Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World Read Online Free PDF Page A

component throughout the broadcasts. Where Nazi propagandists in Europe informed audiences that the Nazi regime was then in the process of exterminating Europe's Jews, the Arabicspeaking announcers on Berlin in Arabic and the VFA would on a number of occasions urge listeners to take matters into their own hands, to, as they put it, "kill the Jews." The Cairo transcripts offer unprecedented documentation of the merging of National Socialist with radical Islamist anti-Semitism and its diffusion to the Middle East, as well as of the incitement to violence and murder purveyed in the Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany.
    During the war, the Germans, Americans, and British all tried to assess the impact and reception of Nazi propaganda in the Middle East. The Germans' intelligence networks provided a reasonably accurate grasp of which political and religious groups were most sympathetic to their cause. That said, Germany's wartime abilities to assess the impact of its foreign-language propaganda were not impressive. The works of Richard Breitman and Shlomo Aronson have drawn our attention to the efforts of U.S. and British intelligence agencies to monitor Nazi communications and plans, both in general and, in Aronson's case, in the Middle East.25 This book also draws on reports by American and British diplomats, intelligence agents working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), for branches of the U.S. military, and for the Office of War Information as the United States and Britain tried to assess what impact fascist and Nazi propaganda was having in the region. They did so without the benefit of modern methods of research on mass audiences in a region with very high rates of illiteracy. Nevertheless, with a mixture of anecdotes, reading of the local press, and contacts with informed local observers, Allied intelligence reports are important sources for any history of the Arab and Muslim reception to the Axis powers. A fully adequate account must be done by historians who read Arabic and/or Persian. I hope that the documentation and interpretation of Nazi propaganda that this book offers will contribute to such efforts and to the opening of the relevant archives of Arab governments and of relevant Arab and Islamic organizations and institutions.26 American and British intelligence reports generally avoided broad claims about what most Arabs and Muslims were thinking about the events of the day. Instead their focus was on specific groups, institutions, and individuals known to have pro-Axis sympathies. Moreover, American and British officials were fully aware of and, indeed, were working with Arab political leaders who supported the Allied cause. Furthermore, all of the leading officials of the Axis and the Allied powers believed that the issue of propaganda's success or failure was inseparable from the stark facts of victory or defeat between the Allies and the Axis in the battles in North Africa. The outcome of these battles, that is, the military history of these years, was decisive both for the course of the war and for the intellectual and cultural history of the region.27

    As a student of the intersection of ideas and politics in modern German history, I share with my fellow intellectual and cultural historians a preoccupation with the reading and interpretation of texts, their contexts, and their audience and reception. Though the question of the reception of Nazism's Arabic propaganda is of great importance, it cannot be adequately done before we look at the texts themselves. As I worked on Nazi propaganda aimed at a German audience, I observed a tendency in some historical scholarship to draw the mistaken conclusion that the regime's propaganda was so familiar, well understood, and documented that the most interesting questions primarily concerned its reception and impact on intended audiences. Yet I found that a close reading of even the most famous texts of Hitler, Goebbels, and their associates