He is best known for his work on A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, originally published in German as Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart in 1952.

[1] He joined the Nazi Party in 1940, and wrote an essay arguing that Germany should ally with the Arabs against Great Britain and France.

He had begun work on an Arabic–German dictionary, and the project received funding from the German government, which intended to use make use of the dictionary in translating Mein Kampf into Arabic.

[2] His dictionary, entitled Arabisches Wörterbuch für die Schriftsprache der Gegenwart, was eventually published in 1952.

An English version, edited by J Milton Cowan and entitled A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, was published in 1961.