Beginning in 1933, the Nazi leadership in Germany made efforts to increase their influence in Iran, and they financed and managed a racist journal, Iran-e Bastan, co-edited by a pro-Nazi Iranian, Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Seif. This and other chauvinistic publications in the 1930s were popular among Iranian elites; they "highlighted the past and the pre-Islamic glories of the Persian nation and blamed the supposedly 'savage Arabs and Turks' for the backwardness of Iran."[34] In Iran: