Broadcasting Antisemitism to the Middle East: Nazi Propaganda During the Holocaust

Jeffrey Herf Broadcasting Antisemitism to the Middle East: Nazi Propaganda during the Holocaust With the emergence of radical Islam in recent decades, the question of the rela- tionship between antisemitism in Europe, and hatred of the Jews in Muslim, Arab, and Persian societies has remained the subject of intense political discussion. To what extent can the Jew-hatred expressed by the radical Islamists of varying ideological hues in Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the government of Iran be explained by factors indigenous to these societies and cultures experiencing the pressures of attempted modernization? Or do they also have roots in antisemitic currents that came to the Middle East from twentieth-century Europe, especially during the era of fascism and Nazism.¹ Historians of modern Europe have exhaus- tively documented and analyzed the European impact on Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia in the era of colonialism. Until recently, however, the impact of Nazism and fascism outside Europe was less examined. In recent years, in part under the impact of contemporary events, this relative disinterest has given way to a flurry of scholarly interest in Nazi Germany’s efforts to spread its ideology and policies in the Arab, Persian, and Muslim countries. As a result of recent research, we have a better understanding of a meeting of hearts and minds, not a clash of civilizations, that took place in wartime Berlin between pro- Nazi Arab exiles, on the one hand, and Nazi leaders, on the other. The result of that conjuncture was the production of thousands of hours of Arabic radio broadcasts and hundreds of thousands of Arabic leaflets and pamphlets that translated and diffused Nazism’s radical antisemitism into an easily understandable political discourse adapted to the political realities of local circumstances in the Middle East. Due in part to the fact that Germany’s armed forces were defeated in North Africa in the fall of 1942, the several million pieces of printed materials in Arabic dropped from airplanes and distributed by propaganda units working with the General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika-Korps comprised only a small portion of Nazi Germany’s propaganda efforts. By far, the most important means used to spread the Nazi message was shortwave radio beamed to the region by powerful trans- mitters near Berlin. The archives of the German Foreign Ministry, which directed the program, hold important materials on the direction and organization of the 1 For a recent essay collection on this issue, see Jeffrey Herf, ed., Antisemitism and Anti- Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence (London, 2006). DOI 10.1515/9783110288216.213, ©2017 Jeffrey Herf, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 214 Jeffrey Herf program. Some texts of broadcasts survive in the files of the Propaganda Ministry. Yet a combination of Allied bombing raids on government buildings in Berlin, the chaos of war, and perhaps significant amounts of document destruction meant that much of the evidence of the Arabic language broadcasts no longer exists in the German archives. What did not survive in Berlin was recorded for posterity in wartime Cairo by officials working in the American Embassy there. Beginning in the fall of 1941, under the direction of Ambassador Alexander Kirk, a staff equipped with tape recorders and working with native Arab speakers taped, transcribed, translated, and sent to Washington a (mostly) weekly set of verbatim English translations of Nazi Germany’s Arabic language radio broadcasts to the Middle East. Between the fall of 1941 to the spring of 1945, “Axis Broadcasts in Arabic” resulted in several thousand pages of texts. Kirk’s despatches were sent to the Office of the Secre- tary of State and were circulated to the key American (and British) intelligence agencies as well as to the U.S. Office of War Information that conducted Amer- ican political warfare. In summer 2007, I found them in the State Department files of the United States National Archives. Although what I will call “the Kirk transcripts” were declassified in the 1970s, they have not figured in subsequent scholarship.² With the recent findings in the American and German archives, we now have much more evidence regarding Nazi Germany’s efforts to find common cause with radical Arabs and Muslims and to adapt its central propaganda themes to circumstances of the Arab and Muslim societies of the Middle East. Needless to say, a fully adequate history of the reception and impact of this propaganda and its aftereffects in both Arab nationalist and radical Islamist ideology will require the efforts of historians who read Arabic and Persian. My current work will, I hope, be of use to them in that important endeavor. In The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holo- caust,³ I asked what had changed between 1939 and 1941 in Nazi Germany in the nature of antisemitism, which Robert Wistrich aptly called “the longest hatred,” so that for the first time in its history it became an ideology that incited and legit- imated genocide.⁴ While George Mosse and many others have documented the ideological path “towards the Final Solution,” the search for origins and long 2 On some examples of the distribution of the Kirk despatches to other agencies of the United States government, see “Dimensions of Allied Response to Hitler’s ‘Jewish Politics’ and the Deepening of the Trap,” in Hitler, the Allies and the Jews, ed. Shlomo Aronson (New York, 2004), 54–64. 3 Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass, 2006). 4 See Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (New York, 1991). Broadcasting Antisemitism to the Middle East 215 continuities did not bring us to the event itself.⁵ In The Jewish Enemy, I examined both very famous and very public speeches and essays by Hitler and other leaders of the Nazi regime as well as lesser-known government directives sent to the German press to depict the translation of antisemitic ideology into a narrative of ongoing events present as well in the daily and weekly news. My resulting interpretation of Nazism’s radical antisemitism focused on the following points. First, the Nazi’s radical antisemitism was an interpretive framework through which the Nazi leadership misunderstood ongoing events. It was not only a bundle of prejudices. From the beginning to the end of the war Hitler and his associates concluded that their paranoid fantasy of an international Jewish con- spiracy was the key to contemporary history. As E. H. Gombrich, who worked at the BBC during the war listening to German radio broadcasts, understood, the Nazis’ interpretation of the actual events of the Second World War through the distorted and paranoid prism of radical antisemitism comprised the core element of Nazi propaganda.⁶ The “logical” endpoint of this paranoia was to push German antisemitism beyond its past eras of persecution to one of genocide. Theirs was an explanatory narrative that seemed to solve key riddles of contemporary history. Radical antisemitism offered an explanation of this central paradox of the Second World War in Europe, namely the emergence, deepening, and persistence of what Churchill called “the unnatural alliance” between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies. In the eyes of common sense, Frank- lin Roosevelt and Churchill had decided to make a pact with a lesser evil Stalin, in order to defeat a greater evil, Hitler.⁷ From the perspective of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, the anti-Hitler coalition, along with the entry into the war by the United States, were the two most powerful pieces of evidence that international Jewry had created and sustained “the unnatural alliance.” Second, the key to the radicalization of Nazi antisemitism lay in its over- whelmingly political accusation, that “international Jewry,” had started and esca- lated the Second World War in order to exterminate Germany and the Germans. The regime’s frequently-discussed biological racism was important primar- ily because it pointed to a bond said to exist among all Jews. Yet though racial 5 George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison, Wisc., 1985); and idem, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964, 1998). 6 E. H. Gombrich, Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts (London, 1970), 18. 7 Jeffrey Herf, “If Hitler Invaded Hell: Distinguishing between Nazism and Communism during World War II, the Cold War and since the Fall of European Communism,” in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices, eds. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (London, 2004), 182–95. 216 Jeffrey Herf biology did justify horrible crimes against tens of thousands of persons judged to be “unworthy of life,” it was not central to the justification for mass murder.⁸ While caricatures of the Jewish body filled the pages of Der Stürmer, the distinc- tively genocidal components of radical antisemitism derived from beliefs about what “international Jewry” was alleged to have done, not how Jews looked. It was the actions of what the Nazis believed was a truly active political actor, “international Jewry”—not the Jews’ supposed stereotyped physical features—that have preoccupied so much scholarship, that stood at the center of the Nazi commit- ment to mass murder. When the Nazi leaders spoke of what Lucy Dawidowicz called “the war against the Jews” they were not only referring to the Final Solu- tion.⁹ Rather it referred as well to the conventional war Nazi Germany was waging against the anti-Hitler coalition composed of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other Allies. On many occasions, Nazi propagandists described the war that the Allies were waging against the Third Reich as “the Jewish war.” Hitler and his associates pointed to an allegedly real political subject, “international Jewry” which was the power behind the scenes, the driving force and the glue of the Allied coalition.

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