So this might fit more in /r/badhistory, but I'm posting here because I'm hoping for some sources. I recently went to a lecture entitled, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World during the Holocaust and It's aftereffects and Echoes in Recent Years. It's a really terrible name, and the lecture was equally awful. Among the lecturer's claims was the notion that all modern Islamic anti-semitism descended from Nazi propaganda through the influence of such individuals as Amin Al-Husseini, and that the Soviet Union was the sole aggressor of the Cold War, and had morally failed, and thus was responsible for modern day bigotry, by supporting Israel's enemies such as Egypt and Iran.
Point is, it was bad. However, one point the lecturer made was that sometime in the 1930's a turkish boy had been expelled from the Hitler Youth. After complaining to his father, who then complained to the embassy, the Nazi party decided to officially revise their policies regarding race. They renounced anti-semitism and decided that their policies were going to be distinctly anti-Jewish, not anti-semitic, so as not to offend any potential arab allies. The boy was invited back to the Hitler Youth, happily rejoined and from then on the official stance of the Nazis was that semites were ok, so long as they weren't jews. Now, I don't know if any of this is true or not. The rest of his lecture makes me suspect, especially considering how much effort he put into trying to tie Naziism to Arabs, and it does seem a little unbelievable, especially considering turks are not semites. I've never heard about this event before, and I have spent a while searching around for any references to it but can find nothing. Can anyone clarify whether this event actually happened or not, and if it did I'd greatly appreciate any sources.
You seem to have misunderstood Jeffrey Herf's argument, there was no question of "renouncing antisemitism" as the Nuremberg racial laws never used that term, they instead used the word "Jews" throughout. There are two Nuremberg laws that are rerlevant: the "Reichsbürgergesetz" that determined that only those with German or "related" blood could be "Reichsbürger" or citizens of the Reich, all the others were merely "state subjects"; and the "Law on the Protection of (German) Blood" that prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and those of German blood or related.
The incident with the son of a Turkish officer and a German woman really happened, and it was the result of an overzealous interpretation of the laws. This sparked a diplomatic furore that involved not only Turkey, but Egypt, Iran, and other states. They wanted to be assured that their blood was not lumped in with Jewish blood and ideally wanted to be classified as "related" to German-blooded people. The former they were assured of, the latter was diplomatically avoided.
All this is based on extensive research by Jeffrey Herf in the Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry, where the frantic letters back and forth in this game of damage control are kept, as the Germans did not want to alienate their potential allies.
One area in which critics have taken issue with Herf's work is in the extent to which he blames Nazi propaganda for post-war Arab antisemitism and anti-zionism.
Source: Herf, Jeffrey. Nazi propaganda for the Arab world. Yale University Press, 2009.