The story of Nazi Germany’s involvement in the Middle East has hitherto largely been viewed as a dramatic tale of might-have-been that was nevertheless marginal to Middle East history and the course of World War II. In fact, however, this episode was central to the modern history of the Middle East and continues to reverberate many decades later given its profound effects on Arab nationalism, Islamism, and the course taken by the Palestinian Arab movement.
The recent release by the U.S. government of massive quantities of both wartime and postwar documents coupled with the translation of previously unused German documents and Arabic-language accounts permits a much fuller telling of the story of the interactions among Arabs, Muslims, and Germans.
To understand this history requires bringing together several elements. First, there was the German strategy, beginning in the late nineteenth century, that saw Berlin’s interests in the Middle East as being linked to an Islamic jihad against Germany’s European rivals conducted with the help of Muslim organizations.
On the other side were radical forces of nationalism and Islamism in rebellion against the regional status quo. These latter groups would become not merely Nazi Germany’s protégés but its partners due to common interests and a set of parallel ideas. This was, then, neither purely an alliance of convenience nor a situation in which the Nazis were the teachers and the Middle Easterners were the pupils.
Beyond the world war itself and the collapse of Nazi Germany these events were to have long-term ramifications for Middle Eastern history going far beyond 1945. The Middle East was the only part of the world where the local allies of Nazi Germany and those holding so many of the same ideas actually emerged triumphant in the postwar world.
Again, these forces were not Nazi or fascist—they would later draw many ideas from the Communist bloc—but radical nationalist and Islamist forces that held certain parallel views and at times converged and created syntheses. Their political triumphs came not so much against their external opponents but over their more moderate Arab and Muslim rivals. During the first round, despite the defeat of their European allies, these forces were able to destroy and discredit nonauthoritarian thinking and methods in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Their success was so thorough that liberal democratic forces—not uncommon in the Arabic-speaking world before the 1930s—did not again emerge as contenders for power until the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Today there is a second round in that battle. Revolutionary Islamism, one of the movements that cooperated with Imperial Germany up to 1918 and Nazi Germany up to 1945, has reemerged to challenge its former partner, militant Arab nationalism, which had crushed it in the 1950s. Once again, moderate democratic views are facing a three-way battle in which they are at a considerable disadvantage. At any rate, the ideological debates and political battles reflected in and unleashed, beginning in 2011, by the “Arab Spring” which, according to many observers, seemed to have turned into an “Islamist Spring,” can only be fully understood with reference to the earlier eras documented here.
We thank those who assisted us in granting Freedom of Information Act Requests to the U.S. National Archives for CIA records, especially the coordinator for information, Scott Koch, in Washington, D.C.; and likewise Caroline Lugato for arranging access to the Bundesnach-richtendienst collections in the German Federal Archives.
Our gratitude is due to the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and especially to Yeru Chernilovsky. We want to give warmest thanks to the archivists Lars Amelung, Ludwig Biewer, Birgit Kmezik, Oxana Kosenko, Martin Kröger, Larry McDonald, Michael Petersen, Knut Piening, Christoph Stamm, Christiane Stegemann, Gabriele Teichmann, and Dominik Zier. We have researched private collections, among them those of Joseph W. Eaton, Hannelore Grobba, Maria Pawelke, and Manfred G. Steffen. Our thanks go to colleagues Wajih Abd as-Sadiq Atiq, Xavier Bougarel, Joel Fishman, Rainer Karlsch, Jacob M. Landau, Walter Z. Laqueur, Bernd Lemke, Astrid Ley, Jamal Malik, Sean McMeekin, Bernard Lewis, Stefan Meining, Chantal Metzger, Daniel Pipes, Wladimir J. Sacharow, Hans-Ulrich Seidt, Abd ar-Rauf Sinnu, and Matthias Uhl. And last but not least, we thank our agent Andrew Stuart; our editor, Sarah Miller and her assistant, Heather Gold; and our copy editor, Gavin Lewis, and our senior editor Margaret Otzel, for all their efforts.