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Sami was born in 1886, received his medical training in Baghdad and
Constantinople, and served as an Ottoman army medical officer. After the
Great War, he became an ardent Arab nationalist. He returned to Baghdad
in 1919 and worked as a physician and health administrator until 1931,
when he became director of education. In the following year, the Germans
opened a consulate in Baghdad under Fritz Grobba, to whom Sami
Shawkat was immediately drawn. Grobba was of course delighted to have
the man in charge of Iraq’s entire educational system beside him. Sami
quickly became indoctrinated with Nazi ideology and, in 1933, rallied all
the teachers and secondary-school pupils of Iraq, subjecting them to a
lengthy lecture entitled ‘The Struggle for Life.’ The lecture was intensely
anti-British, criticizing British policy in Egypt and India and extolling the
virtues of Mussolini’s blackshirts and the Nazi concept of Greater Germany.
With his tirade Sami Shawkat planted the seed of ideological Nazism in
the minds of Iraqi youth. From then on he saw to it that all secondary-
school pupils were given military lessons, and that German became a com-
pulsory subject in the school curriculum. Sami then recruited a significant
number of anti-British Palestinian and Syrian teachers, several of whom
soon acquired MOFA numbers. The next step taken was to foster the
growth of Nazism by sending Iraqi educational missions to Germany.
While there, Iraqi youths received special attention and returned home to
spread the word.^40
After a year as director of education, Sami became director-general of
health and associated himself with the notorious Muthanna Club founded
by his brother Saib, who was its president. Nazi influence now spread to
other government departments. During the Arab revolt in Palestine in
1936, the Muthanna Club was responsible for sending much financial and
material aid to Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian rebels. Finding him-
self director of education again in 1939, Sami founded the Iraqi Youth
Movement (al-Futuwwa) under the aegis of the Muthanna Club and along
HJ lines. If measures were needed of the gravity of Sami Shawkat’s antise-
mitic malevolence, one need only read the vile book he published in 1939
entitled Hādhihi Ahdāfunā (These Are Our Aims), in which he called for
the annihilation of the local Jews as a precondition for national rebirth.^41
During the Rashid Ali coup and interregnum in 1941, Sami was respon-
sible for arming the Futuwwa and oversaw the creation of the paramilitary
Katayib ash Shabab (Regiment of Youth) and Hizb al-Haras al-Fida’i
(Suicide Guard Party) organizations led by his former cabinet colleague
Yunis Sabawi. After the armistice, unlike his brothers Saib and Naji who
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