Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-19T00:32:13.917Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Iran in the Nazi New Order, 1933–1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Jennifer Jenkins
Jennifer Jenkins*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite a succession of scholarly studies over the years, the relationship between Reza Shah’s Iran and National Socialist Germany has not been fully explored. Rather than focusing on the supposed Aryan ideological sympathies that bound the two countries together, this article argues that the real driver of the German–Iranian relationship in the 1930s was economic and based in the mutual interaction of state economic initiatives. It states that Iran’s place in Nazism’s economic system was the outcome of two factors: the “New Plan” of Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, and its focus on clearing agreements as a motor for depression-era trade, and the connections of Schacht’s system to Reza Shah’s strategy to modernize Iran. In exploring this issue the article focuses on relations between Germany and Iran during three distinct moments: first, the period from 1918 to 1928 and the working out of a new relationship after the First World War; secondly the period of Schacht’s New Plan in Iran in the mid-1930s; and finally the period from the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to the British–Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941. During this last period Iran both belonged to the Nazi–Soviet trade zone created by the Pact and attempted to defend its neutrality.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 5: Special Issue: Dedicated to Homa Katouzian , September 2016 , pp. 727 - 751
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society For Iranian Studies 2016

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran Between Two Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Ahamed, Liaquat. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Barlas, Dilek. “Germany’s Economic Policy Towards the Balkan Countries in the 1930s: A Case of Great Power Pursuit of Domination in the Peninsula.” Turkish Review of Balkan Studies 2 (1994/1995), 135–145.Google Scholar
Bullard, Reader. Letters from Tehran: A British Ambassador in World War II Persia. Edited by Hodgkin, E. C. London: I. B. Tauris, 1991.Google Scholar
Dann, Uriel, ed. The Great Powers in the Middle East 1919–1939. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988.Google Scholar
Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, Volume VIII: The War Years September 4, 1939–March 18, 1940. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1954.Google Scholar
Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, Volume X: The War Years June 23–August 31, 1940. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1957.Google Scholar
Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, Volume XI: The War Years September 1, 1940–January 31, 1941. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1960.Google Scholar
Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, Series D, Volume XII: The War Years February 1–June 22, 1941. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1962.Google Scholar
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power 1933–1939. New York: Penguin Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Fleischhauer, Ingeborg. Diplomatischer Widerstand gegen “Unternehmen Barbarossa”: die Friedensbemühungen der Deutschen Botschaft Moskau 1939–1941. Berlin: Ullstein, 1991.Google Scholar
Geyer, Dietrich. Russian Imperialism: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914. Translated by Little, Bruce. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Geyer, Dietrich. Die Sowjetunion und Iran: eine Untersuchung zur Aussenpolitik der UdSSR im Nahen Osten 1917–1954. Tübingen Auslieferung: Böhlau-Verlag Cologne, 1955.Google Scholar
Gorodetsky, Gabriel. Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Gross, Stephen G. Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Helbig, Herbert. Die Träger der Rapallo-Politik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, Yair. Deutschland und Iran im Spielfeld der Mächte: internationalen Beziehungen unter Reza Schah 1921–1941. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1980.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, Yair. “Irans Bedeutung für die Deutsche Kriegswirtschaft: Vom Beginn des Zweiten Weltkrieges bis zur Anglo-Russischen Besetzung Irans im August 1941.” Jahrbuch des Institutes für Deutsche Geschichte Tel Aviv 7 (1978): 421–445.Google Scholar
Hopper, Bruce C. “How Much Can and Will Russia Aid Germany?” Foreign Affairs (January 1940): 18, 229–243. doi: 10.2307/20028994CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Jennifer. “Excavating Zarathustra: Ernst Herzfeld’s Archaeological History of Iran” Iranian Studies 35, no. 1 (January 2012): 1–27. doi: 10.1080/00210862.2011.594622CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Jennifer. “Germany’s Eurasian Strategy in 1918.” In The World During the First World War, edited by Bley, Helmut and Kremers, Anorthe, 289–302. Essen: Klartext, 2014.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Jennifer. “Hjalmar Schacht, Reza Shah and Germany’s Presence in Iran.” Iran Nameh 30, no. 1 (Spring 2015): xx–xlvi.Google Scholar
Katouzian, Homa. The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926–1979. London: Macmillan, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kozhanov, Nikolay A. “The Pretexts and Reasons for the Allied Invasion of Iran in 1941.” Iranian Studies 45, no. 4 (July 2012): 479–497. doi: 10.1080/00210862.2012.673827CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Küntzel, Matthias. Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold. Translated by Meade, Colin. Candor, NY: Telos Press, Publishing, 2014.Google Scholar
Lenczowski, George. Russia and the West in Iran 1918–1948: A Study of Big-Power Rivalry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1949.Google Scholar
Motadel, David. Islam and Nazi Germany’s War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pogge von Strandmann, Hartmut. “Grossindustrie und Rapallopolitik: Deutsch-Sowjetische Handelsbeziehungen in der Weimarer Republik.” Historische Zeitschrift 222, no. 2 (April 1976): 265–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pogge von Strandmann, Hartmut. “Appeasement and Counter-Appeasement: Nazi-Soviet Collaboration 1939–1941.” In Conflict, Catastrophe and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History, edited by Biess, Frank, Roseman, Mark and Schissler, Hanna, 157–175. New York: Berghahn, 2007.Google Scholar
Ramazani, Rouhollah K. The Foreign Policy of Iran 1500–1941: A Developing Nation in World Affairs. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966.Google Scholar
Ritschl, A. O. “Nazi Economic Imperialism and the Exploitation of the Small: Evidence from Germany’s Secret Foreign Exchange Balances, 1938–1940.” Economic History Review 54, no. 2 (2001): 324–345. doi: 10.1111/1468-0289.00194CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritter, Karl. “Germany’s Experience with Clearing Agreements.” Foreign Affairs 14 (April 1936): 465–475. doi: 10.2307/20030745CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Alfred. Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit. Munich: Hoheneichen, 1935.Google Scholar
Rubin, Barry, and G, Wolfgang. Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Schacht, Hjalmar. 76 Jahre meines Lebens. Bad Wörishofen: Kindler und Schiermeyer Verlag, 1953.Google Scholar
Schacht, Hjalmar. Germany and World Trade. Munich: Bund der Freunde der Technischen Hochschule München, 1935.Google Scholar
Schorske, Carl E. “Two German Ambassadors: Dirksen and Schulenburg.” In The Diplomats 1919–1939, edited by Craig, Gordon A. and Gilbert, Felix, 477–511. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Schulze-Holthus, Bernhardt. Aufstand in Iran: Abenteuer im Dienste der deutschen Abwehr. 2nd ed. Munich: W. Angerer, 1980.Google Scholar
Sommer, Erich Franz. Geboren im Moskau: Erinnerungen eines baltendeutschen Diplomaten 1912–1955. Munich: L. Müller, 1997.Google Scholar
Steiner, Zara. The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tooze, Adam. Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Penguin Books, 2006.Google Scholar
Von Blücher, Wipert. Deutschlands Weg nach Rapallo: Erinnerungen eines Mannes aus dem Zweiten Gliede. Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1951.Google Scholar
Wallach, Jehuda, ed. Germany and the Middle East 1835–1939. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1975.Google Scholar
Wegner, Bernd, ed., Zwei Wege nach Moskau: Vom Hitler–Stalin Pakt bis zum “Unternehmen Barbarossa.” Munich: Piper, 1991.Google Scholar
Wegner-Korfes, Sigrid. “Botschafter Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg und die Vorbereitung von ‘Barbarossa’.” In Zwei Wege nach Moskau: Vom Hitler–Stalin Pakt bis zum “Unternehmen Barbarossa,” edited by Wegner, Bernd, 185–202. Munich: Piper, 1991.Google Scholar
Weinberg, Gerhard L. Germany and the Soviet Union, 1939–1941. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954.Google Scholar
Weitz, John. Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1997.Google Scholar
Zeider, Manfred. “Deutsch–sowjetische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen im Zeichen des Hitler-Stalin Paktes.” In Zwei Wege nach Moskau: Vom Hitler–Stalin Pakt bis zum “Unternehmen Barbarossa,” edited by Wegner, Bernd, 93–110. Munich: Piper, 1991.Google Scholar