Allied-occupied Iran was also to be drawn into the Axis camp, possibly by the means of an uprising. The possibility of Iran as an anti-Soviet bastion was already considered in the 1930s, and coincided with Hitler's declaration of Iran as an "Aryan state" (the name "Iran" literally means "homeland of the Aryans" in Persian). The changing of Persia's name to Iran in 1935 was done by the Shah at the suggestion of the German ambassador to Iran as an act of "Aryan solidarity". However the Iranians had always called their country "Iran", a name that predated the rise of Nazi Germany by more than a thousand years. On the eve of World War II Germany was already Iran's single-biggest trading partner, followed by the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the United States.