The years between Germany’s defeat in the Great War ending in 1918 and the day the Nazis took power in Berlin a mere fifteen years later saw enormous changes in the Middle East. During that time, Hitler and al-Husaini absorbed the lessons of the past German-Muslim alliance and moved toward a new version.
When this period began, though, none of the coming events seemed even remotely possible. No longer a great power, Germany had to pay massive indemnities. The country was wracked by internal instability and rapid inflation, its territory and population drastically reduced, and Allied troops occupied its rich western region. The army was strictly limited in size and weapons while all of its colonies—six times larger than the mother country itself—were lost.1 Postwar Germany was in no shape to play a role in world affairs even if the victors had let it do so.
Passing through Germany en route to Moscow in 1919, the Indian nationalist, now Communist, Manabendra N. Roy, who had worked closely with von Oppenheim’s apparatus, saw hordes of beggars in frayed military uniforms, many with amputated limbs and disfigured faces or suffering from shell shock. They often wore a cardboard sign on strings around their necks with the accusing slogan: “I fought for the Fatherland.”2 Little good had it done them, or the war for Germany.
German Middle East assets were either looted by the winning side or destroyed in the fighting. The German Orient Bank alone lost 30 million marks, including murdered Armenian clients’ accounts first confiscated by the Ottoman Empire and then taken by the French and British after the war.3
The psychological trauma of defeat was as bad as the losses of lives, land, and wealth. As late as spring 1918, a German offensive had almost succeeded before an Allied counteroffensive drove it back and advanced until poised to invade the exhausted Fatherland. Germany gave up in November 1918. Ironically, a clever policy that avoided invasion, occupation, and even more destruction led many Germans to believe that victory had been snatched away by traitors at home rather than lost on the battlefield.
On November 10, 1918, as Corporal Hitler lay in the Pasewalk, Pomerania, medical center almost blinded by a gas attack he had barely survived, he heard about the revolutionary upheaval and the kaiser’s abdication. Hitler would recall that as the moment he decided to become a politician to seek revenge on those he held responsible for betraying Germany.4 He would write six years later that if only the thousands of Jews who had been corrupting the nation had been gassed to death as had the best German soldiers at the front, those killed in battle would not have died in vain.5
Right-wing circles echoed this psychologically self-serving view.6 In using the fact that some Jews had been among the revolutionaries and politicians who brought the war to an end in order to blame them for defeat, Hitler merely echoed popular views. The postwar German democratic state was called the “Jewish Republic of Weimar” on the basis of a Jewish-leftist-stab-in-the-back theory. In 1920, as the Nazi Party formed, the swastika symbol had already appeared on the helmets of right-wing militia units fighting Communists and Socialists. Among those so engaged were many of the thirty thousand German veterans from Middle East campaigns, including von Papen and Oskar von Niedermayer.
Meanwhile, the Middle East’s new era was influenced by President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points address to Congress on January 8, 1918.7 Seeking to promote democracy and stability, Wilson wanted to banish the great powers’ imperial machinations, which he blamed for the war, and enthrone local nationalism. He demanded the abolition of secret deals like the Sykes-Picot Agreement that had partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, and backed free trade.
Thus, though not by design, U.S. policy served Germany’s interests. The less power wielded by Britain or France and the more open the region was to others’ economic efforts, the better for Germany. Free trade and minimum colonialism had also been the kaiser’s program, since otherwise Germany could not compete with the British and French empires. Middle Eastern nationalists were also enthusiastic about Wilson’s program. Nationalism was seen as the wave of the future; Islamism a remnant of the obsolete Ottoman past. But there were Muslims who did not accept this verdict and German experts who still believed that the Islamist ideology had a future.
Wilson was positioning America into the niche that Germany had tried to fill: a great power that wasn’t interested in gaining territory but was friendly to local aspirations and working for mutual enrichment through trade and development. If Middle Eastern nationalists wanted to avoid colonial rule, the United States seemed the only alternative. But when local leaders invited Washington to take a mandate over Greater Syria or Armenia they were turned down.8 The United States was entering an isolationist period. The United States did not join the League of Nations in 1919, much less play an active role in distant places of whose existence it was barely aware.
When Nazi Germany returned to the region in the 1930s, it reclaimed the role of anti-imperialist ally and role model for Arabs and Muslims that pre-1918 Germany had played. In the 1920s, though, Germany was in no shape to play that role. The British and French controlled the Middle East through their mandatory governments, and local elites had made their peace with these new rulers to preserve their wealth and power.
At the same time, though, the British and French competed in subverting each other’s rule. François Picot, the French diplomat who had demanded his country’s total control over Syria and Lebanon, told a group of Muslims in Jerusalem in 1919 that the British “had promised Palestine to Zionism” but staunchly Catholic France “Would not let the land of Jesus go to those who crucified him.” After Picot left, however, his Muslim host declared of the French: “God annihilate them, they lie. Britain would never do such a dirty trick.”9
It was in this murky situation of conflicting loyalties and interests—pro-Ottoman Islamism versus Arab nationalism and revolutionary Islamism; Germany fighting the Allies; Arab factionalism; and British-French rivalry—that al-Husaini made his career. He had been one of those Arabs who had at first remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire on imperial Islamist grounds, serving as an officer in its army and fighting alongside Germany. Then he changed sides to support the anti-Ottoman Arab revolutionaries and became a British agent. It was that fact, never revealed until now, that explains why the British were eager to support his political ambitions in the 1920s and into the 1930s.
In 1916, al-Husaini was a lieutenant in the Ottoman 46th Division at Izmir (Smyrna).10 That November, he became ill, was given leave, and returned to Jerusalem for three months. Al-Husaini, like Hitler, had his vision of the future while in hospital during the war. Early in 1917 he made a momentous decision. Instead of returning to the German-backed Ottoman army he joined the British-backed Arab revolt. Ironically, al-Husaini, who played a direct role in the Ottoman Empire’s destruction, would later describe that event as an “imperialist plot.”11
Be that as it may, al-Husaini worked on behalf of that “plot” and took a salary in British gold as a recruiter for the army of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans. He signed up about fifteen hundred Arabs from what was then called southern Syria—later, Palestine—to join the forces fighting alongside Lawrence of Arabia.12 Junior as al-Husaini was, his being one of the few active supporters of the British and their Hashemite allies from that area marked him as a person of importance for the Allied cause.
But the British were also backing those who would be al-Husaini’s future enemies, the Zionists. In July 1918, the German envoy in Istanbul sent a report arguing that Berlin might use British support for Zionism to mobilize Arab support for its war effort. Foreseeing a Jewish state’s eventual emergence, he explained, Arabs and Ottomans would fight harder to resist it.13 But while the dispatch was prophetic in the longer term, it did not prove useful as an immediate strategy. Al-Husaini, who would soon emerge as leader of the Palestinian Arabs, was fighting for those who had issued the Balfour Declaration.14
Already fluent in French, al-Husaini taught himself English during 1918. He served six months with the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, working for General Gabriel Haddad, the Christian Arab adviser to Ronald Storrs, British military governor of Jerusalem. When Haddad was made commissioner of public safety in Damascus, al-Husaini went there too, with the rank of detective agent.15
Arriving in Damascus with the victorious British army and its Arab auxiliaries in late 1918, al-Husaini’s job was to support the British and his own former commander in the Arab revolt, Faisal, son of Sharif Husain of Mecca. Al-Husaini and the British were undermining London’s wartime promise to Paris that France would rule Syria. Al-Husaini wanted those who would later be called Palestinian Arabs, then known as “southern Syrians,” to become part of an Arab-ruled Greater Syria. To further this goal, he wrote articles for a Jerusalem newspaper, Southern Syria, edited by his friend, Arif al-Arif.16
Much of al-Husaini’s work was in the General Syrian Congress which, on March 8, 1920, proclaimed Faisal to be Syria’s king, as the British wanted. Of course, the British could not openly pursue this goal since it directly violated their pledges to France under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which is why they needed trusted agents like al-Husaini. As a secret agent, al-Husaini reported to the British on the activities of Arab political groups.
One of al-Husaini’s activities was to lobby the United States on behalf of Syrian Arab nationalism. President Woodrow Wilson sent a commission to the Middle East in 1919 headed by theologian Henry King and businessman-philanthropist Charles Crane.17 Their task was to suggest who should rule the former Ottoman lands of Greater Syria and Anatolia.18 The commission met with the General Syrian Congress which wanted a large, independent Syrian Arab state.19 Al-Husaini must have been involved in preparing those testifying, successfully so since the commission endorsed the congress’s stance.
While working as a British agent, however, al-Husaini was increasingly critical of British policy, disappointed both with the implementation of the Balfour Declaration and with London’s refusal to do more to help Faisal and the Greater Syria cause. Meanwhile, though, he gained great personal advantage from having feet in multiple camps.
For example, in June 1918 he founded in Damascus the Arab Club, which had about five hundred members by the end of 1919, and the Literary Club. The former supported Faisal; the latter, dominated by the powerful an-Nashashibi clan—later al-Husaini’s chief rivals and victims—marked the start of a Palestinian Arab nationalist movement.20 By 1920, he also helped organize the first anti-Jewish underground military organization in southern Syria, al-Fidiya (“the Sacrifice,”).21 The busy al-Husaini also found time to back the Christian-Muslim Association.
During this period, al-Husaini saw himself as an Arab nationalist and a Syrian Islamist who regarded Britain as the best ally against French ambitions. There were certainly contradictions in this stance. After all, on January 18, 1919, Faisal had met with Zionist leader Chaim Weiz-mann at the Versailles peace conference and made a deal to accept Zionist aspirations in exchange for Jewish support to establish his own Syrian domain.22
This dream of Greater Syria, however, did not materialize. France accepted a League of Nations mandate to rule Syria in April 1920 and seized control in July, brushing aside an Arab force in a minor battle, and Faisal was expelled. In compensation, the British made him Iraq’s king in 1921 and many Arab officers from the Ottoman and Arab nationalist armies followed him to Bagdad. Al-Husaini was not among them.
These developments forced al-Husaini to rethink his views, identity, and ambitions. The Ottomans and their idea of an all-inclusive empire based nominally on Islam had collapsed to be replaced by Turkish nationalism, which had nothing to offer him. So al-Husaini turned toward Arab nationalism and Syro-Palestinian Islamism. It was Syrian, not Palestinian Arab, nationalism that first attracted him. Yet soon, the idea of an independent Greater Syria also disintegrated. During that transitional period, however, al-Husaini did not have to make an immediate choice. He could combine four seemingly disparate, if not outright contradictory, doctrines.
First and foremost, he was a Pan-Arab nationalist, seeking a large Syrian state that would include what are today Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and perhaps more. Even after Faisal’s defeat, al-Husaini did not have to give up this goal or the idea that the British could be persuaded to favor it. After all, though Britain was allied with France, it didn’t want to share power over the Middle East with that partner.
Second, al-Husaini, who functioned as a completely secular political figure at this point, did not have to choose between Arab nationalism and Islamism in setting his political identity. The two standpoints seemed compatible.
Third, and least important, al-Husaini was a leading figure among the then largely passive group of those who would later define themselves as Palestinian Arabs. Focusing on this group was al-Husaini’s best career move. After all, he was of no importance in Faisal’s entourage—especially when it moved to Iraq—and would be even less so in French-ruled Syria. But in the relatively backward area of Palestine and especially in Jerusalem he had almost no competition, came from an important family, and thus could realistically hope to become leader himself.
Finally, al-Husaini was advancing himself by accepting British patronage. In later years, this type of behavior was denounced—even by al-Husaini himself—as that of an imperialist lackey and traitor. This connection, kept secret throughout his long life, explains the mystery of why the British would promote and back a young, unknown, and troublesome man to a position of such power.
If al-Husaini’s employment by the British settles that particular historical mystery—why London promoted the ambitions of such a seemingly antagonistic political figure—another secret was the identity of his other patrons. With the French taking over in Damascus and Faisal’s supporters kicked out, why was the vocal al-Husaini able to remain there? According to U.S. intelligence reports, the reason was simple: he went to work for French intelligence.23 This not only gave him further protection—and a quarter-century later the French would save him from punishment as a Nazi ally and war criminal—but also a sponsor happy to see him subvert British rule in Palestine.
Thus, within a few months, al-Husaini had fought with the Ottomans to suppress Arab nationalists and beat the British, then with the Arab nationalists against the Ottomans and Germans, next for the British to help Syrian Arab nationalists against the French, and finally for the French to undermine British rule on behalf of Palestinian Arab nationalists. By 1920 and 1921, al-Husaini was involved in numerous organizations in both Damascus and Jerusalem, spending time in both cities.
At this point an event took place that would rocket al-Husain overnight into the position of the Palestine Arabs’ leader for more than three decades and help determine the fate of the entire Middle East. Palestine’s Arabs themselves had nothing to do with selecting al-Husaini as their chief. Instead, that choice was made by Herbert Samu els, who was Jewish, pro-Zionist, and Britain’s first high commissioner in Palestine. He appointed al-Husaini as grand mufti of Jerusalem on May 10, 1921, making him the country’s highest Muslim cleric and providing the basis for al-Husaini to become the political leader, too.
Since no one knew about al-Husaini’s British intelligence activities, the decision seemed inexplicable at the time. True, he was from a distinguished family and half-brother of the previous grand mufti. Al-Husaini was also still only twenty-four years old, yet he was being given a post usually awarded to a much older man. He was no religious scholar with advanced studies or even a cleric at all, though he held the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in religious studies from al-Azhar University. Moreover, he had made many anti-British statements and been involved in subversive groups.
Clearly, his previous service had convinced the British that al-Husaini would be reasonably loyal to their interests. It was one of the most remarkable errors of judgment ever made in a region rife with them. What makes this strategy even more incredible was that al-Husaini had not so long before been sentenced by a British military court to ten years’ imprisonment for sedition.24 On April 4, 1920, a little more than a year earlier, al-Husaini had made a passionate Syrian nationalist speech at the Nabi Musa religious procession in Jerusalem. The fired-up crowd responded with shouts of “Death to Zionism” and “King Faisal for Ruler,” then rioted and killed a number of Jews.25 The British put out an arrest warrant and al-Husaini fled across the Jordan River.
Was there a secret agreement between al-Husaini and the British to secure his pardon? Whatever happened, Samuel voided al-Husaini’s conviction, let him return to Jerusalem, and then made him grand mufti.
Next, Samuel asked him, on August 24, 1921, to create a Supreme Muslim Council to supervise all Muslim charities, foundations, and courts in the British mandate of Palestine. This gave al-Husaini tremendous patronage power and a large, secure source of revenue. It would be virtually impossible for any other Palestinian Arab to compete with him. On January 9, 1922, the council elected al-Husaini as its president. This nominally philanthropic body would become the Palestinian Arab political leadership.
Thus, the British had elevated the man who would become their worst enemy in the Middle East. But this mistake only became fully apparent in the late 1920s. During the immediate postwar period it was the changes in Turkey that seemed most important for Europeans and especially for Germany.
The wartime Allied plan had been to divide Turkey into British, French, Italian, and Greek zones of occupation. The Sèvres peace treaty, signed August 10, 1920, was intended to fulfill that goal. Then, however, everything changed. The Turks came together under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Kemal Atatürk), a former Young Turk and successful officer in World War I. The British, Italians, and French had no desire to fight. Only the Greeks pursued their territorial claims but were soundly defeated.
As a result, an armistice was concluded on September 23, 1922, followed by the Treaty of Lausanne on July 24, 1923. Turkey won full independence, and Atatürk would create a secular republic that sought to emulate and join the Western world. Before that happened, however, there was a now-forgotten period when Turkish thinking echoed the wartime German-Ottoman cooperation on jihad. The Turkish-Afghan treaty of March 1, 1921, established an Islamic Confederation, an Islamic United States of the Orient, as one Turkish official called it, with the idea of adding Iran as a third partner.26
Turkey and Afghanistan agreed to cooperate if one of them declared a jihad, but pledged not to declare any jihad against each other.27 The two countries also agreed to fund and direct Islamic groups promoting revolts in British-ruled South Asia and Soviet-ruled Central Asia.28 Sultan Ahmad Khan, Afghan envoy to Ankara, claimed the Indian revolution would triumph as the Islamic world awakened.29 Some of those involved were former Ottoman officials who had worked closely with Berlin, among them the Turkish envoy to Kabul, Abd ar-Rahman Peshawari, who had participated in the German-Ottoman expedition to Afghanistan during the war.30
The British were worried that the Kemalists ruling Turkey might take an Islamist route, following the prewar Young Turks’ policy. There were signs in 1921 and 1922 that they might be right. Atatürk revived the Jemiet ul-Islam association to promote Islamic revolutions under Ahmad as-Sanusi, formerly one of von Oppenheim’s men from an anti-Christian Islamic brotherhood group.31
The Turkish leader threw a banquet in as-Sanusi’s honor and gave five million pounds to found Pan-Islamic centers to agitate for a new jihad.32 Turkey sponsored as-Sanusi,33 arguing, in Atatürk’s words, that he would “consolidate the Turkish Empire as fulcrum of the Islamic world.”34 Another old von Oppenheim collaborator, the Egyptian al-Jawish, was appointed by Atatürk to head the Ulama Council of Muslim Scholars.35
As late as May 1922, British intelligence assessments were that Turkey was enthusiastically promoting Pan-Islamism in pursuit of a Federation of Muslim Communities under Turkey’s leadership.36 This was not, however, the direction Atatürk finally chose. In March 1924, definitively rejecting Islamism in favor of secular Turkish nationalism, Atatürk abolished the caliphate.37 The last caliph, Abdülmecid II, who had been deposed eighteen months earlier as Ottoman ruler, was expelled from Turkey with his family.38
For the first time since Islam had been founded twelve hundred years earlier there was no caliph to make at least a pretense of leading a united Muslim religion and empire. Not only the Ottoman Empire but also the Ottoman dynasty, Germany’s old ally, was at an end. Atatürk closed Islamic schools, forced people to wear Western clothes and hats, introduced European legal codes, gave voting rights to women, and changed written Turkish from Arabic to Roman letters.
The torch of modern Islamism, once lit with the kaiser’s help, now briefly passed to a surprising new sponsor: the atheistic, Communist Soviet Union. One of the key people in this strange alliance was once again as-Sanusi, a veteran of both German and Turkish Islamist campaigns. The Kremlin promised weapons for his Pan-Islamic schemes.39 Hearing of these contacts confirmed Atatürk in his belief that Islamic politics were dangerous for Turkey’s interests, and he kicked as-Sanusi out of the country.40
Abolition of the caliphate came as a great shock to Muslims in many countries despite the fact that they had largely ignored it for centuries and had ignored the caliph’s call for jihad in World War I.41 Still, Islamic loyalty had been a major factor in holding together the Ottoman Empire. The loss of something hitherto taken for granted was a reminder to Muslims of how far they had declined since their glory days. Usama Bin Ladin would remind them of this shame seventy-five years later when he called for Muslim unity and a global war against the Jews and the Christian “crusaders.”
In this way the question was raised, as it has been again in the twenty-first century, about who might fill the vacuum of transnational Islamic legitimacy. There were several self-declared candidates.
Just two days after the Turks deposed the caliph, Sharif of Mecca Husain Bin Ali, Faisal’s father and ruler of the Hijaz in western Arabia, declared himself caliph, but nothing came of it since he had so many enemies. In 1925 his own kingdom was conquered by Ibn Saud, who annexed the Hijaz and went on to create Saudi Arabia.
Another claimant to leadership over all Muslims was a new group, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose founding in 1928 marked the start of the modern Islamist movement. As an organization rooted in the Ottoman-German jihadization of Islam, it would also develop close relations with Germany during the following decade. Thus, Islamism remained alive in the 1920s, available for use by Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
When the British general Edmund Allenby spoke at the ceremony opening the British military cemetery in Ramallah, Palestine, he had echoed the slogan that World War I had been a war to end all wars. Unfortunately, this assessment proved inaccurate.42 True, the postwar settlement had produced a seemingly stable system in the Middle East in which moderate elites accepted a leading role. But militant Arab nationalists and Islamists were dissatisfied with British and French rule.
The League of Nations was established—albeit without U.S., Soviet, or German membership—in 1919 and soon issued mandates for British rule over Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan. The June 1922 Palestine mandate incorporated the Balfour and the similar Ottoman Declaration’s goal of creating a national home for the Jewish people. The French received a mandate in September 1923 to rule Syria and Lebanon.43
How would von Oppenheim’s former agents, both German and local, find a place in this new order? Many of them carried on with their earlier efforts during the Weimar Republic era, like Grobba, von Hentig, and Nadolny. Formerly military coordinator of von Oppenheim’s jihad plan, Nadolny became German ambassador to Ankara and, after the Nazis took power, briefly to Moscow.
Others pursued revolutionary activities, sometimes with former Ottoman comrades.44 One such man was a former German officer, Wilhelm Hintersatz. As a pilot, he had survived the perilous skies, though frigid air paralyzed the right side of his face in 1916. At age thirty, he switched to service with von Sanders in the Ottoman army. Learning Turkish and Arabic, he became commander of all the Ottoman Empire’s machine-gun units. Wounded several times in combat, Hintersatz worked closely with Enver and even converted to Islam in Istanbul. As he later explained, he did so fully aware of the conflicts of loyalty it brought him as a German. The shaikh ül-islam, the empire’s highest cleric, Musa Kazim Effendi, honored him with a Muslim name that had been that of a ninth-century caliph, Harun ar-Rashid, who had both fought and developed good relations with Germanic kings.
Returning to work for the German government, Harun ar-Rashid Hintersatz helped his old friend Enver wage Pan-Turkish nationalist and Islamist wars in Central Asia. As head of the Turkish treasury ministry’s security force, he oversaw depots full of Ottoman weapons supposed to be scrapped under the peace agreement, managing to smuggle much military equipment to his wartime comrade fighting the Soviets in the Caucasus.45 Indeed, Hintersatz was soon himself battling the local version of the Soviets when he returned to Berlin and commanded right-wing militia forces against revolutionaries there.
Enver, who had been Germany’s main ally in the Ottoman regime, had equally remarkable adventures. He and five other leaders fled to Germany within hours of the Ottoman surrender in October 1918. It was a wise move. The next year he was sentenced to death for leading the empire into war and for the mass murders of the Armenians.46
In the early 1920s, the leading role in fomenting revolutionary movements in the Muslim world had passed from Germany to the Soviets, who urged Muslims to overthrow their European rulers.47 Enver therefore next went to Moscow and offered his services to the new Soviet government, becoming director of its Asian department and winning the personal support of Lenin. Remarkably, Enver would persuade Lenin to support an Islamic religious revolt based on a plan drawn up for the kaiser.
At the September 1920 Baku conference, the Soviets sought to rally the “people of the east” for their cause. Grigory Zinoviev, the Communist International’s thirty-seven-year-old head, tried some fancy dialectical footwork to justify these contradictions. Pan-Islamism was not a Soviet idea, he explained, but “we are now faced with the task of kindling a real holy war against the British and French capitalists.” The combatants in World War I, Zinoviev continued, had tried to present that slaughter as a holy war. Now, he rationalized, the peoples of the east must proclaim the real jihad against the Anglo-French robbers.48
Figure 11. “Red Holy War.” At the September 1920 Baku Conference, the Soviet agitators Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek incited Pan-Islamism and jihad against the “Anglo-French capitalists” in the name of the Communist International.
Communist leaders realized that they were playing with fire. Karl Radek, the Communist International’s secretary, admitted that the call for jihad appeals to “warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of the East when they advanced upon Europe” as in the days of Genghis Khan and the caliphs of Islam. Yet this was different because it was in a good cause. When you draw your daggers and revolvers, Radek told the assembled Muslims, it was not for purposes of conquest or to turn Europe into a graveyard but to build a new civilization of free workers and peasants. This was no wave of barbarism or a new horde of the Huns. This was “The Red East, which together with the workers of Europe will create a new civilization under the banner of Communism.”49 The delegates applauded wildly.
Enver’s Soviet-approved plan for jihad against Britain’s empire in the Middle East and India was basically just his and von Oppenheim’s wartime scheme. One comrade explained that as German allies the Ottomans under Enver were merely liberating lands from Russian or British imperialism to hand them over to German or Turkish imperialism, but now it was the power of the masses that would triumph.50 Yet there was little and nothing particularly Marxist or proletarian about Enver’s strategy. To build a base in Afghanistan and the formerly tsarist territories of eastern Turkestan in order to strike at India, he promised to enlist Afghanistan’s ruler, King Amanullah, who had been involved in the German-Ottoman strategy, as well as some of his contacts among Indian Muslims.51 Enver also turned to still another old German collaborator, the Indian Roy who had now become a Communist. His task was to prepare a base near the Afghan-Indian border, a job similar to what he had done for the Germans a few years earlier.52
Enver, however, was still loyal to Islamism and Turkic nationalism. After fighting for the Soviets against Muslim rebels in the Caucasus for a while, he then defected to the Islamic forces, training them along German lines. When he visited Berlin in 1922, he asked Hintersatz to join him. Hintersatz agreed and applied for a visa at the Iranian embassy, planning to cross over into the rebel area. But Hintersatz never heard from Enver again.53 In Tajikistan, the Red Army caught up with Enver in August 1922. In a case of poetic justice, the unit that killed him was commanded by an Armenian.
For his part, Hintersatz carried on preparing for the battles to come. He advised Italian intelligence during that country’s war in Ethiopia. Under cover as a reporter for Turkish newspapers, he himself went to Ethiopia as an Italian spy and won the confidence of Emperor Haile Selassie. Hintersatz was convinced that the great battle between the Germans and British to decide the world’s fate would take place in the Middle East. When World War II came, he would command a German army unit of Azerbaijani Muslims, recruited in cooperation with al-Husaini.54
But these events lay well ahead. Germany in the 1920s was uninterested in foreign adventures, especially in the Middle East. The prime concern was individual and national survival. Two days before World War I ended, the Red Flag was flying over German government buildings.55 Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated and went into exile in the Netherlands,56 and a new liberal democratic constitution was adopted.
Germany was defeated, disarmed, blamed for the war, and forced to pay France’s war costs and to give up much territory.57 Isolated, marginalized, and excluded from international organizations until 1926, Germany also saw its contacts with the Middle East completely cut. Germans could not even travel there without a British or French visa.58 The idea, an expert explained in 1925, that Germany would one day again have influence in the Middle East seemed doubtful.59
Of course, the French and British were determined that Berlin would never return to any important role in an area they sought to monopolize.60 Wanting to avoid trouble and having other priorities, the Weimar Republic’s leaders accepted this fate. Germany only did anything in the Middle East when repeatedly asked to do so by governments there.
The best example was Afghanistan, still trying to use Germany to offset British and Russian domination. In 1921, King Amanullah asked for diplomatic relations, educational exchanges, and German advisers, along with trade and investment. Berlin was so cautious that it immediately informed the British about the exchange and did nothing for more than two years.61 Only in late 1923 did Grobba, who had led Muslim ex–prisoners of war against the French in World War I, arrive in Kabul with a seventy-man mission, including military officers to train the Afghans.62 Almost immediately, the Soviets approached him for an alliance to subvert British rule in India, a major theme in von Oppenheim’s plan. Grobba turned them down.
With Berlin’s government so hesitant, the private sector took the lead. Businessmen began a German-Iranian Society, headed by von Hentig; a German-Turkish Association, led by Deutsch Bank president Arthur von Gwinner together with Jäckh; and an Egyptian-German Chamber of Commerce led by Aziz Cotta Bey.63 The German Orient Bank reopened in Turkey in 1924 and in Egypt in 1926, with a big effect on both countries. An Egyptian entrepreneur who worked at that German bank’s branch in Istanbul, Talat Harb, used this experience to start the first Egyptian-owned bank, Bank Misr, in Cairo. Similarly, Celal Bayar, who had worked in the German bank’s branch in Istanbul, founded the Türkiye Isş Bankasi in 1924.64 A dozen years later he became prime minister and would then work closely with Hitler’s envoy, von Papen.
Using such old contacts and experiences, Berlin rebuilt its business presence with remarkable speed. By the late 1920s, Berlin was again the region’s third largest trading partner, exceeded only by Great Britain and France.
This doesn’t mean that there were no political contacts. Many young nationalists from the Middle East saw Britain and France as their enemies. Beginning in 1920, they went to Berlin to study or as a place of exile. As early as 1922, British policymakers were watching this trend. Their Committee on Eastern Unrest pointed to rising anti-European sentiment throughout the region in which nationalists, Islamists, and Communists were ready to cooperate. But the center of action was not the Middle East or South Asia but Europe itself, with many agitators taking refuge in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.
Radical newspapers like Azadi ash-Sharq, Liwa al-Islam, and Echo de l’Orient were published in Berlin and smuggled into Egypt, Iran, and India. Pan-Islamic and nationalist clubs in Germany helped build secret organizations back home and plotted revolts. There was no immediate danger, the British concluded, but the spirit of revolution, if unchecked, could burst into flame in the future.65 During this period, however, Germany was avoiding trouble, focusing on the strategy von Bismarck had recommended: trade, commerce, and culture. Yet what would happen if a new regime came to power to revive the kaiser’s approach at a time that the region was far readier to burst into flame than it had been in 1914?
For Hitler at the start of his political career the Middle East posed an emotional and ideological difficulty. As a racist and German nationalist Hitler disdained what he called “colored humanity.” Arab and Muslim immigrants to Germany were for him no better than Jews. He had called France, facing a similar influx, a “Euro-African mulatto state,” moving toward “Negrification” and “racial pollution,” that posed a “danger for Europe’s white race.” He did not want to associate with “inflated Orientals” from Egypt or India.66 In 1920 the Nazi Party demanded permitting only immigration by ethnic Germans and expelling all who had arrived since the war’s end.
German academics, often von Oppenheim alumni, supplied an idea, though, that Hitler would later accept: Islam’s equality as a religion with Christianity. At a September 1921 meeting of Middle East experts, Islam was described as being closely related to Christianity and to European culture, albeit somewhat inferior since the latter had invented individualism and humanism.67 Humanism did not figure in Hitler’s ideology but Islamism as a useful ally would do so.
Meanwhile, Hitler was busy with other issues. In an attempt to emulate Mussolini’s successful march on Rome, Hitler tried to start a coup in Munich on November 8, 1923, but was defeated by von Seeckt, the Ottoman army’s last and the Weimar Republic’s first chief of staff. Ironically, Hitler’s later military successes would depend on what von Seeckt did next. After helping throw Hitler into prison, von Seeckt and other Middle East veterans ran a secret operation to bypass the restrictions on Germany’s army by cooperating with that other European pariah state, the USSR, to develop new weapons and military technologies. The Germans’ go-between, Alexander Parvus, and his Soviet counterpart, Karl Radek, old partners in the wartime German plan to promote Communist revolution in order to push Russia out of the war, again united in this project.
General von Niedermayer, who had been a leading figure in von Oppenheim’s operation, ran von Seeckt’s Moscow office. In 1912 he had made a dangerous journey of exploration through India and Persia. During World War I, he had led the daring two-year-long wartime expedition to Afghanistan. He then became commander of German troops in the Middle East, following that up after the war by gaining his Ph.D. at Munich University with a dissertation on Iran’s geography.
Von Seeckt began supervising a dozen-year-long German-Soviet effort to develop airplanes, tanks, and chemical weapons. This preparation for rearmament later gave the Nazis a huge, modern military far faster than rival powers expected. When World War II began, von Niedermayer would lead an Ostlegion, one of four Soviet Muslim units recruited with help from al-Husaini. Having criticized Hitler, however, he was imprisoned. When he sought refuge with his old Soviet friends at the war’s end, they threw him into a concentration camp where he died three years later.68
But that all lay in the future. In 1925 von Seeckt began phase two of the secret plan, codenamed Alexander, to rebuild and rearm Germany’s army for a war of revenge. From just 100,000 soldiers in 1925, he planned to have 3 million by 1939. Raw materials—many bought cheaply in the USSR in exchange for technical aid—were funneled into arms production. And von Seeckt relied on the old von Oppenheim group and his comrades on the Middle East front to implement his rearmament plan.
Every detail was foreseen. Von Seeckt accurately projected that Germany would have 252 generals and eight armies by 1939. The year for going to war was set, with near accuracy, at 1940. France’s army was expected to be weakest then, given the country’s low birth rate during World War I. Von Seeckt was only wrong in the strategy he foresaw for the new war. Like generals on the other side, he underestimated how new weapons and strategies would give the offense the advantage. According to von Seeckt’s original plan the German army would go on the defensive, draw the French onto German territory, and wear them down with a hit-and-run war of attrition. Then, heavier German forces would finish them off. But von Seeckt’s miscalculation didn’t matter since he gave the German army the tools needed to win that future war. Every possible weapon would be used in what he described as a war of passionate hatred: scorched earth tactics, sabotage, terrorism, poison gas, and germ warfare.69
Writing Mein Kampf in his prison cell and no doubt cursing von Seeckt as a traitor, Hitler could never have dreamed that the German army was doing his work for him and that he would one day reap the benefit of von Seeckt’s labors. In damning Jews and Communists as his enemy, Hitler was unaware that Communists, including such Soviet Jewish officials as Radek, were building his new army.70
Just as von Seeckt turned to veterans of the Middle East front and to von Oppenheim’s apparatus, so Hitler used them when building his Nazi Party. The future dictator was also already thinking of Arabs and Muslims as reliable allies. In the draft of his book, though this did not make it into the final version, Hitler counted the people of ancient Egypt and India as examples of Aryan cultures.71 “I am prevented,” Hitler explained, “by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of the so-called oppressed nations from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs.”72 Yet he left room for temporary alliances with those whose help would benefit Germany.
Still, Hitler’s romanticism about Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East would ultimately let him forgive their racial make-up. Germany’s past policy in the region also influenced him. Not that he took previous German experience uncritically: he studied Enver’s career and praised the Ottoman leader’s tactical flexibility.73 But he concluded that Germany had made a mistake to ally with the declining Ottoman Empire. He wanted to find new, vigorous revolutionary movements, foreign equivalents of his own Nazi Party.
He also noted the failure of the kaiser’s policy to promote jihad in Egypt and India. Even though Hitler was a secularist who distrusted religion in politics.74 he valued its ability to promote fanaticism in battle.75 Only after he took power did a meeting with two Turkish generals make him change his mind on the usefulness of jihad.76 Under the motto “Aryans always used lower races,” he opened the door to dealing with people of relatively “lighter skin color”—a category that included Arabs, Afghanis, Armenians, Indians, Iranians, and Turks, in whom he saw “the last visible traces of former master races.”77
Hitler also began to take an interest in the Zionist issue. The Jews needed no separate state, he claimed, since they were a “colony of parasites” trying to dominate every other nation.78 Zionism, Hitler said, was merely a cover for the organization described in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even if the book itself was a forgery, he explained, it was still an accurate description of what Jews were doing.79
Hitler was cautious on the Middle East at first, however, because he hoped for an alliance with Britain. Consequently, he did not want to appear to be coveting British colonies or threatening its sea routes through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.80 He foresaw Germany’s expansion as being in Europe itself and the main battle as having to be fought against the USSR and France.
His trial after the attempted coup in Munich had made Hitler a national hero and his party grew quickly after his release from prison. Helped by the economic depression, the Nazis went from 18 percent of the votes in the 1930 elections, to 33 percent in late 1932, and 44 percent in early 1933. On January 30, 1932, Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, having gone from prison cell to total power in just seven years.
Far away, one of those celebrating Hitler’s triumph was al-Husaini in Jerusalem. The grand mufti visited the German consulate there to send his congratulations to the new chancellor. During the 1920s while Hitler was building the Nazi movement, al-Husaini was constructing a militant network of his own combining Islamism, Pan-Arab nationalism, and Palestinian Arab nationalism. With the open, militant Islamist movement centered in the safe haven of Berlin, al-Husaini had high hopes for his old German comrades as the best future allies.81 It was in Berlin that radical Islamists for the first time confronted and defeated more moderate Muslims, developed their ideology and propaganda, and constructed international networks. As early as 1920, the London Times was already warning about Muslim militants in Germany, reporting prophetically, “It is likely that many, if not all, of those returning students shall be a serious danger for peace in North Africa and the Middle East for they will return as pro-German or Bolshevik agents.”82
When the Nazis came to power and began to formulate their Middle East policy, they found a reliable set of networks and activists right on their front doorstep. Many of the individuals involved—both German and Muslim—were von Oppenheim’s veterans. And their postwar effort began in the war’s last days. When peace returned in 1918, about sixty people—half of them German experts and half of them Muslims—worked for von Oppenheim’s organization in Berlin. Herbert Müller, one of von Oppenheim’s deputies, asked the Foreign Ministry to transform the intelligence and subversion organization into the German Orient Institute, founded on November 1, 1918, with Mittwoch, the news organization’s last head, as its first director.83
Other wartime groups set up for the jihad effort also continued into the postwar years, including German-Egyptian, German-Turkish, and German-Iranian societies;84 the Indian Independence Committee, the Central Committee of the Indian Nationalists, the Union of India’s Friends; the Iranian Committee, the Tunisian Independence Committee, and the Association for Egypt’s Liberation.85 During their stay in Berlin, Talat and Enver, the Ottoman Empire’s fleeing former rulers, had set up the Union of the Revolutionary Islamic Societies, which survived their deaths in 1921 and 1922, respectively.
Activists from South Asia also continued old von Oppenheim projects. In 1923, Muhammad Wali Khan, an Afghan, printed his fortnightly magazine The Crescent in Berlin. Kabul’s ambassador to Berlin, Ghulam Siddiq Khan, a confidant of al-Husaini and later Afghan foreign minister, also promoted Islamist causes against British rule in India.86
Representatives of the Indian caliphate movement and the Muslim League organized along the same lines. These included Mahendra Pratap, the brothers Muhammad and Shaukat Ali,87 and Muhammad Iqbal, the main ideologue for the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state.88 British intelligence reports in the 1920s repeatedly associated Muslim communalism in India—which would eventually bring the country’s bloody partition—with the von Oppenheim legacy and Berlin-based Islamists.89
Figure 12. The front page of Muhammad Wali Khan’s fortnightly The Crescent, one of many Muslim journals published in Berlin after World War I, shows a Waziri warrior against the British in the borderland between India and Afghanistan. In the postwar period, the German capital became a magnet for Arab, Afghan, Iranian, Indian, Kurdish, Turkish, and Turkestani nationalists and Islamists.
Another veteran of the von Oppenheim news organization was Shakib Arslan, who had been present at the kaiser’s 1898 speech in Damascus that first publicly expressed Germany’s Islamist policy.90 Arriving in Berlin in 1921, Arslan would lead the local Islamist movement, coordinate with al-Husaini, and work closely with the Nazis. Arslan often repeated the von Oppenheim group’s mantra that Germans and Muslims were natural allies.91
Born in 1869 to a prominent Lebanese Druze family, Arslan had been a member of the Ottoman parliament, supporting the Ottoman Empire on Islamic grounds, helping to begin the Islamic Benevolent Society and Pan-Islamic League on this basis before World War I.92 He then worked closely with the Ottoman pro-German leader Enver and become part of Oppenheim’s network. When the French took over Lebanon and Syria, they exiled him and he returned to Berlin and Geneva.
During the war, von Oppenheim and Arslan set up many Arabic-language newspapers in Europe. Far away from Middle Eastern rulers’ repression or colonial powers’ control, these publications grew more radical. Arslan, a prolific writer, promoted Islamism through The Newspaper of the Orient in Damascus. Beginning in 1930, he edited the monthlies La Nation Arabe and Al-Islam. Arslan also published a book that year asking how Muslims could reverse their decline. His response has been accepted by Islamists ever since: adopt European technology but reject its values and instead revive Islamism as the way to govern state and society.93
In addition to Arslan and his friend al-Husaini, a third key figure was the deposed pro-German Khedive Abbas Hilmi of Egypt, who lived in exile in Geneva.94 This trio, architects of the international Islamist movement, would all later work with the Nazis.95 Hilmi subsidized Arslan’s papers like the biweekly Liwa al-Islam, established in 1921 by Arslan, his Egyptian deputy Abd al-Aziz Jawish, and the Turkish Islamist Ilias Bragon. Jawish had also worked for von Oppenheim and retained good contacts with revolutionary movements in his home country, among them the Muslim Brotherhood leader, Hasan al-Banna.
With Hilmi’s financial support, Arslan and Jawish started the Orient Club in 1920 for Muslims living in Germany.96 In 1924, Arslan moved his base to Switzerland, often visiting Berlin, and keeping al-Husaini well informed. Jawish became the movement’s leader in Berlin, ably assisted by the new generation’s most dynamic young Islamist, the Syrian-born Muhammad Abd an-Nafi Shalabi.
Still, the movement was tiny at a time when the Ottoman Empire was wrecked, the last sultan deposed, and European colonial control at its height. But these men tirelessly worked to prepare a base for Islamism (the Arabic word for “base” is al-qaida) in Europe and a network throughout the Muslim-majority world, from Morocco all the way to India. This was, to say the least, an ambitious program, yet in the long run the plan worked and its results confront the world in the twenty-first century.
The Islamists’ first challenge was to seize control of the Muslim community in Germany. During the 1920s, there were only about 2,500 Muslims in all of Germany97 while in Berlin there were just about 250. The best-organized among them, controlling the city’s sole mosque, were 50 members of the Ahmadiyya sect, a nonpolitical group that most Muslims considered to be heretics.98 Al-Husaini supplied funds for Arslan, Jawish, and Shalabi to start the Islam Institute in Berlin on November 4, 1927, with Shalabi as its leader.99 Arslan and Shalabi,100 as well as the fifty-three-year-old Ahmadiyya leader Muhammad Ali, gave the main speeches, but control was firmly in the Islamists’ hands. Ironically, given what Arslan would advocate as a Nazi ally in a few years, his theme was that Islam was above all racial quarrels or claims of superiority. As colonialism declined, he predicted, the Arabs would unite and renew their power under Islam’s political as well as religious guidance.101
The institute worked closely with German sympathizers, many of whom would soon become Nazi officials. Von Papen, head of the institute’s honorary board, would be one of the Third Reich’s main policy architects for Middle Eastern issues. Another expert, Georg Kampffmeyer of Berlin University and a co-founder of the institute, had formerly served in the German army on the Iraqi front.
Kampffmeyer was also the creator of an early form of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.” While many at the time spoke of the “Europeanization of the Orient”—the title of Hans Kohn’s 1934 book102—Kampffmeyer criticized that idea. He opposed Turkey’s secular orientation and suggested that Islam was a better framework for governing Middle Eastern countries. In his speech at the institute’s opening, Kampffmeyer said it should equip Muslim students with modern knowledge so they could return to their homelands as leaders.103 Since the institute was controlled by Islamists, they would be returning as pro-German Islamist leaders.
The Islamists completed their victory in 1928 by ejecting the Ahmadiyyas from the mosque leadership.104 On March 3, 1930, they officially took power by registering the newly created German Muslim Community under their control.105 At that time there were about three thousand Muslims in Germany but the Islamists seized power with only about 10 percent of them.106 Indeed, the movement’s pro-German orientation was so strong that even the London Pan-Islamic society was controlled by advocates of an alliance with Germany.107
While al-Husaini operated behind the scenes108 and Arslan acted as senior statesman, the main credit for this takeover goes to Shalabi, their lieutenant on the scene.109 Just twenty-nine years old in 1930, he seemed the movement’s rising star. Born in Aleppo, then in Ottoman-ruled Syria, he had arrived in Berlin in 1923 to study engineering at Charlottenburg College.110 The dynamic Shalabi simultaneously led both the Arab nationalist and the Islamist student clubs, a good symbol of how these movements intertwined. One of his closest colleagues and fellow students was the Egyptian Kamal ad-Din Jalal who would later become a Nazi government official. Remaining in Berlin after graduation, Shalabi edited a monthly, Contemporary Islam, and two weeklies, The Islamic Student, for Muslims studying in Europe, and Islamic Echo.111 As if that were not enough, he also ran what he called “the news service of the Islamic Liberation Movement.”
Figure 13. The Ahmadiyya mosque in Berlin-Wilmersdorf was inaugurated in 1927. In the 1920s about twenty-five hundred Muslims lived in Germany, 250 of them in Berlin. The mosque itself was nonpolitical, and some of its worshipers became victims of the rising Nazis, but it was also the venue where former “Asian fighters” of World War I like Franz von Papen and Erich Ludendorff joined ranks with the nationalists and Islamists of Geneva under Shakib Arslan, backed by Amin al-Husaini. The grand mufti also had another base in Berlin, a branch of the Islamic World Congress which met in 1931 under his presidency.
Shalabi’s world view and the movement’s political line were described in an article he wrote for General Erich Ludendorff’s magazine, Ludendorff’s Volkswarte, in 1931. The popular general was a notorious anti-Semite who favored Hitler without being a follower. In his article, “Palestine under Jews and Arabs,” Shalabi supported al-Husaini. He quoted extensively from the complaints of the grand mufti’s uncle, Musa Kazim al-Husaini, about the alleged barbaric crimes of the Zionists and their British supporters in Palestine. Palestine, Shalabi explained, belonged solely to the Arabs who should use terror and boycotts against the Jews until Zionism was destroyed. He advocated, two years before Hitler came to power, an economic boycott and other anti-Jewish actions in Germany, too; proposed a jihad against all Jews, not just Zionists; and asked Germans to support a new war against “world Jewry” and the British.112 Shalabi’s full leadership potential, however, would never be tested. In the summer of 1933, aged only thirty-two, he drowned in a lake in Berlin’s Grunewald Park.
Along with control of mosques, the Muslim community, political groups, and publications, the Islamists next sought to create an international coordinating organization, the General European Islamic Congress. This was to be a branch of al-Husaini’s General Islamic Congress, established in Jerusalem in 1931 at a meeting of 132 delegates from twenty-two countries. While the ostensible idea was to mobilize support for Palestinian Arabs against the Zionists, the meeting was also part of al-Husaini’s larger scheme to become the Muslim world’s leader. Among those involved in the European project were Arslan;113 Abbas Hilmi; Riyad as-Sulh, a leading Lebanese politician;114 and Mahmud Ibn Salim al-Arafati, an Egyptian living in Paris.115
To prepare for this step, an Iranian student, Husain Danish, founded the Berlin chapter of the Islamic World Congress on October 31, 1932, in the mosque’s meeting room. The twenty founders from eight countries made Danish their leader and a former Ottoman officer from Syria, Zaki Kiram, his deputy. Shalabi was put on the board of directors. Their platform included the creation of Islamic schools in Germany based on Sharia law. Danish became editor of the Nazi-backed, French-language magazine, La Jeune Asie.116 In September 1935, sixty-six Muslim delegates met in Geneva, home base of both Hilmi and Arslan. Also participating was Bosnian mufti Salim Muftić who would become al-Husaini’s representative there.
Arslan had persuaded Mussolini to send representatives.117 But the potential for a clash between Islamist and fascist interests was vividly shown when an Italian Muslim convert, Laura Veccia Vaglieri, gave a speech praising Italian colonial rule in Libya, setting off a storm of objections from other delegates.118 The Nazi-Islamist link in Berlin, however, faced no problems. During the 1930s, al-Husaini’s and Arslan’s Islam Institute flourished.119 Finally, in 1939 the Nazis completely took over the institute with the help of its leading figures.
Nazi scholars were very much aware of Islamism’s potential as a political movement and its parallels with their own world view. For example, Paul Schmitz-Kairo, who lived in Cairo as a reporter for the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, wrote a 1937 book on the subject, describing Islamism as a movement opposing Western intervention in the lands of Islam. True, Schmitz noted, the movement’s first phase was as the Ottoman sultan’s instrument and the World War I jihad had failed. But the new, modernized Islamism, blended with nationalism, was far more powerful. Indeed, the blend of religion and peoplehood, promoting both spiritual and ethnic unity against the West, made it stronger than ordinary nationalism. While Schmitz doubted that all Muslims could unite in one state, he thought the “traditional intolerance of Islam” would ensure its victory in war against outsiders. The grand mufti, whom he approvingly called leader of the “Palestinian terror organization,” and the Muslim Brotherhood were the main examples of this new type of movement.120
But despite the fact that Islamism was an anti-Western movement, Schmitz-Kairo continued, Germany had nothing to fear from it for two reasons. First, the movement was against democracies, not fellow dictatorships, and, second, Germany had no colonies in the region. Schmitz-Kairo was prophetic on several points. He predicted a future Islamist political resurgence in Turkey; that the Soviets would use Islam as a strategic tool; that the Islamists would adapt well to using modern technology; and that they could use their more rapid population growth to subvert the West.121
Another important book read by German leaders at the time was the work of the pro-Nazi Hans Lindemann in 1941. It was a knowledgeable summary of recent regional history that spoke of the clash between Islam and the West as well as of parallels between Nazism and Islamism. Lindemann quoted a 1937 British jibe that al-Husaini was the Middle East’s “little Hitler” as a positive assessment. He concluded that the vast majority of Arabs would follow al-Husaini. Lindemann even praised Saudi Arabia as the “Third Reich in the Wahhabi style.”122
Lindemann also saw Islamism and Nazism as natural allies.123 The Islamists, too, believed in having a strong single leader (Führer).124 National Socialism and Islamism, according to the author, shared such virtues as enthusiasm, discipline, and a passion for unity. They had experienced traumatic national humiliation and defeat, while both fearing that their own tradition was disintegrating in the face of foreign challenges.125 Both were united in hatred of the Jews as an “inferior race”126 and sought to restore their respective peoples as world powers.127
The only thing Lindemann criticized in Islam was polygamy, but he concluded this would disappear in time.128 Like Schmitz-Kairo, Lindemann was also impressed with the Muslims’ high birth rate. In Egypt, he noted, half of the population was under eighteen years old whereas the median age in France was thirty-five and in Germany thirty-three.129 This meant the Nazi influence on Middle Eastern young people continued to reverberate directly for decades afterward. Indeed, such young men as Abd ad-Nasir and as-Sadat; the Ba’th party’s founders; Arafat, socialized in the Muslim Brotherhood; and Saddam Husain, trained by a radical uncle—obscure Nazi sympathizers at the time—would be their countries’ future rulers.130
Before World War II began, then, and even largely before Hitler came to power, al-Husaini and his allies had taken control of Muslim communities in Europe, with Germany and Switzerland as their headquarters. Not only did this movement furnish many of the cadre who would soon work with Germany’s effort to gain hegemony in the Middle East, it also formulated the Islamist ideology that remained largely unchanged into the twenty-first century. From the Third Reich’s standpoint, the evolving political situation made an alliance with Islamism and jihad an even more attractive strategy than it had been in the kaiser’s day. German writers and Nazi ideologues stressed the viability of the Islamist movement; diplomats, military officers, and intelligence officials who had worked with Muslims in World War I and retained good contacts still believed in the strategy originally developed by von Oppenheim and the kaiser.
But now the movement’s leader was not some elderly isolated Ottoman caliph but the vigorous, young, worldly, and well-connected leader of the Palestine Arabs, Arab nationalists, and Islamists: al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husaini, about ten years younger than his idol, Adolf Hitler.
