Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (review)

Nearly two decades ago, at least one scholar of modern German history had concluded that Hitler and those who operated the German military effort and killing program during World War II also had targeted Jews living outside Europe for death. “The final crushing of Axis forces in North Africa,” Gerhard Weinberg wrote in 1993, “ended all prospects for a German occupation of the British mandate of Palestine and the slaughter of its Jewish community.”¹ In November 1941, Hitler had promised Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, that once German armies invaded the Middle East they would ensure “the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.”²

Most recently, in 2006, the research of two German historians, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, brought the issue of the possible extension of the Holocaust from Europe to the Middle East to the center of scholarly discussion. In their book on Nazi Germany, the Arabs, and Palestine, they established that the SS had prepared an Einsatzkommando to follow Rommel’s Afrika Korps into North Africa and the Middle East, with the objective of murdering all Jews there.³

Jeffrey Herf’s impressive new book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World offers, as the author observes, “abundant evidence of the antisemitic propaganda barrage that, as had been the case in Europe, would have accompanied any Middle Eastern mass killing operations” (p. 8). Equally important, the new evidence Herf unearths on Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language print and broadcast propaganda connects that propaganda to antisemitism in the Middle East in the decades since the war. The book is the continuation of an earlier study, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust, in which he explored the Nazis’ use of what he termed “radical antisemitism” in their presentation of events in Germany.

Nazi Arabic-language broadcasts began in October 1939 and continued until near the war’s end in 1945. Hitler eventually gave the German Foreign Ministry control over these broadcasts, which could be heard around the clock. A large number of high-ranking German government officials, as well as pro-Nazi Arab exiles—most notably el-Husseini—were involved in the broadcasts, and especially in adapting radical antisemitism for an Arab audience. Herf recognizes that reliable information on the size of the Arab listening audience is difficult to obtain; he provides what evidence there is from estimates of the audience by the U.S. Office of War Information and emphasizes that many Arabs listened to radios in cafes and other public places—which is not unimportant given the high rate of illiteracy in the Middle East.

Most of Nazi Germany’s Arabic-language wartime broadcasts—either original recordings or their transcripts—were destroyed during the Allied demolition of Berlin. But in wartime Cairo, the center for Allied military and intelligence operations in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the American Embassy transcribed and translated the Nazi Arabic broadcasts into English. Much of the effort resulted from the far-sighted work of Alexander Kirk, first head of legation and then U.S. ambassador to Egypt during the period from 1941 to 1944. Herf used the Cairo transcripts, most of which are declassified and housed at the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland. But his study rests also on vast archival research in Germany and the United Kingdom; this was essential in tracing the work of numerous German government officials—both German Orientalists and Arab exiles in Germany—in the propaganda campaign.

Herf describes the extensive efforts the Nazi regime made in the 1930s to define antisemitism so as to make it acceptable to Arabs and others in the Muslim world. Some Arabs initially questioned whether Nazi antisemitism referred to non-Jewish “Semites” as well. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which had attacked the Jews and emphasized the superiority of an “Aryan race,” had also revealed his contempt for...