Hans Bodo Gerhardt Wehr (; 5 July 1909,

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

24 May 1981,

Münster Münster (; nds, Mönster) is an independent city (''Kreisfreie Stadt'') in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also a state distr ...

) was a German

Arabist An Arabist is someone, often but not always from outside the Arab world, who specialises in the study of the Arabic language and culture (usually including Arabic literature). Origins Arabists began in medieval Muslim Spain, which lay on the ...

. A professor at the

University of Münster The University of Münster (german: Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, WWU) is a public university, public research university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. With more than 43,000 students and over ...

from 1957–1974, he published the ''Arabisches Wörterbuch'' (1952), which was later published in an English edition as '' A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic'', edited by

J Milton Cowan J Milton Cowan (February 22, 1907 – December 20, 1993) was an American linguist. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Cowan was the son of a butcher, who, hesitating between the first names James and John when the boy was born, decided to give him nei ...

. For the dictionary Wehr created a transliteration scheme to represent the Arabic alphabet. The latest edition of the dictionary was published in 1995 and is Arabic–German only. Wehr joined the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...

in 1940, and wrote an essay arguing that the German government should ally with "the Arabs" against England and France. The dictionary project was funded by the Nazi government, which intended to use it to translate

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...

's ''

Mein Kampf (; ''My Struggle'' or ''My Battle'') is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germ ...

'' into Arabic.

References

1909 births 1981 deaths Linguists from Germany German Arabists German orientalists University of Münster faculty Writers from Leipzig 20th-century linguists {{germany-linguist-stub