Thread by @HusseinAboubak

The Arabic Voice of Hitler
During WWII, Younis Bahri, an Iraqi-born journalist, became the most familiar voice to the Arab masses from Morocco to Iraq. It is common to find him mentioned in memoirs of leaders alive during the period. The Arabic Nazi broadcast service, "The /1

Voice of Berlin," established in 1939, was Bahri's perfect medium. He sent his thunderous voice praising Great Germany and calling on the Arabs to stand with their Nazi brothers to destroy France and Britain. Bahri started his broadcasts with an iconic catchphrase "Huna Berlin./2

. Hai Al Arab." The station, style, and catchphrase would become the format on which the Cairo-based "Voice of the Arabs" would be built later. Bahri started his life as an officer in the Ottoman military, and he spent some time in the Cavalary School in Munich, where he said /3

to have personally met Adolf Hitler. He then roamed many European cities and traveled all over the continent. In 1929 in Hague, he met Julie van der veen, a young Dutch painter who fell in love with him. According to her website, she broke with him after discovering he was /4

lying to her about his life while constantly asking her for money. According to her he disappeared only to reappear again 1939. According to her, "on 5 December 1939. We celebrated Christmas in Berlin together and were married there, on 29 December 1939. Yunis worked for the /5

German world broadcasting as a journalist for the Arab world, he had a radio program in which he read the news about Germany. He never told me anything about it...In April 1940 we were separated, at the same embassy of Afghanistan where we were also married. I left Berlin and /6

came back to mama in The Hague on May 9, 1940, a few hours before the Germans invaded our country." During that period, Bahri worked in Berlin with Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and Haj Amin Al Husseini on the Arabic broadcast. He asked Goebbels to let him broadcast Quran at the /7

beginning of the broadcast to get the attention of Muslim listeners. Goebbels was very hesitant and agreed only after he obtained the approval of Hitler. This innovative move would force the BBC to start doing the same and start its broadcasts with Quran in order to compete. /8

This would inaugurate a practice that would become a mainstay in all Arabic broadcasting services. He was a true radio genius in many ways. Bahri's broadcasts were popular and succeeded in mobilizing the most politically inclined Arabs and Muslims against Jews, /9

the British, the French, and for the Nazis. After the fall of the Third Reich, and according to his memoirs, he could escape by forged papers and pretending that a childhood scar was from Nazi torture. He went to Paris were he established a newspaper calling for Arab /10

nationalism and Arab unity. According to van der veen memoirs, "In the summer of '48 I went back to Paris and I stayed in Hotel Belfort in the Rue Sophie Germain, a small room, but I did not mind, it was much worse that Yunis was in Paris as well. He had a newspaper, Al-Arab, /11

for the Arab world, his office was at Rue Vivienne, in the second arrondissement. When he found out that I was in Paris, he wrote me. He wanted to meet me, we spoke in a cafe, I was very nervous of course. He told me about his new work and I asked how it ended in Berlin and /12

then he told me that he was a spy to the English and that I then was not allowed to know that." There is little doubt his work for the English was a lie. In the 1950s, Bahri would go back to the Middle East and would be called in person by Nasser to go to Cairo. Not much is /13

known about what he did there but the close similarity between the Nasser propaganda outlet "Voice of the Arabs" and the Voice of Berlin are suggestive. At the time, Voice of the Arabs was also employing Leopold von Mildenstein, Goebbels's man for Arabic propaganda and whom /14

Bahri undoubtedly knew from his time in Berlin. Bahri would have many jobs and posts during his lifetimes, such as a mufti in Indonesia and an Imam in European mosques. Bahri's life of infatuation with European women, alcoholism, Nazism, Arab nationalism, and Islamic piety /15

sheds a very important light on the history that is badly distorted by bad scholarship. Here is the website of Julie von der even julievanderveen.nl/english/biogra…

Bahri would later become close to many officials and politicians all over the region. A picture of Yunis Bahri with Anwar Sadat in Beirut 1955

A short recording of Bahri from the Voie of Berlin

A scene from the Algerian film, Sanwat Al-Gamr, showing local peasants listening to Bahri's Berlin broadcast

What was Bahri? Was he an Arab Nationalist? Was he a Nazi? Was he an Islamist? Was he just a charlatan? What happened to all this Arab nazism? Did it just disappear? Or did it turn into anti-imperialism, decolonization, and resistance? If Nazism in the Middle East can

transform into social justice, could that happen elsewhere as well? Some good questions for you to think about, because trust me, we need a new perspective right now.

By the way,
The story continued in a new aesthetic,

Oh, and when Nazism landed in the Middle East it landed as liberation from imperialism.

The front page of an issue of Al-Arab, Bahri's Paris publication as well as an anti-Israel propaganda booklet for prepared for Nasser.