by Matthias Küntzel
Hat tip: Jenny Grigg
I delivered this speech on June 4, 2023 on the occasion of the Klangteppich V – Festival for Music of the Iranian Diaspora in Berlin
As a German who doesn’t even read Farsi, why am I dealing with Iran?
It is firstly because Iran is a particularly fascinating country with a
particularly fascinating history and population. Secondly, it is because
I have always followed the great uprisings of the Iranian people
against Ali Khamenei and his regime and supported them in my essays: the
Green Movement of 2009, the Movement of 2019, and now, of course, the
Woman-Life-Freedom Uprising, which continues today while we are here in
Berlin. Third, I am also particularly interested in Iran because one of
my research interests is the ideology of Islamism and its connection to
antisemitism.
In the beginning of my research, more than 30 years ago, I naturally
wanted to know how Auschwitz could happen and why my parents were able
to love Adolf Hitler as teenagers. To understand this, I focused on Nazi
ideology, and specifically Nazi antisemitism.
Since the 9/11 attack in 2001, I began to study Jew-hatred in Islamic
societies and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, that is, Sunni Islam.
In 2005, the then Iranian President Ahmadinejad demanded that Israel be
erased and disappear from the map. That same year, at the Frankfurt Book
Fair, I was able to buy from Iranian booksellers an English written
copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: the most prominent antisemitic libel and Hitler’s textbook for the Holocaust.
I started to study the reasons and roots of the Iranian regime’s
hatred of Israel and its antisemitism. I was especially interested in
the influence that Nazi Germany had taken to create and strengthen this
hatred also in Iran.
In doing so, I discovered that the Nazis used very well done radio
broadcasts to spread their hate propaganda in the Near and Middle East
not only in Arabic, but also in Persian language, day after day from
1939 to 1945. After all, Ruhollah Khomeini was one of the regular
listeners to the Persian-language propaganda from Berlin. This brings us
to our topic – the Persian-language radio propaganda of the Nazis and
its after-effects.
German-Iranian cooperation during World War II
Let me start with a few basic facts about the the special
relationship between Tehran and Berlin. Since the beginning of the
twentieth century, Germany and Persia have made a great team. Persia
needed Germany because it distrusted all the other great powers but was
dependent on foreign technical assistance. Germany needed Iran because
it was the only raw material-rich country as yet unconquered in the
nineteenth-century struggle for colonies. These mutual interests
produced an unparalleled level of cooperation between a Christian and a
Muslim country.
Already in the First World War most Iranians had supported the
Germans, who were fighting their common enemies, the British and the
Russians. Moreover, the Germans also enjoyed great prestige as
technicians and engineers. Since the mid-1920s, Germany had not only
laid the foundations of an Iranian industrial infrastructure, but also
exported technical education to Iran.
With the start of the Second World War, cooperation became especially
close. In 1940 47 percent of all Iranian exports went to Nazi Germany,
while Germany’s share of Iranian imports had reached 43 percent. During
those years, eighty percent of all machinery in the country came from
Germany.
Iran was of strategic importance for the Nazis’ warfare. According to
Adolf Hitler’s plan the Wehrmacht would after the assault on the Soviet
Union occupy the Caucasus and in so doing, open the way to the Middle
East. Then Iran and Iraq would be conquered and the British Empire
destroyed from the south. According to the Nazi plan, a pro-German
mass-movement in Iran reinforced by a concentrated propaganda effort
would prepare for the German invasion of that country. Fortunately,
however, the war took a different course.
The Nazi radio at work
At the beginning of World War II German short-wave transmitters were
broadcasting in 15 different foreign languages. However, of all the
foreign-language broadcasting units, the “Orient Zone” was given
“absolute priority”. It broadcast to Arabs and Persians, but also to
Turks and Indians and employed about 80 people, including some 20
presenters and translators.
Editorial control was in the hands of the Foreign Office Radio Policy
Department and the program content was determined in cooperation with
the Propaganda Ministry and the Wehrmacht High Command’s Foreign
Propaganda Department. The broadcasts were recorded in Berlin,
Kaiserdamm no. 77 and then transferred by a special telephone line to
Zeesen, a small village 40 kms south of Berlin.
The transmitter systems in Zeesen were equipped with state-of-the-art
directional antennae. The American radio expert César Searchinger
described the “huge” short-wave radio complex in Zeesen as “the biggest
and most powerful propaganda machine in the world” and its “supremely
cunning technology of mass influence” as “the most formidable
institution for the dissemination of a political doctrine that the world
has ever seen.”
While exaggerated, the assessment is not wholly false. While all the
combatant powers in the Second World War used short-wave transmitters in
different languages, the Zeesen radio had some special features.
Firstly, in 1936 the Olympics took place in Berlin. The
overhaul of the Zeesen short wave equipment carried out in preparation
for this event had greatly improved its long-range sound quality. No
other station provided a better listening experience than Radio Zeesen.
Secondly, the Orient Zone editors succeeded in recruiting
Bahram Shahrokh as their Persian announcer. He was an outstanding
speaker with a good voice and excellent diction. A 1941 survey of German
propaganda achievements in Iran boasted that “Sharokh [was] always
praised as a brilliant speaker and was more popular than even others,
including the enemy ones.”
Let me give you an example how Shahrokh’s antisemitic incitement in
Berlin had at times a direct impact on the situation of the Jews in
Iran. An Iranian Jewish woman, her name is Parvin, who was 17 years old
at the time, remembers in particular a speech by Bahram Shahrokh on
Radio Zeesen on the occasion of the Jewish Purim festival. Shahrokh
urged the audience to exact revenge for the alleged massacre of Persians
by Jews that the biblical Purim story mentions. Parvin recalls:
The next day some Muslim friends of my father came into his pharmacy
and demanded an explanation. I was with him that day and heard them
belittle and mock the Jews. When my father tried to explain the issue …
they attacked him and grabbed his neck, whereupon my father told me to
run home. I never asked, nor did I ever find out how he got rid of them.
At the same time Shahrokh presented himself as brave and cheeky. He
repeatedly made barbed remarks about Reza Shah, the detested Iranian
ruler. Following angry protests from Reza Shah, who was a regular
listener of the German radio station, at the end of 1940 the German
Foreign Office had to take Shahrokh off air, but only temporarily. In
August 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran, ousted Reza Shah
Pahlavi from his throne and installed his son, Mohammed Reza Shah, in
his stead. Shortly thereafter, Shahrokh was back on air.
Thirdly, the Zeesen broadcasts employed a crude and folksy
antisemitism. In 1940 Reader Bullard, the British Ambassador to Iran,
complained that, “Even if we [the British] do broadcast in Persian, we
cannot hope to rival the Germans in interest, as their more violent,
abusive style, with exaggerated claims … appeals to the Persian public.”
And indeed: Radio Zeesen’s programs were rabble-rousing rather than
factual. Their aim was not to inform, but to incite antisemitism and to
boast of German successes. They were targeted at a mass audience rather
than intellectuals. Thus, the United Nations was dubbed the “United
Jewish Nations,” and the Jordanian king, Emir Abdullah, was mocked as
“Rabbi Abdullah” for wanting to negotiate with the Zionists.
The fourth distinguishing feature of this radio propaganda was its adaptation to Islam.
Already during World War I, many Shi’ite clerics had demonstrated
reverence for the German Emperor as a protector and a secret convert to
Islam. Hitler, for as long as the Germans were winning, was an even
better figure upon which to project such a myth. A report on this matter
by the German Ambassador in Tehran, Erwin Ettel, of February 1941 is
illuminating:
For months, reports have been reaching the Embassy from the most
varied sources that throughout the country clerics are speaking out,
telling the faithful about old, enigmatic prophesies and dreams which
they interpret to mean that God has sent the Twelfth Imam into the world
in the shape of Hitler. Wholly without Embassy involvement, an
increasingly influential propaganda theme has come into being, in which
the Führer and therefore Germany are seen as the deliverers from all
evil.
The German short-wave radio station was happy to exploit these
fantasies in its Farsi broadcasts. However, Erwin Ettel was not
satisfied. The Imam-belief strengthened the love of Germany, but it
contributed little to hatred of the Jews. Here was still work for him to
do.
It was understood in Berlin that German-style antisemitism would have
little resonance in Iran. “The broad masses lack a feeling for the race
idea,” explained the propaganda expert of the German embassy in Tehran.
He therefore laid “all the emphasis on the religious motif in our
propaganda in the Islamic world. This is the only way to win over the
Orientals.” But how exactly could Nazi Germany, of all countries,
conduct a religious propaganda campaign? Ambassador Ettel had an idea:
“A way to foster this development would be to highlight Muhammad’s
struggle against the Jews in ancient times and that of the Führer in
modern times,” Ettel recommended to the Foreign Office. “Additionally,
by identifying the British with the Jews, an exceptionally effective
anti-English propaganda campaign can be conducted among the Shi’ite
people.”
Ettel even picked out the appropriate Koranic passages: firstly, sura
5, verse 82: “Truly you will find that the most implacable of men in
their enmity to the faithful are the Jews and the pagans”; and,
secondly, the final sentence of chapter 2 of Mein Kampf: “In resisting
the Jew, I do the work of the Lord.”
Ettel’s proposal demonstrates that the Nazis sought to use religion
to create an implacable hostility to the Jews. Again and again the
program makers of the Orient Zone repeated only those verses from the
Koran that are suitable for presenting the Jews as “enemies of Islam.”
Let me quote the historian David Motadel:
Berlin made explicit use of religious rhetoric, terminology, and
imagery and sought to … reinterpret religious doctrine and concepts to
manipulate Muslims for political and military purposes. … German
propaganda combined Islam with anti-Jewish agitation to an extent that
had not hitherto been known in the modern Muslim world.
These, then, were the four special characteristics of Radio Zeesen’s
Iranian broadcasts: First, the excellent sound quality, second, its
popular speaker, third, the populist agitation, and fourth, the use and
abuse of religion.
What do we know about the resonance of this propaganda among the Iranian population?
We must keep in mind that during the 1930s short-wave radios offered a
medium with a great power of attraction. In his memoirs, Grand
Ayatollah Husain Ali Montazeri recalls the installation of a radio in an
Isfahan coffee house at the end of the 1930s: “Thousands of people” had
come to see and hear the radio including Montazeri himself, who was
wondering, “what is a radio?”
In those days listening to the radio was a public occasion. People
did so in coffee houses and bazaars. Sometimes the radio would be placed
on a pedestal in the town square around which the information hungry
would gather. For example, the population in the center of Tehran was
regularly bombarded with German news at the Maidan-I-Sepah Square.
What had been heard would immediately then be talked about, further
extending the reach of the programs’ message. It has been estimated that
by the start of the 1940s, “about a million people were regularly
listening to the radio in the Middle East and North Africa.”
Obviously, Germany’s Farsi-language wartime broadcasts enjoyed great
popularity. Let me quote Iranian writer Amir Hassan Sheheltan:
In many newspapers and private notes of the time we find reports of
how in the late 1930s … during the broadcast of the Farsi-language news
from Berlin people would gather together on the steps of the tea houses
with a radio set in order to listen to the Germans’ reports of their
territorial gains on the various fronts. The reports inspired the
fantasy of the crowd on the street that every victory corresponded to a
defeat for the colonial powers, the Soviet Union and Britain, which they
cheered and applauded.
Moreover, after the deposition of Reza Shah in 1941 by Britain and
the Soviet Union, many fervently awaited the German invasion of Iran,
hoping that it would put an end to the hated British-Soviet occupation.
Now the Nazis’ radio propaganda was more than just commentary on the
war: it was an instrument in the service of the “liberation” of Iran by
German forces.
“In those days”, according to an American journalist, “swastikas were
painted on the walls of many houses in Tehran. Bazaar traders sold
pictures of Hitler. The new Shah recalled that, ’… the German …
propaganda was very effective. … The propagandists always depicted
Hitler as a Muslim and descendant of the Prophet. He was said to have
been born with a green band around his body’.”
In May 1942, also Louis Dreyfus, the American ambassador to Iran at the time, was alerted:
German propaganda … made a deep impression on the masses. The daily
radio broadcasts from Berlin had been particularly effective and a film
audience in the poor section of Tehran had cheered wildly for Hitler and
at decidedly the wrong places when a British war film was shown. At one
point, the British pressured the Iranian police to remove all radios
from public places, but they were quickly restored, again at British
request, when it was found, strangely, that one could not tune in the
British broadcasts either, without a radio.
Finally, in June 1942, the BBC reported: “Although action is been
taken to make effective the ban on public listening to Axis broadcasts,
it seems that listening in private houses is still widely practiced. As a
result it appears that many people are still convinced that the Axis
powers will win the war; Hitler, moreover, is said to enjoy great
personal popularity.”
At the same time, after the fall of Reza Shah, who, despite his
admiration for Hitler, did not share the latter’s antisemitism,
Jew-hatred began to play a greater role in the Zeesen broadcasts. Among
the regular listeners to this material was a man of whom the world was
later to hear much more: Ruhollah Khomeini.
“Germany’s Persian service was, during the war, to enjoy the widest
possible audience in Iran and Iraq”, writes Amir Taheri in his biography
of Khomeini. When, in winter 1938 Khomeini, then aged thirty-six,
returned from Iraq to Qum in Iran, he
had brought with him a radio set made by the British company Pye
which he had bought from an Indian Muslim pilgrim. The radio proved a
good buy. … It also gave him a certain prestige. Many mullahs and
talabehs would gather at his home, often on the terrace, in the evenings
to listen to Radio Berlin [= Radio Zeesen] and the BBC.
Even though Khomeini opposed Hitler and National Socialism, it is
reasonable to assume that there is a link between the eruption of his
Jew-hatred in 1963 and the invective from Berlin that he had imbibed
over the radio 20 years previously.
Did Radio Zeesen influence Ayatollah Khomeini?
Research on the impact of the Nazi’s radio propaganda in Iran has
just begun and many additional discoveries can be expected. What we can
conclude today is that this radio propaganda changed the generell
perception of the so-called Jewish danger.
In 1963, the Nazi seeds may have bore fruits when Khomeini enriched
his anti-Shah campaign with anti-Jewish slogans. Now his religious
warning cry “Attack on Islam” was replaced by the antisemitic battle cry
“Jews and foreigners wish to destroy Islam!”
Khomeini’s most important book, The Islamic State, published
in 1971, is full of antisemitic invective. Let me quote just one
sentence: ”[T]he Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very
foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout
the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I
fear that – God Forbid – they may one day achieve their goal.”
Such fantasies about Jewish world domination were never part of the
Shiite tradition. Here Khomeini has adopted a key idea of European
antisemitism and linked it to his religion-based anti-Judaism. Khomeini
had been a regular listener to the Nazis’ wartime Farsi-language
broadcasts and, although it cannot in retrospect be proven, it would
seem obvious that his fantasy had at least partly been shaped by this
six-year-long barrage of antisemitic Nazi propaganda.
In addition, Radio Zeesen propagated exactly the kind of genocidal
anti-Zionism which became prevalent after the Islamic revolution.
We have to keep in mind that between 1906 and 1979 no other Muslim
country had such an enlightened religious leadership as Iran; a
religious leadership that also accepted Iran’s good relationship with
Israel.
As early as 1967, however, Khomeini started to preach a genocidal
hatred against Israel. It is the “duty” of all Muslims, he told his
followers during that year, “to annihilate unbelieving and inhuman
Zionism.”
After the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, three things
happend: First, Khomeini ordered the execution of Iran’s most prominent
Jew, Habib Elghanian, in a sustained effort to intimidate the Iranian
Jewish community.
Second: He moderated his tone and promised to spare Iranian Jews,
provided they accepted a subordinate status and radically distanced
themselves from Israel.
Third: Iran’s new rulers began to concentrate their anti-Jewish
hatred on Israel. They began to use the term “Zionist” the way Hitler
used the word “Judas”: as a cipher for all evil in the world. “From the
beginning,” Khomeini declared in 1981, “one of our main goals was the
destruction of Israel.”
The real aim of Khomeini’s struggle with the Jews was, in my opinion,
the wish to fight all aspects of modernity that could undermine his
conservative concept of Islam. This connection between antisemitism and
anti-modernism also explains the popularity of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which is of Russian origin, in the Islamic world.
This text was conceived as a rallying cry against liberalism: in
order to drive forward the struggle against individual freedom the
latter is denounced as the main tool of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Ideas originally disseminated a hundred years previously by Tsarist
agents in order to save Tsarism are today being repeated by key leaders
of Islam in order to secure the domination of a conservative Islam.
At the beginning of my talk I mentioned the Woman-Life-Freedom
Uprising, which continues today while we are here in Berlin. The courage
of the women of Iran and their persistent fight for freedom is for me
still a bright beacon of hope for the future.
But for this hope to be realized, it is – I think – essential to also
look back and answer the question – What went wrong? – which I at least
partly tried to do today. Thank you for your attention.
(The sources of the quotes can be found in my book Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East: The 1948 Arab War against Israel and the Aftershocks of World War II,
to be published by Routledge in August 2023. Please visit the Homepage
of Berlin’s Klangteppich V – Festival for Music of the Iranian Diaspora here.)
Bild: Rundfunkempfänger Telefunken Super “Zeesen” T 875 WK. Quelle: Stiftung Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin · Lizenz: CC0 – No rights reserved · Bild wurde beschnitten und farblich angepasst.
Matthias Küntzel
Source: http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/broadcasting-as-a-weapon-the-persian-language-nazi-propaganda-and-its-consequences
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And
leftists won't be pleased to hear that the composition of the audience
was “representative” of the country’s demographics, i.e., it was quite
diverse. In fact, the vast majority of the audience was Hispanic (my
guess with the amount of Spanish I heard is first generation), Black,
and much of the audience was likely 30 and under, although there were
definitely people a bit older as well (I spotted only one white man who
appeared to be older than 50). These are people the left thinks they
own.
