During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazi regime engaged in an intensive effort to appeal to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa.Footnote ¹ It did so by presenting the Nazi regime as a champion of secular anti-imperialism, especially against Britain, as well as by a selective appropriation and reception of the traditions of Islam in ways that suggested their compatibility with the ideology of National Socialism. This article and the larger project from which it comes draw on recent archival findings that make it possible to expand on the knowledge of Nazi Germany's efforts in this region that has already been presented in a substantial scholarship.Footnote ² This essay pushes the history of Nazism beyond its Eurocentric limits while pointing to the European dimensions of Arabic and Islamic radicalism of the mid-twentieth century. On shortwave radio and in printed items distributed in the millions, Nazi Germany's Arabic language propaganda leapt across the seemingly insurmountable barriers created by its own ideology of Aryan racial superiority. From fall 1939 to March 1945, the Nazi regime broadcast shortwave Arabic programs to the Middle East and North Africa seven days and nights a week. Though the broadcasts were well known at the time, the preponderance of its print and radio propaganda has not previously been documented and examined nor has it entered into the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the Nazi regime during World War II and the Holocaust. In light of new archival findings, we are now able to present a full picture of the wartime propaganda barrage in the course of which officials of the Nazi regime worked with pro-Nazi Arab exiles in Berlin to adapt general propaganda themes aimed at its German and European audiences to the religious traditions of Islam and the regional and local political realities of the Middle East and North Africa. This adaptation was the product of a political and ideological collaboration between officials of the Nazi regime, especially in its Foreign Ministry but also of its intelligence services, the Propaganda Ministry, and the SS on the one hand, and pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin on the other. It drew on a confluence of perceived shared political interests and ideological passions, as well as on a cultural fusion, borrowing and interacting between Nazi ideology and certain strains of Arab nationalism and Islamic religious traditions. It was an important chapter in the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Nazism during World War II and comprises a chapter in the history of radical Islamist ideology and politics.

In wartime Berlin, radical anti-Semitism of European and German-speaking provenance found common ground with radical anti-Semitism rooted in Koranic verses and the commentaries on them in the traditions of Islam. Just as Nazi anti-Semitism was a radicalization of elements that already existed within European culture, so the anti-Semitism of the pro-Nazi Arab exiles resulted from a radicalization of elements that already existed within the traditions of Islam. In both cases, these twentieth-century extremists, in patterns familiar to historians of reception, engaged in what Raymond Williams called “the labor of selective tradition.” That is, they actively reworked and appropriated received traditions, emphasizing some elements and diminishing others.Footnote ³ As a result of their shared passions and interests, they produced texts and broadcasts that they could not have produced on their own. Through this active labor or conserving and reworking their own while incorporating foreign traditions, the Nazis and their Arab collaborators found common ground to produce the texts and broadcasts that accompanied the Axis military and propaganda offensives in North Africa and the Middle East during the war.Footnote ⁴ Cultural and intellectual historians of Nazism have long demonstrated that it can neither be separated from nor reduced to its European, German, and Christian predecessors. These were necessary but not sufficient conditions for its emergence. The same was true of the radical nationalism and Islamism of the Arab exiles who joined forces with Hitler's regime. Their political outlook could neither be separated from nor reduced to its Arabic or Islamic background. The historical conjuncture of World War II brought them together in the shared project of radicalizing their own past traditions. In contemporary academic language, the meeting between Nazism and militant Islam and Arab nationalism in Berlin was a chapter in the history of transnationalism and cultural fusion, one that brought out the worst elements of the two civilizations.Footnote ⁵

The Nazis taught the Arab exiles the finer points of twentieth-century Jew-hatred, above all, its paranoid, conspiracy theory and how to apply it to ongoing events. The Arabs and Muslims in Berlin taught the Nazis that their hatred of the Jews was not as unique as they might have imagined and thus that they had found allies in unexpected and unforeseen places. Nazism became less Eurocentric while Arab and Islamic radicalism drew on modern, European totalitarian ideology. The Nazi leadership sought ways to burst the bonds of nationalist particularism and even of the doctrine of the Aryan master race in order to appeal to Arabs and Muslims. The Arabs and Muslims in Berlin engaged in a variant of what I have called “reactionary modernism” as they demonstrated a mastery of modern propaganda techniques in the interest of advocating a revival of a fundamentalist version of Islam.Footnote ⁶ Radical anti-Semitism did not first enter Arab and Islamic politics because of the cleverness of Nazi propagandists. On the contrary, their cleverness lay partly in understanding that some currents in both Arab politics and the religion of Islam offered points of entry for a positive reception of Nazism's message. Nazi officials working with the Arab exiles in Berlin as well as the Orientalists working for the SS and the Foreign Ministry believed that the founding text of Islam, the Koran, as well as commentaries and oral folk wisdom offered powerful points of connection with modern European anti-Semitism. By referring to these texts, they believed they could supplement secular appeals to Arab nationalists with religiously based appeals to Muslims as Muslims.

Neither Nazis nor the Arab exiles could have achieved alone what their alliance made possible. The Nazi regime lacked native speakers of Arabic as well as familiarity with the details of local politics in the Middle East, deficiencies made up by the presence of the Arab exiles who could make Nazism's message understandable in fluent, colloquial Arabic to Arabs and Muslims. The Arab exiles from Palestine and Iraq had no way of reaching a mass audience in their home countries. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany's shortwave radio transmitters, their printing presses, and from 1940 to 1943, their armies fighting in North Africa made that possible. Nazi Germany's Arabic-language propaganda was not primarily the result of translation of Nazi ideology and canonical texts into Arabic. Although Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were translated into Arabic before 1939, neither figured prominently in Arabic propaganda. Indeed, neither did Hitler's speeches nor Goebbels's essays. The entry point of Nazism's propaganda to Arabs and Muslims was its selective reading and quotation of the Koran and the traditions of Islam. There were German diplomats who preferred to limit Arabic-language propaganda to appeals to secular Arab anti-imperialism directed against Britain and the United States or to Arab anti-Communism. Others were more comfortable with explicit appeals to the traditions of Islam. In practice, the distinction between secular and religious dimensions blurred into insignificance. In the same texts and broadcasts, the Nazis spoke the secular language of attacks on American, British, and “Jewish” imperialism while also appealing to what they depicted as the ancient traditions of hatred of the Jews in Islam itself. Nazi Germany presented itself both as an ally of Arab anti-imperialism as well as a soul mate of the religion of Islam.

The events in North Africa and the Middle East and their interaction with the war in Europe have long preoccupied military and diplomatic historians of World War II.Footnote ⁷ In 1965, the East German historian Heinz Tillmann in Deutschlands Araberpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg drew on then-available German archives to examine the policy of “German imperialism” in the Middle East from the 1930s to spring 1943.Footnote ⁸ In 1966, Lukasz Hirszowicz's The Third Reich and the Arab East presented an enduring synthesis of military, diplomatic, and political history up to the end of World War II.Footnote ⁹ 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 2006, two German historians, Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, drawing on German diplomatic, military, and SS archives that had been opened and declassified in the interim, published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina.Footnote ¹⁰ Reflecting the shift in historical analysis which led to much greater attention to the connection between the Holocaust and World War II, Mallmann and Cuppers revealed that the SS had plans to extend the Final Solution to the 700,000 Jews of North Africa and the Middle East. The question of whether they would be able to do so depended on the outcome of the battles at El Alamein and later in Tunisia between Germany's General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps and the Allied armed forces. As the Israeli historian Tuvia Friling has pointed out, in 1942 given the proximity of Rommel's Afrika Korps, the fear of German invasion of Palestine among its Jewish population was “indeed real.” The mutual attraction among Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Arab radicalism had emerged during the Arab revolt in Palestine between 1936 and 1939. Then both German and Italian propaganda, and probably also money and arms, supported the rebellion and attacked the British Mandate while Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and his supporters deepened their enthusiasm for the Nazis and the Fascists.Footnote ¹¹ In light of the tensions between the British and the Jews in Palestine, and British refusal to allow increased Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Holocaust, it is ironic to note that Britain and Australia's victory at the battle at El Alamein was both a decisive turning point in the history of World War II and a successful effort to prevent the extension of the Holocaust to the 700,000 Jews of the Middle East.Footnote ¹²

Significant historical scholarship has documented the actions and beliefs of Husseini, the most important public face and voice of Nazi propaganda aimed at Arabs and Muslims.Footnote ¹³ The mutual admiration between Husseini and Hitler and his virulent Jew hatred are a matter of public record. Details about his collaboration with Heinrich Himmler and his knowledge about the Holocaust came to light after the war as well. Husseini was also a key figure in finding common ground between the ideology of National Socialism on the one hand, and Arab nationalism as well as the doctrines of militant Islam on the other. While the Mufti was a key figure in this historical episode, so, too, were many other German intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers, members of the German Foreign Ministry's division of political radio, announcers, writers, and editors along with mostly anonymous native Arabic-speaking radio announcers and writers.Footnote ¹⁴ The broadcasts were the result of a cooperative effort including German officials working in the Division of Political Radio in Joachim von Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry with occasional assistance from Joseph Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry. They received assistance from Orientalists in the cultural division of Heinrich Himmler's Reich Security Main Office, and from German Orientalists who advised the Foreign Ministry and worked in the SS research offices.Footnote ¹⁵ The pro-Nazi Arab exiles gave the Nazis a resource they had not had before or possessed in such abundance.

The Arabic propaganda campaign, especially with shortwave radio, was far more extensive than the previous 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” and other stations broadcast a mixture of music, news, and commentary seven days and nights a week. They broadcast about two hours of news and commentary each evening. Information about the size of the listening audience remains scarce. In August 1941, the 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.Footnote ¹⁶ Radios were often heard in cafes and other public places, and listening was a kind of collective experience. Radio was crucial to propaganda efforts in the Middle East in this period because rates of illiteracy there were so significant. Government surveys conducted after World War II found illiteracy rates were still almost eighty percent in Egypt and eighty-five percent in Libya. In Palestine, the British mandatory government census of 1931 put the overall literacy rates among Arabs seven years and older at about twenty percent. Among Muslims, it was fourteen percent (twenty-five percent among men and only three percent among women). By 1947, another observer assessed the literacy rate among Palestine's Arab community to be twenty-seven percent and twenty-one percent for Muslims (thirty-five percent for men and seven percent for women).Footnote ¹⁷ Therefore shortwave radio reached a far larger audience than did print materials. Throughout the war, however, 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 Luftwaffe. Others were distributed on the ground by propaganda companies accompanying the Axis armed forces, German diplomats in Tunisia, and networks of German secret agents and Arab collaborators moving on railways and small boats in the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁸

Between 1940 and spring 1943, the Axis armed forces were present in North Africa. After their defeat in the Battle of Tunisia, that presence ended. At no point during the remainder of the war were the Germans or Italians on the ground in the Middle East. So for most of the war in most of the region, and especially in its most politically volatile places, notably Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran (with Persian-language broadcasts), the most effective means of reaching a broader Arabic public were shortwave radio broadcasts. Most of the broadcasts originated in Berlin, or to be more specific, from the even safer and more secure small town of Zeesen, just outside the capital. From the thousands of hours of this six-year-long propaganda barrage, German government archives contain transcripts from only 1940 and 1941. The rest of what had been a massive output was either never recorded or transcribed, or it was lost, fell victim to Allied bombing, or was intentionally destroyed by German officials themselves in the last months of the war.

Beginning in summer 1941, under the direction of recently arrived American Ambassador to Egypt, Alexander Kirk, American diplomats to the Cairo Embassy began to transcribe and translate the Axis broadcasts (that is, Italian and German Arabic broadcasts). Kirk took up his post in Cairo on March 29, 1941. He had been chargé d'affaires of the United States Embassy in Berlin in 1939 to 1940. In that capacity, he had sent informative memos to Washington about Nazi anti-Jewish persecution. He remained the American Ambassador to Egypt until March 29, 1944. Kirk sent the first or one of the first of his dispatches about Nazi radio broadcasts in Arabic to the Office of Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington on September 13, 1941. In it, he summarized themes in the broadcasts of August 18 to September 7, 1941.Footnote ¹⁹ The summaries continued and expanded in length and detail until April 1942 when Kirk's staff at the American Embassy in Cairo began to produce verbatim transcripts in English translation of Nazi Germany's Arabic-language radio broadcasts to the Middle East. Kirk sent the texts to Washington every week until March 1944. Thereafter until the end of the war, his successor, Pickney Tuck, continued to do so. As far as I have been able to determine, the resulting several thousand pages comprise the most complete record anywhere in any language of Nazi Germany's efforts to influence the Arab and Islamic world via its most important propaganda program, the shortwave radio broadcasts. The transcripts of Axis broadcasts in Arabic were placed in the United States National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and declassified in 1977 but have not previously entered into historical scholarship.Footnote ²⁰ They are an indispensable source for examination of Nazism's efforts to extend its appeals to the Arab and Muslim societies.

Before the Nazis could appeal to Arabs, Persians, and Muslims in general, they needed to clarify if their “anti-Semitism” extended to the non-Jewish Semites of the Arab, Persian, and Muslim world. In Mein Kampf, Hitler thought it did. He spoke with disdain about hopes for “any mythical uprising in Egypt” or the idea that “that now perhaps others are ready to shed their blood for us.” English machine guns and fragmentation bombs would bring such a Holy War “to an infernal end.” It was, he continued, “impossible to overwhelm with a coalition of cripples a powerful state that is determined to stake, if necessary, its last drop of blood for its existence. As a völkisch man who appraises the value of men on a racial basis, I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs.”Footnote ²¹ Hitler's famous book gave anti-Semitism a broad meaning, one that applied first and foremost to the Jews, but that also encompassed non-Jewish “Semites” such as Arabs and Muslims.

Disputes surrounding the Berlin Olympics of 1936 alerted German diplomats that Hitler's broad view of anti-Semitism posed a problem for effective propaganda aimed at Arabs, Persians, and Muslims. The Arab belief that the Nuremberg race laws in 1935 discriminated against “non-Aryans” caused consternation in Egypt. Officials in Egypt threatened to boycott the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Why, they asked, should Egyptian athletes travel to a country that regarded them as racially inferior? In a series of meetings in 1936 and 1937, high-ranking officials in the German Foreign Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry, the Nazi Party's Office of Racial Politics (Rassenpolitisches Amt), and Himmler's Reich Security Main Office (SS) devoted many hours finally to conclude that Nazi racial legislation distinguished between Germans and Jews, not Aryans and non-Aryans.Footnote ²² The Nazi regime regarded Arabs (and Persians) and Muslims as simply different, not inferior. The Foreign Ministry devoted considerable effort before and during World War II to convince Arabs, Persians (Iranians), and Muslims that its anti-Jewish policies were not based on a biological racism directed at “non-Aryans” or “Semites” in general. Rather they were only directed at the Jews who were, the Nazis claimed, the common “enemy” of Nazi Germany and the Arab and Islamic Middle East. As was the case in Nazi propaganda in Germany, Nazi anti-Semitism aimed at the Arab and Muslim Middle East focused on a political accusation embedded in a conspiracy theory, one that superseded an anti-Semitism based on racial biology.

Having dispensed with the charge that their racism extended to Arabs and Muslims, Nazi propagandists appealed to them as allies in a common cause, the fight against the Jews. In September 1939, Hitler resolved a dispute between Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop over control over propaganda aimed abroad in favor of the latter.Footnote ²³ By October 1939, Nazi Germany was broadcasting fifteen hours of air time in 113 daily broadcasts. By the end of 1940, about 500 people were working in the offices of German radio aimed abroad.Footnote ²⁴ By 1943, the Nazi regime was broadcasting on sixteen such stations in thirteen different languages every day.Footnote ²⁵ Prominent exile politicians, such as Subhas Chandra Bose from India; Rashid al-Khilani from Iraq; and Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; spoke frequently.Footnote ²⁶ Within the Foreign Office Political Division, the Orient Office, Division VII, oversaw propaganda and political strategy, including broadcasts, toward Egypt, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, India, Iran, Sudan, and Ceylon.Footnote ²⁷ An Office for Political Radio (Rundfunkpolitischen Abteilung) existed within the Foreign Office Political Division.Footnote ²⁸ By September 1, 1943, its staff included 226 employees.Footnote ²⁹ Kurt Georg Kiesinger, subsequently the Chancellor of the Federal Republic between 1966 and 1969, worked in the office and was its director from 1943 to 1945.Footnote ³⁰ The staff met regularly with the Foreign Office Arab Committee, which included experts on the region and officials responsible for contact with prominent Arab exiles such as Husseini and Khilani.Footnote ³¹ Among the various divisions of the Foreign Office working on foreign language broadcasts, only the Russian division broadcasting to the enormous Eastern Front was larger.Footnote ³² The director of Division VII throughout the war was Kurt Munzel, a diplomat and Orientalist who had worked in the Dresdner Bank in Cairo in the decade before the war.Footnote ³³ By 1942 he led a staff of nineteen, including (judging from the names) seven native Arabic speakers and four “scholarly assistants,” that is, Germans with knowledge of Arabic and Islam. In addition to broadcasts, the office published Barid as-Sarq (Orient Post), an Arabic-language magazine, and worked closely with the Arab Committee in the Foreign Office.Footnote ³⁴

From September 1939 to fall 1941, the Arabic broadcasts drew on the expertise of German Orientalists of Arabic and Islamic literature and poetry, the local knowledge gained by German diplomats in the prewar years and on pro-Axis Arabs living in Berlin when the war began. Most of these broadcasts had the tone of a sympathetic, well-informed politically engaged scholar, one eager to please yet not quite able to pick up the ins and outs of local politics. These early broadcasts sent a clear message that the Nazi regime, rather than celebrate the superiority of Aryans over inferior Middle Eastern Semites, was a friend to both Arab nationalists and Muslims. Several examples illustrate key themes. On December 3, 1940, Munzel's Orient Office VII broadcast “a paper about the English occupation of Egypt.”Footnote ³⁵ With the incantation “Oh, Mohammedaner” (Oh, Muslims!), the broadcast made a direct appeal to Muslims and not only to Arab nationalists opposed to British rule in Egypt. It did so in the repetitive incantations of a religious sermon that evoked the authority of the “holy Koran” and past days of piety.

Nazi broadcasts repeated that the values of Islam, such as piety, obedience, community, unity rather than skepticism, individualism, and division were similar to those of Nazi Germany. That this anti-modernist assault was conveyed via the most modern means of electronic communication in 1940 was another example of what I've previously called the “reactionary modernist” character of aspects of Nazi ideology and policy.Footnote ³⁷ This and other broadcasts conveyed the message that a revival of fundamentalist Islam was a parallel project to National Socialism's political and ideological revolt against western political modernity. In this effort, a selective and literal reading of the Koran and its application to contemporary events was presented as not only or primarily a relic of a backward culture but part of the great movement now in power in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. On December 12, 1940, for example, German radio announced that Islam “is a religion of the community, not a religion of the individual. It is thus a religion of the common welfare [Gemeinnutzes] and not of self-interest [Eigennutzes]. Islam therefore is a just and true nationalism for it calls on the Muslim to place the general interest ahead of private interests, to live not for himself but for his religion and his fatherland. This is the most important goal that Islam follows. It is at the basis of its prayers and commandments.”Footnote ³⁸ The priority of “the common welfare” over self-interest was a continuing and key theme of the Nazi Party before 1933 and the Nazi regime afterward.

The Nazis hoped the appeals to Islamic themes in these broadcasts would serve as an entry point into Arabic and Muslim hearts and minds and foster a willingness among Muslims to listen to Nazism's secular political messages as well. On the same day that Radio Berlin broadcast the above message, it also sent out “A Government Statement for the Arabs.”Footnote ³⁹ From the same station in the same hour, perhaps with the same announcer, Nazi radio moved from the specifically religious to the clearly secular and political. Listeners heard that Germany expressed “full sympathy” for the Arabs' “struggle for freedom and independence” so that they could “take their proper place under the sun and to recover the glory and honor in service of humanity and civilization.” The German government's expression of “love and sympathy” for the Arabs had “found a strong echo among the German people” while strengthening “the bonds of friendship with the Arabs which the Germans have cherished for many years.” This connection was not surprising, the talk continued, because Germans and Arabs shared “many qualities and virtues,” such as “courage in war … heroism, and manly character.” They “both shared in the suffering and injustices after the end of the [First] World War. Both of these great peoples had their honor insulted; their rights were denied and trampled underfoot. Both bled from the same wounds, and both also had the same enemy: namely the Allies who divided them and allowed them no claim to honor. Now Germany has succeeded in getting out from under this disgrace and regaining all of its old rights so that Germany's voice is now heard everywhere and has again taken its old place.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Nazi Germany was a model to emulate of a nation that had been humiliated yet had recovered its independence and unity.

These early broadcasts displayed both the talent as well as the limits of Nazi Orientalism. They lacked a certain political punch and grasp of local idioms and politics. The arrival in Berlin in November 1941 of Haj Amin el-Husseini and Rashid al-Khilani and their entourage ended this shortcoming.Footnote ⁴¹ They both had much-publicized meetings with Hitler and Ribbentrop. They and their associates worked closely with officials in the Nazi Foreign Ministry in its Arab and Orient committees in the Office of Political Radio to fashion radio and print propaganda for Arabs and Muslims.Footnote ⁴² In a particularly famous meeting with Husseini in Berlin on November 28, 1941, Hitler heard Husseini lavish praise on him, express his support for Nazi Germany in the war, and request that Germany and Italy issue a strong declaration in support of Arab independence from Britain. Though Hitler replied that the time had not yet arrived for issuing such a declaration, he told Husseini that when the German armies on the Eastern Front reached “the southern exit” from the Caucuses, Hitler would “give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany's objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.”Footnote ⁴³ In other words, in the same period in which Hitler had taken the decision to launch the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe, he also made clear to Husseini that he intended to extend it outside Europe, that is, at least to the Jews living in Egypt, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq. Husseini, Khilani, and the Arabic-language radio writers and speakers accompanying them could foster support for the Axis armies fighting in North Africa as well as for an extension of the Final Solution to the Jews of the Middle East.Footnote ⁴⁴

Kirk's dispatch of April 18, 1942, summarized German Arabic broadcasts of the preceding six months, that is, the period since Husseini and Kilani had arrived in Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁵ These were themes that continued throughout the war. German propaganda broadcasts, he wrote, attempted to convince the Arabs of the following. The Axis countries had “a natural sympathy with the Arabs and their great civilization, the only one comparable with the civilization introduced by the New Order into Europe, which is now being suppressed by ‘British Imperialism,’ ‘Bolshevik barbarity,’ and ‘Jewish greed’ and more recently ‘American materialism.’” Indeed, “one of the main German war aims” was “to release Arab countries from the oppressive grip of Anglo-Bolshevik Imperialism.” It was necessary for “the Arab countries to aid their liberators by uniting against the common enemy.” They could do so with confidence because “the Allies ‘despise but fear’ the Arabs” while German victory and the break-up of the British Empire were becoming more certain. In the scramble that would follow this “imminent British collapse” when “Americans, Russians, and Jews” would “try to seize the countries now held by Britain, the Arabs may find themselves with new masters if they do not move quickly.” They could never be Britain's friends because “her promises are false.” Britain had “destroyed Arab unity and murdered Arab patriots; she has handed Palestine over to the Jews and loosed the Communists over Iran and Iraq.” The Arabs remembered “the generous promises made by Britain in the last war.” Those promises were broken while “British oppression” continued into the current period.Footnote ⁴⁶ Throughout World War II, Nazi Germany presented itself to Arabs and Muslims as a champion of anti-imperialism.

Kirk noted the blend of secular and religious appeals from the Axis. “Before Islam” the Arabs had been divided against themselves. “When Mohammed united them, they overthrew the Persians, Romans, and Jews as they can now overthrow the British, Russians, and Americans.” Now they would “be led by their great leaders the Mufti [Haj Amin al-Husseini] and Rashid Ali [Kilani] who are continually exchanging congratulatory messages with Hitler and Mussolini.” Only traitors to Islam would support Britain and later the Allies.Footnote ⁴⁷ An Axis victory in the Middle East would be “a bad day for traitors when the victorious and righteous liberators of Islam arrive” assisted by “a widespread revolt throughout the entire Middle-East” by the Arabs.Footnote ⁴⁸ Axis radio attacked the Jews “ad nauseam,” claiming that the Jews, backed by Britain and the U.S., were “the arch-enemies of Islam.” They controlled American finance and forced Roosevelt to pursue a policy of aggression. Roosevelt and Churchill, though criminals themselves, were “playthings in the hands of the Jewish fiends who are destroying civilization.” It was known that “the White House ‘is full of Jews’ and most eminent figures among the Allies in the Near East are Jews.” The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was an “aspirant to the throne of Palestine.” He was “determined that Palestine, Syria, and Transjordan will be united as a pure Jewish center that will control the whole of the Middle East and, eventually, the world.” America and Britain supported this plan. The Arabs who had “lost their lands and wealth to the rapacious Jewish settlers in Palestine and their liberty to the British, will now be deported to suffer famine and discomfort in lands even more barren than those palmed off on them in Palestine.” Five million Jews were soon to be brought to Palestine. The Jews promised to raise an army of 20,000 men “ostensibly to assist the Allies, but in reality to wipe out the Arabs should the Germans advance.” German radio repeatedly claimed that a new Jewish state would expand into the territories of the existing Arab countries.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the spring, summer, and fall of 1942, as General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps had advanced to within sixty miles west of Alexandria, Egypt, Nazi Germany's leaders thought victory in North Africa might be in their grasp. Hitler and Mussolini then decided to issue the public declaration about Arab independence that Husseini and Kilani had been requesting since their arrival in Rome and Berlin the previous fall.Footnote ⁵⁰ Neither Vichy France nor Fascist Italy had gone to war in order to guarantee independence and sovereignty to the Arabs. Hitler had hesitated to make such a declaration first so as not to offend Britain when he had hopes of reaching an accommodation with it and then in order not to undermine Mussolini's hopes of expansion in the Mediterranean. Now that an uprising in Egypt might undermine British armed forces, both of the dictators agreed to go ahead with the declaration in order to assist their military operations in North Africa. On July 3, 1942, “Berlin in Arabic” announced that Germany and Italy resolved that “the troops of the Axis powers are victoriously advancing into Egyptian territory … to guarantee Egypt's independence and sovereignty.” The Axis forces were entering Egypt “to dismiss the British from Egyptian territory … and to liberate the whole of the Near East from the British yoke. The policy of the Axis powers is inspired by the principle ‘Egypt for the Egyptians.’ The emancipation of Egypt from the chains which have linked her with Britain, and her security from the risks of war, will enable her to assume her position among the independent sovereign states.”Footnote ⁵¹ “Berlin in Arabic” then broadcast the following statement by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini: “The glorious victory secured by the Axis troops in North Africa has encouraged the Arabs and the whole East, and filled their hearts with admiration for Marshall Rommel's genius, and the bravery of the Axis soldiers. This is because the Arabs believe that the Axis Powers are fighting against the common enemy, namely the British and the Jews, and in order to remove the danger of communism from spreading, following the [Allied] aggression on Iran. These victories, generally speaking, will have far-reaching repercussions on Egypt, because the loss of the Nile Valley and of the Suez Canal, and the collapse of the British mastery over the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, will bring nearer the defeat of Britain and the end of the British Empire.”Footnote ⁵²

The Americans in the Cairo Embassy monitoring the Arabic broadcasts from Berlin were recording a steady diet of anti-Semitic arguments that echoed the political accusations at the core of Nazi propaganda in Europe. The Nazis claimed that Britain and the U.S. had become stooges of the Jews, that World War II was a Jewish war, and that Allied victory would mean Jewish domination of the Middle East. At 8:15 p.m. Cairo time on July 7, 1942, the Americans recorded one of the most inflammatory broadcasts of the war to that point. The “Voice of Free Arabism” (hereafter VFA) statement “Kill the Jews Before They Kill You” illustrated the links between the general propaganda line in Europe and its adaptation to the Middle East context. It was a statement that equaled that of Hitler and Goebbels in its anti-Semitic radicalism. The broadcast began with a lie, namely that “a large number of Jews residing in Egypt and a number of Poles, Greeks, Armenians, and Free French have been issued with revolvers and ammunition” in order to “help them against the Egyptians at the last moment, when Britain is forced to evacuate Egypt.”Footnote ⁵³ The statement continued:

Here, applied to the Arab and Muslim context, was the same logic of projection and paranoia that was the defining feature of Nazism's radical anti-Semitism. It was impossible to be more blunt. It combined the political accusations of Nazism with evocation of the religious demands of Islam. It was unusual in the extent to which it voiced the genocidal threats that were more implicit in many other assertions about the venality and power of the Jews that were broadcast on Nazi Arabic-language radio. While the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi regime in Germany assured readers and listeners that the regime was making good on Hitler's threats to “exterminate” and “annihilate” the Jews, the Arabic-language propaganda took an even further step in incitement to anti-Jewish violence in its clear appeal for audience participation and that listeners take matters into their own hands.

As Mallmann and Cuppers have documented, in the spring and summer of 1942, German diplomats and intelligence services reported evidence of Arab sympathy for the Nazi cause rooted in hopes that Rommel's victory in the region would lead to expulsion of the Jews.Footnote ⁵⁵ In view of the evidence they gathered regarding the hopes and actions of radical Arabs in these months, the authors drew parallels to the mood among anti-Semitic Lithuanian, Latvian, and Ukranian nationalists in spring 1941 preceding the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June. At the end of 1942, Walter Schellenberg, the chief of foreign intelligence for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) reported to the Foreign Office that “the Arabs' extraordinarily friendly mood toward Germany was basically due to the hope that ‘Hitler will come’ to expel the Jews.” Schellenberg reported further that the Arabs still believed in German victory and that even though “only a few” heard German shortwave radio, the broadcasts in “exaggerated and embroidered” fashion spread quickly by word of mouth.Footnote ⁵⁶ An Einsatzgruppe of SS troops under the command of Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff was prepared to depart to Palestine to murder the Jewish population if Rommel won the battle of El Alamein. Schellenberg and other German officials received support from radical Arabs precisely because of the shared anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist goals.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nazi propaganda had the dual purpose of drawing Arabs and Muslims to the side of the Axis as well as inciting them to support Nazi plans to extend the Final Solution beyond Europe's geographical limits. As had been the case in its propaganda in Germany and Europe, the war against the Allies and the war against the Jews merged into one mutually reinforcing endeavor.Footnote ⁵⁸

Axis radio painted a grim picture of Palestine. The conflict over Palestine came to occupy a central place in its wartime broadcasts. It was “swimming in a pool of blood.” Its people lived “in an atmosphere of shame and misery” and were “ruled by a reign of terror dominated by the brutal British and the dirty Jews.” The British violated the Arab “holy places,” spread famine and poverty, and brutally ruled the Arabs whom they were soon going to deport. The Jews were intending to combine Palestine with Syria and Transjordan in a “huge Jewish Home.” Britain's main aim in the Middle East was “to annihilate the Arabs entirely and to aid in this purpose, large numbers of Jews are being enlisted in a Palestine army.” This idea, namely that the Jews were going to participate in the annihilation of the Arabs, was a Middle-Eastern counterpart to the Nazi assertion that Jews were fighting World War II in Europe with the intent of annihilating the German people. In addition to Britain and the Jews, “a new oppressor in the shape of the U.S.A.” was soon to arrive. It was known “that when the Americans seize the British Empire they intend to hand over Palestine to their masters—the Jews.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Following the British disaster at Tobruk, President Roosevelt decided to send tanks and other military supplies to aid the British in North Africa. In spring and summer 1942, defeating the Axis in North Africa became an American priority as well. The more the United States entered the fray, the more Axis propaganda linked Franklin Roosevelt to the Jews. On July 2, Fritz Grobba, the head of the Orient Committee in the Foreign Office in Berlin, wrote a propaganda directive entitled “The Jews Are the Wirepullers of the Americans.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He urged that more than in the past, German propaganda in Arabic needed to stress that every American who “comes to the Orient comes in service of the Jews. He is sent here by the Jews, even if he does not know it. The Jews are the wire pullers of the Americans.” His memo called for diffusion into Arabic of the anti-Semitic interpretation of Franklin Roosevelt that had been standard fare in German-language propaganda in Germany.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet as late as March 1943, officials in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin acknowledged that German propaganda in North Africa was “running into difficulties because leading Arab circles are hostile only to Britain. As in the past they still trust the Americans. Therefore, we should again stress the necessity of using all relevant materials about Zionism. In particular, we should point to the Jews' desire to establish boundaries [in Palestine] rooted in the Old Testament, that is, [boundaries that extend] to the Euphrates River. This material can be used gradually to shatter the Arabs' confidence in the Americans' promises.”Footnote ⁶² Although the Nazi regime encouraged limited Jewish emigration to Palestine in the 1930s under the Transfer Agreement, its purpose was to facilitate Jewish migration out of Germany but not with the intent of supporting Zionist goals.Footnote ⁶³ Nazi Germany consistently opposed the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine, one that it viewed as another potential outpost of an international Jewish conspiracy. Anti-Zionism became both a key theme in its appeals to the Middle East as well as an important aspect of Nazi anti-American propaganda and policy.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nazi radio broadcasts repeatedly denounced “Roosevelt and the Jews,” at times even going so far as to claim that FDR himself was Jewish and that American policy was an example of “Jewish imperialism.” German officials viewed the anti-Semitic argument about Jewish domination of the Roosevelt administration as vital for stimulating anti-Americanism in North Africa and the Middle East.

The question of the impact and reception of the propaganda was one that preoccupied German, British, and American officials. British wartime censorship in Egypt and Palestine made it difficult for pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi Arabs and Muslims there to express their views publicly. An adequate assessment awaits further work by scholars who read Arabic (and Persian). That said, reports by American diplomats and intelligence agents in the region indicated that anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist elements of Nazi propaganda found a positive reception in some quarters. The American broadcast efforts in the region were far less extensive than the Germans'. The BBC was a much greater Arabic-language Allied presence. Yet neither the BBC nor the United States Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts run by the Office of War Information (OWI) decided to fight a war of ideas with Nazism over the issue of anti-Semitism. Both the Americans and the British thought that Allied identification with the Jews and with Zionism was a hindrance to building Arab and Muslim support for the Allied cause. In a “Weekly Propaganda Directive” of November 14, 1942, the Overseas Operations Branch of the Office of War Information established the following guidelines for Voice of America broadcasts for Palestine.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Voice of America had to speak to the people of Palestine with greater tact and caution than elsewhere in the Middle East.

1. 1 Spoken and written words must alike be guided by an honest acceptance of the fact that the subject of Zionist aspirations cannot be mentioned, inasmuch as any serious outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling which might result among the Arab peoples in this area would jeopardize our strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

2. 2 Equally taboo, at present, is any mention of a Jewish army.

3. 3 It must be remembered that, as a whole, the Jews are staunchly supporting the cause of the United Nations: the Arabs are not. Therefore, our words must be addressed primarily to Moslem and Christian Arabs, especially in view of the effectiveness of enemy propaganda.Footnote ⁶⁶

VOA broadcasts should “quote Hitler's own observations in regard to alien races and cultures, and hold them up to ridicule and scorn” while stressing “the paganism of our enemies and embroider our comments with Biblical and Koranic phrases of denunciation.” Contrasts should be drawn between “the terrible consequences of German rule upon her own allies and in the occupied countries with accounts of the benefits to be reaped by all people when victory is ours.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In short, in order to win and sustain support for the Allied cause in Palestine, American OWI officials thought it was essential not to challenge directly the anti-Semitic barrage arriving many evenings from Axis Arabic shortwave radio. The assumption behind the OWI directive was that Nazi propaganda was having success in undermining support for the Allies by linking them to the Jews. This concern was a repeated theme in subsequent reports by Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and American military intelligence agents in the course of the war.Footnote ⁶⁸

The purpose of Nazi radio broadcasts was to inflame and incite, not inform. They were designed literally to preach to the converted rather than to sway the views of the uncommitted. They offered little, or often nothing in the way of hard news, especially regarding Nazi Germany's military setbacks. From 1943 to the end of the war, however, “Berlin in Arabic” and “The Voice of Free Arabism” presented constant and increasingly desperate warnings of the catastrophe that would befall Arabs and Muslims if the Allies were to win the war. In Germany, Goebbels's “Do You Want Total War?” speech of February 18, 1943, had set the tone for Nazi propaganda faced with setbacks. While the propaganda expressed confidence in victory in the longer term, it turned to increasingly vivid descriptions of the disasters to befall the Germans should they lose the war.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Arabic-language broadcasts focused on the supposedly awful plans the Jews had in store for Arabs and Muslims, in particular following the German defeat in Tunisia in May 1943. On September 8, 1943, for example, “Berlin in Arabic” described “The Ambitions of the Jews.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The Jews would not be satisfied until they made “every territory between the Tigris and the Nile Jewish.” Their goal was to “remove the Cross and the Crescent from all Arab countries.” If they succeeded, “there will remain not a single Arab Muslim or Christian in the Arab world. Arabs! Imagine Egypt, Iraq, and all the Arab countries becoming Jewish with no Christianity or Islam there.”Footnote ⁷¹ On September 24, Voice of Free Arabism continued this line of attack when it asked, “What are the aims of international Zionism?”Footnote ⁷² The Jews did not only want Palestine. Rather they sought “possession of all Arab countries in the east and the west” up to the Atlantic Ocean. In the west they sought Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, while in the east, they wanted to connect Syria to Lebanon and then add both to Palestine. This “Jewish plan” was the “greatest danger” that would face the Arabs and Muslims if “our enemies the British, Americans, and Bolsheviks emerge victorious.” It was the “sacred duty” of Arabs to unite in order to “repulse this Jewish menace” and prevent “Jewish imperialism” from being established with the assistance of the British. An Allied victory would enable the Jews to realize these dreams and to force the Arabs “to live as nomads.” Predictions of catastrophe if the Allies and “the Jews” won the war remained a key theme of Nazi propaganda and Nazi Arabic-language propaganda until the war's end.Footnote ⁷³

A month later, on November 3, 1943, the Voice of Free Arabism discussed “Palestine between the Bolsheviks and the Jews.”Footnote ⁷⁴ It mirrored the incitement to murder of Nazi propaganda in Germany.

Not only did these assertions fly in the face of common sense and wildly exaggerate the power of the Jews, but they also vastly exaggerated the global significance of the conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine. In World War II, especially after the Allied victory in the Battle of Tunisia in 1942–1943, the fighting in North Africa was over, and the conflict over Palestine was a sideshow to the main drama of the war in Europe. Yet with this broadcast, VFA found the cause of World War II as a whole to lie in the Zionist aspiration for a Jewish state in Palestine. Hence the only way to establish world peace, and also prevent the establishment of such a state, would be to exterminate “the Jewish race.”

One of Haj Amin el-Husseini's distinctive contributions to the fusion and diffusion of radical anti-Semitism to the Arab and Islamic societies lay in his ability to combine Nazi ideology with references to the Koran. On November 5, 1943, VFA reported that Husseini had spoken at a meeting in Berlin of “all the Moslems of Germany and Europe” to protest the Balfour Declaration.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Islamic Central Institute in Berlin published a German text of Husseini's Balfour Protest speech, and the Foreign Ministry printed thousands of copies of the speech in Arabic and distributed them through its clandestine courier network in the Middle East.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Mufti made clear that his hatred of the Jews lay both in ancient religious texts as well as in modern secular sources. The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, whose goal was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, “was the result of a Jewish-English conspiracy in the last war.” The declaration gave Palestine, “an Arab-Islamic country” of great importance to Muslims, to the Jews and in so doing, broke Britain's promises to Arab leaders of postwar independence. Husseini poured forth his intense hatred of the Jews. He referred to their “overwhelming egoism” that was part of their character, their “contemptible belief” that they were God's chosen people, and their claim that everything had been created for their own sake and that “other men are animals that could be used for their own purposes.”Footnote ⁷⁸ As a result of these characteristics, the Jews could not be loyal to anyone or integrate into another nation. Rather “they live like a sponge among peoples, suck their blood, seize their property, undermine their morals yet still demand the rights of local inhabitants. They want every advantage but they won't assume any obligations! All of this has brought the hostility of the world down on them and nourished the Jews' hatred that had been burning for two thousand years against all the peoples.” He believed that “God's anger and the curse on the Jews mentioned in the Holy Koran” was due to these Jewish characteristics. The Jews who had “tormented the world for ages have been the enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: ‘You will find that those who are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.’ They tried to poison the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to them, and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For all that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs and Muslims.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Husseini's hatred of the Jews was a central component of his understanding of Islam and his reading of the Koran. For him, Islam rooted in the Koran was an inherently anti-Semitic doctrine. He placed the efforts of Disraeli, Lord Balfour, Lionel Rothschild, and Nathaniel Rothschild to establish a Jewish home in Palestine into this longer continuity of Jewish-Muslim enmity. Indeed, he called the Jews “the driving forces of the destruction of the regime of the Islamic Caliphate” in the Middle East. The Jews used their power in finance, politics, and the press to this end. The Arabs and Muslims all knew of “Jewish desire” to seize the Islamic holy sites, such as the Al Aksa Mosque and “to build a temple on its ruins.”

This cultural fusion of racism, anti-Semitism, and religious fanaticism found regular expression on the radio in the last year and a half of the war. On January 29, 1944, “Berlin in Arabic” broadcast “Arabs and Moslems at war with Jewry.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It presented the two as distinct and different not only as religions but also as races. While the Arabs were “lavishly generous,” the Jews were “meanly miserly.”

Both the racial and religious arguments supported the Manichean conclusion that a conflict between Arabs and Jews was total and must end in the destruction of one or the other. The anti-Semitism of the broadcast drew on an interpretation of Islam's view of the Jews and then added modern, secular anti-Semitic arguments about the supposed decisive role of the Jews in World War I and World War II. The anti-Semitism of the broadcasts was both ancient and modern, evoking a continuity that extended back to the founding of Islam yet as up to date as the Nazi regime's twentieth-century anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

In spring 1944, resolutions were introduced in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives to lift restrictions on Jewish emigration to Palestine and to support the creation of a Jewish state there. For Nazi propagandists these initiatives confirmed their assertion that the war was a Jewish war. On “Berlin in Arabic” on March 1, 1944, Haj Amin el-Husseini stated that the “wicked American intentions toward the Arabs are now clearer, and there remain no doubts that they are endeavoring to establish a Jewish empire in the Arab world. More than 400 million Arabs oppose this criminal American movement. … Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This serves your honor. God is with you” [emphasis in original].Footnote ⁸² As in the broadcasts of July 1942, Husseini and other announcers on Nazi radio urged Arab and Muslim listeners to take matters into their own hands and engage in murderous violence against Jews “wherever you find them.”

Despite Allied wartime censorship that prevented open expressions of pro-Nazi sympathy in North Africa and the Middle East, American and British intelligence agencies were aware that Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist propaganda struck some responsive chords in the region. With the lifting of wartime controls, the postwar months and years produced evidence about the aftereffects of the Nazi propaganda campaign. In summer 1945, Husseini fled Germany but was arrested in France. Under suspicious circumstances he “escaped” French custody and arrived in Cairo. In Washington, the OSS issued a report on June 23, 1945, about the political response in the Middle East to possible war crimes trials against pro-Nazi Arabs.Footnote ⁸³ The authors of “The Near East and the War Crimes Problem” wrote that “in the Near East the popular attitude toward the trial of [Nazi] war criminals is one of apathy. As a result of the general Near Eastern feeling of hostility to the imperialism of certain of the Allied powers, there is a tendency to sympathize with rather than condemn those who have aided the Axis.”Footnote ⁸⁴

A year later Husseini returned to Egypt. The reaction offered an example of what the OSS analysts had in mind. Throughout the war, American and British intelligence agencies had been concerned about the pro-Axis sympathies of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. On June 11, 1946, Hassan al-Banna, its leader, sent the following statement to officials of the Arab League.

A plausible reading of al-Banna's statement would be that Haj Amin el-Husseini was continuing the same struggle that Hitler and Germany, as well as Husseini himself, had been waging during World War II. Indeed, for al-Banna, that war and its themes were to be continued in the Middle East. If so, who better to play a leading role than a political and religious leader with experience in fighting the Jewish enemy in Europe. Far from criticizing him for having sided with “Germany and Hitler,” al-Banna expressed admiration for Husseini's wartime activities. Living in wartime Egypt, al-Banna and the members of the Muslim Brotherhood would have been able to hear what Husseini and others on Axis radio had to say about the Jews and the Allies. He found these words and actions admirable. Moreover, Husseini's survival, “escape,” and arrival in Cairo were proof that God approved as well.