Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (3 page)

"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 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 IL' 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 193os, 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 193os. 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]."' 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 historians.' ° 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." 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 Cuppers, broke new ground with Halbmond and Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber and Palestina (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 Cuppers 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 Cuppers discovered that the SS had an Einsatzgruppe Afrika, a paramilitary task force, under the leadership of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer (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." 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 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."

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 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,ooo 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 cafes 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 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 8o 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 charge 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 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.