The Third Reich's war in the Middle East and North Africa posed significant political, diplomatic, and ideological challenges. Francis Nicosia has presented a well-documented, detailed analysis of how Adolf Hitler's government coped with the competing strategic imperatives it faced in this vast region, while also conducting wars in western and eastern Europe and in the Atlantic. The clashing imperialist ambitions of Berlin's allies in the Fertile Crescent and North Africa, the claims of Nazi Germany's putative Arab allies, as well as the often opposing goals of Hitler and his Nazi officials regarding the future of the Arab world, only complicated this story.

Nicosia's introduction provides historiographical context. Two early pathbreaking works from 1966—Lukasz Hirszowicz's The Third Reich and the Arab East and Robert Melka's Ph.D. dissertation, “The Axis and the Arab Middle East, 1930–1945”—provided detail about Nazi policies but downplayed racial ideology and antisemitism. More recent works—including Klaus-Michael Mallman's and Martin Cüppers's Halfmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (2006) and Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2010)—have emphasized the latter but made “simplistic generalizations” that are “impossible to demonstrate in the absence of a necessary Middle Eastern historical context, familiarity with Arabic-language sources, and the fortunate reality that Nazi Germany was defeated in the Second World War” (4). Integrating the two approaches with wide-ranging German documentation and his own previous research, Nicosia stresses the “incompatibility on both the ideological and strategic levels” (13) of Hitler's goals, on the one hand, and Arab aspirations for “full sovereignty and independence” (14), on the other. He thus questions the extent, depth, and legacy of the Nazis' wartime influence over the Arab populations of North Africa and the Middle East.

The book's seven chapters, organized chronologically and covering the years between 1871 and 1944, underscore Nicosia's theme of a “line of continuity in German policy toward the Middle East” (18) that included the acceptance of other Great Power claims in the region; the promotion of the Reich's economic and cultural interests; and a response to political and economic changes with a combination of “aloofness and improvisation” (18). As the Ottoman Empire's ally in World War I, the Kaiser's government opposed Arab nationalism and, in January 1918, declared its support for Jewish settlement in Palestine. The Weimar Republic also upheld the status quo, which now included expanded British and French control over the Arab world and a Jewish National Home in Palestine, while focusing on trade and good relations with both rulers and ruled.

Although welcomed enthusiastically by Arab nationalists, the Third Reich brought little change to the region. According to Nicosia, Hitler had already developed his views toward the Middle East—his esteem for European imperialism and his contempt for the Arabs—before coming to power. Nazi Germany not only encouraged the flood of German-Jewish emigration to Palestine after 1933, while firmly opposing the creation of a Jewish state, but also failed to endorse the 1936 Arab revolt. Two years later, however, Berlin decided to exert pressure on the increasingly recalcitrant British by instituting Arab-language propaganda broadcasts and by sending weapons to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and, indirectly, to the Palestinians. Yet, Germany's refusal to halt the flow of Jews to Palestine and its unqualified support for Italy's imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean and the Middle East vexed its potential Arab allies and exasperated their Nazi advocates, including diplomat Fritz Grobba, who later complained bitterly of “wasted opportunities” (130).

Facing a potential two-front war in September 1939, Nazi Germany hoped to stay out of the Middle East—apart from intensifying its anti-British propaganda there. But Italy's entry into the war and France's collapse stirred Arab leaders, in particular the exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husayni, to call for Berlin's support for Arab independence, which immediately raised objections in Rome and Vichy. Nazi Germany was involuntarily drawn into the Arab lands by Italy's defeat in Egypt and the British invasion of Libya in December 1940. Although General Erwin Rommel achieved stunning victories in North Africa, Berlin, which was launching Operation Barbarossa at the time, failed to halt Axis setbacks in Iraq and Syria in the spring and summer of 1941. Hitler nevertheless announced in October 1941 that Germany's impending victory over the Soviets in the Caucasus would be followed by triumph in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. To be sure, there was still no commitment to the Arabs, and at his meeting with al-Husayni on November 28, the Führer vowed to murder the Jews in the Arab lands but still refused to alienate his Italian, Vichy, and Spanish allies—as well as neutral Turkey—by issuing a declaration of support for Arab independence.

Hitler's expectations of victory in the Arab world were crushed on the battlefields of North Africa in 1942–1943. According to Nicosia, the causes of the debacle—the Reich's inadequate military effort, Hitler's deference to Italian and French interests, as well as Berlin's “often murky policy toward the Arabs” (221)—are still open to debate. Nicosia also underlines the Third Reich's inconsistent policies toward the Jews, citing its willingness—despite al-Husayni's protests—to permit European Jewish refugees to enter Palestine in exchange for captive Germans. Al-Husayni's sole victory, the creation of a Muslim Waffen-SS division in Bosnia-Herzegovina that recognized him as its spiritual leader, was, Nicosia concludes, small recompense for his failure to achieve a full-scale Arab alliance with Nazi Germany.

Nicosia maintains in his conclusion that Nazi Germany's wartime propaganda barrage in the Middle East and North Africa was actually meant to conceal its rejection of the Arabs' political aspirations. Even in victory, he argues, it was “unlikely that Hitler's government could ever have supported Arab independence and the end of European colonial rule in some form in the region” (278). Whether the Arabs' failure (with the exception of the abortive 1941 coup in Iraq) to rally to the Axis cause between 1940 and 1943 was the result of the insufficient appeal of the Third Reich, the political shortcomings of the exiled Arab leaders, or the actual political views of the North African and Middle East populations, is a question that must await the work of experts familiar with the local languages and history. Nicosia has nevertheless succeeded in posing valid questions for such future research.