Lyn Julius
Germans and Nazis in the Middle East

Lyn Julius - Germans and Nazis in the Middle East

- On the morning of the 31st of October, 1898, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II was preparing to enter the city of Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. He wanted to do so riding on a horse, followed by his vehicle escorts in order to present a potent image of a historical moment in Germany’s foreign relations. And here is the Kaiser on the left, dressed as an Ottoman officer. The Ottoman authorities breached the old city wall right next to the Jaffa Gate, so that the Kaiser could enter with his vehicle escorts. Until today, this opening in the wall is used as a car entrance into the old city. During his trip, he visited Saladin’s Tomb in Damascus and symbolically laid this bronze laurel wreath. Saladin was the great hero of the Arabs who defeated the Crusaders. The Kaiser’s trip led to an agreement for Germany to build the Ottoman Empire’s railways. The German Orient Bank was established. Its founders were the Jewish bankers Gutmann, as well as Deutsche Bank in Istanbul. The Young Turks Revolution was led by German-trained young officers, and German unification was a model for emerging nation states. 20 years later, the allies entered Damascus in triumph, after defeating the Ottomans and their German allies in World War I. Lawrence of Arabia sent the wreath as a war trophy to London, where it is still on display at the Imperial War Museum. But back in 1898, just 30 years after the unification of Germany, the Kaiser was keen to cement an alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Germany’s relationship with the Turks and then the Arabs and Muslims culminated in a Nazi-Arab alliance. And some argue that the path leading to Hitler’s 1941 meeting with the Mufti of Jerusalem, which you see here, began with the Kaiser’s visit to the Levant. And one can also argue that there is a direct link between the Nazi era and the genocidal ideology of Hamas, as we saw the 7th of October.

It’s not easy to define what we mean by Nazis in the Middle East. Few would’ve been card-carrying members of the Nazi party in the strict sense of the term. In the Middle East, we find Germans, we find pro-German Arabs and Muslims. We find Italian fascists, pro-Nazi Vichy French. We even find Nazi boots on the ground, for instance, in Tunisia, which came under German occupation for six months in 1942. We find Nazi sympathisers, collaborators and Nazi-inspired ideologues, and we find actual Nazis or ex-Nazis. The topic is huge. German involvement in the Middle East begins with Max von Oppenheim. He was an advisor on Muslim affairs who accompanied the Kaiser. He was as enchanted by the Middle East as the Kaiser was. Kaiser Wilhelm dreamt of being an Oriental potentate, and von Oppenheim was a German Lawrence of Arabia, captivated by the romance of the East. von Oppenheim’s objective was to launch a German-backed Jihad or Holy War to subvert Germany’s rivals. Born in 1860, Max von Oppenheim descended from the Jewish banking family. His love affair with the East began when he met the charismatic prophet Sayyed al-Gaylani from Persia. And the name al-Gaylani might ring a bell with you, because his descendant Rashid Ali al-Gaylani was to launch a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941. von Oppenheim was also inspired by the Mehdi who ruled Sudan for 13 years.

The Mehdi had set up a caliphate and was leading a Jihad against the British until his defeat at the Battle of Omdurman. von Oppenheim, like Lawrence of Arabia, was based in Cairo. He wanted Germany to use a pan-Islamic movement to inspire Muslim revolutions in enemy colonies in the event of a European war. And that war came to pass in 1914. Russia and Britain were so alarmed at Germany’s strategy that they made an alliance. If you ever read the book “Greenmantle” by John Buchan, you would recall that the protagonist Richard Hannay, is sent to investigate a German conspiracy to seize the Middle East as a base to conquer Europe. One might assume that stirring hatred amongst the Muslims would inevitably inspire mass murder. von Oppenheim supported Ottoman repression of Armenians and Jews. The Turks murdered a million Armenians and Thracians in 1915, and the Turkish governor of Jaffa, Djemal Pasha, expelled thousands of Jews from Palestine in 1917. Was this a prelude to their extermination, one might ask? So was there German complicity with the Armenian genocide? Did the Armenian and Assyrian genocides during World War I become so acceptable that they paved the way for the Holocaust against the Jews during World War II? Barry Rubin, in his book, “Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, which I have here, says that, “Hitler would draw a lesson on the uses of genocide.”

He writes, “The deep German complicity in the mass murder of the Armenians, set a precedent. German officials were aware of these killings and other war crimes, hid them from the public eye, often justified them and never acted to stop or reduce their scope, though they could easily have done so.” The Ottoman War effort in Palestine during World War I was often led by German officers and their military successes like Gallipoli or the siege at Kut, can be attributed to German officers. For instance, the German general, Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein helped direct the Ottoman army in World War I, and he was followed by Erich von Falkenhayn, a Prussian officer who served as the chief of staff of the German army and the commander of the Turkish, Austrian and German troops during the critical year of 1917. The owlish and school-masterly Prussian general, Field Marshall Colmar von Der Golz, who’s on the left here, fought the British in Iraq. And the British suffered 23,000 casualties at Kut, which was besieged for six months. And Otto Liman von Sanders commanded the Ottoman army against General Allenby in Palestine. He had 40 German officers under him. He masterminded the charge at Gallipoli, the famous victory against the allies in 1915. General Hans von Seeckt was the last Ottoman chief of staff and the first of the Weimar Republic. As we know, the Germans support of Jihad failed, the Ottomans and the Germans were defeated in World War I and the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The British successfully raised an Arab revolt against the Turks, and they won over Sharif Hussein of the Hejaz in Arabia with bribes and promises of territory, Germany could only offer continued submission to Ottoman rule, but Germany could cast itself as the true patron of the Muslims and the Arabs, the champion of the downtrodden. And because it did not have colonies itself, Germany posed as an opponent to British, French and Italian colonialism. Germany’s Jihadist legacy endured.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, so did the Caliphate. The Caliphate being this sort of global Islamic state ruled by one man, the Caliph. But the Caliphate collapsed with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and it caused a great deal of anxiety amongst the believing Muslims. German strategy capitalised on the search for a replacement for the Ottoman Caliphate. von Oppenheim set up independence committees and societies. They continued into the interwar years. The Caliphate movement in India would eventually lead to the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state. The Islamist movement in Egypt led to the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. More about him later. Not only did Germany’s Jihadist strategy endure, but most of the same individuals would be involved in World War II. It is thought that 100 experts and padres who knew the Middle East well were active during the Nazi era. To give just one example, this gentleman on the screen, Wilhelm Hindensatz. He was a pilot during World War I. He converted to Islam. He took the name of the great leader of Abbasid Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid. He commanded Ottoman machine gun units, and he later waged wars in Central Asia. Hindensatz would become the main contact between the Reich and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. And due to his closeness to the Mufti, he was seen as the perfect choice to lead a Muslim division in Bosnia, working together with the 13th Waffen Mountain division of the SS Handschar during World War II. As for pro-Nazi Arabs, well, we can talk about quite a few of them, but probably the most prominent was the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. He was born in 1895, and during World War I, he was an Ottoman officer with strong ties to the Germans. At first, he fought to suppress Arab nationalism, but switched sides fighting with the British and the Arab nationalists. The British-backed Emir Faisal was defeated by the French at the Battle of Maysalun in Syria, so died the dream of a pan-Arab kingdom centred on Damascus.

Faisal was given the consolation prize of the throne of Iraq. After his brief flirtation with the allies, the Mufti did not follow Faisal into Iraq, but cast himself as a pan-Arabist, Syrian, Palestinian nationalist and Islamist. He had no competition. As we know, the British made a grave mistake in 1921 when they appointed Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti is really the man who introduced ideological hatred of the Jews into the Arab world. The Jews became the epitome of evil, and his legacy is arguably still with us today. Soon he was the nearest thing to a leader of the Arab world. As soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, the Mufti made overtures to set up an Arab-Nazi alliance. The Nazis were at first reluctant, because they weren’t really sure if it was worth making an alliance with the Arabs. And because the Arabs were technically of an inferior race, untermensch. But towards the end of the 1930s, they realised that an Arab uprising could be useful against the British and the French. And so the Aryans became what I call honorary Aryans. What about Nazi-inspired ideologies in the Arab world? Well, there there was a fascination with race-based superiority, an admiration for German discipline, Prussian militarism, strength and violence. The added attraction was that the Germans were anti-colonialist and increasingly anti-Zionist. Shocked at the abolition of the Caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. It was rooted in the Ottoman-German Jihad. The Nazis financed many of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities. And there is evidence that Hassan al-Banna was actually a German spy. The Muslim Brotherhood promoted violence against Jews and Copts in the 1930s in Egypt.

Like Nazism itself, the Muslim Brotherhood was a reactive movement. It harped back to an earlier era of Islamic pride and glory. It was anti-modernity and who were the main agents of modernity, but the Jews. And so, Nazi antisemitism fitted neatly into their worldview. The Muslim Brotherhood absorbed the conspiracy theories of the forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which was translated into Arabic in 1925. The Muslim Brotherhood glorified violence, and by 1945, they had a million men under arms. Now the Jews became the epitome of evil. And this was a departure from the traditional Islamic view of the Jews. The Jews had actually been defeated and were not important in the seventh century, but we still have this kind of legacy today, because the Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of Hamas, of al-Nusra, of al-Qaeda, of ISIS, Boko Haram, et cetera. There was also a Nazi-inspired secular ideologies. For instance, the secular nationalist parties in the Arab world were also inspired by Nazism. Arab intellectuals saw a united Germany as a model for a United Arab nation. The Syrian Socialist National Party was partly influenced by Nazi ideas of racial superiority. And this party still exists today in Syria and Lebanon. Samir Al-Dundi of the Syrian Ba'ath Party, that was another ultranationalist party, said, “We were racists. We admired the Nazis.” The Ba'ath Party Ideologue Michel Aflaq said, “Party members must be imbued with a hatred until death towards individuals who embody any idea contrary to Arab nationalism. An idea opposed to ours is the incarnation of individuals who must be exterminated.” Strong stuff. After the British had double-crossed the Emir Hussein by reneging on their promise to make his son, Faisal, king of Syria at the centre of a pan-Arab kingdom, the main focus of pan-Arabism shifted to Iraq and strident Syrian ultranationalists, such as Sati al-Husri entered Iraq with King Faisal.

Sati al-Husri wanted to turn Iraq into the Prussia of Arab nations. And al-Husri engaged in vicious antisemitism, doing his best to undermine Iraq’s first finance minister, the Jew, Sir Sassoon Eskell. There was a rising tide of pro-Nazi feeling in Iraq in the 1930s. And my mother tells the story of her gardener who lived at the bottom of the garden of the family home, when his new baby was born, she asked him what was his name? And the gardener said, “Hitler”. And whether he said that spite the Jewish family he worked for, or whether it was the baby’s actual name, we will never know. But this testifies to the fact that presumably illiterate gardeners in Iraq had heard of Hitler and that he was a popular figure and still remains popular today in Arab countries. Like for instance, Hitler Tantawy is an Egyptian diplomat. Arab nationalism in Iraq, Sati al-Husri founded the Nationalist Muthanna Club. And this was the wellspring of Arab nationalism in Iraq. It was subsidised by the Germans. And from this club sprang the ringleaders of the wartime Farhud Massacre. And this was a cataclysmic event in which almost 200 Jews were murdered in 1941. We will actually never know exactly how many were murdered. Some people say 600 or even 1,000. People were raped and mutilated. There was terrible looting. It was almost a carbon copy of the 7th of October, or rather the 7th of October was a carbon copy of the Farhud. Al-Husri was later joined by the Syrian, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, who fought in the 1948 war against Israel and other virulent antisemites. Sati al-Husri promoted Arab nationalism through education in Iraqi schools. The teaching of Hebrew was banned and the school curriculum was Nazified. So Sami Shawkat succeeded Sati al-Husri as Director General of Education, and he founded the Futuwwah Youth Movement, which was a paramilitary group modelled on the Hitler youth.

They held torchlight processions and were even invited to the Nuremberg rallies. Berlin sponsored large numbers of Iraqis to study in Germany. All secondary students had to wear the Futuwwah uniform. There were other shirts brigades modelled on the Hebrew youth in the Middle East, the green-shirted, Young Egypt, the brown-shirted, Lebanese Youth Group, and the Syrian Young Shirt Brigade, and all promoted militarism. Shawkat had two brothers who were government ministers. He liked to ride around on a white horse. He is best known for his 1933 lecture, “The Profession of Death”, and that’s one of the most famous texts of Arab nationalism. “There is something more important than money and learning for preserving the honour of a nation and for keeping humiliation at bay,” he wrote, he stated, “That is strength. Strength, as I use the word here, means to excel in the profession of death.” Fritz Grobba played a leading role furthering German interests in Iraq, although he was never a member of the Nazi party. Grobba is Abborg backwards. He was a German career diplomat who spoke Turkish and Arabic. He was appointed as ambassador to Baghdad in 1932. He set up a network of spies and agents and sent nubile German girls to seduce politicians. He serialised an Arabic version of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. And soon the German radio began to broadcast propaganda in Arabic from southern Italy. Of course, there were German spies all over the place, not just in Iraq. Trudy mentioned the German Templars in Palestine, who were spies, but there were German spies in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Libya as well. The Nazis financed the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mufti’s Arab Revolt of 1936-39. The aim was to encourage an Arab uprising. They frequently spoke of Arab nationalism out of ousting the British from the Middle East. In April, 1939, the first German radio station broadcasting in several languages, including Arabic, was opened in the town of Zeesen, south of Berlin.

The most powerful of shortwave transmitters, Radio Berlin, under the direction of Yunus Bahri reached the entire Arab Middle East and North Africa. Bahri’s catchphrase was, “This is Berlin, Long Live the Arabs.” The broadcasts are thought to have had a considerable effect on public opinion. Arabs gathered in coffee houses to listen to Radio Berlin, while Jews preferred the BBC. The effect of Nazi incitement on a mainly illiterate and easily swayed Arab population cannot be discounted. Yunus Bahri was a very interesting character. He was an Iraqi journalist who claimed to have met Hitler in 1931. Constantly on the move, he was a man of many guises. He was reputed to have had 15 nationalities, been married 100 times and fathered 100 children. He spent the war years in Berlin, and from 1953, he worked for the Cairo Propaganda Station, The Voice of the Arabs. And this would also broadcast in Persian, Kurdish, and Turkish. What about Nazi sympathisers? Well, for many Arabs, supporting the Nazis was a practical anti-colonial alliance against the British and the French and the Jews were seen as collaborators with the colonialists. People generally believed that the Nazis would win the war in 1941 and into 1942, and they wanted to back the winning side. And by the way, the was poised to move into the Levant to implement the final solution against the Jews living there. But the Mufti was not just against the British and the French, because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I mean, he was not just pro the Germans for that reason.

He was an ideological antisemite, and he would’ve stopped at nothing to kill the Jews wherever he found them as he exhorted Arabs on the radio. And this was proved positive that his anti-Zionism of the 1920s had spilled over into outright antisemitism. And most Arabs across the Middle East and even in North Africa wanted the Nazis to win the war. Throughout the Middle East, public opinion was mostly pro-German. The Mufti himself spent two years in Iraq after 1939. He arrived with 400 anti-Jewish, Syrian and Palestinian supporters. He backed a pro-Nazi military coup by four military officers called the Golden Square. The pro-Nazi government was led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, and it was the only Arab regime to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany and declare war against the British. The British forced the Mufti into exile, but not before he had primed the Arabs of the capital together with defeated returning troops to unleash the Farhud Massacre of 1941, which I mentioned earlier. And the victims of this massacre were the Jews of Iraq. Four days before the Farhud, Yunus Bahri made a poisonous broadcast inciting murder of the Jews from the Nazi radio station at Zeesen. And there is now a respectable body of opinion that the Farhud was a Holocaust-related event caused by Nazi incitement. And this picture is often used to illustrate the Farhud Massacre. But in fact, it appeared in a Berlin magazine two years before the Farhud. The Mufti escaped to Berlin where he was Hitler’s lavishly-funded wartime guest. He was paid more than a German field marshal.

He had an entourage of 60 Arab exiles, and he pumped out poisonous propaganda from the shortwave transmitter at Zeesen, fusing anti-Jewish verses from the Quran with conspiracy theories about the Jews. What was the significance of the Mufti’s meeting with Hitler in 1941? Well, the Mufti pledged to help the Nazis win the war and asked to manage the extermination of the Jews in his sphere of influence. “The Jews are yours,” said Hitler. The Mufti’s collaboration with the Nazis despite strenuous Arab efforts to downplay it has been well-documented. During his stay in Berlin, he met all the senior Nazis, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann. His contribution was twofold. In order to stop Jews fleeing to Palestine, he persuaded the Nazis to close off the expulsion option. And from then on, the Jews of Europe could only be exterminated. He also set up SS units of Muslim troops in Bosnia and Albania, who committed terrible, terrible atrocities. The Arab League founded in 1945, was filled with ex-Axis collaborators. Abdul Rachman Azzam was the First Secretary of the Arab League, and he was one of the Mufti’s agents working with the Nazis. He promised a war of extermination not seen since the Mongolian massacres, if Israel was established. Indeed, the Mufti-inspired charter of The Arab League would soon form the basis of the League’s declaration of war to destroy the nascent state of Israel in 1948. When the war was over, one byproduct was the mass ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews from Arab countries. Arab League states drafted antisemitic decrees, eerily reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws, stripping Jews of their rights and stealing their property. The Mufti was according to the scholar Matthias Kuntzel, “The linchpin between the Nazi’s great war against the Jews and the Arab small war against Israel.”

The Mufti’s top military commanders in the new war against the Jews were al-Qawuqji, Abdul Qadir al-Husseini and Hasan Salama. They had all been Nazi collaborators. There are reports that the Palestinian Arab forces also had ex-Nazi advisors in the field. The Mufti was for various realpolitik reasons, never tried at Nuremberg. This meant that unlike in Europe, Nazi-inspired antisemitism was never discredited in the Arab and Muslim world. In fact, the Middle East became a haven for Nazi war criminals. The Mufti found refuge in Cairo. Although he was not directly involved in politics, he remained influential. He helped war criminals settle in Egypt, and he converted them to Islam. The post-war influence of ex-Nazis in Cairo was a contributing factor in extending the Arabs’ ideological, territorial, and race war with the Jews into the 1950s and beyond. Adolf Eichmann saw the Muslims as continuing the Nazi struggle against the Jews. He said in his memoirs, “I have not managed to complete the task of total annihilation of the Jews, but I hope that the Muslims will complete it for me.” The influence of Nazis in Egypt did start to wane after Adolf Eichmann was caught by the Mossad and executed in Jerusalem in 1961. Some like Otto Skorzeny, which we will talk about in a minute, became double agents in order to save their skins. So let’s talk about Nazis in Egypt. Of course, the Americans and the Russians were keen to attract German scientists and engineers after the war, but not so keen to attract Nazi fugitives from justice.

A thousand Nazis escaped to Argentina via rat lines such as ODESSA and The Spider. But 4,000 were on the Egyptian government payroll and not a few converted to Islam. Edna Anzarut-Turner was a Jewish girl living in Egypt in the 1950s. She now lives in Montreal, and this is how she described the general atmosphere. “A couple of years before we left in 1956, we had moved to Cairo. The main street, Soliman Pasha was filled with blonde men speaking guttural German who were window shopping. My father was flying back to Egypt. He was very puzzled, because the flight was full of Germans. He knew fluent German and chatted with them. They were delighted to meet someone German-speaking. He was told they were all agricultural specialists who had been invited by Nasser to make the desert bloom. My dad was even more puzzled, so many agricultural specialists. It didn’t make sense. He met some of them again on Soliman Pasha and chatting with them. He figured out they knew nothing about agriculture or the desert. Something didn’t add up.” Egypt’s King Farouk, whose sympathies with the Nazis during the war were well-known, was in power until 1952, when the Free Officer’s coup led by General Naguib deposed him and he sailed off into exile. Two years later, Gamal Abdel Nasser took over as president of Egypt. At this point, the mantle of leader of pan-Arabism can be said to have passed from Iraq to Egypt. Was Nasser a Nazi? Nasser became a member of the pro-Nazi Young Egypt Society. “The Second World War, and the short period before it fired the spirit of our youth,” he wrote, “And moved a whole generation towards violence.” We do know that he consulted the Mufti throughout the 1950s. His successor, Anwar Sadat, was expelled from the army for his pro-German activities and jailed in 1942.

Thinking that Hitler was still alive and living in Brazil, Sadat wrote an open letter to the dictator in 1953. “I congratulate you with all my heart, because though you appear to have been defeated, you were the real victor.” Jewish organisations and people like David Ben-Gurion certainly made parallels between the Egyptians and the Nazis. Although some historians claim they were just being paranoid. Farouk already started collaborating with Nazis to rebuild his war machine after his 1948 defeat by Israel. Farouk was a dissolute monarch. He possessed a thousand shirts and a fleet of red Bentley’s. Interesting aside. Military advisors started arriving. They were not Nazis, but they had fought in the Wehrmacht. They were the direct successors of Germans who had advised and modernised the Ottoman army. But this time they did not represent the West German government. Farouk wanted to create an arms industry. Dr. Wilhelm Voss was the leader of the Central Planning Board. He appeared in Cairo in 1951. He recruited German experts and advisors for the military and armament sector. The military advisors would train Egyptian soldiers and prepare the Fedaian guerillas for raids into Germany. General Wilhelm Farhmbacher was a wartime Wehrmacht commander of the old school. He arrived in Egypt in 1952. He had held out against the allies until May, 1945, defending the last Nazi stronghold at Lorient in Brittany. It is said that he ground railway sleepers to feed his troops, flowers mixed with sawdust in ever-increasing amounts as food ran out. he served five years in jail for disfiguring French property. Here you see him surrendering to the allies. Willy Messerschmitt, the aircraft designer, produced Egypt’s first jet fighter.

But Egypt ran out of money and dropped the plan. Gerhard Mertens helped develop paramilitary forces, and he was actually active in training the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a Muslim Brotherhood camp in every university. Wilhelm Beisner, also known as Ali Ben Keshir was a member of the Einsatzkommando Agypten, that those are the death squads squads set up by Walter Rauff. and then Otto Ernst Remer had been key to blocking the anti-Nazi coup of 1944. And he’d denounced the plotters. He reached Cairo with the help of Voss, and he worked with the Muslim Brotherhood too. Leopold Gleim, former head of the Gestapo in Poland, also known as Ali al-Nahar, and his aide, Bernhardt Bender, also known as Ben Salam, held posts in the security police and they helped Nasser hold onto power. Heinrich Willamen, also known as Naheem Yakin, supervised jails in Alexandria and ran the Samara concentration camp in the Western desert. The Israelis found out about these characters through the spy Max Bineth. He was so successful that the Egyptians even offered him a job. He was finally arrested. He committed suicide before his trial in 1954. Otto Skorzeny was perhaps the most important of all the Germans, Nazis in Egypt. He led a precarious life as a spy, as a businessman, a disruptor and adventurer. He played a major role in military training and in re-arming Egypt. He was a swashbuckling soldier. Literally larger than life, 6'4", 20 stone. His face marked from ear to chin by a scar, which I think you could just see in the picture. In the war, he’d served as an Austrian commando commander of Hitler’s special forces. Amongst his wartime exploits, he took part in Operation Oak, where German paratroopers had landed on the Grand Sasso mountain to rescue Mussolini from custody. He’d walked out of Darmstadt Internment Camp in July, 1948. “I shall escape how and when I please, and you shall never find me,” he said, He was an informant, a double agent, and worked for the Mossad, from 1964.

And he was thought to have engineered the assassination of German scientists developing missiles for Egypt called Heinz Krug in September, 1962, although there is no firm proof of that. He was Europe’s most wanted man. Although he did end up betraying his colleagues, he was an unrepentant Nazi. He worked for the CIA. He was implicated in the assassination of JFK. He died of lung cancer in 1975, aged 67. He never regretted his Nazi past. He said, “I would make exactly the same choices.” Johann von Leers was a small balding, blue-eyed goblin of a man. He had a castle in Mecklenburg, which he said was occupied by communists, swines, bandits and thieves. He worked with the Mufti in Berlin on his wartime antisemitic propaganda campaign. From Argentina, he went to Cairo in 1956. He translated the Mufti’s book, “The Truth About the Palestinian Question”. He really was the mastermind behind the antisemitic campaign in Egypt. He was a very strange character. He used to eat sugar cubes. When his bus arrived at Ramses Station in Cairo, he would get up and shout, “Ramses, Ramses!” He was apparently homesick for Germany and afraid that the Jews would throw him into prison. He told the Canadian journalist, Bill Stevenson, “Do not believe in humanity, mercy, or kindness. You must escape always.” And this is what he said about Israel. “Israel is abnormal, not big enough or fertile enough to supply millions of Jews. It must go, it causes trouble.

Zionists are responsible for most of the world’s press attacks on Nasser and Egypt.” He never learned Arabic fluently, but he converted to Islam and was known as Omar Amin von Leers. After the Suez crisis in 1956, Nasser expelled all the French and British citizens in Egypt as retribution for the British, French and Israeli attack on the Suez Canal. But he also expelled thousands of Jews, even those who had Egyptian or other citizenship, although they were not Israelis. And Jews were subject to oppressive legislation, economic strangulation, dispossession, detention, torture, and deportation. How far did the Nazis have a hand in the expulsion of the Jews? Well, the secret police was modelled on the SS. The economic department had a Jewish section, and we know that it drew up an inventory of Jewish property even before Suez. The Nazis held key security posts and even ran internment camps. Bernhardt Bender ran an interrogation centre on a disused cargo ship, nicknamed “The Floating Hell”. He was behind five internment camps, one of which was modelled on Dachau’s block 10 sterilisation unit. Even before the expulsion, the family of Edna Anzarut-Turner was made aware of just how dangerous Egypt was for Jews by none other than the Swiss ambassador to Egypt, who is a personal friend of her mother’s. Edna told me this story. “When the Swiss ambassador saw her, he gasped, ‘Mrs Anzarut, what are you still doing here?

The country is full of Nazis. Otto Skorzeny’s here. Do you want to finish up as a lampshade? Leave, leave as soon as you can.’ She rushed home, picked up my dad’s and her British passport, took them to the Egyptian passport office where they affixed exit and entry visas. She bought airline tickets, packed one suitcase each, one blanket. She filled all the vases of our home with flowers and took the cars to various out of the way garages and threw the keys in the Nile. The next day, they waited for the taxi. There was a banging on the door, yells of , ‘Open the door!’ It wasn’t the taxi, it was two bullying policemen with their expulsion order. My parents just looked at them and the situation was so incongruous that they both burst out laughing. Apparently the police looked totally astounded. No one had ever laughed in their face like that. My parents told them they were too late. They were leaving without having been expelled.” There were some really big fish amongst the Nazis in Egypt. Willie Brenner, ex-SS man, who helped run Mauthausen, in which 200,000 Jews had died. Dr. Hans Eisele who was an SS doctor who murdered Jews by injection and improper surgery. Dr. Aribert Heim, who qualifies as one of the most disgusting Nazis in exile, Dr. Death in Mauthausen. He used to cut heads off, cook them, and used skulls to decorate desks. And he was the third most notorious Nazi after Alois Brunner and Josef Mengele. He lived undetected in Cairo.

Uncle Tarek was his name. He gave out sweets to children. He died in 1992. Then there was Walter Rauff, who was the head of the Gestapo, and he became the most notorious Nazi in Syria. Then other senior Nazis who escaped to Damascus were Franz Stangl, head of Treblinka and Sobibor, and Alois Hudal, who was helped to escape from Austria. Then the biggest fish of all was Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s personal assistant, who had deported 136,000 Jews to camps. He was in charge of Drancy. He rounded up Jews in the south of France, and at first he went to Cairo and finished up in Damascus in 1956. The Syrians insisted they knew nothing about him. He was badly injured, but survived a letter bomb in 1977. He said, “Of the Jews he had killed, they deserved to die, because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage.” And so now we come to perhaps the last link in the chain. Hamas was only created in 1987, but it was created as the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which of course goes back to the Nazi era. And if you read the Hamas charter, you will see a lot of Nazi ideas, a lot of conspiracy theories.

You know, “The Jews are the epitome of evil, they’re power hungry, they’re money grabbing,” all straight out of the protocols of “The Elders of Zion”. But Hamas, of course, marries the Salafist idea of Jihad against the infidel with these conspiracy theories. And so that I’m sort of going to end on this note actually. So just to say that an ideology born in the Nazi era is still with us today. My final, final point will be actually about Iran, which is obviously still promising a holocaust against the Jews, while denying that one took place during World War II. But of course, there isn’t really time to go into them. But the regime is, you know, the story of the regime in Iran is really another story for another day. So I’ll stop there. Thank you very, very much for listening. I’m sorry it was a bit of a marathon, but very happy to answer any questions if I can.

Q&A and Comments:

• [Georgia] Yeah, so there’s a comment about Barry Rubin. Yeah, “Please use the correct spelling. Ruben, R-U-B-E-N.” Then this is more of a statement, but it says, “Always the Jews, Christians in the Middle East, also infidels, but the enemy has always been the Jews.”

• Right, sorry, I can now scroll down a little bit here. Sorry, think about the sound. Okay, just a minute. It’s Barry Rubin and the title of his book, right? So his book is “Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, and it’s by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz. Right, Bob, “I heard that Albanian moved… Muslims didn’t allow Jewish people who escaped from Europe to be killed, because of the Islamic belief in Albania of Besa.” Yeah, actually, it wasn’t really an Islamic belief. It was the sort of Albanian belief. And of course, Albanian Catholics also subscribed to this and that was, that you had to protect the Jews. So as a result, I think the Jewish population of Albania actually increased after the war compared to what it was before.

As Stuart says, “The Jewish population went from 200 to 2,000.” That is absolutely true. Thank you, Tiasa. Let’s see. Thank you, Rita,

“As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, most appreciate.” Thank you, thank you.

Q: “Are there any books on this topic?”

A: Well, actually I’ve got a whole pile of books here. Knew you’d ask that. Really very difficult to know which ones to recommend. But I think you should start with Barry Rubin’s book, because he kind of traces the Ottoman Jihad right through to the Nazi era and beyond, and the connection between the Islamists and the Nazis. I think it’s a very comprehensive book. Yes, this has been recorded.

Q: “Is it any wonder the worldview still disapproves of the Jews?”

A: Well, I don’t know if my talk is connected to the world disapproving of the Jews. I’m just hoping to cast light on the truth.

Thanks to Lauren and Corina. Yes, I second that. Thank you.

Barry, “I grew up in Rhodesian. We had several Jewish families in Salisbury. I wonder how many Jews came to Rhodesia.” Thank you very much, Barry and Myrna. Thank you, you look forward to more lectures.

Well, I’ve got another one coming up next week. This is on the Exodus of the Jews from Arab Countries. Is that the last one, oh, no.

Q: “How do I access the recording?”

A: Well, there’s a whole library of recordings. I think you just need to go to the Lockdown University website. Sorry, it’s a bit stuck here. Are there any more, Georgia?

• [Georgia] I think that’s the last-

• That’s it?

• That’s the last question. Yeah, and I think you get a login. It’s just someone saying.

• Okay, oh, I think there was just one comment from Sarah. Thank you very much, thank you. “I’m not sure whether it’s done me any good sitting in Tel Aviv.” Yes, it’s a bit depressing. I’m sorry to have depressed you. Anyway, okay, well, thank you so much, all of you for listening and hope to see you next week.