the early 1930s, Reza Shah or the elder Reza Pahlavi's economic ties with Nazi Germany began worrying the Allied states. Germany's modern state and economy highly impressed the Shah, and there were hundreds of Germans involved in every aspect of the state from setting up factories to building roads, railroads and bridges. In 1936, the Hitler cabinet declared Iranians to be immune to the Nuremberg Laws, as they were considered to be "pure Aryans". Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian junior diplomat, tried to save many Persian Jews from extermination by convincing many Nazi officials to leave them alone. Sardari was stationed in Paris at the time of the Nazi occupation. His efforts led the Nazis to issue a directive that Iranian Jews should be exempt from wearing the yellow star of David. It is said that Sardari gave out between 500 and 1,000 Iranian passports, without the consent of his superiors. His actions are believed to have saved 2,000 to 3,000 Jewish lives, as passports were issued for entire families. In 1939, Germany provided Iran with the so-called German Scientific Library. The library contained over 7500 books selected "to convince Iranian readers... of the kinship between the National Socialist Reich and the Aryan culture of Iran". In various pro-Nazi publications, lectures, speeches, and ceremonies, parallels were drawn between the Shah and Hitler, and praises were given to the charisma and the virtue of the Führerprinzip. For many decades, Iran and Germany had cultivated ties, partly as a counter to the imperial ambitions of Britain and Russian (later the Soviet Union). Trading with the Germans appealed to Iran because they did not have a history of imperialism in the region, unlike the British and the Russians. From 1939 to 1941, Iran's top foreign trade partner (nearly 50% of its total trade) was Germany, which helped Iran in opening modern sea and air communications with the rest of the world. Demands from the Allies for the expulsion of German residents in Iran, mostly workers and diplomats, were refused by the Shah. A British embassy report in 1940, estimated that there were almost 1,000 German nationals in Iran. According to Iran's Ettelaat newspaper, there were actually 690 German nationals in Iran (out of a total of 4,630 foreigners, including 2,590 British). Jean Beaumont estimates that "probably no more than 3,000" Germans actually lived in Iran, but they were believed to have a disproportionate