Nazi Influence in the Arab World

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Amin al-Husayni meeting Adolf Hitler || November 1941

Writing recently about the Arab war launched against Israel in 1948, immediately after her restoration, I noted that one factor giving the war such an existential quality on the Jewish side was the deep connections between the Nazi government and Arab leaders over the preceding decade, the public support of the Arab leadership in Palestine for a Nazi victory in the Second World War, and the spread of Nazi ideology among Arab populations.¹ I wanted to unpack that a little in this article.

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE NAZI REGIME

Within weeks of the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Palestine Arab notables began a series of approaches to the German Consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff. Hitler was initially hesitant about embracing the Arabs.² There were some ideological qualms, because Nazi racial doctrine as set down in Mein Kampf described Arabs as inferior, but the main issues were strategic: the Germans were quite content to leave the Arab region as mostly a sphere of interest for Axis partner Fascist Italy, Berlin did not in any case believe the Arabs had the capacity to do much for them, and as late as 1938 Hitler was careful to avoid overt anti-British activities, since he was still desirous of a modus vivendi with Britain that gave the Nazis a free hand in Europe in exchange for guaranteeing the security of India and the rest of the British Empire.³

The Nazis’ unresponsiveness to Arab appeals for their first few years in power is quite remarkable. For example, a “journalist” for Egypt’s Al-Ahram, based in Jaffa, approached Germany’s Jerusalem Consulate for assistance in creating an Arab Nazi movement in the summer of 1933, and was rebuffed. Just as remarkable: this did nothing to dampen Arab enthusiasm for the Nazis in the 1930s. Recalling this period, Sami al-Jundi, an early Syrian leader of the Ba’th Party, wrote, “We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the sources of its thought, particularly [Friedrich] Nietzsche”.⁴

The basic ideological-strategic divergence was that the Arabs were hell-bent on preventing the Jews returning to Zion, and the Nazis—before the “Final Solution” crystalised into a program for the physical annihilation of Jews—saw the forced emigration of Jews as the quickest feasible route to a Judenrein (Jew-free) Europe, with Mandatory Palestine regarded as a useful dumping ground,⁵ not least because of the problems it would cause for the British, part of the effort to convince London that its resources were better spent shoring-up the Empire instead of preventing Nazi hegemony in Europe.⁶ This was the context for the Haavara Agreement that so obsesses antisemites.

The Nazis’ view shifted in June 1937, when it became clear the British Peel Commission was going to recommend partitioning Mandate Palestine. The earlier Nazi optimism that Jews sent to Palestine would be liquidated by the Arabs was replaced by alarm that a Jewish State would be created with the backing of an “Aryan” government, handing “international Jewry [a base] somewhat like the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the COMINTERN”.⁷ These “Three Internationals”—Jews, Roman Catholics, and Communists—were regarded as the most dangerous threats to the Third Reich.⁸

In late 1937, with Hitler’s hopes of an accord with Britain fading, the Nazis adopted a more activist policy in the Arab world. The secret Nazi support for Arab forces already underway began coming into the open. At the September 1937 pan-Arab conference against “Zionism” in Bludan, just north of Damascus, the only European present was a German.⁹ The Nazis’ theoretical racialist antagonism to Arabs was—as with the Japanese—no practical impediment whatsoever to cooperation. Mein Kampf was translated into Arabic and became widely available without harming the Nazis’ standing, and the Nazis for their part went as far as they could go—without actually editing the Führer’s sacred text—to revoke the anti-Arab aspects of their ideology.

As early as December 1937, the Nazi Party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, rejected the idea Arabs were “pure Semites” and spoke of their “partial Aryanisation”. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, one of the key leaders on the Arab side in 1948, was named as an example, citing his facial features and his “endurance” in waging the then-ongoing Arab Revolt. Amin al-Husayni had been one of Wolff’s first Arab interlocuters in 1933, offering the Nazis a Muslims alliance stretching far beyond the Holy Land to wage war on the Jews. The Mufti would deliver on this promise, becoming the most individually important lynchpin of the Nazi-Muslim wartime alliance in the 1940s.¹⁰

THE WAR YEARS

Nazi radio broadcasts in the Arab world from the summer of 1938 onwards had an immense impact on public opinion,¹¹ and the fall of France in June 1940 marked the onset of major Nazi influence in the Middle East, as French possessions in North Africa and especially Syria-Lebanon became bases for Nazi propaganda and subversion in the region.

Nazi influence spread in basically three streams. First, by working with pre-existing figures and movements that had compatible ideological-strategic visions. Co-opting the Mufti of the Palestine Arabs would fit in this category, as would the Nazis establishing tight collaborative relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother ship of Islamism.¹² Second, fostering and sponsoring new parties and cadres on the Nazi model. Third, recruiting agents and cultivating converts and collaborators in Arab governments, especially the courts and militaries, with the most success in Egypt and lesser inroads made in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The second and third streams briefly combined in Iraq in 1940-41 with the setting up of a pro-Nazi government.¹³