Iran declares war on Germany

On 9 September 1943 Iran declared war on Germany. That morning the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, signed a decree (farman) to that effect, and the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, approved the decision of Prime Minister Ali Soheili’s government. According to telegrams from the American legation in Tehran, published in the State Department’s collection of diplomatic documents, 73 of the 77 deputies present voted for the declaration of war. Iran did not send a single soldier to any front, and no one expected it to. The gesture was political: a country that had been occupied by foreign troops for two years was becoming a formal ally of the powers occupying it, and qualified to join the United Nations.

A country under occupation

Until August 1941 Iran had been neutral, but it maintained close economic ties with Germany, and several thousand German specialists were working in the country. After Germany attacked the USSR, Britain and the Soviet Union demanded their expulsion, and when the government procrastinated, on 25 August 1941 they invaded Iran. The resistance of the Iranian army collapsed within a few days. In mid-September Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom the British regarded as a German sympathiser, abdicated in favour of his twenty-one-year-old son. The country was divided into zones: the Red Army occupied the north, the British the south, with its oilfields and ports on the Persian Gulf, while Tehran remained formally under the authority of the Iranian government. The German legation was closed, and most of the Germans living in Iran were expelled or interned.

On 29 January 1942 Iran, Britain and the USSR concluded a treaty of alliance in Tehran, signed on Iran’s behalf by Soheili, then foreign minister. London and Moscow undertook to respect Iran’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence, to defend it against aggression and to withdraw their troops no later than six months after the end of the war with Germany and its allies. Iran placed its railways, roads, ports and communications at their disposal. The treaty did not oblige Iran to take part in the war, and its army was to serve only to maintain internal order.

The Persian Corridor

The occupation had one overriding purpose: to open a supply route to the embattled Soviet Union. The Arctic route was dangerous, and after Japan entered the war the Pacific was open only to ships under the Soviet flag. The most reliable route became the Persian Corridor: from ports on the Persian Gulf such as Khorramshahr and Bandar Shahpur, cargoes went north by the Trans-Iranian Railway and new roads to the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus. From 1942 the Americans took over the development and operation of the route. Their Persian Gulf Command under General Donald Connolly numbered some 30,000 men in 1943, who ran trains, assembled lorries and aircraft in Iranian factories and built ports. By various calculations between a quarter and nearly half of the tonnage of American Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union passed through Iran.

By the same route, across the Caspian Sea, some 115,000 soldiers and civilians left the Soviet Union in 1942 with General Władysław Anders’s army. Thousands of Polish refugees, many of them orphans, lived for years in Tehran and Isfahan. For the Iranians themselves the war meant soaring prices, requisitions of food and transport, and famine. In December 1942 bread riots broke out in Tehran, and governments changed every few months.

German agents and pro-German officers

Germany had not given up on Iran. Several agents were in hiding in the country, among them Franz Mayr, who built up a network of contacts among politicians and officers in Tehran, and the Abwehr officer Berthold Schulze-Holthus, who was living among the nomadic Qashqai in the south. In 1943 small groups of German saboteurs were parachuted into Qashqai territory with orders to attack the supply route. Their activities achieved nothing of significance, but the British took them very seriously, because sympathy for Germany – which in the eyes of many Iranians had no colonial past in the region – was strong in the country.

British intelligence regarded General Fazlollah Zahedi, commander of the garrison in Isfahan, as the most dangerous of the pro-German officers. According to the British he was preparing an uprising that was to break out as the Wehrmacht approached the Caucasus, and was speculating in grain during the famine. At the end of 1942 he was arrested in his own office by the British officer Fitzroy Maclean, who later described the operation in his memoirs, and Zahedi was interned in Palestine until the end of the war. In August 1943 the British captured Franz Mayr in Tehran, and documents found on him led to the arrest of further Iranian politicians and officers. The network of German influence in Iran had in practice been broken a few weeks before the declaration of war.

The decision of 9 September

Soheili’s government, formed in February 1943, pressed for a declaration of war on Germany for several reasons. After the defeat at Stalingrad, the expulsion of the Axis from Africa and the surrender of Italy, there was no doubt who would win the war. Iran wanted to sit among the victors rather than among the occupied countries, and to have a voice in shaping the post-war order. Joining the United Nations, which required a state of war with the Axis powers and adherence to the declaration of 1 January 1942, was to strengthen the guarantees of its independence and make it easier to get foreign troops out after the war. Tehran was counting above all on the United States, which alone among the great powers had no colonial interests in Iran and had been sending military, financial and police advisers there since 1942.

The declaration of war did not change the military situation. Germany could not attack Iran, and Iran had no intention of fighting. Immediately afterwards the Iranian minister in Washington approached the State Department about the country’s adherence to the Declaration by United Nations, which gave Iran a place in the coalition and later the status of one of the founding members of the UN.

Significance

The declaration of war on Germany completed Iran’s transformation from a neutral state suspected of sympathy for the Reich into a formal member of the anti-Hitler coalition. Within a few weeks it became clear how much that coalition needed Iranian territory. From 28 November to 1 December 1943 Joseph Stalin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Tehran, having chosen the Iranian capital as a city Stalin could reach without in practice leaving the zone controlled by the Red Army. Soviet intelligence later claimed to have foiled a German plot to assassinate the Big Three, but historians regard this story, known as Operation Long Jump, as largely invented. The host, the young Shah, did not take part in the talks. The Big Three did, however, issue a declaration in which they acknowledged Iran’s help in the war, promised it economic assistance and affirmed their wish to preserve its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

These assurances were put to the test immediately after the war. The British and Americans withdrew their troops on time, but the Soviet Union dragged its feet and backed separatists in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. The Red Army left Iran only in May 1946, after Tehran complained to the UN Security Council – an organisation to which Iran had belonged from the outset thanks to the decision of September 1943. The Iran crisis became one of the first clashes of the Cold War. The war years also shaped the men who were to rule Iran after the war. General Zahedi, interned by the British as a German sympathiser, in 1953, with the backing of those same British and of the Americans, overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and took his office himself, while the Shah, in 1943 a ruler in name only, became for a quarter of a century the sole master of the country.