Erich Waldemar Bethmann: A Lifelong Servant of Truth

By Andrew I. Killgore

The man and the woman had traveled totally different paths before meeting in the late 1940s to discuss establishing an organization to improve understanding between the peoples of the Middle East and Americans. The result was the creation in 1951 of the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), which, with its successor organization, AMIDEAST, has helped sustain the reputation of America and Americans in the Middle East in the face of US government policies disliked by most of the area's people.

The woman was world-famous journalist Dorothy Thompson, widow of Nobel-prizewinning novelist Sinclair Lewis and longtime passionate advocate of a Jewish state in Palestine.

The man was Erich Waldemar Bethmann (pronounced "Bateman"), a Berlin-born Adventist minister fluent enough in Arabic to preach in that language in the 1920s and 1930s in Egypt, Jordan and Iraq. As a German national, Bethmann had been interned by the British army in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II.

When it was over, he chose in 1946 to emigrate to the US rather than return to the war-devastated and occupation-divided homeland he had left more than 20 years earlier. He then had to wait a further three years before being reunited with the wife and three children he had not seen for 10 years.

Promoting Better Understanding

Living in the US, Bethmann longed to use his linguistic skills and specialized knowledge to promote better understanding between Americans and Middle Easterners. In addition to his "German handicap," however, he was an "Arabist," a term originally intended to denote skill in the language and understanding of the history and culture of the Arabs, but to which a pro-Israel media in America had already begun to attach negative connotations.

When Bethmann first met Thompson he found her also deeply troubled by the human degradation she had witnessed in Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East. She found herself in a moral dilemma. She had placed her extraordinary written and spoken communication skills at the service of the creation of Israel, to which the refugees had now lost their lands and homes. She was beginning to see her duty as acknowledging Palestinian suffering, and bringing it to the attention of her fellow Americans.

She met and discussed fervently with Bethmann and others what might be done. The result was AFME, which used Thompson's famous name and the Middle East expertise of Bethmann and others to get started.

A Philosophical Look Back

Now retired in Washington at 87 years of age, Bethmann looks back philosophically on the vicissitudes of his life, almost as if he were commenting on the misfortunes of a third person.

Although he inherited a considerable estate from his mother, this was wiped out in Germany's ruinous inflation of the 1920s. Did he blame the onerous Versailles Treaty for the downfall of Germany's democratic Weimar Republic and his own financial loss? "No," he says. "That is only hindsight."

After graduating as a minister in 1927 from an Adventist college in Germany, he went to Cairo as a 23-year-old missionary, only to realize that he would have to learn Arabic to be effective. Two years of Arabic language study at the American University of Cairo followed, then four years preaching, mainly at Assiut in upper Egypt.

Reverend Bethmann confides that he was not very successful at "making new Adventists." He did, however, learn a lot about Arabs, Islam, Christianity in the Middle East and the Arabic language. This was distilled in his 1950 book, Bridge to Islam, published by the Southern Publishing Association of Nashville.

Bethmann continued his Christian ministry at Al-Husn and Irbid in Jordan from 1933 to 1936, and at Mosul and Baghdad in Iraq from 1936 to 1939. Increasingly, he found himself fascinated by the rich variety of religious and ethnic groups in Iraq. In a general comment on religious sects, including the Christian sects of East and West, he observes that many adherents are less attached to a particular dogma than to seeing themselves as "different" from others.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bethmann, along with other Germans, was interned in Baghdad by the British authorities. He was shipped off to India the same year and held there until 1946. With nothing much else to do, he taught himself Urdu and polished his French, English and Arabic so that, by the end of the war, he was fluent in five languages.

His Serbian-born wife, Zora, their five year-old daughter, and two older sons took refuge in Bavaria, where they spent the war years from 1939 to 1945. When the family was finally united, his daughter was 15 years old and the boys were grown men. Physically reunited, but divided by 10 years of separate existence, Zora and Erich Bethmann eventually were divorced.

From its headquarters in Washington, AFME established field offices across the Arab world and in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s. These engaged primarily in educational exchange, helping foreign students and professors find their way into the American higher educational system, and encouraging Americans to experience the Middle East at first hand. During AFME's period of growth, Erich Bethmann put his expertise to work in its Washington headquarters, and took great pride in the organization's increasing impact on all aspects of US-Middle East relations.

In 1967, however, under publisher Martin Peretz (now publisher of the New Republic magazine), the now-defunct Ramparts Magazine provoked an uproar, especially in the academic community, with an article charging that AFME was among a number of educational, labor and student organizations that received covert financial support from the Central Intelligence Agency. Subsequently, Bethmann retired, AFME cut its staff in half and changed its name to AMIDEAST, and the State Department and US Information Agency replaced the CIA covert support by contracting openly with the organization to conduct student counseling programs, as the number of foreign students in US universities passed the 100,000 mark.

Looking back on his own long experience in the Middle East, and to the painful emotional currents surrounding the Arab-Israel issue and other divisive problems in the area, Erich Bethmann describes without any hint of rancor the two categories of people he has known along the way. He divides people into those with truth as their guiding concern, such as Dorothy Thompson, and those who sacrifice truth to personal ambition or political goals. Still the same optimist who set out to "make more Adventists" 64 years ago, and who 24 years later created an organization to lower the barriers of ignorance dividing Americans and Middle Easterners, Bethmann is convinced that the first category, the truth servers, will always prevail. And so they probably will if, in the 21st century, human society is capable of "making more Erich Bethmanns."

Andrew L Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.