The Myth of the Iranian Schindler: Abdol Hossein Sardari

Abdol Hossein Sardari is often trumpeted by both opponents and proponents of the current Iranian government as the ‘Iranian Schindler’ who saved jews from ‘Nazi persecution’ and the ‘Holocaust’ during the Second World War. A good example of this is the ‘United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s’ article on Sardari, which attempts to use him as an intellectual wedge to declare that ‘anti-Semitism’ (aka opposition to Israel and its regional foreign policy interests) is ‘un-Iranian’. (1)

The main source for information on Sardari is Fariborz Mokhtari’s book ‘In the Lion’s Shadow’ and is repeatedly and uncritically cited by those talking about Sardari. However there have been a lot of Chinese whispers about what Mokhtari claims about Sardari, what these claims are based on and what the facts are.

To illustrate this I will let the different sources ‘tell Sardari’s story’ for the reader and then point out the different ‘interpretations’ as well as how absurd they are.

Firstly we have Brian Wheeler writing for the ‘BBC Magazine’:

‘In his book In the Lion's Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran's legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II.

Although officially neutral, Iran was keen to maintain its strong trading relationship with Germany. This arrangement suited Hitler. The Nazi propaganda machine declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.

Iranian Jews in Paris still faced harassment and persecution and were often identified to the authorities by informers.

In some cases, the Gestapo was alerted when newborn Jewish boys were circumcised at the hospital. Their terrified mothers were ordered to report to the Office of Jewish Affairs to be issued with the yellow patches Jews were forced to wear on their clothes and to have their documents stamped with their racial identity.

But Sardari used his influence and German contacts to gain exemptions from Nazi race laws for more than 2,000 Iranian Jews, and possibly others, arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry.

He was also able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.

A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children.

When Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, Sardari's humanitarian task become more perilous.

Iran signed a treaty with the Allies and Sardari was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible.

But despite being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and status, Sardari resolved to remain in France and carry on helping the Iranian Jews, at considerable risk to his own safety, using money from his inheritance to keep his office going.

The story he spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes.

Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians

However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not.

The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

By December 1942, Sardari's pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari's book, as "the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage".

But Sardari somehow managed to carry on helping families escape from Paris, at a time when an estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from France to death camps.

The number of blank passports in Sardari's safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people "this could have saved over 2,000 individuals".’ (2)

The article on Sardari at ‘History Learning’ interprets bits of this story differently:

‘Sardari has often been referred to as the Iranian Oskar Schindler because of the work he did to save the lives of many Jewish Iranian families. In fact, it is estimated that around 1,000 Iranian Jewish families escaped the clutches of the Nazis because Sardari had provided them with the necessary documentation.

[…]

This is when Sardari’s work truly began as he made use of his political position and influence to get as many Iranian Jews as possible out of France. Sardari’s argument was that the Iranian Jews, in terms of their bloodline, shared no connection with the European Jews that Hitler wanted to wipe out, and this should be spared the same treatment. He purportedly but this argument across that many of the senior Nazis in Berlin came on board with his view.

[…]

However, as well as attempting to spare them the same persecution, Sardari knew the best option was to get as many of them as he could out of the county, so he ordered as many new-style passports as was possible. It is hard to state exactly how many people he helped, but estimates suggest that as many as 2,000 people, including many children, were saved by his actions.

Sardari’s work remained largely unknown even after World War Two ended, with the focus on the 6 millions Jews who lost their lives, thus making the 2,000 Iranian Jews who escaped Paris seem almost trivial.’ (3)

Let’s first notice the numbers and the origin of said numbers.

The article at ‘History Learning’ is inconsistent in itself when it states that ‘1,000 Iranian jewish families’ were saved via the ‘500-1,000’ blank Iranian passports allegedly available to Sardari according to Mokhtari, but the we learn that ‘as many as 2,000 people’ were saved and included ‘many children’.

If we do the math and have 1,000 blank passports and at maximum 2,000 people were saved then at least 1,000 of those blank passports had to be given to adults but also because they were – again as Mokhtari explains – ‘family passports’ then there are only 1,000 people to add onto those 1,000 passports. If we assume that most of these ‘family passports’ were used on families where there were two adults then there would have not been ‘many children’ at all because there simply isn’t enough ‘jews being saved’ to the number of passports for that claim to be true.

In his book Mokhtari also makes it quite clear that this ‘2,000 people’ is a guess based upon the unsubstantiated number of passports - 500 to 1,000 is an extremely vague estimate based on unverified ‘witness testimony’ – that he believes Sardari had in his possession as of September 1941 and assumes – without evidence - that none of these were used for anyone else buts jews ‘fleeing the Third Reich’.

You see the same in Wheeler’s article for ‘BBC Magazine’ in that the ‘2,000 people’ have simply become the ‘more than 2,000 Iranian jews in France’. (4)

Wheeler deals with the difficulty of the number of passports that were allegedly issued by Sardari by inserting vagueness via insisting that if 2,000 ‘Iranian jews’ were ‘saved’ and there were between 500 and 1,000 blank Iranian passports in Sardari’s possession. Then if they were issued to ‘two or three’ people each – hence them being ‘family passports’ – this would make up the 2,000 ‘Iranian jews’. (5)

The problem with this of course that unless there were a lot of singletons then there would not have been many ‘families’ saved, because the maximum number of ‘saved jews’ is too little for ‘families’ and/or ‘children’ to have been saved in any significant way.

Secondly let’s notice the timeline given by both Wheeler and the article at ‘History Learning’ assumes that Sardari began his activities in September 1941 which is four whole months before the decision to ‘exterminate the jews’ was allegedly taken at the Wannsee Conference on 20^th January 1942. They also necessarily assume - without explicitly stating as much - along with Mokhtari himself that Sardari ‘knew’ about what was going to be allegedly decided four months later at Wannsee, which is obviously nonsense given that Sardari no more knew about this than any higher SS security official did at the time and the latter were in a far, far better position to know about it than Sardari was.

Similar historical sins are committed by Rabbi Simchah Aaron Green in the ‘Jewish Exponent’ of Philadelphia.

Green is particularly egregious as he claims that:

‘From 1940 to 1944, Abdol-Hossein Sardari served as the Iranian consul in Nazi-occupied Paris.’ (6)

This is nonsense of course given that Sardari was only Iranian consul in Paris from June 1940 to September 1941 when he was recalled by the Iranian government which been subjected to a British and Soviet invasion and palace coup in August of that year (7) because of Shah Reza Khan’s self-proclaimed admiration for Adolf Hitler as well as Fascism and the presence in Iran of numerous German technical advisors. (8)

From September 1941 Sardari represented no-one but himself (as he had been officially recalled by the Iranian government) and certainly wasn’t an official representative of that new or old government as demonstrated by the fact that he was finally successfully recalled in 1952 by the government it is claimed that tacitly supported his actions by the ‘Wikipedia’ article but was promptly prosecuted for illegally issuing Iranian passports when he was not an official representative of Iran. (9)

Green continues to bloviate when he claims that:

‘In his capacity as consul, Sardari had an abundance of stamps and passports available, and protected an estimated 3,000 Jews by including the spouses, family and friends of those 150 under his actual purview.

[…]

The story of Sardari and the 3,000 Jewish lives he saved has special meaning as we face a new, bold scourge of terror, as well as the anti-Christian, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hatred spreading across the globe.’ (10)

Notice how the number of ‘jews saved’ has suddenly increased from 2,000 to 3,000 – given that the source of Green’s source (the ‘United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’) is Mokhtari and he guesses around 2,000 not 3,000 this is obviously unsupportable – for no apparent reason other than to possibly make Mokhtari’s ‘number problem’ – as explained above – work.

The truth about Sardari’s activities by comparison are hinted at by the ‘United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s’ ‘Encyclopaedia’ article on him when they talk about his campaign from September 1941 onwards to get Iranian jews reclassified as non-jews by the SS as a copy of Dr. Asaf Atchildi’s campaign in August 1941 to have the ‘Juguti’ jewish sect in Iran reclassified as racially Aryan by Vichy France. (11)

To quote the ‘United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’:

‘In August 1941, Soviet and British forces had occupied Iran. Because they perceived him to be pro-Axis, the Allies forced the Iranian ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-1941) to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza (1941-1979). As Iran now stood under occupation of the Allies, Swiss diplomats assumed responsibility for protecting Iranian interests in France and elsewhere in occupied Europe in November 1941, and made appeals on behalf of the Iranian Jews.

The Iranian ambassador in Vichy was recalled by his government, but Sardari remained in Paris, continuing to work unofficially on behalf of Iranians, including Iranian Jews, residing in France. According to Asaf Atchildi, on February 11, 1942, Sardari wrote to him asking him, as the leader of the Jugutis in France, to include Jews of Iranian nationality on the list of Jugutis he had prepared for the Vichy authorities.

In letters dated September 29, 1942, and March 17, 1943, Sardari communicated with German officials concerning the status of Iranian Jews residing in Paris and surrounding towns in an effort to protect them from arrest and deportation. Soon after, on May 4, 1943, the names of 41 Iranians were included on a list of 91 individuals of "Jugutis originally indigenous to Iran, Afghanistan, Bukhara (Central Asia) residing in Paris and surrounding towns," prepared by Atchildi for Vichy officials (within the Commissariat-Général for Jewish Affairs).

[…]

Framing his appeal on behalf of the Iranian Jews in Paris in the terminology of Nazi racial ideology that he calculated would be persuasive to German officials, Sardari argued on March 17, 1943, that the Jugutis should not be considered racially Jewish. He reported that they were a largely assimilated minority whose members frequently intermarried with non-Jews and spoke Iranian, not Yiddish or Hebrew. Sardari also pointed out that Jugutis in Iran had "all the rights and all the civil, legal, and military rights and responsibilities as Muslims."

In the spring of 1943, as a consequence of Sardari's appeals, submitted in cooperation with Atchildi via Kraehling and Swiss diplomats, the Germans agreed to exempt the Jugutis residing in the occupied zone from anti-Jewish measures; in mid-1943, Vichy authorities adopted the same policy. Historian Warren Green has attributed the German response to the Jugutis and other Caucasian and Central Asian Jewish ethnic groups in France, such as the Russian Karaites and the Gruzinian Jews of Georgia, as part of a broader German policy to cultivate ties with non-Slavic, anti-Communist ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union.

[…]

Writing on letterhead for the "Imperial Consulate of Iran," Sardari affirmed:

According to an ethnographic and historical study regarding the Jewish religious communities of non-Jewish race in Russia received by this consulate and validated by the [German] Embassy in Paris on October 28, 1940…the indigenous Jews (Jugutis) of the territories of the former Khanates of Boukhara, Khiva, and Khokand (presently within the Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan) are considered to be of the same [ethnic] origin as those of Persia.

According to the study, the Jugutis of Central Asia belong to the Jewish community only by virtue of their observance of the principal rites of Judaism. By virtue of their blood, their language, and their customs, they are assimilated into the indigenous race and are of the same biological stock as their neighbors, the Persians and the Sartes (Uzbeks).’ (12)

The key thing to understand here is Mokhtari and all sources based upon his work necessarily assume – as previously mentioned above – that Sardari was ‘rescuing the jews’ because he ‘knew’ about the ‘Holocaust’ before it was ever officially formulated as policy. This is a priori conclusion that has been shoe-horned into the more sensible narrative offered by Weisberg among other academic historians. Where Atchildi, Kraehling and Sardari were actually just seeking to help out small obscure sects of jews from the Caucasus by getting them re-classified as non-jews using their unclear and highly specialist history as well as legalistic language (13) rather than jews to escape the heavy restrictions and deportations that characterized the Third Reich’s policy towards jews rather than deliberately seeking to ‘prevent jews being murdered in the Holocaust’, which they obviously could have not have been aware of in 1941 or even as anything more than an unsubstantiated rumour easily attributed to wartime propaganda in 1943.

If we apply this to Sardari illegally issuing Iranian passports to ‘Iranian jews’ or simply just any jew who turned up asking for one. Then we can see that all Sardari was actually doing was trying to get jews out of the Third Reich and Vichy France’s sphere of control to alleviate the onerous restrictions placed upon them and the threat of deportation and not – as is commonly claimed – ‘to rescue them from the Holocaust’.

References

(1) https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion/iran/iran-cartoon-exhibition/history/abdolhossein-sardari-an-iranian-of-the-holocaust

(2) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16190541

(3) http://historylearning.com/world-war-two/holocaust-index/abdol-hossein-sardari/

(4) https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16190541

(5) Ibid.

(6) http://www.jewishexponent.com/2016/06/30/a-muslim-who-saved-thousands-of-jews-from-the-nazis/

(7) Ryszard Kapuscinski, 2006, [1985], ‘Shah of Shahs’, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 25

(8) Ibid, p. 24; Hooman Majd, 2008, ‘The Ayatollah Begs To Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran’, 1st Edition, Doubleday: New York, pp. 12; 160

(9) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdol_Hossein_Sardari#Brief_Overview

(10) http://www.jewishexponent.com/2016/06/30/a-muslim-who-saved-thousands-of-jews-from-the-nazis/

(11) Richard Weisberg, 2013, ‘Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France’, 1^st Edition, Routledge: New York, pp. 220-223

(12) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/abdol-hossein-sardari-1895-1981

(13) Also a common tactic used by Allied propaganda to try and lampoon the Third Reich’s racial policies. For example see: Louis Golding, 1939, ‘Hitler Through the Ages’, 1st Edition, Sovereign Press: London, p. 111; E. O. Lorimer, 1939, ‘What Hitler Wants’, 1st Edition, Penguin: London, p. 59