The Nazis and the Muslims

Jeffrey Herf,  Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2010), 368 pages, US$20.  

History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its edifice except with skulls. Honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.—Sheik Abdullah Azzam, Palestinian scholar
and al Qaeda operative 

If faith, a belief, is not watered by blood, it does not grow… Faith is propagated by counting up deaths every day, by adding up massacres and charnel houses.—Ali Benhadj, Algerian Islamist 

Nazi ideology, Arab nationalism, and a fundamentalist strain of Islam that advocates a politics of slaughter. Those three elements form the essential roots to the pathology of contemporary Islamist politics. The above quotes vividly capture aspects of that toxic chemistry.

Recently analysed transcripts of Nazi radio broadcasts from Berlin to North Africa, the Middle East and Persia during the Second World War throw chilling light on the roots of contemporary Islamist ideology in those regions. It is the deeper story behind the grim daily news from the region. A fascinating account of those transmissions, preserved in a US archive of several thousand pages titled “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic”, is to be found in the recently published book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, by Jeffrey Herf, Professor of History at the University of Maryland.

The archive, declassified in 1977, was developed under the direction of Alexander C. Kirk, who became US Ambassador to Egypt in 1941. Pro-Nazi Arab exiles living in Berlin were the key links between the National Socialist regime and the Muslim world in an extensive and carefully scripted propaganda war conducted between 1941 and 1945. Kirk oversaw the transcription and translation of the short-wave transmissions and had them sent regularly to Washington.

Chief among the Arab exiles involved with the Nazi propaganda effort was Haj Amin el-Husseini, a Palestinian and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. “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,” writes Professor Herf. What is not so well-known is the scale of the propaganda effort Husseini helped implement, in close co-operation with Goebbels, Himmler and Hitler himself. Orientalist intellectuals advising senior officials in the SS also played a role. An Arabic translation of Mein Kampf was published, too; offensive comments concerning Arabs were removed.

Hundreds of thousands of leaflets, and thousands of hours of short-wave radio broadcasts—transmitted seven days and nights a week—were aimed at shaping a pro-Axis sentiment among the broader Arab public. Key messages included violent anti-Semitism (“Kill the Jews before they kill you”, “annihilate”, “exterminate” were frequent usages), a denunciation of British imperialism, and the depiction of the German and Italian forces as armies of “liberation” from the foreign yoke. It was hoped, too, that a general Arab uprising against the Allies would occur.

Husseini’s propaganda was also a part of Hitler’s aim to extend the Final Solution from Europe to the Middle East. As Rommel’s victorious Afrika Korps rolled across North Africa to the Suez Canal and beyond, the intention was to have—just as occurred in Europe—SS extermination squads, dubbed Einsatzgruppe Afrika, following to murder the Jews of the region.

Professor Herf shows how Nazi propaganda during the Second World War has had an enduring contemporary impact: 

The attacks of 9/11 led me to explore the similarities and differences between Nazi ideology and that of the political Islamism that inspired the terrorists. My previous work has also dealt with “reactionary modernism”, that is, mixtures of tradition and modernity in Nazism and fascism in Europe. 

In the case of Husseini, he was fascinated by the way his Berlin broadcasts blended themes of modern European Jew-hatred with anti-Jewish currents in ancient Islamic texts. It was skilful shaping of a message that would resonate with a Muslim audience. 

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this campaign was the proposal to portray Hitler as the so-called Twelfth Imam. In Shi’ite theology this imam is the redeemer figure who returns at the End Times to save a corrupted world. In a February 1941 memo from the German Embassy in Tehran, Berlin was notified that: 

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. 

This idea had emerged in Iran “without any effort on our part”. The memo then went on to suggest the propaganda possibilities in such a belief: 

One way to encourage this development would be to clearly lay out Mohammed’s struggle against the Jews in ancient times and Hitler’s struggle against them in recent times … 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 Jews everywhere, I am fighting for the Lord’s work,” Mein Kampf, p. 69.  

Himmler thought that the idea of promoting Hitler as the Twelfth Imam was worth serious consideration.

Was Professor Herf surprised at the extent of Nazi efforts in the Arab world? 

Not really. [Though] I was a bit surprised at the extent of operational planning to extend the Holocaust if Rommel had defeated the forces of Britain, New Zealand and yes, Australia, at the Battle of El Alamein. Australians may not be fully aware that their soldiers … played a major role in preventing Hitler from extending the Final Solution … to encompass the approximately 700,000 Jews in North Africa and the Middle East in 1942. 

Professor Herf’s work also addresses the question of why the Arab world was so susceptible to Nazi ideas: 

The Nazis and the Islamists had a particular reading of the religion of Islam, one that radicalized currents within it. It is important to distinguish between the religion of Islam, which has many varieties, and political Islamism that emerged in the twentieth century. It is the latter which found common ground in a totalitarian vision … and which also shared Nazism’s hatred of the Jews and its conspiracy theories of world politics. 

The ideological legacy of the war has resulted in a paradox. Terror groups such as al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, even the Iranian regime, express ideas that are not strictly indigenous to the Arab, Persian or Muslim world—except, of course, anti-Semitism. Professor Herf says they are the result of a cultural fusion, a globalisation of ideas, which was particularly intense during the Second World War. That successful alchemy was Husseini’s greatest propaganda achievement, one that has an enduring and lethal contemporary presence in the region.

The Nazi attack on Zionism helped to introduce paranoid conspiracy theorising into postwar Arab politics, too. As a result, when the state of Israel was founded, and when the Israelis won the war of 1948, Nazi predictions that a victory for the Allies in the war would be a victory for the Jews, appeared to be confirmed. In Professor Herf’s view, all this led the centre of gravity of anti-Semitism in world politics to shift from Europe to the Middle East and Iran.

Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is indispensable reading for an understanding of the deeper story behind the almost daily mayhem reported from that region.

This is a longer version of an interview with Professor Herf that was originally published in the West Australian newspaper, where Rod Moran is the Senior Features Writer.

Subscribe to Quadrant magazine here…