Once again, Germany prepared to battle its British rivals in the Middle East, led by a formidable team of experts made up of von Oppenheim veterans, soldiers who had served there during World War I, career diplomats, and academic experts.
The Nazi regime also had new tactics that made this second effort seem more likely to succeed. Nazi Party branches had been established among Germans living in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world in a project headed by the young Wilhelm Bohle, who became an SS general. By 1938, this Auslands-Organisation had 580 cells in eighty-two lands engaged in spying, propaganda, and covert operations.1
Alfred Hess and his brother Rudolf, later Hitler’s top deputy, were sons of a wealthy German merchant living in Egypt. Alfred organized the first party cell in Alexandria in 1926 followed by one in Cairo. There were 214 party members in Egypt by the 1930s, representing one-third of the German families in the country. They urged Egypt’s elite toward pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic feelings, organized anti-Jewish boycotts, and in 1933 held a mock trial of the Jews.2
The party branch in Iran became especially important, running German policy there since the ambassador in Tehran was an apolitical career man. In Beirut and Baghdad, Cairo and Jerusalem, Kabul and Tehran, Tripoli and Tunis, local Nazi Party branches coordinated military and SS intelligence, businessmen, and academics to spread the influence of Hitler’s regime. There were also Nazi Party branches in Alexandria and Port Said; Haifa and Jaffa; and Adana, Ankara, Istanbul, and Izmir.3
The Nazi Party’s branch in Iraq used new strategies to spread German influence. Its leader was the archaeologist Julius Jordan, who had been digging there since before World War I at the ancient city of Uruk, where Gilgamesh had been king forty-five hundred years earlier.4 In 1928, Jordan returned to Iraq for the German Oriental Society,5 and attracted others to his party cell like Willi G. Steffen who, heading a Christian mission in Baghdad and Mosul, had joined the party in 1934.6 Two years later Grobba hired him as an Arabic translator. Steffen became a key figure in planning how to make Iraq into a German client state. Another recruit was the scholar Adam Falkenstein, who joined the Nazi Party and the Abwehr at age thirty-three in 1939, transferring to its Ankara office when the British seized Iraq in 1941.7
A second new feature of Nazi policy in the Middle East was to subsidize and use ideologically compatible Islamist and nationalist groups. These included the fascist Young Egypt Party and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; al-Husaini’s forces in Palestine; and many groups in Syria and Iraq. Arab nationalist clubs were important—one of the main ones being the Arab Club of Damascus, financed by al-Husaini using German money—that energetically organized meetings, demonstrations, and propaganda campaigns.
Arab radicals also aided German intelligence-gathering, working closely with Abwehr agents like Rudolf Roser in Beirut and Paula Koch in Aleppo.8 Koch was an important figure, though Allied intelligence sensationalized that middle-aged, gray-haired lady into a supposed Mata Hari. Born in 1900 to a German family in Aleppo, Koch was a highly praised nurse with the German army during World War I. After some years living in Brazil and Indonesia, she returned to the Middle East for the Abwehr, effectively using her long acquaintance with leading Arab families. Her contact man with Palestine’s Arabs was the grand mufti’s nephew and intelligence chief, Musa al-Husaini.9
The Nazis thought al-Husaini’s network provided generally accurate information from an estimated thirty-six agents in the Beirut area alone.10 In Turkey, al-Husaini built his own spying system headed by the Syrian Adil Azma, who became Syria’s ambassador there after the war.11
But Berlin’s good basis for intelligence and covert operations was hindered by competition between Canaris’s Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdient (SD), the foreign intelligence unit of Reinhard Heydrich’s Security Ministry. The Abwehr looked down on the SD as incompetent; the SD saw the Abwehr as ideologically unreliable. The antagonism was symbolized by their leaders’ contrasting backgrounds and personalities. The prematurely gray-haired Canaris, his face weather-beaten from service at sea, was a respected naval officer who had joined Germany’s navy at age eighteen. During World War I, his cruiser was scuttled off Chile and, avoiding capture by the British, he escaped and made his way back to Germany. In recognition of his skill and initiative, he was sent on an intelligence mission to Spain, where he recruited seamen to give German U-boats information on Allied shipping. He also befriended a young Spanish officer named Francisco Franco. Caught by the French while trying to return to Germany disguised as a monk, Canaris was released because of poor health, returned to Spain, and was evacuated by a German submarine. After holding several naval commands in the 1920s and 1930s, he became Abwehr chief on January 2, 1936, and built the agency into an organization of fifteen thousand people. It gathered and analyzed reports from military attachés, agents under diplomatic or other cover, and local informants.
The younger Heydrich, in contrast, had been dismissed from the navy for dishonorable conduct. Heydrich, the embodiment of Nazi brutality and fanaticism, was noted for his sadism; Canaris, for his sense of humor. Heydrich served under Canaris in the 1920s and alternated between trying to destroy the admiral and seeking to win his approval.
Canaris was a conservative nationalist who had little love for the Hitler regime and sheltered anti-Nazis in the Abwehr’s ranks. In the Middle East, those critical of the Nazis included Paul Leverkuehn, Abwehr station chief in Istanbul, and Günther Pawelke, Grobba’s deputy in Baghdad. Before the war, Canaris used back channels, sometimes through the Vatican, to warn the British of Hitler’s aggressive intentions.
While von Oppenheim returned to the region to try to implement his World War I strategy, Grobba, who spoke Turkish, a little Arabic, and Persian, was now Germany’s leading expert. In March 1916, he had led a thousand former Muslim prisoners of war to Istanbul where they joined the German-inspired, Ottoman-organized jihad. His wide network of Arab friends was especially strong in Iraq, whose king, Faisal, he personally escorted on his trips to Germany in 1921 and 1930. In 1926, Grobba became German ambassador to Afghanistan and stopped in Baghdad to renew his ties. Under Hitler’s regime, Grobba became ambassador to Iraq and was later accredited to Saudi Arabia too. When the British seized Iraq in 1941, Grobba returned to Germany to become the regime’s top Middle East adviser.12
Von Papen, Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, was the other key senior figure on the scene. Born in 1879, von Papen became a cavalry officer and joined the army’s elite General Staff in 1913. When World War I began, he was made military attaché to Washington, where he organized agents to sabotage or use U.S. shipyards and munitions factories while buying arms for von Oppenheim’s planned jihad in India. After his sabotage efforts became public—in part, due to British intelligence—Washington angrily demanded his recall.
Despite his amateurish failure to subvert America, von Papen’s adventures made him a hero in Germany. After service on the Western Front, he joined the military mission to Istanbul in 1917. There he met future Turkish President Ismet İnönü, fought the British, and was interned when the Turks surrendered in 1918. After the war, von Papen returned to Germany and went into politics in the Catholic Center Party. In 1932, when von Papen was proposed as Germany’s chancellor despite his own party’s objections, he falsely told its leader—a priest, no less—that he would not accept the post. The enraged priest later labeled von Papen a “Judas,” a significant insult in Catholic circles. Von Papen’s defection further divided moderates and allowed Hitler’s power to grow.
During von Papen’s six months as chancellor, Germany faced economic collapse, growing polarization, and street violence. To win Nazi backing for his cabinet, von Papen ended a ban on Hitler’s private army. Weakening the already tottering republic, he purged democratic-minded civil servants He then invited Hitler to become his vice chancellor, but on January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg made Hitler chancellor and von Papen received the number two spot. When new elections gave the Nazi Party 44 percent of the vote, Hitler seized power completely on March 23 and made Germany a one-party state.
Von Papen miscalculated, thinking he could outmaneuver the Nazis. He made a speech urging Hitler to allow a multiparty state and grant more liberties. Hitler was infuriated and considered having him killed, but instead, the Nazis murdered the aide who wrote the speech. Von Papen became ambassador to Austria in 1934, where he earned a reprieve by helping subvert that country’s independence, bringing it under Hitler’s control in 1938.
With this achievement under his belt, von Papen was named ambassador to Turkey in April 1939.13 The Turks agreed only reluctantly, since von Papen’s diplomatic record encompassed the attempted subversion of one neutral country and the destruction of another. These precedents of duplicity boded ill for Turkey. “It would have been difficult for the German government to hit upon a more unpopular nominee,” wrote British Ambassador Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen in a secret evaluation of his rival.14 Yet von Papen defused his hosts’ initial misgivings through charm and far-reaching connections among the leading Turks, hints that he was working to moderate Hitler, and threats based on Germany’s power.
The Nazis also had able men, both party and non–party members, at midlevel posts, many of them with long experience in the region and speaking its languages fluently. An example of this expertise was Kurt Munzel, who began work at the Foreign Ministry in 1939 supervising Arabic-language broadcasts15 and advising Grobba’s Arabian Committee on operations and propaganda. In 1942, he became head of the ministry’s Orient Department.16 Incidentally, his boss at the radio propaganda office was a Nazi Party member, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, whom al-Husaini knew through wartime cooperation on propaganda and would contact when Kiesinger was West Germany’s chancellor between 1966 and 1969.
During the time before the Nazis began preparations for war and revolt in the Middle East, Germany’s most effective way of spreading its influence was economic activity. While Middle East trade was an insignificant part of Germany’s economy, for the region’s countries Germany was the number three trading partner, surpassed only by Britain and France.
Iran, then still called Persia, was the Muslim country Berlin economically courted most in the 1930s as well as the only such country whose inhabitants the Nazis regarded as fellow Aryans. That conclusion was rooted in the writings of German experts and diplomats who traveled there before World War I and in the 1920s, such as Friedrich C. Andreas,17 Georg Graf von Kanitz, and Rudolf Nadolny.18
Walter Hinz, one of these Iran experts, wrote a 1936 book extolling Persians as a superior race. He joined the Nazi Party the next year and served with the Abwehr in Turkey during World War II. In 1974, the University of Tehran gave Hinz an honorary doctorate in recognition of his services to Iran.19 German-Persian relations were so successful that the shah’s decision in 1935 to change the country’s name from Persia to Iran—derived from the word Aryan—is often attributed to a suggestion from Iran’s ambassador to Berlin.20
Ernst Herzfeld, an archaeologist, was another key figure linking the two countries. After serving in Iran in World War I, he returned there in 1923. During the early 1930s, he excavated the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis.21 Iran’s ruler, Reza Shah, and his son the crown prince—the future shah—were impressed by their visit to the site. Sebastian Beck, a Persian language expert and another World War I veteran in the area, joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and returned to Iran in 1934. The shah gave him a medal for his research.22
To accelerate its economic development, Iran hired many German advisers in the 1920s and 1930s. Lufthansa, the German airline, opened a direct Berlin-Tehran route. By 1937 there were about six hundred Germans living in Iran. Tehran concluded a new trade agreement with Berlin in 1935. The next year, a dozen big German companies started the Iranian-German Trade Association.23 Yet with Nazi Germany focusing on rearmament, companies faced difficulties in obtaining financing and foreign exchange at home.24 The British also countered German economic interests.
The most important event in Nazi-Iranian economic relations was the 1936 visit of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s minister for economy and president of the Reichsbank, with a sixty-member delegation. The shah gave Schacht a medal; Schacht saluted the monarch, “completely against protocol”—German Ambassador Johannes Smend disapprovingly noted—with “Heil Hitler.” Out of politeness, the shah and crown prince replied the same way.25
Among the German businessmen Schacht visited in Iran was his own son-in-law, Lutz Gielhammer, director of Bank Mellié Iran. The thirty-eight-year-old Gielhammer had served in World War I, earned a doctorate, and spent a decade in Tehran. After World War II he became West German ambassador to Iran for a dozen years. Schacht also toured Nazi Party headquarters, the Hitler Youth branch,26 and the Iranian-German Technical School, where pro-German Iranians received professional training. One of those students, Nawwab Safawi, later became the main radical Islamist leader and al-Husaini’s closest collaborator in Iran.27
But Iraq was the country where Germany held most influence in the 1930s, especially in the army, many of whose officers had fought in the Ottoman army alongside Germany during World War I. Their pro-German attitude was exemplified by Colonel Salah ad-Din al-Sabbagh, leader of the powerful, pro-Nazi Golden Square faction that would later seize power, who named the three Germans who influenced him as his unit’s military adviser in World War I; Major Hans Steffen of the Rheinmetall company, who sold weapons to the Iraqi army; and Grobba.28
Iraqi nationalists hoped Germany would help them develop their economy. Despite gaining independence in 1932, Iraq was still tied closely to Britain. The British controlled Iraq’s oil and pipelines connecting that country’s Mosul fields to the Mediterranean ports of Haifa, in British-ruled Palestine, and Tripoli, in French-ruled Lebanon. By 1939, oil financed one-third of Iraq’s budget through the British-controlled Oil Development Company. Hitler had the chance to buy shares in the company in 1936 but refused so as not to antagonize London.29 Yet this dependence stirred growing anti-British and pro-German passion.30 The radical faction, mainly nationalists but also Islamists, was more powerful in Iraq than any other Arab state. Sati al-Husri, a leading architect of Arab radical nationalist ideology, was strongly pro-German and used that country as his model as director of Iraq’s education system. Iraqi pro-German organizations and individuals cooperated closely with Berlin.31 Officers like Colonel as-Sabbagh and militant politicians like Yunis as-Sabawi, for example, smuggled German arms to Syria and Palestine.32
Yet the two allies did not always perceive their interests in identical ways. In 1936, the anti-British General Bakr Sidqi, a Kurd, seized power and selected as prime minister the radical Hikmat Sulaiman, later replaced by another radical, Jamil al-Midfai, a man close to al-Husaini.33 Grobba met both of them twice a week. Sidqi hired German Colonel Rolf Heins as his military adviser and Heins surveyed the country, planning border defenses and building up the army. Even more German advisers were brought to Baghdad. The situation looked excellent from Berlin’s perspective. But in 1937, Sidqi was assassinated, partly because radical Arab nationalists suspected he was too pro-Kurdish. Ironically, the killer was a pro-German radical who had previously saluted Grobba with an enthusiastic “Heil Hitler” whenever they met.34 The plot was hatched in the German-subsidized Muthanna Club, whose leaders were on the German payroll and whose members called themselves “national socialists.”35 In other words, pro-German agents motivated by Nazi ideology had assassinated a pro-German leader, thus subverting German influence.
The Germans thought that if their Arab allies became more ideologically Nazified the alliance would be even stronger. One effort was to create groups patterned after the Hitler Youth. In 1937 the thirty-year-old Nazi youth leader Baldur von Schirach visited Baghdad and asked King Ghazi to support the al-Futuwa youth movement instead of the British-based Boy Scouts. A year later thirty young Iraqis from al-Futuwa traveled to Germany as guests of the Nazi Party—along with counterparts from Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran—for the annual Nuremberg rally, met Hitler, and toured the country for two weeks. They returned home fascinated by the new Germany. Al-Husaini’s Palestinian Arab Party organized its own al-Futuwa movement.36
Beginning in 1936, Berlin also began to sponsor large numbers of Iraqi students to study in Germany. Many became strong supporters of an Arab-Nazi alliance, returning home impressed by the Nazi regime’s order, discipline, progress, and unity as a remedy for their own countries’ weakness, factionalism, and stagnation. In addition, there were outright fascist movements. In Iraq, led by as-Sabawi and Sami Shaukat, they wore red shirts. The Egyptian equivalent was the Young Egypt Party’s green shirt movement. By the time war broke out, these groups had, at least nominally, thousands of members.37
The Muthanna Club was just one part of the strong radical, pro-German network of Iraqi groups, which also included the Palestine Defense Committee and the Islamist-dominated Young Men’s Muslim Association and Islamic Guidance Association. Such powerful mainstream politicians as Naji as-Suwaidi, al-Midfai, and Sulaiman, all prime ministers, also supported the radical faction. In contrast, as-Suwaidi’s brother, Taufiq, who had served as foreign minister, and as-Said held moderate views. They wanted to maintain the alliance with Britain, compromise on Palestine, and use diplomacy instead of force. Yet such men, unlike the radicals, had no mass organizations or systematic ideology, making it hard for them to compete with rivals using sophisticated mobilization methods adapted from European fascist practices.
Grobba led the effort in Iraq. In 1936 and again in 1938, Canaris secretly visited Baghdad to obtain first-hand impressions of Arab politics. On the second trip, Canaris asked Grobba to become Abwehr chief in Iraq, a job he added to his ambassadorial duties. At first, the Abwehr’s rival, the SD, resisted his authority but soon Grobba controlled its activities as well.38
The ambassador also took the lead in establishing German relations with Saudi Arabia. In 1933, Ibn Saud had proposed giving Germany a concession to drill for oil. Hitler rejected the idea, believing he could not secure the fields in wartime.39 Watching events in Europe and seeking to counter British influence, Ibn Saud sent his secretary Yusuf Yasin to meet Grobba in Baghdad on November 5, 1937. He requested a new treaty and a German mission to his country, and hinted at an alliance with Berlin, saying he would be a “benevolent neutral, if not more, in case of a war.”40 The king also offered to be middleman for sending German weapons to al-Husaini’s Palestine revolt.
Negotiations advanced slowly, however, due to German foreign exchange shortages, debates over how openly to challenge British interests, and suspicions that Yasin might be a British agent. Only in 1939 were talks successfully concluded. On January 13, Grobba was accredited as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. With approval by Hitler and von Ribbentrop, Germany provided a six-million-mark credit for the Saudis to buy weapons.41
When the war began, however, and German fortunes flagged in the Middle East, the king, knowing he was surrounded by British-controlled territory, quickly claimed to be for the Allies. He would soon use the United States, rather than Germany, as Saudi Arabia’s alternative patron to the British.42 Unlike the big city, intellectually more sophisticated Palestinian Arab, Iraqi, and Egyptian radicals, the wily old desert chieftain kept his options open and did not commit himself to the losing side from miscalculation or ideological zeal.
Figure 15. Fritz Grobba was in the course of a quarter-century successively the German envoy to Kabul, Baghdad, and ar-Riyadh, and the senior official for Muslim and Arab affairs within the Foreign Ministry. Interrogated by the Soviets immediately after World War II, he told them about Hitler’s plan to deport the Jews of Palestine as soon as the Nazi troops arrived.
In Egypt, too, the Germans built the foundation for an alliance. Wilhelm Stellbogen, press attaché and director of the German News Bureau in Cairo, acting for the Abwehr,43 paid Muslim Brotherhood leader al-Banna about one thousand Egyptian pounds a month in 1939 and probably before as well.44 To show how proportionately large were these sums, the Brotherhood’s high-priority fund-raising for the Palestine cause that year yielded just five hundred Egyptian pounds.45 Al-Husaini gave more German money to al-Banna through such intermediaries as Auni Abd al-Hadi, Muhammad Ali Tahir, and Sabri Abd ad-Din.46
Some of the key pro-German figures in Egypt made their connections with Germany while in Baghdad. In 1938, Egypt’s ambassador to Iraq, Azzam, a close friend of al-Husaini and later Arab League secretary general, along with Major Aziz Ali al-Misri—who fought in World War I on the British side but had now become pro-German—met frequently with Grobba.47
An alliance with the Arabs, of course, was not enough for Hitler to start a war. He also needed support from the country that was ostensibly his worst enemy, the USSR. At 1 P.M. on August 22, 1939, two German Focke-Wulf Condor planes landed at Moscow airport. Von Ribbentrop came down the stairs to be greeted by a Soviet military band playing the Nazi anthem. That afternoon, the German and Soviet foreign ministers initialed a treaty of alliance. Ostensibly a nonaggression pact, the accord included a secret plan to invade and partition Poland and defined the two dictators’ spheres of influence in the Balkans and Turkey. With everything in place, in September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. The Allies still had substantial superiority in the Middle East but quickly lost the battle for Europe. In 1940, when France, Holland, Belgium, and Norway were conquered by Germany, the British army fled the continent, and Italy entered the war on Germany’s side, the Nazis seemed likely victors.
Germany’s Arab sympathizers became more outspokenly so. In June 1940, the grand mufti wrote von Papen to offer his services. His vision was to obtain from the Axis in World War II what the Arabs had failed to gain from the Allies in World War I, a huge and fully independent state led by himself and absorbing Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. In contrast to the Ottomans, al-Husaini had a popular network extending throughout the Arabic-speaking world and into Muslim countries beyond. Moreover, unlike the Ottoman sultan, he united Arab nationalists and Islamists into one movement.48
The radical Iraqi politicians were eager to smash their country’s alliance with England. In Syria and Lebanon, an additional pro-German incentive was that their colonial master had been defeated and the way was open to join the victors. When things looked bleakest for the Allies, the cautious Ibn Saud, the moderate Iraqi as-Said, and others considered jumping ship.
But before doing so as-Said made one final bid, based on wishful thinking, to stave off the radical revolt. He urged Britain to make even more concessions to keep Arabs from defecting to the Axis. If, as-Said urged, Britain immediately turned Palestine over to the Arabs with full independence within ten years; obtained Syria’s independence from France; and supplied arms, Iraq would enter the war on England’s side.49 Iraq’s people and government, wrote as-Said, “are unanimous in seeking the safety of their country before anything else and in following the road which leads to that safety.” As-Said was right in saying Iraq would face disaster if it fought Britain but wrong in arguing that the radicals thought the same way. They believed Nazi Germany was the safer bet.50 Understanding this fact, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had so clearly foreseen the failure of appeasing Hitler in Europe, refused any additional concessions.
As-Said then proposed to defect to the Axis camp but was rejected by the grand mufti and his Iraqi ally, Justice Minister Naji Shaukat. Why, they reasoned, let a rival join with them on the eve of their total victory? Thus, the most famous of all Arab moderate politicians did not become a Nazi collaborator only because his application was turned down.
Once the tide turned in the war, as-Said resumed his posture as loyal friend of the Allies in 1941. Thanks to his having joined the actually winning side, his career prospered thereafter. In the short run, he triumphed. But the radicals were to have revenge by taking over the region in the following decade. Eighteen years after rejecting as-Said’s effort to join them, the radicals took over Iraq in a 1958 coup and a Baghdad mob tore as-Said to pieces.51
As for the British, they knew their appeasement efforts in 1939 had failed and so, in 1940, they turned to pressure. The British demanded that Iraq freeze all relations with Germany, as well as the resignation of radical nationalist Prime Minister al-Kailani, scion of the family von Oppenheim had predicted in 1893 would one day lead a pro-German revolt. Recognizing that Britain still had much leverage in Iraq, on January 31, 1941 the king forced al-Kailani to resign. Taha al-Hashimi’s new moderate government tried to purge the radical officers, who responded with an April 3 military coup returning al-Kailani to power. Given the military situation, they had good reason to believe they were right to back Germany, a country whose armies were at that moment victorious everywhere.
Egyptians reached similar conclusions. They saw the Italian army advance eighty-five miles into their own territory from Libya. Prime Minister Mahir rejected British efforts to make him break relations with Italy. The British pushed him from office and forced pro-German General al-Misri to resign as Egypt’s army commander. Riddled with pro-German officers, Cairo’s armed forces were largely disarmed and demobilized by the British.52
At the same time, the British did not neglect offering incentives for Arab cooperation as well. On May 29, 1941, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s Mansion House speech catered to Arab nationalist ambitions by endorsing stronger links among Arab countries, a stance that after the war would bring British backing for forming the Arab League.53 But those placing hopes on the Axis were unimpressed. They looked instead to Iraq’s defiance of Britain. Egyptian dissidents, as-Sadat explained, “wanted to attack the British and make Egypt a second Iraq. [Al-Kailani] had given the signal for the war of liberation. It was our duty to rush to his aid.”54 Leaders of the nascent Ba’th Party in Syria felt the same way.
Now battle would be fully joined. Al-Husaini and his colleagues would do everything possible to make the Arab world, Iran, Afghanistan, and even India go up in the flames of a pro-Nazi Islamic revolt.