Lyn Julius
Nazis in the Middle East

Lyn Julius - Nazis in the Middle East

- Thank you for joining me and thank you to Lockdown University for inviting me to give this lecture on, “Nazis in the Middle East”. So, 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 on the left, you see the Kaiser dressed as an Ottoman officer. The Ottoman authorities breached the old city wall right next to Jaffa Gate so that the Kaiser could enter with his vehicle escorts. And 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 actually the Jewish bankers Gutmann, as well as Deutsche Bank in Istanbul. The Young Turks Revolution was led by German trained young officers. German unification would become 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 famous 1941 meeting with the Mufti of Jerusalem began with the Kaiser’s visit to the Levant. Now, 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 pro-Nazi Vichy French. We find Nazi sympathisers, collaborators, and Nazi inspired ideologues, and we find actual Nazis. The topic is huge, and I hope I’ll be able to do it justice in the short time we have available. So, German involvement in the Middle East begins with Max Von Oppenheim, 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 a charismatic prophet named Sayyid al-Gaylani from Persia. His descendant, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani was to launch the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941.

Von Oppenheim was also inspired by the Mahdi who ruled Sudan for 13 years. The Mahdi 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 Buchen, 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. There is the question of German complicity with 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? One can 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 Jaffer, Jamal Pachia, expelled thousands of Jews from Palestine. Was this a prelude to their extermination? Barry Rubin, in his book, “Nazis Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” 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, but they hid them from the public eye. They often justified them and never acted to stop or reduce their scope, though they could easily have done so.” So the Ottoman War effort in Palestine during World War I, was often led by German officers. German General Frederick Kress Von Kressenstein who helped direct the Ottoman army in World War I from 1915 was followed by Eric Von Falcon Heim, a Prussian officer who served as the chief of staff of the German army and the command of the Turkish, Austrian and German troops during the critical year of 1917. The Hourish and School masterly Prussian General Field Marshall, Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz on the left, fought the British in Iraq and halted them at Steffesson 50 miles south of Baghdad. The British suffered 23,000 casualties at Kut, which was besieged for six months. Otto Livan von Sanders commanded the Ottoman army against General Allenby in Palestine and in the Sinai campaign of 1918, he had 40 German offices under him. He masterminded the charge at Gallipoli, the famous victory against the allies in 1915. And there was also General Hanz Von Sect, the last Ottoman chief of staff, and he was also the first of the Weimar Republic. So as we know, the German supported 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. They won over Sherif Hussain of the Hijas in Arabia with bribes and promises of territory. Germany could only offer continued submission to Ottoman rule.

But Germany could cast itself as the Muslims and Arabs true patron, the champion of the downtrodden. 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 causing a great deal of anxiety among believing Muslims. German strategy capitalised on the search for a replacement for the Ottoman Caliphate. Von Oppenheim set up independence committees, clubs, and societies, and they continued into the war into war years. The caliphate movement in India would eventually create Pakistan as a Muslim state. The Islamist movement in Egypt led to the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan Alban in 1928. 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 a hundred experts who knew the Middle East well were active during the Nazi era. To give just one example, this gentleman here Wilhelm Hindensatz was a pilot during World War I. He converted to Islam. He took the name of the great leader of Baghdad Haroun al Rashid. He commanded Ottoman machine gun units and later waged wars in Central Asia.

He worked with the Ottoman War minister Enva Pachia, who was a German afile. Hindensatz would become the main contact between the rite and the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. 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 Hampshire during World War ii. It was finally deployed by order of Heinrich Himla in 1944. As for pro-Nazi Arabs, you’ve already heard Trudy talk about the Grand Mufti, Amin al Husseini. He was a pivotal figure. He was born in 1895. 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 Faisel was defeated by the French at the battle of my saloon. So died the dream of a pan Arab kingdom centred on Damascus. Faisel was given the consolation prize of the throne of Iraq. After his brief flirtation with the allies, the mufti did not follow Faisel 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 great 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 Muslim world. The Jews became the epitome of evil. 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 the Arabs were technically unmentioned, inferior, an inferior race. But they realised that an Arab uprising could be useful against the British and the French. And so the Arabs became ornery Arians. Nazi inspired ideologies were influenced in, sorry, influential in the Arab world. 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-colonialists 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 its activities which promoted violence against Jews and cops. Like Nazism itself, the Muslim Brotherhood was a reactive movement. It harked back to an earlier era of Islamic pride and glory. It was anti modernity. And who were the main agents of modernity? The Jews. And so Nazi antisemitism fitted neatly into their worldview. The Muslim Brotherhood absorbed the conspiracy theories of the SARS forgery, the protocols of the eldest of of Zion, which was translated into Arabic in 1925. So called 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 it’s emblem here may remind you of the swastika. Samir Aldi of the Syrian bath party said, “We were racists. We admired the Nazis.” The bath party ideologue Michelle Aflak 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.” Pretty shocking statement I think. After the British had double crossed the emmy of Hussain by reneging on their promise to make his son facial king of Syria at the centre of a Pan Arab kingdom, the main focus of Pan-arabism shifted to Iraq. Strident Syrian Ultranationalists, such as Sati Al Husri on the right-hand side, entered Iraq with King Fasil. Sati Al Husri wanted to turn Iraq into the Prussia of Arab nations. Al Husri engaged in vicious antisemitism, doing his best to undermine Iraq’s first finance minister, the Jews. There was rising, a rising tide of pro-Nazi feeling in Iraq in the 1930s. And my mother tells the story of her gardener who lived in a heartset at the bottom of the garden. And when my mother asked his wife about his new baby and what did they call it, they shot back, “Hitler.” So whether that was to spite the Jewish family he worked for, or whether it was the baby’s actual name, we will never know. At any rate, Hitler was and remains a popular name in Arab countries. Hitler Tantawi is an Egyptian diplomat, for instance. So Sati Al Husri founded the Nationalist Mutana Club, which was subsidised by the Germans. from this club sprang the ringleaders of the wartime Farhud massacre, in which almost 200 Jews were murdered in 1941.

Al Husri was later joined by the Syrian, Fauzi Al-Qawauqji who fought in the 1948 war against Israel and other virulent anti-Semites. Sati Al Hursi promoted Arab nationalism through education and in Iraqi schools the teaching of Hebrew was banned, and the school curriculum was Nazified. And the the photo on the left shows supporters of fascism in Iraq. I think it was taken in 1932. Sami Al Shawkat succeeded Sati Al Husri as Director general of education in Iraq, and he founded the Futuwwa Youth Movement. 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 Futuwwa uniform. Other shirts brigades modelled on the Hitler youth were founded. The green shirted, young Egypt, and the brown shirts of Lebanon and Syria, and all promoted militarism. Shawkat who liked to ride around on a white horse is best to, is best known for his 1933 lecture, “The Profession of Death,” 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 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 was A Borg backwards, and he was a German career diplomat who spoke Turkish and Arabic. He was appointed as the ambassador to Baghdad in 1932. He set up a network of spies and agents and sent new bile German girls to seduce politicians.

Grobba purchased the newspaper, “The Arab World,” and serialised an Arabic version of Adolf Hitler’s MienCamph. German radio began to broadcast propaganda in Arabic from southern Italy. The Nazis financed the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muftis Arab Revolt of ‘36 to '39. The aim was to encourage an Arab uprising, and they frequently spoke of Arab nationalism and 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 Zeisen, 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 largely illiterate and easily swayed Arab population cannot be discounted. Yunus Bahri was an Iraqi journalist who claimed to have met Hitler in 1931. Constantly on the move, he was a man of many geysers. He was reputed to have had 15 nationalities, been married a hundred times, and fathered a hundred children. He spent the war years in Berlin, and from 1953, he worked for the Cairo Propaganda Station, “The Voice of the Arabs.” This would also broadcast in Persian, Kurdish, and Turkish. 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 they wanted to back the winning side. But the Mufti was an ideological, anti-Semite and would’ve stopped at nothing to kill the Jews wherever he found them, as he exhorted Arabs to do on the radio. And this was proof positive that his anti-Zionism of the 1920s had spilled over into outright anti-Semitism. A poll carried on behalf of the US Consulate in Jerusalem in February, 1941, found that 88% of Palestinian Arabs wanted the Nazis to win the war. Throughout the Middle East, Arab public opinion was mostly pro German. The Mufti himself spent two years in Iraq. After 1939, he arrived with 400 anti-Jewish Syrians and Palestinian mostly teachers. He backed a pro-Nazi military coup by four military officers called, “The Golden Square.” The pro-Nazi government led by Rashi Dali Adgalami was the only Arab regime to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany and declare war against the British. They forced him into exile, but not before he had primed the Arabs of the capitol together with defeated returning troops to unleash the Farhud massacre of 1941 against the Jews of Iraq. Four days before the Farhud, Eunice Bukri made a poisonous broadcast inciting murder of the Jews from the Nazi radio station at Zecen. There is now a respectable body of opinion that the Farhud was a Holocaust related event caused by Nazi incitement. The Mufti escaped to Berlin where he was Hitler’s lavishly funded wartime guest. He was paid more than a German field Marshall. He had an entourage of 60 Arab exiles. He pumped out poisonous propaganda from the shortwave transmitter at Zecen fusing anti-Jewish verses from the Koran with conspiracy theories. What was the significance of the Muftis 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 Muftis collaboration with the Nazis despite strenuous Arab efforts to downplay it has been well documented. And during his stay in Berlin, he met all the senior Nazis, Himler, Gerbles, Eichman. And here he is visiting Sachsenhausen. His contribution was twofold. In order to stop Jews fleeing to Palestine he persuaded the Nazis to close off the expulsion option. From then on, the Jews of Europe could only be exterminated. He also set up SS units of Muslim troops in Bosnia and Albania, and they committed terrible atrocities. The Arab League founded in 1945, was filled with X-axis collaborators, Abdull Rachman Azam was the first Secretary General of the Arab League, and he was one of the Muftis 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 anti-Semitic decrees, eerily reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws, stripping Jews of their rights and stealing their property. The Mufti was according to the Stalin Matchias council, the linchpin between the Nazis, great war against the Jews and the Arabs small war against Israel. The Muiftis top military commanders in the New War against the Jews were Al Abini and Hasan Salma. 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 real politic 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, helped war criminals settle in Egypt, and converted them to Islam. The post-war influence of ex Nazis in Cairo was a contributing factor to extending the Arabs war against the Jews into the fifties and beyond. Adolph Eichman saw the Muslims as continuing the Nazi struggle against the Jews. “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,” he wrote in his memoir. The influence of Nazis in Egypt. Sorry. Yeah. The influence of Nazis in Egypt did start to wane after Adolph Eichman was caught by the Mossad and executed in Jerusalem in 1961. Some of these Nazis became double agents to save their skins. So of course, the Americans and the Russians were also keen to attract German scientists and engineers, but not so keen to attract Nazi fugitives from justice. Thousands of Nazis escaped to Argentina via rat lines such as Odessa and the Spider. But 4,000 were on the Egyptian government payroll, and there could have been as many as 6,000 Germans living in Egypt, living and working in Egypt. Not a few converted to Islam. Edna Anza 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. My father knew German and chatted with the Germans on the plane that took him back to Cairo. And they were delighted to meet someone German speaking.

My father was told that they were all agricultural specialists who’d been invited by Nasa 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 the main street in Cairo, Solomon Pasha, and chatting with them he figured out that they knew nothing about agriculture or the desert. Something didn’t add up.” Egypt’s king Faruk was in power until 1952, when the free officer’s coup led by General Nagi deposed him and he sailed off into exile. Two years later, Gael Abdul Nasa 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 Nasa a Nazi? Nasa 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 our whole generation towards violence.” We do know that Nasa 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,” he wrote. Jewish organisations and people like David Bangorian certainly made parallels between the Egyptians and the Nazis. Although some historians claimed that they were just being paranoid. Faruk already started collaborating with Nazis to rebuild his war machine after his 1948 defeat by Israel. Faruk was a dissolute monarch.

He possessed a thousand shirts and a fleet of Red Bentley’s. Military advisors who’d fought in the Verma were direct successors of Germans who had advised and modernised the Ottoman Army. But this time they did not represent the West German government. Faruk wanted to create an arms industry. Dr. Wilhelm Voss, leader of the Central Planning Board, was the chief technical advisor to the Egyptian government. He appeared in Cairo in 1951. He recruited German experts and advisors for the military and armament sector. He had worked for SCOD Ammunitions factory in Pilsen, and the military advisors would also train Egyptian soldiers and prepare the Fedian gorillas for raids into Israel. General Wilhelm Farhmbacher was a wartime Vermats 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 in Brittany. It is said that he ground railway sleepers to feed his troops flour mixed with saw dust 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. He’s on the right. Willie Messer Schmidt, the aircraft designer, produced Egypt’s first jet fighter. But Egypt ran out of money and dropped the plan. Gohart Mertins helped develop paramilitary forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood. There was a dedicated Muslim Brotherhood camp in every university, and he was training between four and 5,000 a month. Will Helm Bycner, also known as Ali Ben Kashier, was a member of the Einsteins Group in Commando Egypt.

Those were the death squads set up by Walter Ralph, based in Athens in readiness for the German invasion of the Middle East, and Egypt, but more about Ralph later. Otto Ernest Remmah, had been key to blocking the anti-Nazi coup of 1944 and denounced the plotters. He reached Cairo with the help of Voss. He worked with the Muslim Brotherhood. He became a leading Holocaust denier. Leopold Glien, former head of Gustapo in Poland, also known as Ali Nasha, was an ex SS commander in Poland. And his aid, Bernard Bender, also known as Ben Salam, held posts in the security police and they helped Nasa hold on to power. Heinrich Willaman, aka a Naim Yakiem, 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 Binef. Binef was so successful that Egyptians, the Egyptians even offered him a job. He was arrested, but he committed suicide before his trial in 1954. Otto Skorzeny led a precarious life as a spy, businessman, disruptor and adventurer. But he was first and foremost a Nazi. In Egypt he played a major role in military training and re-arming Egypt first as advisor to Faruk, then Nigi and Nasa. He was the head of sabotage. He was a a squash buckling soldier, literally larger than life. 6 foot 4, 20 stone.

His face marked from ear to chin by a scar, which I think you can see on the photo. In the war he had served as an Austrian commander of Hitler’s special forces. In the 1950s he moved to Cairo. He travelled back and forth to Madrid where he set up a business, and he was invited to establish a military academy in Egypt. Amongst his wartime exploits, he took part in Operation Oak, where German paratroopers had landed on the Grand Saso mountain to rescue Mussolini from custody in September, 1943. And he wore a US uniform to lead a clandestine attack on the US at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. He actually walked out of Dan Stat 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 actually worked for the Mossad from 1964. He provided information on German rocket scientists and engineers and missile programmers to Israel. In return, he got an Austrian passport and immunity from prosecution. And he was thought to have engineered the assassination of a German scientist developing missiles for Egypt called Heinz Krug in 1962. So he was Europe’s most wanted man. Although he did end up betraying his colleagues, he remained an unrepentant Nazi. He never regretted his past. He said, “I would make exactly the same choices.” Johan Von Leers was a small, balding, blue-eyed, goblin of a man. Apparently he had a castle in Mecklenburg, which he said, “Was occupied by communists, swine bandits, and thieves.” He was professor of Lort Vienna University SS Storm Fuah, and he worked with the Mufti in Berlin on his wartime antisemitic propaganda campaign.

From 1950 to '55, he was in Argentina, and from 1956 moved to Cairo. He drafted pamphlets. He wrote 27 books with titles like, “Jewry and Navery Blood and Race.” He was interned for 18 months after the war. And in Argentina he published a newspaper called, “Devaugh,” which was a Nazi newspaper. Von Leers was introduced by the Mufti to Nasa, officially a political advisor, posing as a professor of language at Cairo University and a translator. He translated the Muftis book, “The Truth About the Palestinian Question.” He hosted a radio show. He played a part in a film about Suez portraying it as a colonial and imperial attack. He was an eccentric. He used to eat sugar cubes. When his bus arrived at Ramses station in Cairo, he would get up and shout, “Ramses Ramses.” Wolfgang Lots Israel’s Champaign spy visited him at his elegant villa in the Cairo suburb of Maordi. Von Leers told him he was homesick for Germany and afraid that Jews would throw him into prison. And in an interview with a journalist and Nazi hunter called Bill Stevenson of the the Toronto Star, he told him, “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 troubles. Zionist are responsible for most of the world’s press attacks on Nasa and Egypt.” He never learnt Arabic fluently, but he did convert to Islam and was known as Omar Amin von Leers. There was an institute for the study of Zionism set up in Cairo in 1955, headed by Alfred Ziegler, aka Mach Munsadah. And this employed a man called Dr. Verna Vichala, an ex Gerbells propaganda minister. And this institute published the Arabic translations of Minekaf and the protocols.

After the series crisis, in 1956, Nasa expelled all French and British citizens as retribution for the British French and Israeli attack on the Sires Canal. But he also expelled thousands of Jews, even those who had Egyptian citizenship. Even though they were not Israelis, they were subject to oppressive legislation, economic strangulation, dispossession, detention, torture, and deportation. The successful businessman, Ellie Politi, was interrogated and died under torture. He had handed over his entire fortune of 112,000 Egyptian pounds. How far did the Nazis have a hand in the expulsion of the Jews? 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 Series. Nazis held key security posts and even ran internment camps. Bernard 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 Dahals block 10 sterilisation unit. Even before the expulsion, the family of Edna Anza Turner, was made aware of just how dangerous Egypt was for Jews by none other than the Swiss ambassador to Egypt, a personal friend of Edna’s mother. Edna, told me this story. “When the Swiss ambassador saw her, he gasped.” “Mrs. Enzarute, what are you still doing here? The country is full of Nazis. Otto Squwartsani is 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 past 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 with uncontrollable laughter. 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. They showed them the two suitcases, and then my dad roared at them. I.e. scram. Just as the taxi driver arrived, my parents turned around for a last look at their beautiful, elegant home, and the vases filled with flowers. And that was that.” There was some really big fish among the Nazis in Egypt. Willie Brenna, and ex SS man, helped run Mauthausen and was responsible for 200,000 dead. Dr. Hans Eisele this is Nasser there and some Jewish refugees on the right hand side. Let’s stay with that for a moment. So Dr. Hans Eisele was an SS doctor responsible for 200 dead inmates. He was called the butcher of Bookenvalve, and he administered murder by injection. And here we are. He’s the man in the middle. Murder by injection and improper surgery, sentenced to death, his sentence was reduced. He escaped in 1958, with Nazi hunters on his trail, and he died in in Egypt in 1967 by morphine injection. He set up as a GP in Egypt under the name Carl de Bush. And he actually treated Von Leers after he had a stroke in the 1960s. Dr. Aribert Heim, an Austrian qualifies as the most disgusting Nazi exile, also known as Dr. Death. He was in Mauthausen.

Captured by the US in 1945. He was sent to a POW camp, briefly jailed then released. He killed prisoners with lethal injections. He cut heads off, cooked them, and used the skulls to decorate desks. He was the third most notorious Nazi after Aloiz Brunner and Joseph Mengele. And he lived undetected in Cairo. He became Tarek Hussein Farid, Uncle Tarek, and he gave sweets to children. He died in 1992. Then there was Walter Rauff, head of the Gustapo, who made his getaway from Milan in 1945 and became the most notorious Nazi in Syria. He was probably responsible for 250,000 deaths under his watch. In 1942 he was the head of the Einsteins commando. Egyptian planned to kill Palestinian and Egyptian Jews. He was interned in Remini in 1946. He worked in a monastery in the Vatican as a German tutor. And the Syrian security bureau recruited him in Damascus in 1949. Other senior Nazis included Fran Stangel, head of Treblinker and Sobibor, who also fled at the end of the war. He was detained by the United States Army in 1945 and was briefly imprisoned in Austria in 1947. But a Nazi sympathiser bishop called our lawyers hood helped Stangle to escape through a rat line. And he reached Syria using a Red Cross passport. And he lived in Syria for three years. In 1951, they moved to Brazil. And then there was the biggest fish of all, Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s personal assistant. He had deported 136,000 Jews to camps. He was in charge of Dwarcy in France.

He rounded up Jews in the south of France. At first, he went to Cairo and finished up in Damascus in 1956. The Syrians insisted they knew nothing about him. He plotted to kidnap Nahome Goldman, in exchange for Eichman. Menaham Begim, tried to get him arrested. 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.” So how do we conclude this terrible story? Writing in 2014, Barry Rubin said, or wrote, “Remarkably, almost six decades after Hitler died in a Berlin bunker. The middle East’s foremost important Muslim countries, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, are run by leaders politically descended from the Mufti and Berlin’s allies.” Although Sadat dramatically changed his country’s policy, he actually signed a peace treaty with Israel. This new approach did not result in an explicit renunciation of the axis era past. Hamas’ worldview is indistinguishable. Indistinguishable from that of the Mufti and the Muslim Brotherhood. Iran, which I haven’t had time to go into, is ruled by an Islamist regime, also influenced by Nazism. The regime energetically denies that the Nazis had committed the Holocaust, even as it advocates another one against the Jews. But that’s another story. So with that, I will stop. Very happy to answer questions.

Q&A and Comments:

“Hitler was also given, as a Christian name, by Africana Nationalists to their sons in South Africa during World War ii.” Interesting.

Q: “Thank you, Louise. For this lecture on a complex subject, can I recommend a London library, which might be best suited for books on this subject? Can you suggest books that you have found, particularly insight insightful?”

A: Yes, I can suggest a few books. I’m not sure if the libraries would actually carry them. There is, “Nazis Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” by Barry Ruben and Wolfgang Schwanitz. There’s also, “Nazis on the Nile,” by Vivian Kin Ross. This is quite a new book, but very well written and very informative. There’s, “Nazi Propaganda For the Arab World,” by Jeffrey Hearst. There’s a book about, “The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, and the impact of World War II,” by Riva Spector Simon. And there’s a book about, “The Farhud and the Nazi Influence in Iraq,” by Snherel Monet and Svee Yehuda.

And somebody, is it Peter recommends going to the Vina library in Russell Square? Possibly, they do have some of these books.

“The airport in Calcutta is named after Boza.” Yeah, he was a Nazi sympathiser.

Q: “Shelly, why did so many of these Nazis go to the Arab world and convert Islam instead of fading into the woodwork in West Germany or going to Christian South America? Did they take their families with them?”

A: Yes, they mostly did take their families with them. Why? Well, I think it was dangerous to fade into the woodwork in West Germany because West Germany had embarked on a new policy of renouncing its Nazi past. And don’t forget, there were Nazi hunters like Simon Weezental, who wanted to get hold of them. And of course, you know, they were seeking a haven and South America offered such a haven, that’s Argentina and Brazil, but more, more Nazi war criminals did end up in the Middle East, which was actually kind of ideologically more sympathetic to them. And they obviously thought they would be safer there.

I can make the reading list available. I will send a list to to Lauren. Thank you, Rita.

“Depressing lecture.” Yes. I’m sorry to have depressed you.

“Pretending a history of antisemitism that will not go away. It is surfacing in America after being beneath the surface, always.” Yes. Diane, I agree with you there. And Barbara, thank you for your kind words.

Q: “Why do so few people know of this?”

A: I think it’s, it’s probably not considered politically correct to talk about Arabs and Nazis. The Arabs have actually tried to minimise the role of the, the Mufti of Jerusalem, perhaps for obvious reasons.

Q: “What do you think the Nazis would do with the Arab allies if they had won the war?”

A: Well, the Lena asks, well, I think the question is, what would they have done with the Jews? And I think the answer to that is they would’ve allowed the Mufti to run his own extermination programme in the Middle East, in fact the Mufti did have plans to set up concentration camps. I think the Arab Allies would’ve been delighted had the Nazis won the war.

Well, thank you so much Lauren, and thank you to everyone who’s joined us. And thank you to Lawrence, my technical advisor, and good night.