Thread by @Tim_Doner

The weird world of fascism in 1950s Iran. This story's got Hitler lookalikes, CIA money, black-shirted goons and a bizarre underworld of Persian businessmen looking to revive the Third Reich. Buckle up! A thread

As an undergrad at Harvard, I wrote my senior thesis on an obscure Nazi party called the Sumka (سومکا؛ حزب سوسیالیست ملی کارگران ایران), short for "National Socialist Iranian Workers' Party." If you have any doubts about its inspiration, just look at the armbands + insignia

Note: I'm not writing this for any ideological reasons - I simply think it's a fascinating story which deserves to be shared. This thesis represented over a year of archival work and interviews and it sheds much-needed light on the legacy of fascism and Aryanism in Iran. So...

The Sumka was headed by an Iranian philologist named Davoud Monshizadeh (1914-1989), who spent the war years in Nazi Germany, allegedly worked for the SS and claimed to have been wounded at the Battle of Berlin. There's no doubt he walked with a cane - just see this photo (1952)

How much of that is true? Declassified documents show that the US intelligence was aware of him - in a 1946 report, it listed him as a Nazi collaborator, alongside some 50 other Iranians. That whole document is available on the CIA website bit.ly/2FEZfew

MZ's protégé, Dariush Homayoun (middle), was later the Shah's Minister of Information. In his memoires, he claims MZ interrogated + flipped Persian-speaking POWs on the Eastern Front. It's possible: I've seen evidence of Tajiks in the Nazi Freikorps, likely recruited from camps

In a later article from Neue Illustrierte, a writer claiming to be MZ's former colleague states he was an assistant editor (Hilfsredakteur) at Signal during the war - a glossy propaganda magazine published by the Wehrmacht and sent all over Europe and the M. East

Meanwhile, in a letter from October 27, 1942, Dr. Otto Paul (Inst. for the Research of the Jewish Question) lists “Mr. Davoud Monchi Zadeh, Ministry of Propaganda” as responsible for answering questions on the racial identity of Persian Jews. But we don't know what came of that

In 1943, he received his DPhil from Munich in Iranian philology, publishing monographs on Middle Persian and Shia passion plays. There, he developed a close bond w/ Stig Wikander - later a famed scholar of Sanskrit - and Walther Wüst (below), fanatical leader of the SS Ahnenerbe

MZ saw himself as an Aryan, and eventually took a German bride with whom he had four children. He was so devoted to Hitler, he claimed, that "in 1945 I was the only Iranian present as one of the attack guard officers (afsarān-e gārd-e hamleh) in the capital of the Third Reich”

There, he was allegedly shot, leaving him with a shattered pelvis and lifelong limp - a tale he later spun into a bizarre fan fiction involving Scythians, a wife "from the northern tribes" and a loyal Aryan faced with the trauma of King Darius' death (a clear metaphor for Hitler)

But here's the thing: this is all a lie. In 2018, I contacted his daughter (still in Germany), who enthusiastically provided me with family documents and pictures proving MZ wasn't even in Berlin in 1945. The family had fled to a town near Potsdam, and as MZ's wife reported:

"The actual bomb blast lasted only 20 minutes, but the house kept shaking, the windows clattered, and windows, roof, and doors flew away...Then finally we heard the Russian tanks rolling. One came down the path on our property and shot violently onto our house…It was almost

"ten o'clock in the evening when Davoud heard a Russian word outside and immediately opened the cellar door…in came a wild troop of tall, powerful figures and, as it turned out, Mohammedans, who embraced Davoud and kissed him with their shaggy beards and patted the children...

but when the family went outside for air, "Suddenly there was a bang and my head was ringing. Davoud stood beside me for a moment, then said, "My leg is smashed!” (lit. Mein Bein ist kaputt) and fell over…I had to let him slide to the floor because he was so heavy. He was fully

"conscious, groaning, and I could not find [the wound] right away. I also...was bleeding heavily, so I could not distinguish anything. Only then did I see [it]: the bullet hole in his upper thigh was the size of a child's fist and exited backward, where one usually sits.'

Between April and November, as MZ lay frozen in a morphine haze, he began suffering from fevers, hallucinations and malnutrition. After underoing ten surgeries, he mysteriously slipped over to the Western zone - abandoning his family and ending the first phase of his Nazi career

He next pops up in 1947 as a Lektor in Persian in Munich, where he employed a woman named Traudl Junge — the same Traudl Junge who served as Hitler’s personal secretary and stayed with him in the bunker until the very end! I've seen evidence that it was romantic, but cant be sure

By 1950, after a stint in Alexandria (allegedly teaching Anwar Sadat), he returned to Iran and joined a nascent movement founded by other former Nazis. With Monshizadeh at its helm, and support from the CIA, the Sumka Party would go on to play a significant role in the 1953 coup

More tomorrow, including Monshizadeh's youth, early exposure to fascism, relationship with Mosaddegh and the Shah and life as the "Persian Hitler." For now, more photos...

The Nazi-sponsored magazine Iran-e Bastan (Ancient Iran). A young Monshizadeh penned an article for the magazine in 1934

Monshizadeh with Fazlollah Zahedi, leader of the 1953 coup

A Sumka rally in Tehran, 1951 or 1952

Monshizadeh, Dariush Homayoun and others on trial in 1952

Finally, some teenaged members guarding the Sumka Party House on Khanqah Street in Tehran. If anyone knows what became of this building, pls let me know!

All of these photos come from MZ's personal collections and have never been published before. Stay tuned for more tomorrow!

Nazism in Iran - PART TWO
Today I want to share more about Davoud Monshizadeh by discussing his formative early years + the intellectual context for fascism in Iran. No better place to start than with Nazi-sponsored Iran-e Bastan magazine (1933-35)

The paper was originally financed by wealthy Parsis from Bombay. Capitalizing on Reza Shah’s promotion of ancient Iran, they sought to build a bridge to the country’s Zoroastrian community and promote study of pre-Islamic Persia...

but under the leadership of Berlin-based Saif Azad, and with funding from the German government, the magazine became a mouthpiece for the Nazis. Replete with photos of baby Hitler...

...exhortations for Persians to adopt “civilized sports” such as tennis, ice hockey, skiing and more...

...enthusiastic coverage of Nazi racial expeditions to Tibet...

By its 2nd year of publication, circulation grew to 8,000 issues published twice a month, and the journal began regularly condemning “Jewish propaganda” and praising the Third Reich’s racial science. Nazi ideologues such as Alfred Rosenberg also wrote articles for the magazine

With a tip from the incredible Afshin Marashi, I found an article from March 1933 in which one "D. Monshizadeh" wrote of his romantic nationalism — replete with descriptions of the holiness of Iran’s stars and sky and his love for his compatriots (sorry for bad quality scan!)

How was a young Davoud drawn to fascism? It all started with his father Mirza Ebrahim Khan Monshizadeh, who like every Iranian of the Constitutional period (1906-1911) had an awesome mustache...

The Monshizadehs were aristocrats from Yerevan. A distant ancestor, Mohammed Reza Beg, was the city’s mayor (kalāntar) in the 18th c and lead a Safavid embassy to the court of Louis XIV in 1715. His profligate spending and sexual escapades were the subject of much rumor in Paris!

In the 1880s, patriarch Karim Bek Monshiov received permission from Nasser al-Din Shah to relocate to Tehran and brought along his 11-year old son, Ebrahim. Like many Caucasian immigrants to Qajar Iran, Karim Bek soon found himself embedded himself in the Persian Cossack Brigade

...the elite, Russian-trained cavalry unit that would play a decisive role in the creation of modern Iran. In July of 1895, brigade commander Kossogovsky poisoned Karim Bek, leaving Ebrahim with a lifelong hatred of the Cossacks...

When the Cossacks intervened to destroy Iran's Constitutional movement (1907), Ebrahim became a radical. Hefounded an underground society called the komiteh-ye mojāzāt (the Punishment Committee), aimed at killing “Anglophiles and traitors to the homeland.”

Between 1917 + 1918, Ebrahim's followers assassinated at least a dozen high-ranking officials, including newspaper editors and the minister of finance. In September 1918, however, he was apprehended, imprisoned and shot, devastating the 4 year old Davoud (here, L, as a teen)

His father's death left the young Davoud with his own life-long hatred for the Cossack Brigade — the same group whose leader, Reza Khan, would go on to seize power in 1921 and establish the Pahlavi Dynasty four years later. That will be important later

As MZ later reflected, "Every trace of my father that I had ever felt in my life, I gathered it into [me] The never-ending battle for this blood and this soil...I was thinking about the fate of my forefathers and my own racial mission." So begins his flirtation with fascism...

Iran in the 1920s and 30s was the perfect environment for Davoud's radicalization, as the country's confrontation with modernity led to an explosion of interest in communism, nationalism, syndicalism, liberalism, monarchism and...fascism

Inspired by Ataturk, the Shah set out to modernize Persia. He banned the veil in public, enforced Western dress, expanded education and began major public works projects. He also forged a new national ideology - one that glorified pre-Islamic Persia and its “Aryan” identity

Reza Shah, facing the twin dangers of Soviet and British Imperialism, decided that Germany was his best bet to protect Iran's national interests - and Hitler returned the interest (see here for his birthday card to the Shah, March 1936)

In the 18th/19th c., the term “Aryan” had gradually filtered into European academic circles. Originally a self-designation for Indo-Iranian tribes (conveyed by Sanskrit arya and Old Persian ariya), the term gradually morphed into one of the Aryans as a race by the 1850s

The term + its racial connotations (re)entered Iran with Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (1854-97): "[If one compares] an Iranian, a Greek and an Englishman, and then a...Sudanese negro and an Arab, he would clearly be able to judge which one is clean and civilized and which other savage”

As the @RezaZiaEbrahimi has noted, rather than ariyayi (the modern continuation of the Old Persian ariya) Kermani uses 'ariyan' — a transliteration of the French “aryen” or English Aryan, indicating that the concept itself had been borrowed and not yet indigenized.

Under Reza Shah, Aryanism - and its belief in the mythic utopia of pre-Islamic Persia - had gone from a fringe theory to state ideology. In 1935, he went a step further in requesting foreign embassies refer to Persia by its name native name, “Iran” (lit.“(Land) of the Aryans”)

As @DavidMotadel notes, the Nuremberg Laws do not refer to “Aryans,” (only persons of “German or kindred blood,” /deutschen oder artverwandten Blutes), but the Shah nonetheless pushed the idea that Iranians were legally and racially the same as German Aryans

In August 1941, the British and Soviets invaded and ousted the Shah, who was sent into exile and replaced with his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (here w FDR). However, the legacy of Aryanism lived on - and took on its most violent form w/ Davoud Monshizadeh and the Sumka in the 1950s

That's all for today, but tomorrow we'll pick up with the Sumka, the CIA and the 1953 coup. For now, more chilling photos from the party's archives:

Nazism in Iran - PART 3
Sumka's founders were a cabal of gov officials + businessmen, many of them Zoroastrians, led by one Manuchehr Amir-Mokri. Binder (1962) claims he spent the war in Germany; I suspect he might be this mysterious figure who shows up in dozens of party photos

Others: H. Zarrabi @ Naval Ministry; Zoroastrian Forutan bros @ Min. of Energy; Dr. Mahmoudian, later Min. of Railroads; Houshang Sepehr, w/ brother in fascist Aria party; lawyers Sadegh Behdad + Kazem Masoumkhani, affiliated w/ Pan-Iranists. Maybe in audience in these photos?

and one more: Saif Azad (of Iran-e Bastan fame), who frequented Sumka meetings in 1951/52.
(ps. if anyone out there recognizes someone in these photos, please get in touch!)

So, what were the founders looking to achieve?

As communist influence expanded, w/ a Tudeh plot to kill the Shah in 1949, advertising oneself as anti- communist (and backing those claims with a private militia) could have helped them win favor with the Pahlavi court.

Second, ultranationalist groups already existed during this era (e.g., the Pan-Iranists, est. 1946) and Sumka might be seen as an attempt to “cash in” on the trend with a uniquely fearsome and extreme brand. (See below for Pan-Iranists' similarly Nazi-inspired symbols)

Finally, ideological conviction: having faced a humiliating Allied occupation, founders genuinely believed that fascism was the key to Iran’s freedom and, in the words of MZ, that “Hitler was not a dictator” and his regime “100 times better than [its] lying, trickster” opponents

Thus, at a time when Germany was embarking on a painful process of de-Nazification, a mix of opportunism, personal politics and anti-communism fueled a Nazi resurgence in Iran

In 1951, after Mohammad Mosaddegh became PM, party founders invited Davoud Monshizadeh to take over day-to-day ops and fully expected to control him from behind the scenes. But he soon began engineering an internal coup — one that would establish him as the party’s sole authority

Party members claimed their symbol had nothing to do with the swastika, but was instead a simorgh (Phoenix), that the black shirts were inspired by 8th c. Abu Muslim and that the party greeting - an extended right arm - is simply a gesture from ancient Persia. You be the judge...

Sumka materials state party goals as:
"Breaking the power of money and destroying all manifestations of capitalism,”; destruction of artistic or literary societies which “may be against the national interest"; opposition to the "rotten and corrupt path of Parliamentary gov”;

Also, oddly: destroying the “poisonous and effeminate” nature of Persian lit, which MZ blamed for cultural decline. He bemoaned Iranians who excuse their lateness with “a misread line from Hafez” and obscure their lies with “a sentence from Sa’adi’s Golestan”!

In their place, he recommended the "Aryan heroes" of the Shahnameh. That obsession with changing literary tastes went hand-in-hand with a call to change the Persian alphabet, whose spelling system he blamed for creating a crisis-stricken and “undisciplined” society

The party had an almost pedantic need to cultivate new forms of behavior — as is evident in its 25-point “National Socialist Etiquette,” which includes such rules as “Do not chew with your mouth full” and “Do not use foul language.”

MZ also had plans for a new religion w/ children’s parades at the tomb of Darius (“the greatest manifestation of the Aryan race") + pilgrimages to the “holy” centers of pre-Islamic Iran, a Hitler Youth-style org, prohib. of drugs/alcohol + emphasis on sports and athletics.

Anti-semitism: "All Jews, even if living in Iran for hundreds of years, obtain their wealth by (exploiting) the state’s misfortune...this rogue Jewish nation knows only fraud and falsehood.” “Jews [do not have] the right to be or become Iranian...[and] pollute Iranian blood"

This was not merely a rhetorical device: Haroun Yashayaei, now a leading figure in Iran’s Jewish community, notes that, during the Mosaddegh period, Sumka members used to gather outside of the Jewish-French Etehad school and attack the students.

Side point: interesting to note that Iranian diplomats managed to save Persian Jews in Paris during WW2 by arguing that they were “racially” Aryan/Iranian — the exact opposite of the views espoused in Sumka propaganda. Subject of 2007 show w/ Shahab Hosseini مدار صفر درجه

By 1952, the party had drawn the attention of US diplomats, as seen in this declassified memo from the embassy. As CIA operatives began plotting the coup, they decided that it might be useful to have these fanatical anti-communists in their network. More tomorrow...

...and just one more photo because seriously wtf