During this time of the year, we in Israel commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and then exactly one week later, the nation commemorates Memorial Day. On Memorial Day, we in Israel mourn our fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism, halting everything as the sirens blast (cars stop, pedestrians stop, the nation literally comes to a standstill). These past weeks and months, given that Israel’s sirens were prompts to rush to bomb shelters, one can only imagine the anxiety and accompanying stress, should one of those sirens have coincided with a memorial siren.
The common denominator between these two pivotal historical events namely the Holocaust and the Iranian attack on the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) and Israeli civilian population centers, is Germany’s intentional involvement and compliance. Nazi Germany’s responsibility for implementing the Holocaust is an undisputable historical fact. Yet few associate Iran’s current nuclear and military capabilities with the very same nation, namely Germany, a nation responsible for annihilating 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Germany played a key role in the early development of Iran's nuclear program decades ago that jump-started the Iranian nuclear capability by providing German nuclear technology, training, specialized components, and machinery. Key details regarding German involvement included providing Iran with specialized equipment such as high-strength aluminum, vacuum pumps, numerical controlled machine tools and frequency Converters: critical frequency converters for thousands of Iran’s centrifugal machines.
Historically, Germany was a primary technological partner for Iran, particularly in infrastructure and energy: This transfer of technology of actual components by Germany has over the years enabled Iran to advance and transform its nuclear weapons industry to weapons grade enrichment. Despite international sanctions, approximately 77 formal agreements were initiated over the years between German and Iranian higher education institutions. These involved student exchanges and joint research in fields like physics and IT. A major treaty was signed between the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and the West German Ministry for Research and Technology. This paved the way for the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, originally designed and partially built by the German firm Kraftwerk Union (Siemens), a core installation for Iran’s enrichment program.
Iran has relied on dual-use German nuclear technology to enrich and produce weapon-grade uranium enabling a nuclear threshold capacity. Iranian leaders being confident that their advanced nuclear weapons industry would deter any external attempt to prevent their nuclear ambitions, interpreted the West’s apathy over the years to this emerging threat that a nuclear Iran would pose for the world. This indifference has enabled Iran to spread her tentacles of Islamist terror through her proxy Islamist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Today, the United States and additional Western nations have come to the realization that Iran poses an existential threat beyond the borders of the Middle East, with Israel being just the first step within its overall plan.
Iran’s existing constitution, formed in 1979 and subsequently amended in 1989, outlines a vision that is fully incompatible with Western principles and has guided and empowered the Islamic leaders of Iran throughout its forty-seven-year existence. It also gives meaning to what has often been mistaken for mere hyperbolic cheerleading: "Death to America" and “Death to Israel.” While America was built on notions of liberty, individual freedoms and limited government control, the Islamic Republic of Iran is based upon a global totalitarian vision. Essentially, it seeks a one-world Islamic government derived from Koranic principles and Sharia law. It set out to help all similar revolutionary efforts across the world, justifying its support for its proxies such as Hamas and other Palestinian terror factions in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Islamic terror cells throughout Europe. In addition, it was hoped that this Islamist vision of world domination would be realized by the end of the 20th century, which certainly explained Iran’s unquenchable appetite for nuclear weapons as the optimum, most accelerated pathway toward overtaking all other forms of rule.
Germany has also provided the Islamic Republic of Iran, whether intentionally or not, an additional motivational path to use their nuclear ambitions to achieve their goal of world domination. The Aryan myth closely associated with German Nazi society during the 1920s and 30s, is one of the fundamental pillars of Iranian Islamist nationalism. Iran’s Islamic leaders have used their sense of self-acclaimed Aryan superiority to demand parity with Europe and dislocate Iran from the perceived backwardness of the Islamic Sunni world. Born in early nineteenth-century Europe, the Aryan myth was a product of linguistics, of racial anthropology – a pseudo-science that today is totally discredited. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933, they began to legislate on the basis of their racist worldview. A central goal of Nazi policy was exclusion and, ultimately, the annihilation of Jews. It often claimed to empirically demonstrate the inherent superiority of Europeans over the non-European subjected ‘races’. It later became a fundamental component of Nazi ideology.
Believing in the Aryan kinship of Iranians, German Orientalists and cultural emissaries introduced the Aryan myth into Iran in the first half of the twentieth century. The convenient intellectual device produced from this curious importation is well known: Iranians are part of the Aryan race and thwarted from their glory by religious and cultural miscegenation with Semites (in this case the Jews, and Sunni Arabs). The Nazis were careful to use ‘Aryan’ themes. Erwin Ettel, a German ambassador to Iran from 1939 to 1941, emphasized the use of such themes in his “general guidelines for propaganda to Iran” while he also insisted that “Germany’s battle against World Judaism” should also be directed “against the Jews in Iran, who want to force the Aryan Iranian people under their yoke”. In 1951, Sumka, the Iranian Nation-Socialist Party, was explicitly modeled on the Nazi Party and, alongside other far-right groups such as the Pan-Iranian Party, it sponsored attacks on local Jews and leftists in Iran while boasting about the ‘Aryan’ race that the majority of Iranians supposedly belonged to. It is remarkable that although both terms ‘Aryan’ and ‘race’ have fallen into disuse in the West, they are a fundamental component of modern Iranian political thinking among Iranian leaders.
Since 1952, when diplomatic relations were established between the Federal Republic of Germany and Iranian Islamic Republic, diplomatic relations were close and resulted in numerous technological, cultural, and industrial bi-lateral agreements. However, the volume of trade has decreased significantly in recent years as a result of the sanctions against Iran, primarily from the United States’ withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the sanctions unilaterally imposed by the United States. Nevertheless, there is still considerable interest in bilateral cultural and academic exchange between the two countries’ civil societies. One can only conclude that had Germany NOT been forced to end their close bi-lateral relations with Iran due to American sanctions, not only Israel but the whole of Western societies would be under the existential threat posed by Iran on the world.