The fates of these Iranians were diverse: some were students who came to study in Germany or another European country before or during the war; some might have been workers in German industry, though it is likelier that they were forced laborers; a few were undoubtedly victims of [anticommunism] and were arrested, imprisoned, or detained in concentration camps.
Most of these individuals were not Jewish but they came from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds: Azeri, Armenian, Christian, Muslim, Baháʻí. Many of the people only appear as names on official lists—hospitalization records, displaced person (DP) camp counts, and censuses of the foreign nationals living in various occupation zones shortly after 1945.
Of others we only know from search inquiries of relatives who tried to find their loved ones in the postwar chaos. While we’re not always able to reconstruct the details that are missing from the paper trails, we do know that those Iranians who were in Europe during the war, were deeply affected by this history.
Even though they might appear to be just piles upon piles of paperwork, the archives reveal the human side of history, and tell stories about resistance, migration, love, and death. Here, we note some examples of Iranian individuals who found themselves in [Fascist] concentration camps or were otherwise victims of the war and its vicissitudes.
Aga Hassan’s journey stretches across physical and historical grounds, and sheds light on what Iranian victims of [Fascism] endured. He was born in 1916 in Khoy, an Azeri‐majority city in northwestern Iran and worked in the same city as a typographer.
In 1941, as Iran was occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union, Khoy fell to the latter. The [Allies] demanded manpower from the Iranian authorities and Aga Hassan was among those deported to the USSR. Together with about 200 others, he [had to work] in a port in Crimea, then part of Soviet Russia. His conditions took a turn for the worst when Crimea fell to [the Axis] in July 1942, after an eight month campaign[.]
Many Soviets were taken as POWs and Hassan and other laborers were sent to the […] concentration camp Majdanek in [Axis] occupied Poland. Some in Hassan’s group were killed in the camp as, according to his testimony, the [Axis] mixed up non‐Jewish Iranians with the Jewish prisoners who were being killed on a mass scale. But Hassan survived. From Majdanek, he was transported several times to different camps in occupied Poland, Germany, and Austria as a forced laborer.
[…]
Others, like Magammed, were already in Europe or even Germany itself as workers or students, and became forced laborers under [Fascism]. While many of the documents tell little about individual stories and fates, they often point to companies and organizations that were part of the [Fascist] operation, many of which exist till today, like Siemens and Demag.
Those companies notoriously used forced labor to their benefit during the war, and while it’s impossible to say how an Armenian man from Iran’s Tabriz, Aghbekian Hartoun, found his way to [the Third Reich] during WWII, it’s safe to assume that he ended up as a forced laborer since his name appears in records of Organisation Todt, a civil engineering organization run by [Fascists] that folded in 1945.
Some other victims are thought to have been involved in anti[fascist] activity. Emir Farrokh Granmayeh was born in Berlin, the son of the Iranian ambassador to Germany, Reza Moayed al‐Saltanah. He grew up and lived in between Germany and Iran. By the 1940s, he was married to a German woman and had a family in Berlin.
In his postwar application for assistance by the PCIRO to be repatriated to Iran, he describes himself as a Prisoner of War. During the war, [the Axis] attempted to use prominent Iranians in Berlin as part of its efforts to broadcast propaganda to Iran. Some notable figures were successfully recruited for this effort including Bahram Shahrokh, son of a prominent Iranian MP and head of the Zoroastrian community in Iran, who became the main Persian voice of Radio Berlin.
The [Axis] wanted Granmayeh to also join these efforts but he refused and had to pay a high price for his refusal. In 1944, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Granmayeh deserves to be remembered as a case of a hitherto little‐known story: an Iranian who braved political opposition to the [Axis] and thus found himself in a concentration camp.
We don’t know much about the reason why Maxud Miridzianian, an Iranian innkeeper living in Paris, was sent to Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora. His Häftligs‐Personal‐Karte–prisoner ID–from the concentration camps list him as an Iranian political prisoner.
Many Iranians of the time were partisans of socialist, communist or other anti‐fascist tendencies that would have deemed them politically unacceptable to the [Fascists]. He did not survive to tell his story, and died in the concentration camp Nordhausen in March 1945, just a month before it was [captured] by American forces.
[…]
According to his testimonies, Abilsofl served as a spy during the war, working for Switzerland. In this work, he “betrayed his country people,” according to him, though the nature of his service remains in large part a mystery. One detail that is mentioned in his correspondences is that he was tasked with gathering information on an Iranian Jewish man named Haim Askenassi.
Askenassi lived in Paris, was detained in the internment camp Drancy, and then deported to Auschwitz where he died. […] Stories such as those of the individuals above reminds us that the Holocaust, i.e. the systematic murder of six million Jews by [the Axis] and its collaborators, also left its marks on other nations, including Iran: whether through the Iranians who were persecuted by the [Fascists] due to their politics or to those who simply found themselves victims of the adverse conditions of the Second World War. Much more research needs to be done to achieve a fuller picture.
(Emphasis added.)
I am loath to rely on a neoimperialist source (IranWire dedicates itself to alienizing the Islam Republic of Iran), but if I knew of a better one, I’d share that instead. I have to admit, though, that I couldn’t help but chuckle at this apparent faux pas:
We are proud to be the only media outlet in the Middle East to regularly produce articles, videos, and other types of content about the crimes of the Nazi regime and its allies and their victims.
In other words, there are no media outlets under the Zionist régime (the so‐called ‘Jewish state’) that regularly produce articles, videos, and other types of content about the crimes of the Axis and its victims. That’s exactly right. I’m glad that we finally agree on something, anticommunists.
Click here for events that happened today (April 14).
1939: Washington wrote to Berlin and Rome in an attempt to maintain peace, asking them to guarantee the borders of 31 countries for at least one decade.
1940: As Fascist paratroopers of the 7th Flieger Division were paradropped into Dombås, King Haakon of Norway appealed to his folk to resist the invaders, but the Reich threaten to round up and shoot any civilians who aided the British.
1941: Axis submarine U‐52 sank Belgian passenger ship Ville de Liège southwest of Iceland early in the morning slaughtering forty out of fifty‐two people, and the Axis commenced its first major mass arrest of Paris’s Jews. Cairo invited the Reich’s head of state for a discussion on Egyptian independence from the British Empire, and as the Greek Epirus Army continued to withdraw from Albania, the German 73rd Infantry Division attempted to block it at Kastoria Pass, resulting in heavy fighting. On Greece’s eastern coast, the Axis advance was halted at Platamon between Mount Olympus and the Aegean Sea. King Petar II of Yugoslavia fled to Athens as Axis troops advanced on his capital; in the evening, the Yugoslavian government asked General Ewald von Kleist of the 1st Panzer Group for a ceasefire. At Tobruk, Libya, Axis infantry filled antitank ditches and cut wires at the El Adem road starting at 0230 hours, with Allied fire periodically interrupting the work. At 0520 hours, thirty‐six tanks of the 5th Panzer Regiment moved through the gap that the infantry created, but the Allies halted them. In the air, British and Axis fighters engaged in combat in the air while forty Stuka dive bombers attacked the Tobruk harbor. At 0730 hours, the Axis offensive was called back after losing sixteen tanks and four hundred men (150 killed, 250 captured).
1942: As Pierre Laval became Chief of Government with special powers in Vichy, the Axis executed Michel Brûlé for his anticapitalist agitation. The Axis bombing on Grimsby, England that began before midnight on the previous date ended, leaving thirteen dead, more wounded, and a number of homes destroyed. Berlin ordered the Luftwaffe to recommence air attacks on United Kingdom with an emphasis of bombing cities with no particular industrial value but of great beauty.
1943: Twenty‐three Axis dive bombers, forty‐four medium bombers, and 129 fighters assaulted Milne Bay.
1944: Axis soldiers killed some workers at the LTT factory at Conflans‐Sainte‐Honorine, resulting in two thousand people ceasing work as protest. As well, the first transports of Greek Jews to Auschwitz departed from Athens. Coincidentally, the Axis sent a transport of five hundred prisoners from Stutthof to Neuengamme. In France, the Axis authorities ordered mass arrests of Jews; to provide incentive for civilians to aid this effort, it offered payments to those who led authorities to Jews in hiding. Likewise, SS Brigadier General Veesenmayer reported that Hungarian Prime Minister Sztojay promised that by the end of April 1944, at least 50,000 Hungarian Jews fit for work would become available to the Reich, starting with 5,000 Jews effective immediately and 5,000 more every three to four days until the number of 50,000 has been reached. An additional 50,000 Jews were to be made available in May, and the number of Jewish labor draftees inside the Kingdom of Hungary was to be raised from 100,000 to 150,000.
1945: Heinrich Himmler ordered the extermination of all prisoners at Dachau in southern Germany, and Jürgen Stroop met with him in his private train near Prenzlau, Germany, proclaiming that he would lead Werwolf resistance groups with total loyalty after the end of the war.