This is a difficult question to answer for two reasons. Firstly, drawing connections to the Third Reich is a common delegitimization tactic for a highly politically charged topic. There is a lot of faulty history that magnifies tangential connections into lines of strong continuity, often to the detriment of studying this topic. Secondly, Arab nationalism was not a monolithic bloc. There were multiple Arab nationalist movements and their differences could be quite stark; an Arab nationalist in Egypt is different than one in Syria or Iraq. The colonial status of most of the Arab world in the interwar period compounded this complexity as nationalist movements had to define a nation that really did not exist in a formal sense, but were in a state in which foreign powers exerted great control. This makes parsing out the impact of either National Socialism or fascism in general a difficult process.

In general, the unification of Germany in 1871 and its rise to a world power made Germany a model for many aspiring nationalist activists around the world. The rise of Germany from a disjointed entity into a singular powerful nation-state was an attractive narrative for these activists to emulate. The rise of Hitler, who seemingly had transformed a defeated Germany into a world power added further to this German mystique. Hitler's self-conscious emphasis upon the modernity of his Third Reich and its propaganda focusing upon the national unity of an awakened German people also drew in a number of non-German nationalists. In the Arab world, many nationalist groups like Young Egypt were influenced by the paramilitary style and leadership cult of both fascism and National Socialism. However, aping the style of a political movement is not the same as accepting its ideology. National Socialist racialism, an essential component of the NSDAP's ideology, gained little traction within these intellectual circles and many Arab nationalists explicitly rejected biological racism in their writings. Mīshāl 'Aflaq, one of the intellectual founders of Ba'athism was always very explicit that Arab nationalism was native grown and was not borrowing foreign concepts. 'Aflaq himself is a curious case of an intellectual who borrowed from many different intellectual trends within Europe, including fascism, and made something relatively unique. The main influence of National Socialism upon the embryonic Ba'athist though in the 1940s was a close connection between the idea of an eternal Arab nation whose antithesis was the anti-nationalism of communism. 'Aflaq would speak highly of German philosophy in the 1944 when he and his collaborator Salah al-Din al-Bitar wrote German philosophy:

was the correction for the influence of materialist philosophy on us. It protected us against the deceptions of the abstract thought on which socialism is based, and which is the negation of the fundamentals of nationalism.

What this statement shows is that many nationalist intellectuals in the Arab world approached European thought highly selectively, appropriating ideas and concepts that seemed both topical and fit immediate needs.

Although it is very difficult to assess public opinion or even the motivation of these activists, there are some indications that the appeal of Nazism was very thin. Most of the Arab public treated the outbreak of the war with a relative indifference. Although there was a widespread disenchantment with the Mandate system and European intrusions into the running of the state, there were no major mass uprisings to take advantage of Britain and France's preoccupation with affairs on the continent. The closest to a pro-Axis revolt was in Iraq in 1941when Rashid Ali al-Gaylani led a military coup against the pro-British monarchy. The Germans extended al-Gaylani some material support, but the problem of distance and the relative weakness of the coup itself led to the swift defeat of al-Gaylani. Surveys of newspapers and the writings of other intellectuals, who were often at the vanguard of these nationalist movements, often show that they perceived the advance of the fascist nations as yet another expansive European power. Some intellectuals in Egypt would actually use the crimes of fascism like the Holocaust as evidence that the moral superiority that justified European imperialism was a myth.

The name most closely associated with the Arab world and the Third Reich is the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. He was a figure very strongly associated with Palestinian independence movements and fought both against the British and the Zionists. After the failure of the Iraq revolt in 1941, al-Husseini ended in Europe and worked for the German propaganda machine. the Mufti styled himself as a leader for the Arab world and made numerous anti-Jewish statements. Now al-Husseini very much fits into the mold of being a bad man and a fool, but looking beyond his propaganda broadcasts there was a discernible desperation for the Third Reich to recognize the cause of Arab independence and place him at the head of it. This was a step that Hitler was unwilling to make. He helped in the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims in the SS Handschar Division, but he was often quite frustrated that the Germans did not put much weight behind his efforts and the Handschar was not used to fight for Arab independence.

The pathetic case of al-Husseini's activities within Germany were emblematic of the Third Reich's relationship to Arab nationalism as a whole. The Third Reich's overall strategic goals and racialist ideology were fundamentally incomparable with that of Arab nationalists over the long term. Some individuals like al-Gaylani tried to breach this gap, but found that the Third Reich approached these efforts with a mixture of indifference and opportunism. Other Arab nationalist movements sought to emulate certain elements of the Third Reich, but rejected others. Still other nationalists used the example of the Hitler's crimes as part of a larger condemnation of the West's purported moral superiority. The diversity of the Arab nationalism in the interwar period belies a simple answer.

Sources

Gershoni, I., and James P. Jankowski. Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship Versus Democracy in the 1930s. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Nicosia, Francis R. Nazi Germany and the Arab World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Nordbruch, Götz. Nazism in Syria and Lebanon: The Ambivalence of the German Option, 1933-1945. London: Routledge, 2009.