General Classiﬁed Records, 123– 320, entry 2778, box 1. 61. Ibid. 62. Stanton Grifﬁn to Secretary of State,“Sequestrations of Jewish Ground Property in Egypt,” Cairo (September 15, 1948), NACP RG 84, Palestine: Jerusalem Consulate, General Classiﬁed Records, 330–800 Egypt, entry 2778, box 2. 63. See Rene Wildangel, Zwischen Achse und Mandatsmacht: Palästina und der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2007). 64. See Sayyid Qutb, Our Struggle with the Jews, trans. Ronald Nettler in Ronald L. Nettler, Past Trials and Present Tribulations: A Muslim Fundamentalist’s View of the Jews (Oxford: Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Pergamon Press, 1987), 72– 89. In what follows, I am using Nettler’s translation. 65. On Qutb, also see Olivier Carre, Mysticism and Politics: A Critical Reading of Fi Zilal alQur’an by Sayyid Qutb, 1906–1966, trans. Carol Artigues and rev. by W. Shepard (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Gilles Kepel, The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt, trans. Jon Rothschild (London: Al Saqi Books, 1985); Adnan Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005). 66. Qutb, Our Struggle with the Jews, 72–74. 67. Ibid., 74–75. 68. Ibid., 75. 69. Ibid., 75–78. 70. Ibid., 78–80. 71. Ibid., 81–82. 72. Ibid., 83. The Koran citation is Qu’ran, Sura 5, verse 82. 73. Ibid., 83. 74. Ibid., 86–87. 75. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972), 218–29, 263–70. 76. Ibid., 250–53. 77. Cited by Harkabi, in Arab Attitudes to Israel, 235. 78. Johann von Leers, “Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze,” Die Judenfrage 6, no. 24 (December 15, 1942), 275–78. Also see discussion of same in Herf, Jewish Enemy, 180– 81. For an English translation, see Johann von Leers, “Judaism and Islam as Opposites,” in Andrew G. Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), 619–25. 79. Also see the Central Intelligence Agency ﬁle on von Leers, NACP RG 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, First Release of Name Files under the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, box 32.

Conclusion 11. See Jeffrey Herf. “Convergence: The Classic Case—Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II,” in Jeffrey Herf, ed., Convergence and Divergence: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Semitism in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2007), 50 –70.

310

Notes to Pages 263– 65

12. For a fuller elaboration of this issue, see Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 3. Helmut Felmy,“German Exploitation of Arab Nationalist Movements in World War II,” n.d., NACP, Foreign Ministry Studies, P-207; also cited by Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 100. 4. Jeffrey Herf,“Foreword,” to Matthias Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press, 2007), xiii. Also see Jeffrey Herf, “What Is Old and What Is New in the Terrorism of Islamic Fundamentalism,” Partisan Review 49, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 25 – 32. An important study of post-1945 Arab views of the Holocaust was published as this work was going to press. See Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) for abundant material from the Arab press, politics, and intellectual life that adds to our understanding of the issues of change and continuity of wartime mentalities raised in the preceding pages.

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Index

Aaki, Selim Pasha, 253 Abdul-Hadi, Nuralidin, 40 Abdullah (king of Transjordan), 71, 98, 131–32 Aden, 9, 36, 62 Africa Corps, 7, 9, 58, 64, 79, 87, 88, 96, 122. See also Oberkommando der Wehrmacht; Rommel, Erwin Akcan, Necati, 40 Al Ahram, 242, 307n Al Aksa Mosque, 186 Al Azhar University, 129, 226, 249, 259; Nazi propaganda on, 141, 192, 206; political activities at, 66, 95– 96, 161, 230, 241, 254 Al Ikhwan al-Muslimin, 225–26, 239–40, 242– 43, 305n, 307n–8n; newspaper of, 242, 247, 249, 254, 307n–8n. See also Muslim Brotherhood Al Kutla, 242, 307n Al Misri, 242, 254, 307n Alam el Halfa, Battle of, 135 Alami, Musa al, 236 Alexandria, 112–13, 122, 127, 132, 140, 231, 239, 255, 306–7n Algeria, 9, 36, 62, 76, 147, 153; Nazi propaganda on, 159, 168, 175, 181, 240; situation of Jews in, 89, 269n Ali Maher, 64, 95–96, 161, 226; in Nazi broadcasts, 101, 284n; OSS report on his antiBritish activities, 234–35. See also Farouk (king of Egypt) Allah, 227, 254; and Hitler, 121, 200, 259; Nazi propaganda on, 82, 126–28, 197, 200; Sayyid

Qutb on, 256–59. See also Himmler, Heinrich; Koran; Reich Security Main Ofﬁce Allies (United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Union), 88, 94, 102, 105, 149, 182, 189, 194–95, 265; Arab support for, 264; concerns about Arab support, 208–9; nature of appeals to Arabs and Muslims, 136–38, 150, 161, 167, 228; on Nazi racism, 153; postwar assessments, 234–35; war in North Africa, ix, 6, 12, 14, 135, 140–41, 147, 159, 172, 225, 230, 263 Allies, Nazi propaganda on: described as enemies of Arabs, Muslims and Islam, 47, 98, 142, 144, 189, 201, 210, 215, 220, 222, 224, 304n; and “Jewish imperialism,” 5, 14, 181, 262; link to Jews and Zionism, 71–72, 87, 99–100, 103, 110, 135, 144–47, 149, 157, 162, 165, 170, 172, 176, 182–84, 187–88, 205, 215, 218, 221, 244, 263, 292n, 297n, 299n American Consulate: in Casablanca, 159, 296n; in Jerusalem, 33, 308–9n American Embassy, Cairo, ix, 10–11, 225; military intelligence reports, 165, 177–78; Ofﬁce of Strategic Services (OSS) reports from, 300n, 306n; political reports from, 69–70, 97–102, 140, 163, 226, 230, 232, 269n, 280n– 81n, 284n–85n, 305n–09n; transcripts of Nazi Arabic broadcasts from, 11, 13, 124, 126, 162, 213, 232, 270n, 282n–83n, 285n–86n, 288n–92n, 294n–99n, 301n–5n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Kirk, Alexander C.; Tuck, Pinkney American Legation in Beirut, 165

324 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, 37, 99, 226, 235 Ankara, 8, 41, 55, 68, 74, 90, 95, 170, 278n, 283n, 288n, 293n. See also German Foreign Ministry; Papen, Franz von Anti-Americanism, 72, 165, 264. See also AntiSemitism; Anti-Zionism; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Anti-Communism, 5, 77, 151, 206–7; Hassan al-Banna, 247–48; Muslim Brotherhood, 249; Sayyid Qutb, 257 Anti-Communism in Nazi propaganda: appeals to Arabs, Muslims and Islam, 81, 101, 123, 168, 201, 224; and the Jews, 153 Anti-imperialism: 245, 260, 265; Nazi support for Arab version of, 5, 58; in service of Nazi expansion, 114, 117 Anti-imperialism in Nazi propaganda: antiSemitism and, 144; identiﬁcation with Arab version of, 183 Anti-Semitism, xv; allied response to, 84–85, 264; anti-Zionism and, 160, 165, 168, 178, 229, 260; broadcast incitement to kill Jews, 126; deﬁned by Nazi regime, 15–36, 271–75n; diffusion to Middle East and North Africa, ix, 2, 11, 87, 151, 168, 194, 207, 266; in Egypt, 93–94, 284n; fusion of European and Islamic traditions, 3–5, 192, 223–24, 255, 258– 59, 262; as interpretive framework, 174, 193; Nazi broadcasts and, 11, 13–14, 72, 130; in Nazi printed materials, 80, 197–98; as Nazism’s opiate, 165, 223. See also AntiZionism; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Qutb, Sayyid Anti-Zionism: anti-Semitism and, 262; Holocaust denial and, 177; Muslim Brotherhood and, 239, 242, 244, 248, 252–53; Gamal Nasser and, 260; Nazi regime and, 13, 30, 248; Palestine People’s Party and, 241; Sayyid Qutb and, 257 Anti-Zionism, Nazi propaganda on: and antiAmericanism and anti-Semitism, 160, 165, 168, 178, 229, 260, 262; appeals to Arabs and Muslims, 13, 35, 87, 264 Arab exiles in Berlin: collaboration with Nazi regime, x, 3–5, 8–9, 39, 88–89, 113, 261, 266; OSS report on, 233 Arab Higher Committee, 29, 240, 253, 308n Arab League, 234, 236, 243, 245 Arab Nation, 105–6, 126, 128, 141, 143, 145–46, 148, 153, 164, 169, 171, 175, 177, 178, 182, 285– 86n, 288n, 290–92n, 294–96n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Arabs: American appeals to and analysis of, 12, 14, 70–71, 83–85, 98–99, 134, 138–42, 208–10,

Index 218–19, 225, 230, 235–38, 245–46, 248, 255, 255–59, 264, 284n, 296n, 304n; Axis policy towards, 41–44, 53–55, 58–56, 69, 74; collaboration with Nazi Germany, 74–78; literacy rate, 9–10; Nazi racial ideology and, 15–35, 118; respond to Husseini’s return, 241–45 Arabs, Nazi propaganda for, x, 1, 4, 45–53, 58, 73, 75, 81, 89, 91, 102, 129, 191; Allied victory means victory for Jews and defeat for Arabs, 134, 144, 158, 187, 162, 215, 222; Americans and the Allies as enemies of, 128, 130, 165, 173, 175, 180, 217, 285n, 288n, 297n, 303n; Axis victory means freedom and independence for Arabs and Muslims, 50, 91, 111, 113, 117, 123– 25, 133, 157, 166, 171, 187–88, 190, 220, 288n, 303n; Balfour Declaration, 49; Bolsheviks as enemies of, 73, 100, 103, 114, 207; British as enemies of, 101–5, 109–11, 131, 147, 151, 198; calls for killing the Allies, 210–11; calls for killing Jews or suppressing Jews, 111, 126, 213; combines secular and religious themes, 46, 49, 63, 100, 153, 214, 262; Himmler and SS appeal to, 200–204, 301n; Islam and the Koran, 170, 298n; Jews as enemy and threat, 73, 80– 82, 107, 126, 128, 132, 148, 153–54, 159–69, 176– 78, 181–83, 186, 187, 197–98, 210, 216, 219–20, 222, 227, 263, 288n, 299n; Nazi Germany as friend of, 47, 86, 121–22, 150, 159–60; Nazi Germany has common enemies with, 86, 102–3; Nazi Germany will help to exterminate the Jews and defeat Anglo-Saxons, 211; Palestine, 48, 86, 143, 169, 171, 178–79, 183, 185, 209–10, 215–16, 290n–91n, 298n–99n; Zionism, 168, 185, 210, 298n. See also Muslims Aronson, Shlomo, 11–12, 84, 270n, 282n, 293n Arslan, Shakib, 26 Aryan race, 16, 18, 23–24, 36, 137. See also AntiSemitism Athens in Arabic, 105–7, 145, 169, 191, 285n, 291n, 294–95n 298n, 303n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Atlantic Charter, 85, 130, 165, 211, 244, 246, 289n Auschwitz, 7, 88, 100, 125 Australia, armed forces of in North Africa, 7, 54, 60, 64, 122, 159 Auswärtiges Amt (AA). See German Foreign Ministry Axis Broadcasts in Arabic: ix, xv, 11, 102, 233, 284–86n, 288–99, 301–5n; Allied assessments of impact and reception of, 4, 138, 165, 218, 224–25, 269n, 275n, 303n–4n; impact on and reception by Arabs and Muslims, x, 4, 11–12, 14, 194, 200, 211, 230, 265.

Index See also American Embassy, Cairo; Arab Nation; Athens in Arabic; Bari in Arabic; Free Voice of Egypt; German Foreign Ministry; Kirk, Alexander C.; Ofﬁce of War Information; Radio Bari; Radio Berlin; Tuck, Pinkney; Voice of Free Arabism Axis powers: arrests of suspected supporters in Iran, 238; British political warfare against, 137; efforts to appeal to Arabs and Muslims, 6, 12, 71, 102–3, 110–11, 114, 118, 163; importance of Middle East for defeat of, 97; military developments, 60, 75–76; nature of Arab support for, 264; on politics in Egypt, 94; relations with Arabs, 41–42, 59, 69; support independence for Arab countries, 74, 123–24, 133 Axis Propaganda in the Moslem World, 282n. See also Military Intelligence Division, United States War Department Badoglio, Petro, 82 Baghdad, 211, 274n, 279n Bahri, Yunis, 8, 71, 139, 234, 238, 280n. See also Arab exiles in Berlin; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Balfour Declaration, 6, 8, 100; Arab rejection of, 139, 185, 239–40, 298n; attacked in Nazi broadcasts, 50, 146, 198 Balkans, 60, 64, 70, 122 Banna, Hassan al-, 64, 95, 225–26, 265; antiCommunism of, 247; praises Haj Amin elHusseini, 243–44, 248, 253, 265, 307n. See also Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Muslim Brotherhood Baqir, Abdul Hamid, 253 Bari in Arabic, 72, 113, 124–25, 129, 134, 145–46, 148, 177, 286n, 288–91n, 294–96n; asserts “Jews will be annihilated by the will of God,” 162; ceases broadcasting, 182; on “Islam and Anglo-Saxon Democracy,” 109; Mussolini praises Kilani, 171. See also Axis broadcasts in Arabic; Italy Barid as-Sarq (Barid al-Schark) (Orient Post), 40, 203, 276n Baruch, Bernard, 99, 127, 180–81 Basbous, Sa’ad, 253 BBC, 34, 71, 163, 195, 306n; called “Jewish Broadcasting Station” by Voice of Free Arabism, 129, 144; on Zionism, 71 Beirut, 24, 28, 37, 68, 96, 102, 132, 165, 166, 226, 239; U.S. military intelligence and OWI reports from, 165–67, 218, 224, 248, 304n, 308n Bendersky, Joseph, 165

325 Berger, Gottlob, 199, 299n. See also Himmler, Heinrich Berlin. See Arab exiles in Berlin; Axis broadcasts in Arabic; Collaboration, of Arab exiles with Nazi regime; Cultural fusion; German Foreign Ministry; Reich Security Main Ofﬁce Berlin in Arabic, 9, 11, 62, 110–11, 124, 128, 135, 142–44, 147–48, 162, 172, 182, 188, 195–97, 205–6, 216, 220, 222, 231–32, 251, 262, 286n, 288–92n, 294–300n, 301–305n; “The Ambitions of the Jews,” 181; Anglo-Saxon victory means loss of Palestine, 219; appeal to “Moslems and Arab mothers,” 221; associates Jews with United States, 178; attacks “criminal American Senators,” 209–11; attacks Jews, 174–75, 217; attacks on Franklin Roosevelt, 163–64, 223; “The Axis and the Moslems,” 129; on Britain and the Jews, 211; broadcasts joint German–Italian declaration, 123; claims Jews intend to annihilate Arabs, 216–17; Husseini on, 168, 170, 182–83, 214–15; “Islam and National Socialism,” 173; “The Jews,” 189–90; Kilani on, 171, 183; Rashid Ali Kilani-Walter Gross exchange, 150–51; Ribbentrop-Husseini-Kilani exchange, 188, 220, 223; on Rommel, 222–23; urges Arabs to “kill the Jews wherever you ﬁnd them,” 213. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Berlin Olympics, 21, 150, 221 Berlin Olympics of 1936, 20–21, 24, 150–51, 221 Bolsheviks: Nazi propaganda on, 80, 87, 91, 100–101, 107, 114; Jews, Britain and/or the United States, 104, 112, 115–16, 131–32, 143– 46, 158, 171, 179, 181, 183–84, 188–89, 195, 197, 205–6, 217, 221, 224, 298n; threat to Arabs, 207, 219–22; threat to Egypt, 190; threat to Islam, 103, 206; and Zionism, 207 Bolshevism: Nazi propaganda on, 73–75, 81, 91–92, 99–100, 111, 114, 162, 177, 189, 232, 249, 285n, 298n, 301n; conﬂict with Islam, 104, 128, 142, 168, 206, 217; Jews and, 196, 219; opposition to in Arab states, 85; and Zionism, 206, 220 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 38, 142, 290n Bosnian SS Division, 200–202, 204, 233, 299– 300n. See also Himmler, Heinrich; Husseini, Haj Amin elBourse Egyptien, La, 19–20. See also Cairo Brandt, Rudolf, 199, 299n. See also Himmler, Heinrich Breitman, Richard, 11, 270n, 282n, 298n

326 Britain: x, 235, 239, 241, 246; Balfour Declaration, 6, 8, 50, 100, 139, 145, 185, 198, 239, 240, 298n; homeland for Jews, 6; in Nazi Germany’s policy, 29–30, 32, 57, 61, 63; policies and activities in Middle East, 12, 36–37, 39, 41, 44, 50, 56, 63–67, 89, 93, 127, 137, 139–40, 183, 237, 239; White Paper, 27, 34, 37, 130, 168, 202, 205–7, 275n, 302n Britain, Nazi propaganda on, 280n, 303–4n; associated with Jews, 33–34, 71–73, 86, 88– 89, 102, 104, 135–36, 145–47, 153, 162, 164, 174, 183, 188, 195, 211, 222, 285n, 294n, 301n; Bolsheviks and, 104, 207, 219–20; called enemy of Arabs and Islam, 75, 77, 84–85, 86, 98, 99– 105, 107–10, 112–13, 123–25, 129–30, 142, 160, 171, 183, 186, 188, 214, 219–20, 289n, 299n British Eighth Army, 122, 127, 135, 144–45. See also El Alamein, battle of; Montgomery, Bernard; North Africa British Embassy, Cairo, 10–11, 67–70, 225, 247– 55, 279n–280n, 283n–84n, 307n. See also Lampson, Miles British Empire, 35, 59, 92, 98, 102, 116, 123, 125, 130, 143–44, 164, 174 British Foreign Ofﬁce: Political Intelligence Department, 136 Britt, George, reports from Beirut, 166–68, 294– 95n. See also Ofﬁce of War Information Bucharest, 90, 170 Bulow-Schwante, Vico von, 19–20, 28, 271– 73n. See also German Foreign Ministry Cairo, 25, 39, 65, 95, 122, 161–62, 236, 239, 240– 42, 255, 259; Haj Amin el-Husseini returns to, 242–45; Nazi propaganda on, 112, 119– 20, 132–33. See also American Embassy, Cairo; Axis roadcasts in Arabic; British Embassy, Cairo; Egypt; German Embassy, Cairo; Kirk, Alexander C.; Lampson, Miles Canaris, Wilhelm, 32, 274n Cassoun, Joseph, OWI reports from Beirut, 224–25, 304n Caucasus, German campaign in, 75, 77–78, 158 Ceylon, 39 China, 97 Churchill, Winston, 61, 87, 130, 183, 189–90; Nazi propaganda on: 86–87, 91, 99, 106, 115– 16, 131, 132, 159, 171–72, 189, 206, 215, 221, 285n Ciano, Gian Galeazzo, 43, 74, 117 Cohen, Benjamin, 127 Collaboration (of Arab exiles with Nazi regime), x, xi, 2–3, 8, 41–43, 61, 69, 198, 242 Communism. See Anti-Communism

Index Conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic, x, 78, 260, 262, 264–65; on Allies, Jews and Zionists against Arabs and Muslims, 185–88, 192–93, 206, 215; diffusion to Middle East, 4, 14, 26, 99–100, 130, 157, 261; in Nazi propaganda, 126, 164–65, 179–80; not needed as explanation, 212; Sayyid Qutb and, 255–57 Crete, 61, 115, 184 Cultural fusion, 3–4, 122, 154, 259. See also Axis broadcasts in Arabic Cüppers, Martin, 7, 138, 269n, 273–75n, 279n, 286n, 290n, 299–300n, 310n Damascus, 68, 132, 226 Disraeli, Benjamin, 186 Doehle, Walter: German policy in Palestine, 27–30, 31, 273n; meets with Husseini, 44. See also Jerusalem Donovan, William, 233, 245, 395n. See also Ofﬁce of Strategic Services Doron, Edmund, J., 253 Dunkirk, 115, 131 Eastern Front, 73, 77, 87, 88, 95, 100, 103, 118, 125, 127, 159, 199, 263. See also World War II The Economist, called a “Jewish paper” on Nazi radio, 136 Eden, Anthony, 64–65, 280n, 284n. See also Lampson, Miles Egypt, ix, 5, 7, 9–10, 18–19, 29, 32, 39, 42, 78–79; American Ambassador Kirk on, 67, 69–71; anti-Semitism in, 93–94; Berlin Olympics and, 20–21; British Ambassador Lampson on, 64–67, 69, 93–96; British presence in, 33–34, 36, 99; crisis of February 1942, 94; ends diplomatic relations with Germany, 37; Foreign Ministry, 20; German intelligence reports on, 96; German propaganda for, 44, 47, 62–63, 72, 80–82, 84, 91–92, 101, 104–9; Hitler’s contempt for in Mein Kampf, 16, 25; limits on German activity in, 34, 54, 59; Nuremberg race laws and, 20–24; sympathy for Germany in ofﬁcer corps, 37, 54; World War II in North Africa and, 110 Egyptian Olympic Committee, 21 Eichler, Wilhelmine, 40 Eichmann, Adolf, 7 Einsatzgruppe Afrika, 7, 112. See also Rauff, Walter Einsatzgruppen, 88, 125, 199, 287n Eisenhower, Dwight, 162, 167, 291n El Alamein, battle of, 7, 127, 131, 141, 144–45, 158, 225, 230. See also Egypt; North Africa; Rommel, Erwin

Index England: 35, 55, 97; Arabs as Germany’s ally against, 2–3, 30, 41, 43, 47–48, 75, 77, 90, 96; German strategy towards, 59–61, 63, 74, 109– 10, 114, 135, 275n; Haj Amin el-Husseini on, 55–56, 188; Rashid Ali Kilani on, 142; linked to Jews, 107, 164, 170; Nazi propaganda on: 50–51, 81–82, 91, 100, 103, 115–17, 131–34, 166, 277–79n; political and military presence in Middle East, 33–34; support from Jews in Palestine, 37. See also Britain Eritrea, 178 Ethiopia, 34, 54, 70, 84, 136 Ettel, Erwin, 9, 90–91, 198, 283n. See also German Foreign Ministry; Husseini, Haj Amin elEuphrates River, 160, 175 Facteau, Bernard, U.S. Naval Intelligence reports, 240, 306n Farouk (king of Egypt): Hassan al-Banna and, 226; British Ambassador Lampson on 67, 94–96, 137, 230; distinguishes between Jews and Zionists, 254; Ahmad Husayn and, 235; Haj Amin el-Husseini and, 242; Muslim Brotherhood and, 226; Nazi Germany and 32, 95, 114, 142, 284n; pro-Axis sympathies, 37, 94 Fascist Italy. See Italy Felmy, Helmut, 109, 264, 310 Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe, 58, 88, 177, 202; plans to extend to North Africa and Middle East, 7, 57, 77–78, 126 France, 32–33, 35, 41, 43–44, 61, 68, 75, 77, 89, 100, 144–45, 221–22, 243–44, 269n, 293n; Husseini’s “escape” from, 241 Frankfurter, Felix, 99, 127, 180–81 Free French Forces, 61, 101, 125, 169. See also France Free Voice of Egypt, 124, 288n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Fuller, Anne: OWI reports from, 71–72, 269n, 280–81n Galal, Kamal ad-Din, 203. See also Barid as-Sarq German Consulate: Jerusalem, 16; Tunis, 68, 160 German Embassy: Ankara, 283n; Cairo, 19, 37, 274n; Paris, 13, 38, 90, 233; Rome, 42, 78, 90– 91, 146, 286–87n, 293n; Tehran, 20, 68, 79, 154, 237, 271n German Embassy, Cairo, 19, 96, 274n; German intelligence on, 113–14 German Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt): 78, 275n, 292n; appeals to “non–Aryans,” 15,

327 272n; Arab Committee, 41–42; Arabic language propaganda, 3, 8, 13, 287n; contact with pro-Nazi Arab exiles, 216; Department of Radio Policy, 8–9, 38–40, 62, 118; policy toward Muslims and Islam, 16, 271n, 286n; propaganda and diplomatic strategy in Middle East, 264; in World War I, 6. See also Ettel, Erwin; Grobba, Fritz; Hentig, Werner Otto von; Melchers, Wilhelm; Munzel, Kurt; Neurath, Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von; Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy; Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce of the Political Department; Rahn, Rudolf; Ribbentrop, Joachim von; Weizsäcker, Ernst von; Winkler, Hans Alexander; Woermann, Ernst Giraud, Henri, 169. See also France; North Africa Globke, Hans, 18, 22, 271n Goda, Norman, 7, 269n, 291n Goebbels, Joseph, 9, 13, 38, 88, 125, 130, 149, 158, 176–77, 197, 203, 271n, 297n; Arabic language propaganda compared to German domestic propaganda, 132, 184, 213; predictions of catastrophe if Germany defeated, 174, 176, 181. See also Reich Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (also the Grand Mufti and Grand Mufti of Palestine) 8, 16, 28–29, 32, 41, 55, 57, 59, 123, 125, 135, 139–41, 148, 162, 170, 196, 199, 202, 221, 223, 240, 246, 278n, 281n–82n, 286n, 291–92n, 295n, 298n, 302n, 394n. See also Husseini, Haj Amin elGreece, 54, 60–61, 64, 70, 100, 105, 115, 131, 306n Green, William, 206 Grobba, Fritz, 6, 24–25, 30–32, 34, 41, 43–44, 55, 61, 74, 76, 109, 268n, 272n, 274n, 276–77n, 281–82n, 283n, 286n, 288n, 292n; Rashid Ali Kilani, 9, 24, 152; Mein Kampf in Arabic, 24– 25; on Roosevelt and the Jews, 127–28. See also German Foreign Ministry Gross, Walter, 18, 22, 150–52, 271n, 292n. See also Anti-Semitism; Ofﬁce of Racial Politics Gwynn reports, 165–66, 294n. See also American Legation in Beirut Haddad, Osman Kemal, 41, 43, 56, 277n. See also Collaboration; Husseini, Haj Amin elHagannah, 245 Haifa, 39, 61, 209, 222, 231 Halbmond und Hakenkreuz, 7, 269n, 273–75n, 279n, 286n, 290n, 299–300n, 310 Harb, Salih Pasha, 234 Harkaby, Yehoshafat, 260. See Nasser, Gamal

328 Harriman, Averill, 229 Hashemi, Taha el-, 60. See also Kilani, Rashid Ali Henderson, Roy, 208, 302n Hentig, Werner Otto von, 6, 34, 38, 273n, 276n; and Mein Kampf in Arabic, 25–26. See also German Foreign Ministry Hess, Rudolf, 7, 21 Heyd, Dr. Rosemarie, 40 High Command of Military. See Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Hildebrandt, Gisela, 40 Himmler, Heinrich, 6, 8–9, 80, 216; and Bosnian SS division, 200–201; and Husseini, Haj Amin el-, 90, 198–99, 223; on placing Hitler in context of Islamic traditions, 121, 157, 199–200, 202, 204, 260, 299–300n Hirszowicz, Lukasz, 7, 26, 30, 32, 61, 268n, 273– 75, 277n, 279n, 282n Hitler, Adolf: 2, 31, 86, 90, 166, 176, 213, 216, 227, 231, 256; anti-Semitism and, Holocaust, 2, 4, 52, 88, 125, 149, 154, 177, 184, 189, 194–95, 263; Arabic translation of Mein Kampf, 24–25; extension of the Final Solution to North Africa and Middle East, 57, 74–78, 265–66; Haj Amin el-Husseini and, 8, 40, 55–56, 60– 61, 74–78, 86–87, 97, 162, 278n, 282n; Rashid Ali Kilani and, 131, 133, 289–90n; Mohammed’s struggle with Jews and, 155–57; policy and propaganda for Arabs, Muslims, North Africa and Middle East, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 30–36, 38, 51, 57–59, 61, 63, 74–78, 80, 87, 98, 109, 120–21, 135, 147, 155, 158–59, 182, 197, 268n, 273–74n, 276n, 278–79n, 286n; Sayyid Qutb on, 259; racism towards Arabs in Mein Kampf, 15–17, 83, 149; RSHA on Hitler as messenger from Allah, 199, 200, 202–5, 259, 299n. See also Himmler, Heinrich; Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Ribbentrop, Joachim von Hitler Youth, 17, 31–32 Holocaust, ix, 1, 8, 14, 56, 78, 99–100, 177, 212, 247, 259; intent to extend to North Africa and Middle East, 7. See also Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe Hong Kong, 29, 86, 131 Hull, Cordell, 10, 69, 97, 127, 135, 144, 166, 169, 178, 208, 212, 289n, 294n, 302n. See also United States State Department Hussein, Ahmed, 64–65, 95, 161, 230. See also Young Egypt Husseini, Haj Amin el-, 8–9, 13, 16, 26, 28–30, 32–33, 37, 116, 125, 130, 141, 221, 223–24, 233, 246; Arab reception after 1945, 240–45, 248; Arabic language German broadcasts, 39, 41,

Index 44, 63, 73, 98, 109, 123, 139–40, 147–48, 163, 168, 190, 196, 213, 223, 240, 286n, 288n, 291n, 295n, 304n; Hassan al-Banna and, 243–45, 253, 265; Bosnian SS division and, 204; contact with German Foreign Ministry, 43–44, 59, 68, 74–75, 89–90, 135, 276n; contact with Heinrich Himmler, 198–202; contact with Hitler, 55–57, 76–78, 87–88, 162, 278n, 281– 82n; contact with Italians, 74, 104; hatred of the Jews, 185–86; incitement to kill the Jews, 213, 216; on Islam and the Jews, 168, 170–72, 185–86, 216, 259; OSS report on, 234, 236–37; pro-Axis coup in Iraq and, 60–61; rejects Jewish presence in Palestine, 110, 183; speeches in wartime Berlin and Rome, 146–47, 153– 54, 170, 178–79, 182–83, 185–88, 214–15, 291– 92n, 295n, 297–98n, 298n, 302n; welcomes Axis victory, 111, 123–24, 223. See also AntiSemitism; Anti-Zionism; Berlin in Arabic; Cultural fusion. Ettel, Erwin; Himmler, Heinrich; Hitler, Adolf; Islam; Jews; Palestine; Voice of Free Arabism Husseini, Jamal (Jamal al-Husayni), 37, 236, 241, 308 India, 18, 26, 38–39, 41–42, 54, 56, 59–60, 75, 84– 85, 92, 97, 122, 131, 138–39; Nazi appeals to Muslims in, 132, 139, 142, 151, 179, 195, 216, 269n, 303n. See also Bose, Subhas Chandra International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, 233–34, 247 Iran, 17–24, 38–39, 50, 58, 61, 68, 70, 72, 82, 84, 86, 90, 98, 100, 101, 114–15, 132–35, 155– 57, 199, 234, 236–38, 271–72n, 277n, 280n, 293n Iraq, 2, 5–7, 9, 18–20, 24, 29–43, 47, 55–56, 58–59, 62, 65–66, 68, 78, 95, 109, 130–32, 139, 208–11, 234, 236, 253, 267, 277n, 302n, 304n; Nazi propaganda on, 71, 75–76, 80–81, 84, 92, 98, 101, 105, 108, 110, 125–26, 150, 155, 160, 163, 169, 171–72, 175, 180–81, 186, 205, 220, 297n; pro-Axis coup of April 1941, 60–62, 237–38, 264. See also Kilani, Rashid Ali Ireland, Phillip, 247, 308n. See also Banna, Hassan alIslam (also Islamic, Islamism): ix, x, 1–2, 59, 265; American and British political assessments of, 138–40, 240, 248–49, 253–54; Muslim Brotherhood and, 250–52; Sayyid Qutb on, 255–60. See also Anti-Semitism; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Cultural fusion; Himmler, Heinrich; Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Munzel, Kurt; Muslims; Winkler, Hans Alexander

Index Islam, Nazi propaganda on: adaptation of, version of and appeals to, 3, 6, 11, 13, 26, 31, 36, 40, 45–53, 63, 73–74, 79, 81, 92, 98–99, 103–4, 109, 114, 121–22, 124, 128–30, 132, 141–43, 146– 48, 151, 154–57, 159, 165, 168–70, 173, 175, 178– 79, 181, 191, 194, 197, 199–206, 210–12, 217, 274n, 278n, 286–87n, 289n, 296n, 299n, 302n; antagonism to Jews in, 3–5, 85, 175–76, 191– 92, 196–98, 260, 262–63; blend with secular themes, 100, 126, 162; Haj Amin el-Husseini on, 8, 153–54, 185–91, 214–16, 223, 298n Islamic Central Institute, Berlin, 39 Israel, 100, 248, 255, 258–60, 265 Italy, 3, 5–7, 9, 11, 29–31, 34, 41–42, 44, 50, 54, 58– 60, 62, 69, 72–75, 82, 89–91, 97, 104, 110, 118, 123, 140, 145, 151, 159, 172, 182, 190–91, 209, 220, 222, 236–37, 252, 277n, 281n, 285n Italy in Arabic, 104, 285n Jacobs, John, 11, 226, 270n, 285n, 302–5n. See also American Embassy, Cairo Japan (Japanese), xv, 3, 22, 31, 70, 86–87, 91, 97, 103, 105, 136, 151, 188, 189–91, 211, 215, 227, 285n Jerusalem, 84, 100, 236, 248, 253; American Embassy, 33, 102; German Consulate, 27–29, 31, 47, 96, 271n, 273n–74n; Nazi propaganda on: 132, 148, 153, 168, 170, 179, 189, 222; North Africa as bridge linking it to New York, 183, 292n The Jewish Enemy, 1, 277n, 283, 300n, 305n, 310n Jewish Question, 7, 29, 57; German foreign policy and, 29; in Palestine and Arab countries, 42, 55, 58, 77, 139, 156, 188–89. See also Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe Jewish state in Palestine, 72, 190, 303n; American opposition to, 249; American support for, 212, 217, 245; Arab and Muslim opposition to, 230, 246, 253; Nazi opposition to, 28–29; Nazi propaganda on, 13, 160, 165, 177, 184, 186, 192, 207, 216, 218, 263; Franklin Roosevelt and, 103, 128 Jews: ix–x, 2, 4, 11, 261–66; Allied policies on, 83–85, 149–50, 207–10, 212–13; in Arab countries, 57, 59, 89, 93–94, 260; Arab hostility towards, 5, 8, 14, 44, 55, 139, 227–28, 305n; emigration to Palestine, 26–27, 34, 37, 302n; German, 26–28; Hitler and extension of Final Solution, 77–78; Jewish state in Palestine, 27–29, 228–31, 239–41, 245–47; Muslim Brotherhood on, 242, 248–49, 254, 307n; Nazi persecution in Europe, 17–21, 23, 26,

329 88–89, 150–51, 157; Sayyid Qutb on, 255–59, 309n. See also Anti-Semitism; Anti-Zionism; Zionism Jews in Nazi policy and propaganda: the Allies and, 13, 43, 87, 105, 130, 135, 162, 173–74, 177, 188–89, 193–5, 215, 221, 285–86n, 292n, 297n; antagonists with and “enemies of ” Islam and Muslims; 13, 48, 52–53, 71, 73, 99, 129, 146–47, 153–55, 168–70, 175–77, 179, 185–87, 192, 196–98, 206, 292n, 298n; in Arab countries, 159–60, 162, 171, 211, 216, 286n, 291n, 296n; attacked in Arabic print materials, 80–81, 114–22, 132–34; and Balfour Declaration, 49–50; Bolshevism and, 74, 177, 207, 298n; Britain and, 33, 56, 103–4, 108, 110, 147, 164, 174, 211, 214, 285–86n, 294n, 302–3n; common enemy of Arabs and Germans, 60, 75, 172, 199–204, 220–21, 296n; Egypt and, 107, 111–13; enemies of Arabs, 47, 101–5, 147, 16, 173–76, 179, 181–83, 195–96, 204–5, 222, 231, 290n, 296–98n; Husseini on, 16, 76, 146, 153–55, 170, 185–88, 195, 211, 213, 292n; incitement to kill them, 88, 111–12, 125–26, 184, 213–15, 288n, 303n; Franklin Roosevelt and, 106, 127, 148, 163–64, 192, 285n, 291–92n, 297n; started World War II, 158, 169, 198; United States and, 72–73, 92, 105–6, 127, 134, 143–45, 169, 173–74, 177–78, 180, 206, 210, 217, 285n, 289n, 291n, 294n, 296n, 301n; Zionism and Palestine, 71–72, 74, 98, 102, 107, 110, 128, 143, 160, 171, 175–76, 179, 185, 196, 210, 216–17, 222, 296n, 301n, 303n Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Military, 245–47 Joint German–Italian Declaration, 41–42, 55, 74, 122–23, 127, 140, 277n, 288n Joyce, William (Lord Haw-Haw), 71, 280n Kadem, Ahmed, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Karbala, mosque in, 155 Kaspar, Dr. Georg, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Keitel, Wilhelm, 58–59 Kerr, Alba, 248–49, 308n Kettanch, Francis, 138, 140 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg, 39, 276n. See also German Foreign Ministry Kilani, Rashid Ali, xv, 234, 279n; contact and collaboration with Nazi Germany, 9, 24, 39, 41, 44, 55, 68, 74, 86, 89, 152, 216, 281n, 290n; meeting with Hitler, contacts with Ribben-

330 Kilani, Rashid Ali (continued ) trop, 131, 133, 171, 220; Nazi print propaganda and, 116, 130–31, 133, 135; Nazi radio propaganda and, 38, 86, 89–90, 98, 104, 109, 124–25, 127, 142, 150, 163, 171, 183, 188, 220, 292n, 294–95n, 297n, 304n; pro-Axis coup in Iraq, 8, 24, 60–61, 237–38, 264 Kirk, Alexander C., 10, 106; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic, ix, 10–11, 13, 217, 285–86n, 288n–92n, 294n–99n, 303n; political reports from Cairo, 69, 70–74, 86, 88, 97–99, 127, 140–41, 162, 177–78, 225, 263, 269n, 280n–81n, 283n– 84n; summaries of Axis Broadcasts in Arabic, 1941–42, 101–102, 284n Kissling, Dr. Hans-Joachim, 40, 276n. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Koran: anti-Jewish aspects of, 3, 53; Nazi propaganda on, 44–45, 47–49, 51, 53; Nazism’s selective appropriation of, 5, 14, 26, 53 Kursk, Battle of, 182, 191 La Bourse Egyptien, 19, 20. See also Cairo La Guardia, Fiorello, 127 Labor of selective tradition, 3, 261–63 Lampson, Miles: on anti-Semitism in Egypt, 93–94, 284n; on political stance of Egyptians towards Axis and Allies, 64–68, 87, 95, 263, 279n–80n, 284n; on postwar events, 241–65, 307n; on support for Axis in Egypt, 96, 225. See also Britain Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honor, 17 League of Nations, 55, 130 Lebanon, 181, 229, 237, 239–40, 294n–95n, 303n–4n; Nazi propaganda on, 186, 211. See also Military Intelligence Division, United States War Department; Ofﬁce of War Information; American Legation in Beirut Leers, Johann von, 260 Lehman, Herbert, 99, 127 Libya, 18, 54, 64, 84, 91, 94; Nazi propaganda on, 110–11, 131, 136, 211, 240, 286n Lind, Nils, E., 226–27, 305n Lockhart, R.H. Bruce, 136–37, 290n. See also British Foreign Ofﬁce London, 28, 63 London, Nazi propaganda on: associated with New York, Moscow, Washington, and/or Jerusalem, 88, 143, 188–89; and Washington, 80, 88, 143, 149, 163, 188–89 Luftwaffe, 3, 58–59; delivers Arabic print propaganda, 10, 116, 118, 122, 130–31, 220

Index Mackenson, Hans Georg, 42, 281n, 284n, 287n. See also German Embassy: Rome Madfai, Jamil al, 211 Madrid, 90 Maghreb, 62, 187 Maher Pasha, Ali, 64, 95–96, 101, 161, 226, 234– 35, 284n. See also Farouk (king of Egypt); Lampson, Miles Malaysia, 115 Mallman, Klaus-Michael, 7, 138, 269n, 273– 75n, 283n, 286n, 290n, 299–300n, 310n Maraghi, Mohammed Mustafa el, 95–96, 129, 161. See also Al Azhar University Marshall, George C., 208, 212, 230, 254, 302n Mayer, Franz, 238. See also Iran McCloy, John, J., 208–9, 212, 230, 302n Mediterranean, ix, 10, 29, 34, 41, 54, 56, 58, 61, 73, 83–84, 95, 118, 123–24, 127, 145, 149, 186, 202, 206–7, 209. See also North Africa; World War II Mein Kampf, 5, 15, 23, 160, 197, 255; Arabic translations of, 24, 26, 60, 261; Hitler’s contempt for Arabs in, 16, 34, 52 Melchers, Wilhelm, 9, 38, 41, 53–55, 74, 238, 275n, 278n, 306n. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce of the Political Department, German Foreign MinistryMilitary Intelligence Division, United States War Department, 138, 165, 177, 218–19, 282n, 290n Misri, Aziz el, 65. See also Young Egypt Mohammed, references to in Nazi propaganda, 45, 49–51, 98, 109, 120–22, 141, 147, 153, 155–56, 169–70, 173, 175, 179, 191–92, 202–3, 206, 210, 214, 219, 257, 262. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Koran Moneim, Abdel, 21. See also Egyptian Olympic Committee Montgomery, Bernard, 127, 167. See also North Africa Morgenthau, Henry, attacked in Nazi propaganda, 99, 127, 180–81. Moritz, Bernard, 25 Morocco, 9, 26, 29, 36, 62, 76, 85, 89, 146–47, 159, 164, 168, 172, 175, 178, 181, 211, 244, 269n, 296n Moslems. See Muslims Mosul, 132, 231 Munzel, Kurt, 9, 39, 44, 51, 53, 109, 118, 238, 276n, 306n. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Murad, Dr. Juan, 40 Murphy, Robert, 172–73, 296n. See also American Consulate: in Casablanca

Index

331

Murray, Wallace, 228, 230, 305n Muslim Brotherhood, 37, 64, 96, 161, 225, 230, 239, 241–42, 244, 247–48, 251–52, 254, 259, 265, 308n Muslims (also Moslems): American propaganda to and analysis of, 83–85, 134, 138–42, 218–19, 225, 237, 245–46, 248, 255–59, 264, 284n; literacy rate, 10; Nazi racial ideology and, 15–35, 118. See also Arabs Muslims, Nazi propaganda for: x, 1, 4, 45–53, 58, 73, 75, 81, 89, 91, 102, 129, 191; Allied victory as disaster for Muslims, 158, 187; Americans as enemies of, 144, 178; Axis victory and freedom and independence for Arabs and Muslims, 90, 157, 171, 187–88, 288n; Bolsheviks as enemies of, 73, 100, 103, 114–15, 158; boundary blurred between secular and religious aspects, 46, 262; British as enemies of, 151; Germany as friend of, 122, 150, 160; Germany will help to exterminate the Jews and defeat Anglo-Saxons, 211; Himmler’s and SS’s appeals to, 200–203, 204; Hitler as second prophet, 201; Islam and the Koran, 92, 121, 128–29, 142, 153–56, 192, 196–200, 214– 15, 298n; Jews as enemy and deadly threat, 148, 153–54, 169, 176–78, 181–3, 186, 187, 210, 227, 263, 299n; Palestine and, 169, 171, 178– 79, 183, 185, 209–10, 215–16; solidarity with Muslims in India, 139–43; threats to Jews, 111; Zionism, 168, 185, 210, 298n Mussolini, Benito, 29, 34, 41, 74, 91, 98, 171, 182, 191, 213, 244, 295n

9, 114, 116, 284n, 286n; Nazi print propaganda in North Africa, 78–82, 118, 282n, 287n, 289n. See also German Foreign Ministry; North Africa; Panzerarmee; Winkler, Hans Alexander Neurath, Konstantin Freiherr von, 9, 28, 78, 273n New York, Nazi propaganda on, 80, 99, 127, 132, 138, 148, 153, 169, 177, 183, 207, 231 New York Times, 169, 212 New Zealand, forces of in North Africa, 54, 60, 159 Nokrashi, Mahmud, 252 North Africa, ix–xii, 1–7, 9, 12–13, 15, 18, 32–37, 39, 54–55, 57–58, 60, 62, 64, 68–69, 72, 78– 79, 85, 87–90, 95, 107–8, 110–11, 114, 116, 118, 121–23, 126–27, 130–31, 134, 138–39, 146–48, 151, 153–54, 156, 158–60, 162–63, 165, 169, 172– 75, 177–78, 182–83, 187–88, 194–95, 203, 205, 209, 221, 231, 245, 255, 260, 263, 265, 288n, 291–92n, 294–96n, 304n. See also El Alamein, battle of; Lampson, Miles; Neurath, Alexander Konstantin Freiherr von; Rommel, Erwin; Winkler, Hans Alexander Norway, 100, 115 Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress and rallies, 31–32 Nuremberg race laws, 18, 89; Nazi ofﬁcials on applicability to Arabs, Turks, and Persians, 19–22, 118, 150 Nuri Pasha, 208 Nye, Gerald P., 212

Nagger, Abdel Hakim el-, 40 Nahas Pasha, 101, 114, 148, 161, 191–92, 196–97, 241; Nazi propaganda on, 299n, 303n Nasser, Gamal, Abdel, 260. See Leers, Johann von La Nation Arabe, 26 National Socialism, 52, 77, 213, 244, 261; Islam and, 8, 25–26, 45, 122, 150–51, 153–56, 173, 194, 200–201, 251, 260, 296n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Himmler, Heinrich; Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Munzel, Kurt Nazi propaganda in Arabic. See Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Berlin in Arabic; German Foreign Ministry; Grobba, Fritz; Himmler, Heinrich; Hitler, Adolf; Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Jews; Munzel, Kurt; Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry; Ribbentrop, Joachim von; Voice of Free Arabism; Winkler, Hans Alexander Neurath, Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von,

The Oasis: Field Newspaper for German Troops in Africa, 121 Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) (High Command of the Military), 3, 58, 61, 96, 116, 130, 276n, 279n Ofﬁce of Racial Politics (Rassenpolitisches Amt), 18–19, 21–22, 150–52, 292n Ofﬁce of Strategic Services (OSS), 12, 102, 218, 233–38, 243, 245, 247–48, 300n, 306–7n; Near East and the War Crimes Problem, 233–38, 305–6n Ofﬁce of War Information (OWI), 9; interpretation and impact of German propaganda, 160–61, 166–68, 293–94n, 304n; policy in Middle East, 83–84, 162–63, 282n, 292n, 293n; on short wave radio ownership in Middle East, 9 Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry, 9, 39–40 Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce of the Political Department, German Foreign Ministry, 24–25, 38

332 Ohlendorf, Otto, 199 Operation Barbarossa, 61, 278n. See also Eastern Front Operation Sunﬂower, 58. See also North Africa; Rommel, Erwin Operation Torch, 89, 145. See also Allies; North Africa Orientalists, German, 4, 38, 79, 199, 257 Osman, Amin Pasha, 241, 307n Our Struggle with the Jews. See Qutb, Sayyid Palestine, 5–9, 140, 226, 239–45, 247–48, 253; American analysis and policy, 83–85, 138– 40, 149–50, 166–68, 177–78, 194, 207–12, 228–30, 234, 236–37, 245–49, 254, 282n, 292n, 302n, 307n–9n; British analysis and policy, 37, 93, 100; German policy on, 16, 26–34, 40–43, 47, 54, 58, 61–62, 138, 202, 204, 275n; Hitler’s comments on, 40; Jewish emigration to, 9, 27; literacy rates, 9– 11; in Nazi broadcasts, 13, 48, 50, 71–78, 86– 87, 89, 92, 98–99, 101–7, 110–11, 126, 128, 141–44, 145–47, 151, 164–65, 169, 171–72, 175–93, 195–200, 205–7, 214–23, 231–32, 263, 286n, 288n, 291n, 294n–96n, 298n, 301n–4n, 306n; in Nazi printed materials, 130–32, 159–60; revolt of 1936–39, 33, 93. See also Arabs; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Banna, Hassan al-; Husseini, Haj Amin el-; Muslim Brotherhood; Muslims; Palestine People’s Party Palestine People’s Party (PAP), 236–37, 240– 41 Panzerarmee, 7, 10, 78–79, 113, 117, 127, 144, 158, 216, 269n, 284n, 287n, 290n. See also Neurath, Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von; North Africa; Rommel, Erwin; Winkler, Hans Alexander Papen, Franz von, 40–41, 55, 152, 276n, 278n, 292n. See also Ankara Pearl Harbor, attack on, 86–87, 97 Persians: and Nuremberg race laws, 15, 18–19, 38, 84, 98, 118, 139, 151, 238, 255 Petschulat, Elfriede, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Pieckenbrok, Hans, 32. See also Canaris, Wilhelm Poland, 33, 35, 59, 88, 100, 125, 184 Prietz, Ingeborg, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 5, 197, 257, 260–61

Index Qarqani, Khalid al-Hud al-, 34. See also Saud, Ibn (king of Saudi Arabia) Qawuqji, Fawzi el-, 37 Qena, Egypt, 64, 95. See also Banna, Hassan alQuanas, Hade Najib, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Queling, Hans, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Qutb, Sayyid, 260; compared to European radical anti-Semites, 258–59; execution of, 259; Israel and, 258–59; on Jews as enemies of Islam, 255–59; Koran and the Jews, 256– 57; Our Struggle with the Jews, 255–59; warns of Jewish conspiracies against Muslims and Islam, 255–57. See also Anti-Semitism; Banna, Hassan al-; Koran; Muslim Brotherhood Rademacher, Franz, 152, 292n Radio, Nazi Germany’s short wave broadcasts, 37–40; estimates of Arabic listening audience, 9–10, 25, 269n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Berlin in Arabic; German Foreign Ministry; Voice of Free Arabism Radio Bari, 6, 72–73, 124, 275n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Radio Berlin, 46, 73, 86, 123, 163, 265, 304n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Rahn, Rudolf, 68–69, 160, 280n, 293n. See also German Foreign Ministry Rantzau, Josiah von, 118, 287n. See also German Foreign Ministry Rassenpolitisches Amt. See Ofﬁce of Racial Politics Rauff, Walter, 7. See also Halbmond und Hakenkreuz Razeq, Aref Abd er-, 37. See also Husseini, Haj Amin elReactionary modernism, x, 4 Red Army, 158, 182, 191. See also Eastern Front; Soviet Union Reich Citizenship Law, 17, 271n. See also Nuremberg race laws Reich Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda, 3, 19, 24–26, 216, 271n; on Hitler and Islam, 202–4 Reich Security Main Ofﬁce, Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), 3, 6, 9, 199, 202, 204. See also Himmler, Heinrich Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 6, 8–9, 34, 38–39, 58, 60, 62–63, 90, 131, 135, 279n, 281n, 287n, 296n, 298n; Haj Amin el-Husseini and, 74–

Index 76, 188, 223, 304n; Rashid Ali Kilani and, 86, 133, 171, 188, 220; propaganda guidelines and strategy for the Middle East, 91–92, 109–10, 160, 175, 205–6. See also German Foreign Ministry Richards, I.A., 18, 271n. See also German Foreign Ministry Rommel, Erwin, 7, 9–10, 58, 62, 64, 70, 78–79, 88–89, 96–97, 110–11, 113, 116–18, 122–23, 127, 132, 135–36, 138–39, 141, 144–45, 158, 167, 195, 203, 222–23, 230, 284n, 286–87n, 291n, 304n. See also North Africa Roosevelt, Franklin D., 127, 130, 159, 161, 172, 189–90, 212, 227–28, 305n; on Jewish national home in Palestine, 229–30, 264, 288n, 294n, 302n, 305n. See also Jews; Palestine; Wagner, Robert; Weizmann, Chaim; Zionism Roosevelt, Franklin D., Nazi propaganda on: as ally of Jews, 73–74, 86–87, 91–92, 99, 103, 105–6, 127–28, 130–32, 134–35, 144–46, 162, 164, 169, 176, 178, 180, 192, 206, 219, 285n, 288n, 291–93n, 297n; as enemy of Arabs and Islam, 7, 132, 134, 146, 148, 158, 221, 296n; responsible for World War II, 86, 91–92, 116, 285n, 288n; said to be insane, 223, 304n; said to be Jewish, 163–65, 223, 294n Rose el Yousef, 25 Rosenman, Samuel, 99, 127 Rothschild, Lionel, 186 Rothschild, Nathaniel, 186 Ruhle, Gerhard, 62–63, 118, 279n, 287n. See also German Foreign Ministry Rundfunkpolitische Abteilung, 33, 39, 275– 76n, 282n. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Ruppert, Johannes, 17–18 Russia. See Bolshevism Rüther, Annemarie, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Sadat, Anwar, 231 Said, Nuri, 42, 98, 101, 180, 208 Salama, Sheikh Hasan, 37. See also Husseini, Haj Amin el-. Samuel, Herbert, 8 Saud, Ibn (king of Saudi Arabia), 34, 59, 101, 139, 228, 246; on Jews, 227. See also AntiSemitism; Jews Saudi Arabia, 9, 32, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43, 59, 62, 85, 101, 132, 186, 211, 226, 228–29, 241, 246 Schellenberg, Walter, 199

333 Schirach, Baldur von, 31 Schulze, Felix, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Sebawi, Yunis, es-, 60 Senff, Joachim, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Shabibi, Muhammed Ridha, 211 Sharp, Frederick O., 138–40, 290n. See also Military Intelligence Division, United States War Department Shawkat, Naji Bey, 40–41, 43, 279n. See also Husseini, Haj Amin elSicily, 182 Singapore, 28, 115, 131, 134 Sirri, Hussein Pasha, 64–66 Sobibor, 88, 125 Soﬁa, 90, 170 Sollum, 64 Soviet Union, x, 58–59, 61, 67, 88, 101, 103, 152, 154, 158, 183–84, 192, 195, 218, 229, 234, 237, 246, 262; and Hitler’s plans for Middle East, 75, 78. See also Bolsheviks; Bolshevism Soviet Union, Nazi propaganda on: linked to Jews, 179, 183, policy hostile to Muslims in, 92, 129–30 Spain, 31, 121, 129, 142–43, 164 Special Staff F (Sonderstab F), 58, 109. See also Felmy, Helmut SS. See Reich Security Main Ofﬁce Stalin, Joseph, 189, 214 Stalingrad, Battle of, 158, 167, 181, 191, 225 Steger, Christian T., 33, 275n Stettinius, Edward R., 228–30, 305n. See also United States State Department Stimson, Henry, 207, 212, 302n Stohrer, Eberhard von, 19–20, 271–72n. See also German Embassy, Cairo Stuckart, Wilhelm, 18, 22–23, 272n. See also Nuremberg race laws Sudan, 39, 42, 70, 110, 195, 211, 226, 279–80 Suez Canal, 36, 57, 59, 99, 110, 123, 127, 135, 231, 239 Swallhay, Saidduddin, 40. See also Ofﬁce VII, Orient Ofﬁce, Department of Radio Policy, German Foreign Ministry Syria, 5, 9, 36, 39, 47, 61–62, 166–67, 204, 208, 211, 218, 229, 237, 240, 243–44, 294n–95n, 300n, 303n–4n, 309n; German policy toward, 34, 39, 42–43, 55, 68–69, 78, 135, 280n; Nazi propaganda on, 72–73, 76, 80–81, 84– 85, 98–99, 101–2, 105, 108, 110, 126, 128, 130– 32, 146, 160, 164, 169, 175, 177, 181, 186

334 Taft, Robert, 207, 209–10, 213, 218, 302n Taher, Mohamed, 20. See also Berlin Olympics Tehran, 8, 19–20, 39, 74, 79, 90, 154, 155–56, 189–90, 272n. See also German Embassy: Tehran Thaw, Lawrence C, 138–40, 290. See also Military Intelligence Division, United States War Department Tobruk, Battle of, 64, 88, 122, 125, 127, 223. See also North Africa; World War II Transfer Agreement, 27–30 Transjordan, 42, 47, 50, 62, 71, 78, 98; Nazi propaganda on, 99, 102, 105, 131–32, 135, 164, 175, 186, 211 Truman, Harry S., 245, 249 Tuck, Pinkney, 11, 69, 242, 254, 303–5n, 307–9n. See also American Embassy, Cairo; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Tunis, 68, 159–60, 182, 244, 300n Tunisia, 7, 103–6, 62, 76, 89, 145, 158–60, 167, 172–73, 178, 181, 184, 211, 218, 230, 293n, 296n Turkey, 17, 19, 39–40, 55–56, 61, 86, 90, 99, 101, 152, 190, 237, 276n, 278–79n, 282n, 300n. See also Papen, Franz von United States Congress, House and Senate Resolution on Jewish emigration to Palestine, 205, 207–10, 211–12, 218, 228, 302n United States State Department: 11, 69, 178, 227–30, 264, 269–70n, 275n, 280n, 305n; Beirut Legation and Embassy, 294–95n; Berlin Embassy, 10; Damascus Legation, 253, 305n– 7n, 309n; Jidda Legation, 102, 226. See also American Embassy, Cairo; Axis Broadcasts in Arabic; Kirk, Alexander C. University of Berlin, 39, 287n. See also Munzel, Kurt University of Erlangen, 40, 238. See also Munzel, Kurt; Senff, Joachim University of Göttingen, 38 University of Heidelberg, 68, 287n, 293n University of Tübingen, 68, 79, 202, 293n, 300n. See also Rahn, Rudolf; Reich Security Main Ofﬁce; Winkler, Hans Alexander Voice of America, 83, 149, 163 Voice of Free Arabism (VFA), 9, 11, 104, 163, 212, 217, 231, 251, 262, 285n, 297n, 304n; on Allies, “Anglo-Saxons” and the Jews, 110–13, 130, 134, 136, 149, 173, 179, 189, 206, 291n, 298n, 301n; on Bolshevism, 184, 190, 196, 206, 298–99n, 301n; on Britain, 171, 285– 86n, 288n, 295n; collaboration with and

Index support for Axis, 108, 111, 171, 195, 221–22, 286n, 288n, 291n; Haj Amin el-Husseini on, 129, 185–88, 285n; incitement to kill Jews, 112, 125–26, 184, 288n, 304n; Islamist appeals, 191–2, 298n, 299n; on Jewish antagonism to Islam, 147, 176; on the Jewish danger to Arabs and Muslims, 107, 176, 181–82, 285– 86n, 290n, 297n, 305n; Jews as “most bitter enemies,” 196; Jews in Arab countries, 112– 13, 172, 296n; praises Al Azhar University, 141–42, 290n; Roosevelt and the Jews, 106, 148, 180, 291–92n; on United States, 144–45, 162, 178, 289n, 291n, 294n, 296–97n, 302n; on Zionism and Palestine, 107, 143, 175–76, 184, 232, 291n, 295–98n, 303n. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Völkischer Beobachter, 176, 205 Wadsworth, George, 165–66, 294n. See also American Legation in Beirut Wafd Party, 65–67, 96, 114, 137, 226, 241–42, 254. See also Egypt; Lampson, Miles Wagner, Robert (senator), 207, 209–13, 218, 228–29, 302n, 305n. See also Jews: emigration to Palestine; Roosevelt, Franklin D. Wannsee Conference, 59, 88 Weizmann, Chaim, 73, 99–100, 157; Nazi propaganda on, 99, 100–101, 127–28, 132, 143, 153, 175, 180, 215. See also Zionism Weizsäcker, Ernst von, German Middle East policy and, 30, 41–43, 59, 68, 89, 114, 274n, 277n, 279n–80n, 286n Welles, Sumner, 97, 143, 169 White Paper. See Britain Wilkie, Wendell, 167, 178, 289n Winkler, Hans Alexander, 9, 282n; Nazi Germany’s Arabic leaﬂets in North Africa, 79– 82, 96, 114, 118–20, 282n, 287n; suggestions for German propaganda in Iran, 156–57, 293n. See also German Foreign Ministry; Neurath, Konstantin Alexander Freiherr von; Panzerarmee Wise, Stephen, 207, 303n Woermann, Ernst, 41, 43, 58–59, 68, 90–91, 276– 77n, 279–81n, 283n, 290n. See also German Foreign Ministry Wolff, Heinrich, 16, 271n. See also German Consulate: Jerusalem World War I, 6, 15, 18, 48–49, 51, 68, 109, 146, 198, 252 World War II, ix–x, xv, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 13– 14, 24, 26, 36, 44, 50, 56, 100, 194; aftermath, 252–53, 259–60, 262–65; impact of events in North Africa and Middle East on, 69, 78, 97,

Index 184, 208–9, 212, 225, 231; See also Hirszowicz, Lukasz; Holocaust; North Africa World War II, Nazi propaganda on: 87, 92, 102, 109, 115, 130, 134, 145, 147, 174–75, 182, 193; as chapter of longer Muslim-Jewish conﬂict; 170–71; described as a Jewish war, 13, 136, 145, 153, 169, 189, 215, 221, 263; impact of Allied victory on Arabs and Muslims, 158, 164–65; kindled by Anglo-Saxons, 169; started to attain Zionist goals, 157, 198 World Zionist Congress, 100. See also Weizmann, Chaim

335 Yemen, 37, 62 Young Egypt, 64–65, 95–96, 161, 230, 235, 241, 284n. See also Hussein, Ahmed Yugoslavia, 60, 70, 100, 190, 204, 233, 299– 300n. See also Bosnian SS Division Zagreb, 170 Zeesen, 37, 85. See also Axis Broadcasts in Arabic Zionism: 247, 254; the Allies and, 14, 71–2, 83– 85, 87, 161, 166, 181, 184, 192–93, 230, 264; Nazi propaganda on: x, 5–6, 57, 87, 106–7, 133, 147, 153, 158, 194, 205–7, 220, 291n, 297n, 301–2n; Franklin Roosevelt and, 264