Editor’s note: Martin Cüppers directs the Research Unit Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He studies the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust, and how they were treated by postwar German society and its judiciary. Together with Klaus-Michael Mallmann he published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Half Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine] in 2006. His work belongs to a growing body of scholarship that exposes how Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general. Other contributions to this important line of research include books by Matthias Küntzel, such as Jihad and Jew-Hatred (Telos Press, 2009) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), and Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. The Nazi genealogy of Palestinian animosity toward the Jews helps understand the particular viciousness of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. This interview originally appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 5 and appears here with Cüppers’s permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose commentary appears here.
Mr. Cüppers, in your book Half Moon and Swastika you explore the connections between the Third Reich, the Arab world, and the Palestine conflict. What is your main finding?
In light of our current context, the book makes clear that the terrible Hamas massacre of October 7 was inconceivable without the historical influences of Nazi Germany.
How so?
First of all it is crucial to recognize that the conflict in the Near East did not start with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, as is often falsely claimed. Instead, radical Palestinian and Arab groups developed decisive preconditions during the three preceding decades. Since the late 1930s, Nazi Germany supported these radicals ideologically, politically, financially, and even militarily. Dissident Arab voices were silenced, and the basic conditions were established to radicalize the conflict between Muslims and the Jewish minority in Palestine, as we can still see today in evident continuity with that past.
In the blind hatred and exterminationist intent of the Hamas terrorists, as well as in the antisemitism that some Muslims are displaying in Germany, are we therefore seeing elements of Nazi Jew hatred?
Absolutely. The historian Saul Friedländer labeled the National Socialist version of modern Jew hatred as “redemptive antisemitism.” This is the insane notion—insane but it nonetheless became an official doctrine of salvation in Germany—that the elimination of Jews could solve fully unrelated problems and grievances. Precisely this sort of “redemptive antisemitism” found fanatical advocates and supporters in Palestine and other parts of the Arab world. A positive relation to Hitler and Nazi Germany because of their obsessive Jew hatred is evidenced extensively in historical sources. As a result, conspiracy theories continue to thrive in the Near East in general, and even after 1945, after the defeat of National Socialism in Germany, they never disappeared nor were they ever critically examined.
How did Nazi ideology arrive in the Arab world?
For example, as early as 1929, Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and therefore the most important authority in questions of religion in the region, invoked the notorious Protocol of the Elders of Zion, well known as a czarist fraud. This shows how ideological aspects of radical antisemitism from Europe were imported into the Muslim world and intentionally deployed there. Precisely this same Mufti became one of the most important Muslim collaborators with the Nazis during the World War. After 1941, when Nazi Germany intervened in the Arab world with Rommel’s troops, both sides—the Nazis and the Arabs—emphasized their shared “redemptive antisemitism.” On the German side, this included dropping millions of leaflets and very popular Arabic-language radio broadcasts, i.e., propagandistic methods with which Jew hatred and antidemocratic thinking were distributed massively in the Near East.
During the 1968 protest movement in Germany, young people rebelled against their parents’ generation that had participated in the Nazi regime that murdered six million Jews. How could those same young, leftist Germans, who thought of themselves as anti-fascists, side with Palestinian extremists and even turn into terrorists who attacked Jews?
Most of the 1968 generation systematically ignored the mass crimes of the Nazis as a target of their criticism. Instead they vilified the “imperialist” United States, while simultaneously ignoring the crimes of Communism carried out by the Soviet Union and China. This was a complete betrayal of every capacity for emancipatory reflection. Humanity and the well-being of individuals are not primary for the anti-imperialist left but rather a power calculation, targeting democracies to the benefit of barbaric dictatorships. This heartlessness, the absence of any empathy for the millions of victims of these regimes, continues today. The terrorists of Hamas or Hezbollah, with Iran in the background, are celebrated as alleged freedom fighters, and their homicidal insanity is even rationalized away with leftist rhetoric. This shows a fundamental lack of humaneness.
What are the consequences regarding the future response by the German state toward Arab antisemitism?
As a society we Germans have the obligation to combat every form of antisemitism. Whether it comes from the extremist right or left or if it hides under the cover of Islam, a reimported antisemitism, it represents an unacceptable threat for Jews who live in this country. This should concern all of us because “never again” should not degenerate into merely symbolic politics.
Translated by Russell A. Berman.
Left-Orientalism meets right-Orientalism, or should one simply say that fascist anti-Semitism is fascist anti-Semitism, as great scholars of Orientalism like Bernard Lewis could have also told us.