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

minds that began from very different civilizational starting points.

     

CHAPTER 2

Defining Anti-Semitism
1933-1939
    azi ideology posed two seemingly insurmountable barriers to successful appeals to Arabs, as a national, regional, and ethnic group, and Muslims, as a religious grouping. First, Hitler had written that an Aryan master race existed at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of other, clearly inferior races. How, then, could the Nazis find allies and collaborators among nonEuropean "races"? Second, the Nazis made anti-Semitism a core element of their program. For Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East, anti-Semitism could be interpreted as applying also to non-Jewish Semites, such as themselves. Before the Nazi regime could engage in a propaganda campaign with any hope of success, its leaders needed to clarify these two issues. Officials in the German Foreign Ministry bore the primary responsibility for finding allies and collabo - rators. They had thought most about how to appeal to "non-Aryans" and nonJewish Semites, including Arabs, Persians, and the Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa. These officials also understood that the perception that Nazi Germany was racist toward Arabs and Muslims constituted a serious drawback compared with the universalist appeals of liberal democrats to all individuals and with the Communists' appeals to workers of all countries.
    Nazism's most famous book, Mein Kampf, clearly presented Hitler's views on Aryan racial superiority. Any reader could discern that he did not believe in the equality of all human beings and saw this inequality as rooted in racial biology. Hitler also left no doubt about his disdain for Arabs. In contrast to hopes in Imperial Germany for aid from the Arabs in World War I, he harbored no hopes for "any mythical uprising in Egypt" or that others were "ready to shed their blood for us." English machine guns and fragmentation bombs would bring such a holy war "to an infernal end." It was, he continued, "impossible to overwhelm with a coalition of cripples a powerful state that is determined to stake, if necessary, its last drop of blood for its existence. As a volkish man, who appraises the value of men on a racial basis, I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called `oppressed nations' from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs."' The reader of Mein Kampf would correctly conclude that Hitler's contempt for the Egyptians was consistent with his belief in the superiority of an "Aryan race." Further, such a reader might also plausibly conclude that Hitler's anti-Semitism had a broad meaning. Although they applied first and foremost to the Jews, his comments about the Egyptians suggested that his contempt for Semites extended to Arabs and Muslims.

    Yet one Arab reader who shared Hitler's hatreds drew other conclusions. On March 31,1933, two months after Hitler came to power, Haj Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, called on Heinrich Wolff, head of the German Consulate in Jerusalem.2 In his report to the Auswartiges Amt (Foreign Ministry), Wolff wrote that Husseini said, "Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, antidemocratic state leadership to other countries." In his view, "current Jewish influence on economy and politics" was "damaging everywhere and needed to be fought." In the hope of doing economic damage to the Jews, Husseini opined that "Muslims hope for a boycott of the Jews in Germany because it would then be adopted with enthusiasm in the whole of the Muslim world." Further, he was willing to spread the boycott message among Muslims traveling through Palestine and to "all Muslims." He also looked forward to trade with "non-Jewish merchants" dealing in German products.3 Husseini's remarks on March 1933 demonstrated his early enthusiasm for the Nazi regime based on his ideological support for its antidemocratic and anti-Jewish policies.