One of the most serious accusations raised against Saadeh is the allegation that he was a Nazi. Newspapers flooded the readers with false reports and stories likening him to Hitler and describing his ideas as re-enactments of the tenets of Nazi theories. These reports then made their way to foreign newspapers and subsequently to Western political and academic literature.

Images of Saadeh as a Nazi persisted in the West even after his execution in July 1949. Both foreign scholarship and the foreign press actively promoted this image uncontested and with almost total disregard for the recognized standards of objective journalism and scholarship. In some quarters, Saadeh has been linked to Nazism based either on the Nazi strategy for the Near East or on Nazism's ideological extension beyond Europe.

While a certain normative position is inevitable in the social sciences, Western depiction of Saadeh as a Nazi, with all the negative connotations associated with it, is hard to sustain. There are numerous problems of balance and interpretation involved both in the creation and development of the image. The concerns underlying most of these problems fall into three main categories:

1. Saadeh’s links to Nazi Germany
2. Saadeh’s alleged infatuation with Hitler.
3. Saadeh’s duplication of Nazi symbols, discipline and Führerprinzip

The first theme in the image portrays Saadeh, impetuously, as the brainchild of the Third Reich. We are told that he lived and studied in Germany, which is why he was fluent in German, that he was on the Nazi payroll, and that he was set up by the Nazis to establish a party for them on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. Of course, none of this is true. Saadeh’s first visit to Germany occurred in 1938 and his fluency with the German language was autodidact.

The allegation that he was a contrivance of the Nazi regime is also remotely true. No evidence to that effect has ever turned up. Saadeh was cleared of the charge in a court of law in 1935 and again in 1939 upon his arrest in Brazil on trumped-up reports from Francophile Lebanese informants that he was a Nazi agent on a mission to promote German policies among the Syrian émigrés of South America. During interrogation, the Brazilian secret police raised the allegation with Saadeh in the form of a direct question: What is the relationship between your party and the Fascist Party in Italy and the Nazi Party in Germany? Saadeh answered:

There is absolutely no relationship between my party and the Nazi and Fascist parties. I established my party in my own country in 1932, one year before the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. On my way to Brazil last year, I stopped in Italy and Germany for two reasons. The first reason was to make contact with the international corridors of power in order to explain the cause of my country. In that time, I made several statements to the press in Berlin and Rome to that effect, as I did to the press in Brazil soon after I arrived here. The second reason was that my party’s branches in Rome and Berlin had sent me a formal request to visit them at the first opportunity. During my stay in Rome and Berlin, I met with officials from both governments and discussed many issues with them. However, I walked away from those meeting very disappointed because I learned that their regimes are bent on waging all-out war for the control of the whole world. I also learned that Germany intends to give Italy free reins in our country, which would mean a new colonization that is worse and more burdensome than the existing French and British colonial rule.

If any indication were to be found that Saadeh was a Nazi provocateur it would surely be in the Nazi archives. Here, too, the evidence is compelling. The archives contain no reports dating back to 1932, when Saadeh began his clandestine work. This is very suggestive because if there were to have been any contacts contact between Saadeh and the Germans they would most likely to have happened during this period. Then there is the oft-discussed matter of Saadeh’s brief visit to Berlin in 1938. This issue also does not stand up to serious scrutiny. To adjudge Saadeh as a Nazi based on a single brief visit to Berlin is to adjudge every politician who visited Berlin back then as a Nazi. This is both absurd and satirical. Saadeh did not visit Berlin in an official capacity. He was not invited to Germany by the Nazi leadership and he was not received as a foreign dignitary. Nonetheless, he managed to meet with Nazi leaders and to make statements to the German press concerning the purpose of his visit. Apparently, Saadeh did not get on with the Nazi leaders he met. He argued with them over ideology (in particular over the question of racial purity), and tried to portray Syria for them as a nation of great civilization on a par with Germany and other European countries.

Attaching to Saadeh the stigma of being a ‘Nazi’ because he visited Berlin or because he met with the Nazi leadership on a solitary occasion is logically absurd. Such meetings are neither wrong nor illegal in international diplomacy provided they are based on mutual respect whereby each party can strive after its objectives without compromising its beliefs or be compelled to adjust its policies for the sole purpose of the other party.

In relation to Saadeh’s alleged infatuation with Hitler, it is a perception that dominates the Western mind. Epithets such as ‘Saadeh was a Hitler admirer’; ‘Saadeh styled himself as the Fuhrer of the Syrian nation’; ‘Saadeh founded the SSNP inspired by Hitler’s ascent to power’; ‘Saadeh aimed at becoming the Hitler of the Middle East’ are rampant in Western journalistic and literary tradition. Yet, as absurd as they sound, these epithets can be addressed with common sense and simple logic:

1. Saadeh founded the SSNP in 1932, almost one year before Hitler’s ascent to power.
2. Not one document or letter or statement has ever turned up showing Saadeh bragging about Hitler or promoting Nazi dogmas.
3. Both Saadeh’s public declarations and private letters reveal a determined effort to steer the party (SSNP) away from the Axis powers.

Saadeh’s ‘Nazi’ image in the West is also built on certain formalistic features that are reiterated without elaboration: style of leadership, discipline, and the symbol of the Zawaba’a. Outwardly, Saadeh’s style of leadership can easily be construed as Hitler-like, but it is different from it both in nature and, more crucially, in the way it was conceived. Three points are worth noting in particular:

(1) Unlike Hitler, who indulged in absolute power and regarded absolutism as an article of faith, Saadeh saw absolute power more as a temporary evil that is useful and justifiable under specific and unique circumstances: e.g., in redeeming a society ripped apart by profound social and national divisions.

(2) Absolute leadership in Sa’adeh’s discourse is non-transmittal. It does not pass from one leader to another leader but ends with Saadeh himself and becomes largely symbolic. After Sa’adeh, the exercise of power does not pass to another leader solely but is shared by the institutions of the party.

(3) Unlike Hitler, Saadeh turned to absolute power as a matter of necessity, not choice. In contrast to Hitler’s Germany, whose state institutions were highly developed and its national identity reasonably balanced, Saadeh’s Syria was socially fragmented, its national identity eroded, and its institutions were primitive and under foreign occupation. Such conditions often require absolute power, at least as a temporary measure, to fix them.

When a New York-based Syrian newspaper, in the early 1940s, reported on the similarity between Saadeh’s dictatorship and that of Hitler, Saadeh retorted indignantly. He pointed to the difference between the SSNP and the NSDAP on a host of questions, and added:

Except in appearances, there is no similarity between the Leader of the SNP’s and the leader of the NSDAP’s monopoly on power. The reasons in each case are different, for the SNP Leader is a Mentor (Mu’alim), a legislator and a reformer who created the reformist nationalist call on his own with no outside help, his followers being more like disciples of his. His monopoly on power is meant only as a guarantee for the safety of his call and reforming effort. The case is different with the leader of the NSDAP who joined a party founded by a person other than himself. He held power in it and controlled it through his own personal ability and exploited the old racial doctrines to create intensive racial bigotry that won him support to further his effort to make war and conquer new territories. His goals were to expand his riches and his capabilities for aggrandizement that is known by the term Nach Osten.

What Saadeh calls for is totally different from any of these purposes relevant to the German aims, for the Leader of the SSNP did not establish his party to conquer neither the East nor the West nor to help any conquest of that kind or to propagate the superiority of the Aryan race. He did that to create indeed a sound nationalist feeling in Syria that will unite its people and enable it to defend the boundaries of its land and to set up a new social order that sets Syrian groups free from the tyranny of feudalism and the fear of poverty.

The accent on discipline is hardly an issue because discipline is not a distinctly Nazi feature. Centuries before Nazism, George Washington wrote: “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak and esteem to all.” Discipline was and still is a key element of parties at all points on the political spectrum. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, for example, elevated discipline to a very high level. Saadeh did the same thing not out of fascination for Nazism, as commonly suggested, but because the rod of discipline was deemed necessary as a countermeasure to the chaos and confusion rampant in his country.

The symbol of the Zawba’a is much more contentious and requires some teasing out. The Nazis appropriated the swastika as a symbol of Aryan purity, and the colours – red, white, and black – were the colours of the old North German Confederation flag. In contrast, the Zawba’a was developed locally as a symbol of Christian-Muslim unity through an artistic blending of the Cross and the Crescent. Reflecting a general desire for solidarity against sectarian division, the concept itself pre-dated the Zawba’a. For example, the mixed Muslim-Christian brigades established at the end of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman army hoisted a flag with a ‘Cross in the Crescent’ emblem.

It is worth noting here that the swastika is not an original Nazi symbol. It is an ancient symbol that has been used for over 3,000 years and artefacts such as pottery and coins from ancient Troy show that the swastika was a commonly used symbol as far back as 1000 BCE. During the following thousand years, the image of the swastika was used by many cultures around the world, including in China, Japan, India, Syria and southern Europe. By the Middle Ages, the swastika was a well-known, if not commonly used, symbol with different names – wan in China, Hakenkreuz in Germany, fylfot in England, and so on. Though it is not known for exactly how long, Native Americans have also long used the symbol of the swastika. As a derivative from the Sanskrit svastika (‘su’ meaning ‘good’, ‘asti’ meaning ‘to be’, and ‘ka’ as a suffix), the swastika was used by many cultures to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck. Likewise, in the conference of the Muslim-Christian Association in Palestine that convened in Jerusalem on 5 March 1919, the Arab flag was hoisted alongside a banner with a crescent enclosing a cross as a symbol of Muslim-Christian brotherhood. According to Tamir Sorek, the drive for a ‘Cross in the Crescent’ emblem reappeared in 1929 during an Arab Executive (AE) campaign for a distinctive Palestinian flag. This quest for an all-unifying emblem was the backdrop against which the symbol of the Zawba’a grew. It had nothing to do with the swastika or with mimicking the Nazis, as generally believed.

The point of this exercise is not to defend Saadeh or to illustrate how he differed from the Nazis. Rather, it is to demonstrate the absurdity and impracticality inherent in using formalistic symbols to judge Saadeh, or indeed anyone else for that matter, as a Nazi. In the real world, formalistic and organizational resemblance between political parties is unavoidable, as it is between one army and another and one parliamentary system and another. The resemblance does not necessarily imply that one is under the influence or submission of the other or that they share the same ideals and outlook on life.

These contradictions or inconsistencies belie efforts to subsume Saadeh under the rubric of Nazism. It appears that the factors that have impeded Western scholars from ascertaining the degree of support or refusal of Nazi tendencies among Arabs have been found to apply to Saadeh, too, but the evidence clearly does not support the allegation.