Nazi Germany's Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust: Old Themes, New Archival Findings

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. 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. 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.