Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (6 page)

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 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 Kampf36 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.4o 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 Fiihrer's work would have great propagandistic value" 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 Fiihrer'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. 1146 By November 1938, Arslan's translation of Mein Kampf was almost done. Its 960 pages were to be published in an edition of between io,ooo 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 Kampfpublished by the Nazi regime ended.47 Although the work was not published, Hentig's view that Mein Kampfin 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 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 goo in 1940however 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 6o 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 [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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer." 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 Bulow-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; 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- 1160