 In the latest episode of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute podcast, Gabriel Noah Brahm, director of TPPI’s Israel Initiative, talks with German political scientist Dr. Matthias Küntzel about the Nazi roots of the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, and about the dangers posed today by Iran. This conversation follows TPPI’s webinar of February 7, 2024, “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War,” with Küntzel, Jeffrey Herf, and Benny Morris. The podcast is available in both video and audio-only formats.
Küntzel’s books Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold and Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 are available in the Telos Press store.
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The video of the second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II,” the webinar featured historians Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Benny Morris. Their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 18, 2023 In this brief interview, Martin Cüppers refers to Islamic antisemitism in Germany as a “reimport.” That terse designation builds on his core thesis that during the 1930s Nazi Germany exported its particular brand of antisemitism, with all its uncompromising viciousness, to the Arab world, where it spread and festered and eventually came to define the Arab–Israeli conflict. With the considerable immigration from the Arab world into Germany, especially after 2015, this same Nazi legacy has returned to Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany, which made serious efforts to develop a memory culture and to face up to the German culpability for the Shoah, had in effect opened its doors to carriers of some of the same Nazi values that it had done its best to overcome. The refugees from the Arab world were Germany’s own “return of the repressed.”
Cüppers’s argument about Nazi ideology as a source for Palestinian and more broadly Arab antisemitism is part of a larger body of scholarship that includes the publications by Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Elham Manea in particular. Thanks to this research, the claim has become incontrovertible that Nazi Germany played a significant role in shaping the ideology of the Arab–Israeli conflict in ways that continue today and that explain the unique brutality of the October 7 Hamas attacks as well as the aspiration for a massive elimination of Jews from the region. It is exactly that which finds expression in the frequent call for Arab Palestine––فلسطين عربية—which means Arabs only, and no one else (one looks in vain in the founding documents of the PLO or Hamas for any commitment to minority rights).
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By Bernhard Junginger · Monday, December 18, 2023 Editor’s note: Martin Cüppers directs the Research Unit Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He studies the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust, and how they were treated by postwar German society and its judiciary. Together with Klaus-Michael Mallmann he published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Half Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine] in 2006. His work belongs to a growing body of scholarship that exposes how Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general. Other contributions to this important line of research include books by Matthias Küntzel, such as Jihad and Jew-Hatred (Telos Press, 2009) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), and Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. The Nazi genealogy of Palestinian animosity toward the Jews helps understand the particular viciousness of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. This interview originally appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 5 and appears here with Cüppers’s permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose commentary appears here.
Mr. Cüppers, in your book Half Moon and Swastika you explore the connections between the Third Reich, the Arab world, and the Palestine conflict. What is your main finding?
In light of our current context, the book makes clear that the terrible Hamas massacre of October 7 was inconceivable without the historical influences of Nazi Germany.
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By Telos Press · Friday, August 31, 2018 In a new opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post, Sean Durns discusses Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, published by Telos Press. Pick up your copy of Germany and Iran in our online store, and save 20% with the coupon code BOOKS20.
 As the German historian Matthias Küntzel detailed in his 2014 book, Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, close ties between the two countries go back to the pre-World War I era.
In the late 19th century, Persian hopes for industrial development hinged on German know-how and technological prowess. After the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1888, “economic relations between the two countries began to expand swiftly” and “it became fashionable for young Persian intellectuals to be pro-German,” Küntzel notes.
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By Aleksandr Shchipkov · Monday, October 2, 2017 The following paper was presented at the conference “After the End of Revolution: Constitutional Order amid the Crisis of Democracy,” co-organized by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, September 1–2, 2017, Moscow. For additional details about the conference as well as other upcoming events, please visit the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute website.
Today is the time when we get to discuss our future together. This is a rare occasion that may or may not occur every hundred years. For once, we now have Russians, Americans, and Europeans sitting in one boat and considering together how to pass the rapids without capsizing. Steering out of the impasse where we have been driven by the global crisis requires clear thinking and direct, candid dialogue, i.e., the return to the “direct statement” culture. And this is exactly the way in which I will take the liberty to speak. I term the manner of speaking plainly in scientific discussions as “intellectual diplomacy.” And there are times when it is capable of achieving greater results than the combined efforts of the foreign ministries of a number of countries of the world.
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