The Hour of Liberation

The Enduring Legacy of Nazism in the Middle East

“This is Berlin; long live the Arabs!” With this catchphrase, Yunis Bahri (1903 - 1979) opened his first German broadcast on the pan-Arab shortwave radio station on April 7th, 1939. Bahri, a figure who would later be wrapped in so much intrigue and myth, was a well-known Iraqi propagandist and journalist. He served as the primary host of the radio station of King Ghazi of Iraq before the former’s death and Bahri’s subsequent relocation to Germany in 1938. Described by some as an Iraqi “Lord Haw Haw”, Bahri was “bawdy, funny, and exciting”. He had a powerful, bombastic voice, proper Arabic pronunciation, and unmatched skill in quick-witted puns and snarky comments. Until the war's end in 1945, the Voice of Berlin would be a sensation in the Middle East, broadcasting religious sermons, political news, and mass calls for armed revolts, all shrouded in the intrigue of Nazism's supreme art of conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and demagoguery. Arab sympathy for Nazi Germany, already at an advanced stage, became an uncontrollable mass phenomenon, and vicious hatred towards Jews, the United States, and Great Britain was firmly inserted into modern Arab mass culture at its birth. Radio Berlin became the first modern mass Arab media medium in the Middle East.

To the Arab audiences, the promises the Voice of Berlin made during the war were simple, “Jews will be driven out of Palestine; the French will be driven out of Syria; the Pasha class will lose power in Egypt in favor of the peasants; Germany will sponsor pan-Arab unity.” “All these things are attractive to the Arabs and especially in Iraq.” The German propaganda aimed primarily at “creating an atmosphere of distrust regarding the British promises” and providing German promises as alternatives. In Hitler’s Directive No.30, the stated core proposal of the Arabic propaganda campaign was that “a victory for the Axis will bring about the liberation of the countries of the Middle East from the English yoke and thus realize their right to self-determination. Whoever loves Freedom will, therefore, join the front against England.” The hatred towards Zionism and the “Jewish menace” was the basic theme of the broadcasts, which included the evils of Jews all over the Middle East and the world, weaving conspiracy theories about the Jews of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. Furthermore, the Voice of Berlin propagated the myth that world Jewry, the United States, and Great Britain formed together one major league of imperialist domination over the world from which Germany, unleashing its global revolution, would help the Arabs gain national liberation. Bahri was the voice that communicated all of this to Arabs. He read news items, translated Hitler’s speeches, offered his commentary, and constantly told fabricated stories of Arab massacres at the hands of the Jews in Palestine and British attempts to mobilize a Jewish army to occupy the Middle East.

Even before the war, for many Arabs, especially in Iraq, Nazism held a mysterious intrigue with its aggressive German Nationalism and the magnetism of Hitler’s personality in propaganda. ِAlready in the early 1930s, there were numerous native attempts to translate Mein Kampf into Arabic, sending Arab youth to Germany to participate in Nazi youth events, and banning The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror, a 1933 French communist anti-Nazi polemic, from entering Arab countries. This openness to Nazism did not go unnoticed by Nazi officials who sought to exploit the matter. In 1937, Baldur von Schirach, the leader of Hitler’s Youth, visited Syria and Iraq and generated much enthusiasm among Arab nationalists, including the family of Michel Aflaq, the later founder of the Ba’ath Party, who visited the Nazi delegation in the airport in Damascus after the French authorities refused to grant them entry. German diplomats in Iraq imported and played Nazi propaganda films exhibiting both Hitler’s Youth and the Stormtroopers and their “great nationalist enthusiasm which came forth in Hitler’s bloodless revolution to awaken the glory of Germany.”  Germany was so popular among the lower strata of Iraqi society that women in the streets sang,

Let all the alarms sound daily, let all the alarms ring, oh brothers,

We wait for the German bombing to take revenge on every Briton.

Long live the men who became Nazis. Nazis they are, old and young,

All of them praying to the Lord, Grant the Germans victory!

Britain and its American ally will fall, And so will Russia, the Communist country.