In the wake of Sept. 11, new light is thrown on the international ties increasingly linking Muslim and neo-Nazi extremists
by Martin A. Lee
SPLC Intelligence Report, Spring 2002
As Germany’s defeat loomed during the final months of World War II, Adolf Hitler increasingly lapsed into delusional fits of fantasy.
Albert Speer, in his prison writings, recounts an episode in which a maniacal Hitler “pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire.”
The Nazi fuehrer described skyscrapers turning into “gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky.”
An approximation of Hitler’s hellish vision came true on Sept. 11, when terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people. But it was not Nazis or even neo-Nazis who carried out the attack — the deadliest terror strike in history allegedly came at the hands of foreign Muslim extremists.
Still, in the aftermath of the slaughter, white supremacists in America and Europe applauded the suicide attacks and praised Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the massacre.
An official of America’s premier neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, said he wished his own members had “half as much testicular fortitude.” The awestruck leader of another U.S. Nazi group called the terrorists “VERY BRAVE PEOPLE.”
Neofascist youth in France celebrated the event that evening with champagne at the headquarters of the extreme right Front National. German neo-Nazis, some wearing checkered Palestinian headscarves, rejoiced at street demonstrations while burning an American flag.
Jan Kopal, head of the Czech National Social Bloc, declared at a rally in Prague that bin Laden was “an example for our children.”
Horst Mahler, a former left-wing terrorist and prominent member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany, proclaimed his solidarity with the terrorists and said America had gotten what it deserved.
What’s going on here?
For decades, American extremists have lumped Arabs in with dark-skinned “mud people.” In Europe, neo-Nazis have been implicated in countless xenophobic attacks on Arabs, Turks and other Muslims.
Extremist parties on both sides of the Atlantic hope to bar entrance to non-white immigrants.
The peculiar bond between white nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a shared set of enemies — Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity.
It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures and the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization.
Both sets of groups also have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish power.
But there is more. Even before World War II, Western fascists began to forge ideological and operational ties to Islamic extremists.
Over the years, these contacts between Nazis and Muslim nationalists developed into dangerous networks that have been implicated in a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East.
Wealthy Arab regimes have financed extremists in Europe and the United States, just as Western neo-Nazis have helped to build Holocaust denial machinery in the Arab world.
In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia hired an American neo-Nazi as a lobbyist in the United States. In the 1980s, U.S. neo-Nazi strategist Louis Beam openly called for a linkup of America’s far right with the “liberation movements” of Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestine.
In the 1990s, an American Black Muslim was convicted in a plot to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks that was masterminded by a blind Egyptian cleric.
Just last year, a meeting sponsored by a U.S. Holocaust denial group brought together Arab and Western extremists in Jordan. And after the Sept. 11 attacks, a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis and white supremacists appeared in Islamic publications and Web sites.
Although links like these illustrate the ties between Muslim extremists and Americans, such ties are far more developed in Europe.
But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, there are a number of signs — including a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis that have appeared in Islamic publications and websites — that an operational alliance may be taking shape in the United States as well.
Banking for Allah
Perhaps the best contemporary snapshot of this Nazi-Islamist extremist axis comes in the person of one Ahmed Huber, a neo-Nazi whose home in a suburb of Berne was raided by Swiss police on Nov. 8, after U.S. officials identified him as a linchpin in the financial machinations of Osama bin Laden.
The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement dragnet that seized records from the offices of Al Taqwa, an international banking group.
Al Taqwa, which literally means “Fear of God,” had been channeling funds to Muslim extremist organizations around the world, including Hamas, a group active in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Huber, a former journalist who converted to Islam and changed his first name from Albert, served on the board of Nada Management, a component of Al Taqwa.
After Swiss authorities froze the firm’s assets and questioned Huber, the 74-year-old denounced Washington for doing the bidding of “Jew Zionists” who “rule America.” In January, Nada Management announced that it had gone into liquidation.
A well-known figure in European neofascist circles, Huber “sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups,” according to Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler adorn the walls of Huber’s office, alongside photos of Islamic political leaders and a picture of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the present-day boss of the French Front National.
In accordance with his self-proclaimed mission to unite Muslim fundamentalists and extreme right-wing forces in Europe and North America, Huber has traveled widely and proselytized at numerous gatherings.
In Germany, he speaks often at events hosted by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, which publicly welcomed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Huber also befriended British author David Irving and other Holocaust deniers while frequenting “revisionist” conclaves.
A Bin Laden Fan in Chicago
At the same time, Huber made the rounds of the radical Islamic circuit in Western countries. In June 1994, he spoke about the “evils of the Jews” at a mosque in Potomac, Md. (just outside Washington, D.C.), where videotapes of Huber’s speeches are reportedly on sale.
During a subsequent visit to Chicago, he attended a private assembly that brought together, in Huber’s words, “the authentic Right and the fighters for Islam.” Huber told journalist Richard Labeviere that “major decisions were taken [in Chicago]. ... [T]he reunification is under way.”
Huber acknowledges meeting al-Qaeda operatives on several occasions at Muslim conferences in Beirut, Brussels and London. He has been quoted in the Swiss media as saying that bin Laden’s associates “are very discreet, well-educated and highly intelligent people.”
The U.S. government claims that Huber’s banking firm helped bin Laden shift financial assets around the world. But Huber denies any involvement in terrorist activities. He insists Al Taqwa was engaged in charitable work, providing aid for social services that benefited needy Muslims.
Described as “the financial heart of the Islamist
economic apparatus,” Al Taqwa is intertwined with the Muslim Brotherhood, a longstanding, far-right cult whose emblem is a Koran crossed by a sword.
The influence of the Brotherhood extends throughout the Muslim world, where it vigorously, and often violently, opposes secular Arab regimes.
In 1981, partisans of the Muslim Brotherhood were implicated in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Several members of Islamic Jihad, an extremist sect closely associated with the Brotherhood, were also involved in the Sadat assassination.
By the early 1990s, Islamic Jihad would closely ally itself with bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.
Back to the Beginning
The roots of the Muslim Brotherhood — and, in many ways, the Nazi-Muslim axis — go back to the organization’s formation in Egypt in 1928.
Marking the start of modern political Islam, or what is often referred to as “Islamic fundamentalism,” the Brotherhood from the outset envisioned a time when an Islamic state would prevail in Egypt and other Arab countries, where the organization quickly established local branches.
The growth of the Muslim Brotherhood coincided with the rise of fascist movements in Europe — a parallel noted by Muhammad Sa’id al-‘Ashmawy, former chief justice of Egypt’s High Criminal Court.
Al-‘Ashmawy decried “the perversion of Islam” and “the fascistic ideology” that infuses the world view of the Brothers, “their total (if not totalitarian) way of life ... [and] their fantastical reading of the Koran.”
Youssef Nada, current board chairman of Al Taqwa, had joined the armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man in Egypt during World War II. Nada and several of his cohorts in the Sunni Muslim fraternity were recruited by German military intelligence, which sought to undermine British colonial rule in the land of the sphinx.
Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, also collaborated with spies of the Third Reich.
Advocating a pan-Islamic insurgency in British-controlled Palestine, the Brotherhood proclaimed their support for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, in the late 1930s.
The Grand Mufti, the preeminent religious figure among Palestinian Muslims, was the most notable Arab leader to seek an alliance with Nazi Germany, which was eager to extend its influence in the Middle East.
Although he loathed Arabs (he once described them as “lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped”), Hitler understood that he and the Mufti shared the same rivals — the British, the Jews and the Communists.
Indicative of the old Arab adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” they met in Berlin, where the Mufti lived in exile during the war.
The Mufti agreed to help organize a special Muslim division of the Waffen SS. Powerful radio transmitters were put at the Mufti’s disposal so that his pro-Axis propaganda could be heard throughout the Arab world.
A Mecca for Fascists
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Grand Mufti fled to Egypt. His arrival in 1946 was a precursor to a steady stream of Third Reich veterans who chose Cairo as a postwar hideout.
The Egyptian capital became a safe haven for several thousand Nazi fugitives, including former SS Captain Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy. Convicted in absentia for war crimes, Brunner would later reside in Damascus, where he served as a security advisor for the Syrian government.
Several American fascists visited the Middle East during this period, including Francis Parker Yockey, who made his way to Cairo in the summer of 1953, a year after the corrupt Egyptian monarchy was overthrown by a military coup.
The Brotherhood had played a major role in instigating the popular uprising that set the stage for the emergence of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser as Egypt’s new leader. But Nasser, who had little interest in mixing politics and religion, would subsequently have a falling out with the Islamic fundamentalist sect.
When Nasser wanted to overhaul Egypt’s secret service, he asked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for assistance. But the U.S. government “found it highly impolitic to help him directly,” CIA agent Miles Copeland recalled in a memoir.
So, the CIA instead secretly bankrolled more than 100 German espionage and military experts who trained Egyptian police and army units in the mid-1950s.
An American Reaches Out
During this period, the Grand Mufti maintained close relations with the burgeoning Nazi exile community in Cairo, while cultivating ties to right-wing extremists in the United States and other countries.
H. Keith Thompson, a New York-based businessman and Nazi activist, was a confidant of the Mufti. “I did a couple of jobs for him, getting some documents from files that were otherwise unavailable,” Thompson acknowledged in an interview.
Thompson also carried on a lively correspondence with Johannes von Leers, one of the Third Reich’s most prolific Jew-baiters, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin after he took up residence in Cairo in 1955.
“If there is any hope to free the world from Jewish tyranny,” Amin wrote Thompson, “it is with the Moslems, who stand steadfastly against Zionism, Colonialism and Imperialism.”
Formerly Goebbels’ right-hand man, Amin became a top official in the Egyptian Information Ministry, which employed several European fascists who churned out hate literature and anti-Jewish broadcasts.
Another German expatriate, Louis Heiden, alias Louis Al-Hadj, translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Arabic.
The Egyptian government also published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic forgery that purports to reveal a Jewish master plan for taking over the world.
A staple of Nazi propaganda, the Protocols also are quoted in Article 32 of the charter of Hamas, the hard-line Palestinian fundamentalist group that is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood — even though Muslim scholars say such views are an anathema to mainstream Islam.
“There are no historic roots for anti-Semitism in Islam,” says Hasem Saghiyeh, a columnist at Al Hayat, a London-based Arab newspaper. “The process of translating books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on a popular scale started in Nasser’s Egypt, but only the Islamic fundamentalist movement incorporated them into its literature.”
Mercenaries for Palestine
After Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six Day War in June 1967, a mood of desperate militancy engulfed the Palestinian refugee camps.
Deprived of a homeland, the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) apparently felt that they couldn’t afford to turn down offers of help, no matter how unsavory the donors. Karl von Kyna, a West German neo-Nazi mercenary, died during a Palestinian commando raid in September 1967.
Eager to continue their vendetta against the Jews, several right-wing extremists subsequently joined the Hilfskorp Arabien (“Auxiliary Corps Arabia”), which was advertised in the Munich-based Deutsche National-Zeitung, a pro-Nazi newspaper, in 1968.
The following year, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked several commercial airplanes. When three PFLP members stood trial after blowing up an Israeli jet in Zurich, the legal costs for their defense were paid by Francois Genoud, an elusive Swiss banker described by the London Observer as “one of the world’s leading Nazis.”
Genoud had previously picked up the tab for Adolf Eichmann’s legal defense, and a number of other Nazi war criminals and Arab terrorists would also benefit from his largesse.
Where did the money come from? According to European press accounts, Genoud was managing the hidden Swiss treasure of the Third Reich, most of which had been stolen from Jews.
“Security services claim he trans
ferred the defeated Nazis’ gold into Swiss bank accounts,” reports Gitta Sereny, who called Genoud “the most mysterious man in Europe.”
After World War II, Genoud served as the financial advisor to the Grand Mufti.
In 1958, the Swiss Nazi set up the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the war chest of the Algerian National Liberation Front, whose partisans were fighting to free their country from French colonial rule.
Several Third Reich veterans, including Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who had served as Hitler’s bodyguard, smuggled weapons to the Algerian rebels, while other German advisors provided military instruction.
Under the guise of supporting the Arabs’ struggle against French colonialism, Genoud and his Nazi cohorts were following the same geopolitical strategy that Hitler had pursued in the Middle East.
Europeans and Pro-Palestinian Terror
In addition to brokering arms sales to Arab militants, Genoud helped subsidize terrorist networks in Europe and the Arab world.
This financier of fascism waited until the statue of limitations ran out before admitting that he had personally written and sent ransom notes demanding $5 million to the German airline Lufthansa and several news services after PFLP terrorists hijacked another jet in 1972.
That same year, the Black September organization murdered nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. When Black September leader Hassan Salameh needed medical attention, Genoud arranged for him to be treated at a private clinic in Lausanne.
In 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat publicly indicated a willingness to renounce international terrorism and declared his interest in a settlement that would finally establish a Palestinian homeland in the Israeli-occupied territories. These steps toward moderation angered Arab hardliners, who ruled out any compromise with Israel.
Not surprisingly, Genoud and other neofascists favored the most belligerent factions that kept calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
After bombing four U.S. Army bases in West Germany in 1982, Odfried Hepp, a young neo-Nazi renegade, went underground and joined the Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Front (PLF).
Hepp, one of West Germany’s most wanted terrorists, was arrested in June 1985 while entering the apartment of a PLF member in Paris. Four months later, PLF commandos seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish American.
Included on the PLF’s list of prisoners to be exchanged for the Achille Lauro hostages was the name of Odfried Hepp.
Fundamentalism and the Iranian Revolution
Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous boost when the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah during the 1979 Iranian revolution.
The Ayatollah’s description of the United States and the Soviet Union as “the twin Satans” dovetailed neatly with the “Third Position” politics of many European and American neofascists, an ideology that rejects both American capitalism and Soviet Communism.
Some white supremacists also shared Khomeini’s dream of launching a “holy war” against what was seen as decadent, Western-style democracy.
When Iran issued a call for the assassination of author Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, several neo-Nazi groups supported the Iranian fatwa.
Far-right fanatics also hailed the 1983 suicide car-bombing by Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists that killed 271 U.S. Marines in Beirut.
The British National Front had nothing but praise for Khomeini’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards:
Their belief in their cause is so strong that they will run through mine fields unarmed to attack enemy positions; their ideals are so all-consuming that they will drive truck bombs into enemy camps knowing full well their [own] death is inevitable. ... This power, this contempt for death, is the stuff of which victories are made.
In 1987, French police cordoned off the Iranian embassy in Paris and demanded that a magistrate be allowed to interrogate Wahid Gordji, an Iranian official suspected of orchestrating a series of bombings that rocked the French capital during the previous a year.
French investigators got on to Gordji’s trail after they discovered a check for 120,000 francs (about $20,000) that he had written to Ogmios, a neo-Nazi publisher and bookstore in Paris. The money was used to underwrite a slick catalogue promoting The Myth of the Jewish Holocaust and similar titles.
But the Iranian government rebuffed the French authorities who wanted to question Gordji, causing a rupture in diplomatic relations between Paris and Tehran.
The six-month embassy stand-off was finally resolved after French officials met with representatives of a group called “The Friends of Wahid Gordji” — a group which included the redoubtable Nazi banker Francois Genoud.
Nazis in Baghdad
Links between white supremacists and the Iranian government continued after Khomeini’s death in 1989.
On several occasions in recent years, American neo-Nazi chieftain William Pierce has been interviewed by Radio Tehran. U.S. white supremacists have also snuggled up to Iran’s archenemy, Saddam Hussein.
In 1990, Gene Schroder, an ideologue of the far-right “common-law court” movement, joined a delegation of Midwest farmers to Washington for a meeting in the Iraqi embassy, where Iraqi officials were trying to drum up opposition to the impending Persian Gulf War.
During that 1991 war, Oklahoma Klan leader Dennis Mahon organized a small rally in Tulsa in support of Saddam. Mahon says he later received a couple of hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope from the Iraqi government.
In addition, shortly before the war, German neo-Nazis solicited support from Iraq for an anti-Zionist legion composed of far-right mercenaries from several European countries. The members of this so-called international “Freedom Corps” pretentiously strutted around Baghdad in SS uniforms.
As soon as bombs started to fall on the Iraqi capital, however, the neo-Nazi volunteers scurried back to Europe.
A number of prominent neofascists have expressed support for Saddam, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian demagogue, who visited Iraq after the Gulf War.
Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French Front National also got the red-carpet treatment when he met Saddam in Baghdad.
Although he built his political career by disparaging Arab immigrants, Le Pen now claims that he is deeply concerned about the plight of Iraqi children who have suffered under sanctions imposed by the United Nations.
His wife, Jany, who heads a group called SOS Children of Iraq, has joined Le Pen on several trips to Baghdad. Thus far, however, Arab children in France have yet to benefit from the supposed good Samaritan act of the Le Pens.
The Libyan Connection
On June 28, 2000, the Times of London reported that Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi had ordered the deposit of $25 million into a bank in Carinthia, the Austrian province governed by Jorg Haider, de facto leader of the far-right Freedom Party.
(The Freedom Party is an immigrant-bashing organization that is home to many neo-Nazis and former Nazis and has downplayed German war atrocities.)
Col. Ghaddafi’s cash gift — which Haider described as “Christmas for Austria” — was meant to ease the strain of sanctions imposed on Austria by the European Union after the Freedom Party joined Austria’s national governing coalition.
This was the second rabbit Haider pulled from his hat as a result of two private forays to Tripoli, where he met Ghaddafi.
After his first Libyan excursion, Haider announced he was tackling Austria’s high gas prices by arranging for Libyan gasoline to be sold in Carinthia at a discount. News photos showed Haider, the Porsche-driving populist, beaming as he pumped gas for motorists.
Over the years, Ghaddafi has been wooed by several neofascist leaders, including Italian fugitive Stefano delle Chiaie, who was accused of masterminding a series of bomb attacks in Rome and Milan.
Described in a 1982 CIA report as “the most prominent rightist terrorist ... still at large,” delle Chiaie wrote a letter to Ghadaffi, inviting him to join in a common struggle against “atheistic Soviet Marxism and American capitalist materialism,” both of which were supposedly controlled by “international Zionism.”
Delle Chiaie added: “Libya can, if it wants, be the active focus, the center of national socialist renovation [that will] break the chains which enslave people and nations.”
Ghaddafi, the Green Book and Western Extremism
Links between Libya and the European far right have been scrutinized in several parliamentary and judicial probes in Italy.
One Italian judicial inquiry found that the Libyan embassy in Rome had provided money to aid the escape of Italian terrorist suspect Mario Tuti shortly after the bombing of an express train near Florence in 1974. Tuti was later captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for orchestrating the attack, which killed 12 people and injured 44 others.
Ghadaffi’s financial largesse and his militant anti-Zionism has generated support for the Libyan regime among right-wing extremists around the world, including in Great Britain, where the Green Book, Ghaddafi’s political manifesto, was promoted by the neo-Nazi National Front.
In 1984, according to former British Nazi leader Ray Hill (who later renounced racism and worked with antiracists), the Libyan People’s Bureau put up money for a special anti-Semitic supplement to the National Front’s monthly magazine.
In addition, Ghadaffi’s government picked up the tab for several junkets so that neofascists from England, France, Canada, the Netherlands and several other countries could visit the Libyan capital.
Col. Ghaddafi is also widely admired by white supremacists in the United States.
The Green Book has been featured as the top online book on the Web site of the American Front, whose professed aim is “to secure National Freedom and Social Justice for the White people of North America.”
Asserting that he is “against race mixing,” American Front leader James Porazzo praises Libya and says that his group has much in common ideologically with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, which has its own links to Ghaddafi.
Porazzo also says he has “great respect for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah,” two radical Islamist groups involved in suicide bombings, as long as they “see that their home is in the Mideast and that their religion is great for their people but not intended for all mankind.”
‘Working for Their Races’
The Philadelphia-based American Front thinks highly of Osama bin Laden, too, describing him as “one of ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government, the name many extremists give to the federal government, which they believe is run by Jews] and the New World Order’s biggest enemies.”
And it is not alone. Wolfgang Droege, one of 17 Canadian racists who traveled on a “fact-finding mission” to Libya in 1989, is similarly enamored of bin Laden, seeing parallels between bin Laden’s struggle and others supporting “racial nationalism” in North America.
“I’ve had dealings with Black Muslims, I’ve had dealings with Arabs, I’ve had dealings with people of various races, and I realize that some of these people are as motivated as I am in working for the interest of their race,” Droege told MacLean’s magazine.
While they wouldn’t want bin Laden, or anyone of non-European descent, living next door, leaders of the hard-core racist movement in the United States have seized upon the Sept. 11 attacks as an opportunity to expand their strategic alliance with Islamic radicals under the pretext of supporting Palestinian rights.
After hijacked airplanes demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, a number of Muslim newspapers published a flurry of articles by American white supremacists ranting against Israel and the Jews.
Anti-Zionist commentary by neo-Nazi David Duke appeared on the front page of the Oman Times, for instance, and on an extremist website based in Pakistan.
Another opinion piece by Duke ran in Muslims, a New York-based English-language weekly, which also featured a lengthy critique of U.S. foreign policy by William Pierce, head of the rabidly racist National Alliance.
In the wake of Sept. 11, several American neo-Nazi websites also started to offer links to Islamic websites.
The psychological dynamics that propel the actions of Islamic terrorists have much in common with the mental outlook of neo-Nazis.
Both glorify violence as a regenerative force and both are willing to slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new social order.
The potential for an alliance between American neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists — an alliance that could develop into strong operational ties — cannot be ruled out given the long and sordid history of fascist links to the Muslim world.
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14066#.Un8aXuI4FpE
Op-Ed: Why Did so Many Wanted Nazis Convert to Islam?
Published: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 12:47 PM
The list is long — but is there a connection?
Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.
There are Nazi grafts in Arab-Islamic terrorism.
At the top of the most wanted list of the Simon Wiesenthal Center there is a man who today would be one hundred years old. His name is Alois Brunner and he is responsible for the deaths of over 130,000 Jews. The Nazi hunters still place him in Syria, where he was last seen in 2001, protected by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Brunner was one of the most zealous ideologues and officials of the “Final Solution”, the plan for the extermination of the Jews. The idea haunted him to the point that in 1985 he said to the German magazine Bunte: “I regret that I didn’t finish the job”.
When the United Arab Republic of Syria was formed, Dr. Brunner took up residence at 7 George Haddad, in the embassy district of Damascus. In 1961, the year that Adolf Eichmann was captured by the Israelis in Buenos Aires, Brunner received a bomb-letter, probably from the Mossad and lost an eye.
Brunner, a personal friend of Hafez el Assad, took part in the construction of Syria’s secret services on the model of the Gestapo.
In November 1967, the neo-Nazi organization Bund Heimattreuer Jugend published in Esslingen Hegensberg, West Germany, the obituary of Karl van Kynast: “Lieutenant (res.) of the Bundeswehr, Captain in the army of the United Arab Republic, he felt at the Suez Canal on 12 September, 1967”.
Brunner is, in fact, only the best known of a number of Nazi officials who participated in the construction of of the Islamic regimes and who died in those lands after converting to Islam.
This alliance between the Nazi swastika and the Islamic Koran is well explained in a 1942 article written by Johann von Leers, the best known of Nazi converts to Islam. Published in the newspaper “Die Judenfrage”, the article presented Judaism and Islam in terms of Hegel’s thesis and antithesis: “The hostility of Muhammad towards the Jews had a consequence: the Oriental Jews were totally paralyzed. If the rest of the world had adopted a similar policy, we would not have the ‘Jewish question’. Islam has made an eternal service to the world by preventing the conquest of Arabia by the Jews”.
One of the leaders of the “Jewish Affairs” in Galicia, Altern Erich, converted to Islam and took the name of “Ali Bella” in Egypt, where he trained Palestinian terrorists.
Leopold Gleim was known through his original name as a head of the Gestapo in Poland, but became “Ali al- Nahar” at the service of the Egyptian dictator Nasser.
Oskar Dirlewanger, after killing tens of thousands of Jews in the Ukraine, became the bodyguard of the Egyptian dictator. Dr. Heinrich Willerman, famous for some of the most atrocious experiments at Dachau, and directed the terrorist “Camp Samarra” in Egypt.
After having “liquidated” the Warsaw ghetto, Kurt Baurnann joined the Ministry of War in Cairo and trained the Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The head of the Gestapo in Düsseldorf, Joachim Daemling, went to work at the Egyptian prison system.
Even François Genoud, the famous banker of Nazism, testamentary heir of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, used the war treasure of the Reich to finance the Arab- Muslim anti-Jewish causes, and in 1959, gave birth to “International Association of Friends of the Arab World”.
Walter Rauff, who invented the “gas vans” which killed at 97,000 Jews during the Holocaust, in 1948 tortured Jews in Damascus.
Boeckler Wilhelm became “Abd al Karim”, the SS Wilhelm Berner instructed Palestinian terrorists, the SS Gruppenführer Alois Moser became “Hassan Sulayman”.
In Cairo lived Hans Eisele, “Dr. Eisele”, who in Dachau became notorious for torturing prisoners with injections of cyanide. Even Otto Skorzeny, the SS commander who freed Mussolini from his prison on the Gran Sasso, lived in Cairo, where he perfected the Intelligence Services of Nasser’s regime.
Among the collaborators of Skorzeny there was also an official of the Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda, Franz Buensch, an “expert on the Jewish problem” who had worked with Adolf Eichmann on the “Final Solution” and had also written a book entitled “Sexual Habits of the Jews”, perhaps the most repugnant document produced by the Nazis.
In the Egyptian capital there was another infamous doctor, Aribert Heim, “Dr. Tod”, Dr. Death, so named because of the cruelty of his experiments in the camps of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. Heim converted to Islam under the name of “Tarek Hussein Farid”. He sported an Islamic beard, he went to the al Azhar mosque every morning and read the Koran in the German translation.
The collaborator of Goebbels, Johann von Leers, was solemnly received in Cairo by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini: “We thank you for having fought against the powers of darkness incarnated by world Jewry”. After converting to Islam, Von Leers assumed the name of “Omar Amin von Leers” and in Cairo occupied many posts in the administration of Nasser.
When Tom Cruise in 2008 produced the movie “Valkyrie”, Major Otto Ernst Remer, who in the film has the face of Thomas Kretschmann, was portrayed as a key figure in the bloody suppression of the conspiracy that tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In 1993, an Egyptian newspaper interviewed Remer, who hailed the Khomeini revolution, said that the gas chambers were “lies” and who compared the defeat of Nazi Germany to that of the Palestinian Arabs, “both victims of the Jews, both suffered under occupation”.
And how to forget that neo-Nazis helped Yasser Arafat in 1972’s Munich massacre?
This is not an exotic, distant story, it sheds a dramatic light on the existential war between political Islam and the Jews.
While reading these and other stories of Nazi officials who fought for Islam, I am reminded of the project of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haji Amin al Hussein, who planned to install a gas chamber and a crematorium near Nablus/Shechem. That is the real “occupation”, that of a genocidal and totalitarian ideology at war with the Jews in their own land.
A Birkenau in the desert. A Mauthausen which would have liked to set foot on Mount Zion.
http://www.vice.com/read/the-eternal-nazi-aribert-heim
The SS Doctor Who Converted to Islam and Escaped the Nazi Hunters
By Jamie Clifton Apr 21 2014
The Holocaust, as you’ll probably know, produced some of history’s worst human beings. The thing is, though, besides those who made it into your textbooks—the Hitlers, Görings and Himmlers—many escaped unscathed, free to live out the rest of their days pretending to be mild-mannered expats who’d moved to Argentina simply because they preferred empanadas and polo to bratwurst and car manufacturing.
One SS member to ultimately escape prosecution was an Austrian concentration camp doctor called Aribert Heim, who later became known as “Doctor Death.” The atrocities committed in the Nazi camps have their very own scale of horror, and Heim sits somewhere near the top (his trademark was injecting gasoline into healthy people’s hearts and keeping their skulls as trophies). Despite his horrific crimes, he managed to mostly evade the authorities, and when they did finally catch up with him, in the early 60s, he had already fled Germany.
Almost 50 years later, New York Times journalist Souad Mekhennet got a tip that Heim had converted to Islam and had been hiding out in Cairo. she teamed up with another NY Times journalist, Nicholas Kulish, and the pair decided to follow up what they’d heard, hoping to track down Heim and explain what exactly had happened after his sudden disappearance.
An article about Mekhennet and Kulish’s search for Heim was first published in the New York Times, before the pair turned their investigation into a book, titled The Eternal Nazi. I recently spoke to the writers about their experience, the briefcase of Heim’s possessions they were handed in Cairo, and the effect the story had on them and those closest to Dr. Death.
VICE: Hi guys. So let’s start at the beginning. When did you start investigating the story of Aribert Heim?
Souad Mekhennet: It started in 2008, when I received a phone call from an old source of mine. We met, and he took out this photocopied photo of Aribert Heim. He told me that he was the most-wanted Nazi doctor, “Doctor Death.” There was information that Heim used to hide out in a certain neighbourhood in Cairo, but it wasn’t confirmed. So I spoke to Nick, and we decided to take on the challenge. I took this photocopy to Cairo to see if it was true. We went from small hotel to small hotel, until, on our third day, we found someone who recognized him.
What exactly had Heim done to become the most wanted Nazi in the world?
Nicholas Kulish: He worked as a Waffen-SS doctor in a series of concentration camps, including Buchenwald, in Germany, and Mauthausen, in Austria. He was accused of committing hideous crimes in Mauthausen in 1941, including operating on healthy living patients, killing them in the process, and injecting gasoline into people’s hearts. He also used to take the skulls with particularly good teeth as trophies and keep them on his desk.
And he then managed to escape after the war.
Well, what a lot of people find unbelievable is that he was held in custody—first by Americans, then the German authorities—for more than two years after the war, but there was no sign on his record that he’d served in Mauthausen, so he was released under the Christmas amnesty in 1947.
How he did he manage to get that wiped from his record?
No one really knows. It could have been a lucky oversight; they were shuffling millions of soldiers around half of Europe.
SM: Also, the witnesses to Heim’s atrocities were in Austria, and it took the investigators quite some time to really figure out who and where Heim was.
Yeah, one story I found interesting was how Nazi hunters started putting things together after Heim was explicitly mentioned in a play written by a Holocaust survivor.
NK: Yeah, that was a fascinating thing – it was one of the earliest works of art about the Holocaust. The playwright, Arthur Becker, was a kind of assistant war-crimes investigator in Mauthausen and took down the first known testimony about Heim’s crimes in 1946. Then he writes this play in which the villain is a doctor who collects skulls as trophies. So Heim has become this bogeyman Nazi murderer within two years of the war.
When really Heim was off playing professional ice hockey.
SM: Yes, he had moved to Bad Nauheim [near Frankfurt] and was playing for the Red Devils ice hockey team. Then he met a girl from a very wealthy family and moved to a tremendously big villa in Baden-Baden, where he settled as a gynocologist.
How long was it until the Nazi hunters caught up with him?
NK: He received a phone call in 1962 asking him if he was the doctor who worked in Mauthausen. He then had this incredibly casual encounter with a couple of investigators, but he knew what it meant. He borrowed his brother-in-law’s Mercedes and basically hightailed from Germany into France and France into Spain, then ditched the car before moving on to Morocco. His brother-in-law was pretty angry with him when he picked up the car. He said, “The least you could have done would have been to wash it.”
And it was in Egypt that he converted to Islam and became Tarek Hussein Farid. It’s apparent in the book that he was very good at hiding who he really was. Do you think his conversion had something to do with that?
SM: We heard a few theories, and one from his immediate family was that when Egypt started to have closer relations with Israel, Heim started to feel very unsafe there. So one way to change his name and blend in better would have been to convert to Islam. But on the other hand, his Egyptian adopted family believed that he had a genuine interest in the religion and that he prayed and followed all the rules. So it depends on who you talk to. But he definitely succeeded in making people believe he had a genuine interest in Islam.
Can you tell me a little about the family he lived with in Egypt?
He moved into a little hotel called Kasr el Madina, and the owner’s family felt sorry for him because he was this older foreign man living alone. He eventually became close friends with the owner, and they used to cook for him and hang out. He more or less adopted them as family and they adopted him. He became very close to Mahmoud Doma, who we interviewed several times for the book. Heim became Mahmoud’s and his younger brother’s second father, because their father passed away when they were very young.
What was it like telling the family that the man they knew had done all these horrendous things?
They had no idea that he was hiding or who he really was, so it came as a big surprise to them. They didn’t about his second identity. But they did know that he’d been married and had two children in Germany. They also met Rüdiger [Heim’s younger son] at one stage because he started to visit his father.
How aware were his real family of what he’d done?
Well, we spoke to his wife before she passed away and she said she had no idea until she first heard the accusations [after Heim met with the investigators in Baden-Baden]. It appeared that her mother had told him there would be no way the family could face such a trial and said it would be better for all of them if he took off.
NK: One of the central ironies was that he supposedly fled to protect his family, in Germany in 1962, when a Nazi war criminal could get off with a slap on the wrist or a couple of years in prison, before going back to a normal life. Instead, he subjected his family to half a century of phone taps, questioning, and searches, and set himself up for decades in exile, essentially turning Egypt into his own prison.
What were Rüdiger’s feelings when you spoke to him? How did he reconcile what his father had done with the father he was visiting in Cairo?
SM: My impression was that he didn’t want to believe that his father would have committed all these evil crimes, and he didn’t want to know whether he’d really done it all or not. He was totally obsessed with trying to prove that his father was innocent.
NK: Heim had two sons, and it’s really telling how different their reactions were. The older son more or less knew and remembered his father and going through all the questions and police investigations. He had nothing to do with his father and never went to visit him in Cairo. Whereas the younger son, who was six when his father disappeared, barely had the faintest memory of him, so he went in search of a father he never knew and who he always longed for.
Was there anything you learned while working on the book that surprised you?
One thing that surprised me was how many real Inglourious Basterds stories there were. Groups with names like Vengeance and the Avengers tracked down and killed former SS and Gestapo members. Tuviah Friedman, who later worked with [renowned Nazi hunter] Simon Wiesenthal, hunted down Nazis in post-war Europe. The SS captain known as the Hangman of Riga was found in a trunk in the bedroom of his beach house in Uruguay, executed for his part in the Holocaust.
SM: Also how the Mossad tried to kill Nazis in Egypt. Hans Eisele, who was also a Nazi doctor, was sent a letter bomb, but it exploded in the delivery guy’s hands.
What did you personally take away from the experience?
It was a chance to learn about what happened in Germany from a totally different perspective. The Egyptian family handed over Heim’s dusty, rusty old briefcase, which was stuffed full of letters and medical records and a long report about Jews and anti-Semitism, which he obsessed over. I took away that there are still so many things that we don’t know about—and, I mean, I grew up in Germany and studied history, but there are so many things we don’t know.
What about you, Nick?
I asked a retired judge who was hunting Nazis in his spare time, “What’s the point in arresting these 90-year-old guys? What’s the point in going after them?” And he said, “At the concentration camps they sent 90-year-old men and women to their death, and they had no problem killing newborn babies. So you pursue justice at any point and at any cost.” There’s a reason why there’s no statute of limitations on murder here in the US, and that’s because the victims deserve justice, no matter how long it takes.
What do you think of the theory held by some that Heim is still alive and out there somewhere?
SM: Well, there is no body. Our research led us to believe that he was buried in a common grave, but of course the final proof is not there. From the Nazi hunters’ perspective, this kind of skepticism is a normal part of their job. There was an investigation into Heim going on in Germany, but because of our research and because of further proof, the case was closed.
NK: On the one hand, this guy made so many escapes after the war, and the idea of him slipping away one last time—of faking his death—is a really attractive one. On the other hand, Heim would be turning 100 in June, but people still feel that justice hasn’t been done—and, in some ways, you could never really catch enough people for the crimes of the Holocaust.
Do you think they’ve mostly missed their chance now?
In the late 40s and early 50s, when almost all the Nazis perpetrators were there to be caught, the Americans were more concerned with fighting the Soviets, and the Soviets were more concerned with fighting the Americans. The Germans just wanted to build Mercedeses and BMWs and to forget about the whole thing, so it was only later—once these people started dying—that people were ready to go after them.
Thanks, guys.