The History of a Fateful Relationship

Given the systematic violation of human rights in Iran, Ahmadinejad’s repeated threats to wipe Israel off the map and campaign of Holocaust denial, it is difficult to understand the long-lasting friendship between Germany and Iran.

In Die Deutschen und der Iran, Matthias Kuentzel comes to grips with this implicit contradiction by explaining the history of this relationship from its inception at the end of the Nineteenth Century, when Iran’s economy was still underdeveloped and based mainly on agriculture, to the present, when Iran is rapidly approaching the status of a nuclear power. Kuentzel’s study is based on several sources, particularly documents from the archives of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs which have not been studied previously.

From 1888 on, Imperial Germany developed a policy with regard to the Middle East. Germany took an interest in Iran as a source for raw materials and as a commercial market. During the First World War, the relationship between Germany and Iran grew closer and, for the first time, Germany called on Muslims to join a “Holy War” against the enemies of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Kuentzel describes the relationship between Nazi Germany and Iran and documents the “Aryan” basis of this relationship as well as the veneration of Hitler as the Twelfth Imam. While the Iranian ruler Reza Shah was an admirer of Hitler during the early 1930s, he opposed antisemitism. This policy changed in 1936 when Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany were denied refuge in Iran.

In several previous articles, Kuentzel noted the role of German short-wave radio broadcasts of Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, which also reached Iran. The book documents the role of this radio-station, Radio Zeesen, which broadcasted daily doses of antisemitism to the Islamic world in Arabic, Turkish and Persian from April 1939 to April 1945, thus encouraging the growth of Muslim anti-Semitism.

The relationship between Germany and Iran continued after the Second World War. Iranians encouraged the Germans to shed their feelings of guilt for crimes which they committed during the Nazi era, and many Nazi-collaborators fled to Iran and escaped persecution. This fact may explain the origins of postwar Iranian antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

As Kuentzel shows, the friendship between Iran and Germany continued after the Khomeini Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Kuentzel makes use of original sources in order to highlight the influence of the antisemitism of the Khomeini Revolution upon the development of Islamic antisemitism in general.

Islamism has its beginnings in the first half of the Twentieth Century and is rooted in in the Iranian Islamic fundamentalist secret society Fadayan-i-Islam (“Devotees of Islam”) and the connections with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan, and the first urban Islamic mass movement, which was founded in Egypt in 1928. Since the 1950s, both movements organized campaigns against Zionism and Imperialism.

Kuentzel describes Khomeini’s fascistic ideology which defines Allah as the ruler over Iran and the antisemitic and authoritarian features of the Revolution. He shows how Western governments including Germany have misunderstood this revolution. In 1979 young Iranians associated with the new regime occupied the United States Embassy in Tehran and held U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days. During the Iran-Iraq war (1982-1988), the Khomeini regime sent thousands of Iranian children into mine fields to become martyrs. Despite protests in the German Parliament, Foreign secretary Hans-Dietrich Genscher made a visit to Iran in 1984 to promote economic ties, and the government directed the media to avoid criticism of the Khomeini regime. Genscher pointed out that “Iran had no bad memories of Germany,” and that Germany never had a colonial presence in Iran, and many Iranians admired Nazi Germany. Kuentzel describes Genscher’s visit to Iran as an act of solidarity against the West and America in particular. Last but not least, Iran is important to Germany because of its strategic geographical location between Asia and Europe

Kuentzel tries to explain the reasons for this continuous friendship in spite of the Myconos case (in September 1992 Iranian agents in an act of state terrorism murdered four Kurdish leaders of the Iranian opposition in a Berlin restaurant), the Rushdie Affair, Holocaust-denial, terrorism and denial of the State of Israel’s right to exist. The basis for this relationship was the long tradition of a friendship between Germany and Iran. Germans mistakenly believed that the Khomeini revolution was progressive, and the Iranians who did not accept any intervention or criticism were interested in benefiting from cooperation with Germany.

The last part of the book deals with the situation under Ahmadinejad. It appears that the same paradigm applies also to the present. Ahmadinejad repeatedly encourages Germans to “liberate themselves from their feelings of guilt for the crimes they committed during the Second World War and to defend themselves against the repression of the “Zionists.” According to a letter written by Ahmadinejad and quoted by Kuentzel, Iranian-German economic cooperation depends on an alliance against the USA and Israel. There has been no extensive discussion of this letter. Ahmadinejad’s repeated threats to wipe Israel off the map and his Holocaust denial are ignored in favour of promoting economic ties between Iran and Germany.

In view of the realistic possibility that Iran may soon possess the ability to construct a nuclear bomb, Kuentzel argues that there may be changes in the policies of Germany and Europe.

Hopefully, this coherent analysis of the cooperation between Germany and Iran will be translated into English and serve as an important basis for rethinking the relationship between Iran and the West in general and Germany in particular.

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Dear Friends,

I am delighted to inaugurate the new book review program of SPME with Ruth Contreras’ review of Matthias Kuentzel’s new study of Germany and its special relations with Iran, Die Deutschen un der Iran; Geschichte und Gegenwart einer verhängnisvollen Freundschaft (The Germans and Iran; The History and Present of a Fateful Friendship). I am especially pleased that it was possible to review this book on a timely basis and to make its contents and arguments available to our readers before the publication of an English edition. Matthias Kuentzel has indeed identified an issue of critical relevance to the peace of the Middle East.

This review will soon be followed by others. I invite the readers of this bulletin who would like to write book reviews to contact me directly with their proposals.

If you have read a good book and would like to review it, then please contact me directly at:joel.fishman@gmail.com and kindly insert “SPME” in the header. Once we have a coordinator, it will be easier to make arrangements for review copies.

In the meantime, I thank our readers for their helpful responses to our first appeal. I look forward to working with you to build the book review program.

Joel Fishman,
Book Review Editor,
Fellow, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs