Forty years ago Lukasz Hirszowicz published a survey entitled The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Considerable additional material on National Socialist relations with the Arabs has become available in the intervening decades. It is to the credit of the two authors of this book published as volume eight in the series of the Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg of Stuttgart University that they have been assiduous in locating information either inaccessible or overlooked earlier.

A chapter summarizing the background covers earlier Arab terror against the small Jewish community in nineteenth-century Palestine though without reference to the 1834 massacre in Safed or the massive Arab immigration into the area. A survey of the Arab uprising against the British and the Jewish minority provides background for the British White Paper of 1939 as London turned from appeasing Germany to preparing to fight that country as it simultaneously shifted from fighting to appeasing the Arabs. The book offers a fine account of the sympathy developing for Nazi Germany in the Arab world and the early complications resulting from Germany's favoring Jewish emigration to Palestine over emigration elsewhere by stealing less from those who moved to the British mandate. A well-documented process of accommodation to each other would lead to closer cooperation in wartime. Germany's need to rescue Italy's disastrous failure in North Africa and Greece brought the Germans directly into the picture militarily.

The book shows how concentration on the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union made it difficult for the Germans to take advantage of their victories in Libya, Greece, and Crete in the spring of 1941 even though they were planning to follow up the anticipated quick victory over the Soviet Union with the conquest of the whole Middle East. As enthusiastic friends of the Third Reich, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Egypt looked forward to replacing British and French colonialism with domination by Germany and Italy. The British succeeded in first crushing the pro-Nazi regime in Iraq and then the equally pro-Nazi Vichy French military in Syria. Though endlessly feuding with each other, both Haj Amin el-Husseinie, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and Rashid Ali Gailani who had led the coup in Iraq, spent most of the war in Germany issuing anti-Jewish tirades and enjoying financial and other support from the German government. While there was agreement among all of them that all Jews should be killed, the German government would not issue the proclamation of Arab independence that their collaborators ardently hoped for until November 1944, when Berlin no longer had to take Italian ambitions into account—and Germany was itself besieged.

There was an enormous welling up of pro-German sentiments as the German army appeared likely to take over the area with its army pushing into Egypt from the South and through the Caucasus from the North in the summer of 1942. A special murder commando was organized for attachment to Rommel's headquarters so that it could kill the Jews of Palestine with local assistance. These were unlikely to be protected by minimal British defenses designed to halt an invasion from the North. As Jews fled Egypt for Palestine and tried to arm themselves in the mandate, the German armies on both fronts suffered crushing defeats that made all the elaborate preparations look much sillier in retrospect than in the circumstances of the time. The subsequent hopes for a reversal beginning in Tunisia were not only defeated by the Allies but hindered on the spot by local French restraint and Italian opposition. Thereafter only recruitment of Muslims for the German military and armed SS could demonstrate Muslim enthusiasm for the Third Reich, though experience showed that the recruited units were more enthusiastic about slaughtering civilians than serious combat. Concluding portions of the book detail efforts to infiltrate agents and spies into the Middle East and trace the postwar fates of those who had earlier played significant roles in the cooperation between the Third Reich and Arab pro-Nazi leaders.

The book is especially strong in its portrayal of substantial affinities between many Arab leaders and National Socialism. It was not just that they believed they had the same enemies; there was a far greater convergence of beliefs than much of the literature—and subsequent apologias—would lead one to believe. There are some errors that might be corrected in any new edition. The authors still fall for the old fairy tales about the Anglo-German Naval Agreement without realizing that the Germans planned to violate it before signing and did so later the same year. They describe the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse incorrectly and have an unrealistic view of the British difficulties in supplying their forces over a route longer, not shorter, than that of the Germans. A more serious error is the assertion that the British did not ask for the extradition of the Mufti. If the existing accounts that they did so and that De Gaulle refused are incorrect, the authors need to document their alternative account.

These slips in no way detract from a book of great value. At a time when the issues of the Middle East are steadily in the news, a serious look at the background is most welcome. The authors have drawn together an enormous amount of material from archives and secondary sources. The writing is clear and forceful. There are numerous well-chosen quotations from contemporary documents, speeches, and proclamations that offer insight into the views of key actors. A translation into English would be most welcome.