Nazi Germany and the Arab World

by Francis R. Nicosia

Overview

This book considers the evolving strategic interests and foreign policy intent of the Third Reich toward the Arabic-speaking world, from Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933 to 1944, a year following the final Axis defeat in and expulsion from North Africa in May 1943. It does so within the context of two central, interconnected issues in the larger history of National Socialism and the Third Reich, namely Nazi geopolitical interests and ambitions and the regime’s racial ideology and policy. This book defines the relatively limited geopolitical interests of Nazi Germany in the Middle East and North Africa within the context of its relationships with the other European great powers and its policies with regard to the Arabs and Jews who lived in those areas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107664814
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/02/2017
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Francis R. Nicosia is Professor of History and the Raul Hilberg Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2008), the coeditor of Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses (2010), and the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2000). Nicosia was a Revson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from 2000 to 2001 and a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar in Berlin from 1992 to 1993 and from 2006 to 2007. He received the Carnegie Foundation's Vermont Professor of the Year award in 2000 and the Holocaust Educational Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award in 2014.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Continuity and departure: imperial and Weimar Germany; 2. Hitler, race, and the world beyond Europe; 3. Germany and the Arab world, 1933–7; 4. The coming of war, 1938–9; 5. From the periphery to the center, 1940–1; 6. The Axis and Arab independence, 1941–2; 7. Collapse and irrelevance, 1943–4; Conclusions.

Editorial Reviews

"Nicosia masterfully captures the tension between the ideological appreciation of European imperial rule over non-Europeans and strategic wartime considerations. As such, his book will be indispensable not only for historians of the Middle East, but also more generally for scholars of the global history of the Second World War."
Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"Nicosia systematically exposes in the book’s seven chapters [Germany’s] interests and policies, and the conflicting approaches of Nazi officials to the issues at stake at every stage between 1933 and 1944, from the rise to the collapse of the Nazi regime."
German History

'Nicosia shows that Nazi Germany’s policies toward the Arab world always remained firmly grounded in European considerations. … Nicosia illustrates well the different interests and approaches of German diplomats and military men during the war and draws attention to differences and rivalries also between the Mufti and al-Gaylani.' Raffael Scheck, The Journal of Modern History

'Francis Nicosia’s Nazi Germany and the Arab World examines German policies towards the Arab world as a whole, focusing mostly on geopolitics while remaining sceptical regarding the Arab world’s reception of German wartime propaganda.' Norman J. W. Goda, European History Quarterly

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