But Reza Shah’s affection for the Nazis had other deep roots, too. An emperor setting out to do nothing less than establish a dynasty, he was by necessity a practical statesman. He wanted, needed, to be on the side that was winning. In the opening years of the war, the Nazis had not only blitzkrieged across Europe, but seemed poised to take control of the Middle East. The Reich’s far-reaching talons were firmly hooked into Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Syria. Waves of German paratroopers had dropped like mythic omnipotent gods from the sky to seize the oilfields and refineries at Mosul, in Northern Iraq. And the Afrika Korps was still on the march. It seemed inevitable that their panzers would roll victoriously through Palestine, Egypt, and Iran as the unstoppable battalions rumbled towards India. Reza Shah was convinced he was backing the winning side.”

Nazi paratroopers dropping in and taking over oil fields. Sounds fucking awesome.

Iran in the Nazi New Order, 1933–1941 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iranian-studies/article/abs/iran-in-the-nazi-new-order-19331941/2E6C02ADD1DD333DB11CC5482F21FA5C

Despite a succession of scholarly studies over the years, the relationship between Reza Shah’s Iran and National Socialist Germany has not been fully explored. Rather than focusing on the supposed Aryan ideological sympathies that bound the two countries together, this article argues that the real driver of the German–Iranian relationship in the 1930s was economic and based in the mutual interaction of state economic initiatives. It states that Iran’s place in Nazism’s economic system was the outcome of two factors: the “New Plan” of Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, and its focus on clearing agreements as a motor for depression-era trade, and the connections of Schacht’s system to Reza Shah’s strategy to modernize Iran. In exploring this issue the article focuses on relations between Germany and Iran during three distinct moments: first, the period from 1918 to 1928 and the working out of a new relationship after the First World War; secondly the period of Schacht’s New Plan in Iran in the mid-1930s; and finally the period from the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to the British–Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941. During this last period Iran both belonged to the Nazi–Soviet trade zone created by the Pact and attempted to defend its neutrality.