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To say that the Auswärtiges Amt (German Foreign Office [GFO]) was
insincere in its verbal enthusiasm for the nationalist and pan- Arab aspira-
tions of those Iraqis who supported Rashid Ali would be an understatement.
Though the Arabs (including both Rashid Ali and the ex-Mufti) seem not
to have realized it, they would forever have been prevented by Nazi racial
policy from achieving the status of independent allies of Hitler’s Germany in
some future regional Reich, for they were a semitic people deemed in abso-
lute seriousness by Nazi ideologues to be racially inferior. Unquestionably,
had he conquered the Soviet Union and then the Middle East, Hitler would
not have brought liberty to the Arab nations but an unenlightened,
European-controlled, more or less colonial regime. Hitler only maintained
relations with the Arab world in order to dislodge Britain from its dominant
position in the Mediterranean and to destroy the main Suez Canal route to
the Far East and Australasia. The only things that Hitler had in common
with many Arabs were shared hostility towards Britain and shared antipathy
towards the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.^2
On the surface of things, military defeat of the British and Indian forces
in Iraq and Persia could have been of tremendous strategic benefit to
Hitler, had he been in a position to achieve it. Germany would have
acquired the great Abadan refinery and virtually limitless Perso-Iraqi oil
resources and infrastructure; the Persian Gulf would have come under
German and Italian control at the westernmost limit of Japanese naval
power, greatly increasing the vulnerability of Allied shipping; British impe-
rial lines of communication and supply between the Mediterranean and
the Indian subcontinent would have been dislocated; British lines of
reinforcement between India and various war theatres would have been
equally disrupted; and ultimately German forces could have invaded India
itself and traversed the subcontinent to link arms with the Japanese. To
this strategic end, though doubtless motivated very differently to the
Führer, Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was planning (in coopera-
tion with foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop), just days before the
Baghdad coup, to introduce a greatly enlarged intelligence-gathering and
sabotage capability for Abwehr I and Abwehr II respectively in the Middle
East, including Iraq and Persia.^3 However, because Hitler had already
decided first to invade and conquer the Soviet Union, any advantages to
be gained in Iraq (or Persia) were abruptly choked off, forever subjugated
to Hitler’s magnificent obsession: his ideological struggle with Josef Stalin.
Of the two hallmarks of Nazism—antibolshevism and antisemitism—it is
clearly the former that took precedence in the Führer’s mind. Rather than
invading the Middle East, including Iraq, and sweeping through Palestine,