German Nazis and the Middle East: Pre-War Friendship and Post-War Refuge
In the previous article, we talked about how Nazi war criminals, after the defeat of Germany in World War II, found refuge in the countries of the New World, from Paraguay and Chile to the United States. The second direction in which the Nazis fled from Europe was the “road to the East”. Arab countries have become one of the final destinations of the Nazis, especially German. The arrangement of fugitive war criminals in the Middle East was facilitated by the long-standing ties that existed between Nazi Germany and the Arab nationalist movements. Even before the start of World War II, German intelligence agencies established contacts with Arab nationalists, who saw Germany as a natural ally and patron in the fight against Great Britain and France - two colonial powers that claimed complete control over Arab countries.
Amin al-Husseini and the SS troops
Germany had the strongest ties with Palestinian and Iraqi political and religious figures in Germany before the war. The great mufti of Jerusalem at that time was Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), who really didn’t want the mass movement of Jews, inspired by the Zionist movement, from Europe to Palestine. Amin al-Husseini, a native of a rich and noble Jerusalem Arab family, graduated from the famous Islamic University Al-Azhar in Egypt, and during the First World War he served in the Turkish army. At about the same time, he became one of the authoritative leaders of the Arab nationalists. In 1920, the British authorities sentenced Al-Husseini to ten years in prison for anti-Jewish riots, but were soon pardoned and even made in 1921, just at 26, by the great mufti of Jerusalem. In this post, he changed his half-brother.
Back in 1933, the mufti contacted Hitler’s party, from which he began to receive financial and military assistance. The NSDAP saw in the muftis a possible ally in the fight against British influence in the Middle East, for which it organized the delivery of funds and weapons to it. In 1936, in Palestine, there were major Jewish pogroms, staged not with the participation of the Nazi intelligence services, who collaborated with Amin al-Husseini. In 1939, Mufti Husseini moved to Iraq, where he supported the rise to power of Rashid Geylani in 1941. Rashid Geylani was also a longtime ally of Hitler's Germany in the fight against British influence in the Middle East. He opposed the Anglo-Iraq Treaty and openly focused on cooperation with Germany. 1 April 1941 The city of Rashid Ali al-Gheylani and his associates from the Golden Square group - Colonels Salah al-Din al-Sabah, Mahmoud Salman, Fahmi Said, Kamil Shabib, Iraqi Army Chief of Staff Amin Zaki Suleiman made a military coup. British forces, seeking to prevent the transfer of Iraqi oil resources into German hands, launched an invasion of the country and on May 2, 1941 began fighting against the Iraqi army. Since Germany was distracted on the eastern front, she was unable to provide support to the government of Geylani. British troops quickly defeated the weak Iraqi army and 30 in May 1941. The Geylani regime fell. The overthrown Iraqi prime minister fled to Germany, where Hitler granted him political asylum as head of the Iraqi government in exile. In Germany, Geylani stayed until the end of the war.
With the beginning of the Second World War, cooperation between Hitler's Germany and Arab nationalists intensified. Hitler's intelligence agencies allocated large sums of money every month to the Jerusalem mufti and other Arab politicians. Mufti Husseini arrived in October 1941 from Iran in Italy, and then moved to Berlin. In Germany, he met with senior management of security services, including Adolf Eichmann, and visited the concentration camps Auschwitz, Majdanek and Sachsenhausen for excursion purposes. 28 November 1941 was a meeting of Mufti al-Husseini with Adolf Hitler. The Arab leader called Hitler Führer "defender of Islam" and said that Arabs and Germans have common enemies - the British, Jews and communists, so they will have to fight together in the war that has begun. Mufti appealed to Muslims to fight on the side of Nazi Germany. Muslim volunteer formations were formed in which Arabs, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, representatives of the Caucasian and Central Asian peoples of the Soviet Union, as well as smaller groups of volunteers from Turkey, Iran, and British India served.
Mufti al-Husseini became one of the main supporters of the total extermination of Jews in the countries of Eastern Europe. It was he who complained to Hitler about the authorities of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, who, according to the mufti, did not effectively solve the “Jewish question”. In an effort to completely destroy the Jews as a nation, the mufti explained this by the desire to preserve Palestine as an Arab national state. So he became not just a supporter of cooperation with Hitler, but a Nazi war criminal who blessed the Muslims to serve in the SS punitive divisions. According to the researchers, the mufti is personally responsible for the death of not less than half a million Eastern European Jews who went from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia to death camps located in Poland. In addition, it was the Mufti who inspired Yugoslav and Albanian Muslims to slaughter Serbs and Jews in Yugoslavia. After all, al-Husseini was at the forefront of the idea of forming in the composition of the SS troops special units that could be recruited from representatives of the Muslim peoples of Eastern Europe - Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, angry at their neighbors - Orthodox Christians and Jews.
East SS Divisions
The German command, having decided to create armed formations from among ethnic Muslims, first of all paid attention to two categories - the Muslims living on the Balkan Peninsula, and the Muslims of the national republics of the Soviet Union. Both had long-standing scores for the Slavs — the Serbs in the Balkans, the Russians in the Soviet Union, so the Hitler generals counted on the military prowess of the Muslim divisions. The Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina formed the 13-i SS Mountain Division "Khanjar". Despite the fact that Bosnian spiritual leaders from among the local mullahs and imams opposed the anti-Serb and anti-Semitic actions of the Croatian Ustash government, Mufti Amin al-Husseini urged Bosnian Muslims not to listen to their own leaders and fight for Germany. The number of divisions was 26 thousand people, of which 60% were ethnic Muslims - Bosnians, and the rest - Croats and Yugoslavian Germans. Due to the predominance of the Muslim component in the division, pork was eliminated in the unit’s ration and five times prayer was introduced. Fighters of the division wore a fez, and on the buttonholes a short sword was depicted - “hanjar”.
Nonetheless, the commanding staff of the division was represented by German officers who belonged to ordinary and non-commissioned officers of Bosnian origin, recruited from simple peasants and often not at all separating the Nazi ideology, very arrogantly. This more than once became the cause of conflicts in the division, including the uprising, which became the only example of a soldier’s rebellion in the SS forces. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the Nazis, its initiators were executed, and several hundred soldiers sent for demonstration purposes to work in Germany. In 1944, most of the fighters of the division deserted and went over to the side of the Yugoslav partisans, but the remnants of the division, mainly from among the Yugoslav ethnic Germans and Croats - Ustashi, continued to fight in France and then surrendered to British troops. It is the Khanjar division that bears the lion’s share of responsibility for mass atrocities against the Serbian and Jewish population in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Serbs who survived the war say that Ustashi and Bosnians committed atrocities much worse than the actual German units.
In April, 1944, as part of the SS forces, another Muslim division was formed - the 21-I Mountain Division “Skanderbeg”, named for the national hero of Albania, Skanderbeg. This division the Nazis manned 11 with thousands of soldiers and officers, most of whom were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and Albania. The Nazis sought to exploit the anti-Slavic sentiments among the Albanians, who considered themselves aborigines of the Balkan Peninsula and its true owners, whose lands were occupied by Slavs - the Serbs. However, in reality, the Albanians did not particularly want and did not know how, so they had to be used only for punitive and anti-partisan actions, most often for the destruction of the peaceful Serbian population, which the Albanian soldiers did with pleasure, given the long-standing hatred between the two neighboring nations. The Scanderbeg division became famous for its atrocities against the Serbian population, cutting out thousands of Serbian civilians, including several hundred Orthodox priests, for 40 during the year of their participation in the fighting. The actions of the division were actively supported by the mufti al-Husseini, who called on the Albanians to create an Islamic state in the Balkans. In May 1945, the remnants of the division surrendered to the Allies in Austria.
The third major Muslim unit in the Wehrmacht was the “Neue-Turkestan” division, created in January 1944 on the initiative of Mufti al-Husseini and staffed by representatives of the Muslim peoples of the USSR from among Soviet prisoners of war who had fallen to the side of Hitler Germany. The overwhelming majority of the representatives of the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Transcaucasus, the Volga region, Central Asia heroically fought against Nazism and produced many Heroes of the Soviet Union. However, there were also those who, for whatever reason, whether it was the desire for survival in captivity or the settling of personal accounts with the Soviet authorities, went over to the side of Nazi Germany. There were about 8,5 of thousands of people who were divided into four waffen groups - “Turkestan”, “Idel-Ural”, “Azerbaijan” and “Crimea”. The emblem of the division were three mosques with golden domes and crescents with the inscription "Biz Alla Billen". In the winter of 1945, the Azerbaijan-Waffen Group was withdrawn from the division and transferred to the Caucasian Legion of the SS. The division took part in battles with Slovenian partisans in the territory of Yugoslavia, after which it broke into Austria, where it was taken prisoner.
Finally, with the direct assistance of Mufti Amin al-Husseini, the Arab Legion "Free Arabia" was created in 1943. It was possible to recruit about 20 thousands of Arabs from the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa, among whom were not only Sunni Muslims, but also Orthodox Arabs. The legion was stationed in the territory of Greece, where it fought with the Greek anti-fascist partisan movement, then transferred to Yugoslavia - also to fight the partisan formations and the advancing Soviet forces. The Arab division, which did not distinguish itself in battles, completed its path on the territory of modern Croatia.
The defeat of Germany in the Second World War had an impact on the political situation in the Muslim world, especially in the Arab East. Mufti Amin al-Husseini flew from Austria to Switzerland on a training plane and asked political asylum from the Swiss government, but the authorities of that country refused the odious mufti to the asylum, and he had no choice but to surrender to the French military command. The French brought the mufti to the Cherche Midi prison in Paris. For committing war crimes on the territory of Yugoslavia, the mufti was put on the list of Nazi war criminals by the leadership of Yugoslavia. However, in 1946, the mufti managed to escape to Cairo, and then to Baghdad and Damascus. He took up the organization of the struggle against the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands.
After the end of the Second World War, the mufti lived for almost thirty years and died in 1974 in Beirut. His relative Muhammad Abd ar-Rahman Abd ar-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussein entered history under the name of Yasser Arafat and became the leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Following the mufti of al-Husseini, many German Nazi criminals - generals and officers of the Wehrmacht, the Abwehr, and the SS troops moved to the Arab East. They found political asylum in Arab countries, having come closer to their leaders on the basis of anti-Semitic sentiments, which are equally inherent to the Nazis and Arab nationalists. The beginning of the armed conflict between the Arab states and the Jewish state of Israel created is a great reason for the use of Hitler's war criminals in the countries of the Arab East as military and police specialists. Much Nazi criminals created a patronage in the Middle East, Mufti al-Husseini, who continued to enjoy considerable influence in the circles of Arab nationalists.
Egyptian Nazi Way
One of the most important locations for the Nazi war criminals who moved to the Middle East after the war was Egypt. In Cairo, as you know, Mufti al-Husseini moved. Behind him, and rushed many German officers. An Arab-German emigration center was created to deal with the organizational issues of the relocation of Nazi officers to the Middle East. The center was headed by a former army officer of General Rommel, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Muller, who naturalized in Syria as Hassan Bey. For several years, the center managed to transfer 1500 Nazi officers to Arab countries, and the entire Arab East received at least 8 thousands of Wehrmacht officers and SS troops, and this without considering Muslims from the SS divisions created under the patronage of the Palestinian mufti.
Johann Demling, who led the Gestapo of the Ruhr area, arrived in Egypt. In Cairo, he took up work in his specialty - led the reform of the Egyptian security service in 1953 year. Another Hitlerite officer, Leopold Glaim, who led the Gestapo in Warsaw, led the Egyptian security service under the name of Colonel al-Nacher. The propaganda department of the Egyptian security service was headed by the former Obergruppenführer SS Moser, who took the name of Hussa Nalisman. Heinrich Zelman, who led the Gestapo in Ulm, became the head of the Egyptian secret state police under the name Hamid Suleiman. The political department of the police was headed by former SS Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Bender, aka “Colonel Salam”. With the direct participation of Nazi criminals, concentration camps were set up in which Egyptian communists and representatives of other opposition political parties and movements were housed. In the organization of the concentration camps system, the invaluable experience of the Hitlerite war criminals was very necessary, and they, in turn, did not fail to offer their services to the Egyptian government.
Johann von Leers - the closest associate of Joseph Goebbels and the author of the book “Jews Among Us” - also found refuge in Egypt.
Leers escaped from Germany through Italy and originally settled in Argentina, where he lived for about ten years and worked as the editor of a local Nazi magazine. In 1955, Mr. Leers left Argentina and moved to the Middle East. In Egypt, he also found a job "in the specialty", becoming the curator of anti-Israel propaganda. For a career in Egypt, he even accepted Islam and the name Omar Amin. The Egyptian government refused to hand over Leers to German justice, but when Leers died in 1965, his body was transported to its homeland in Germany, where it was buried according to Muslim custom. In the propaganda work, Leers was assisted by Hans Appler, who also converted to Islam under the name Salab Gafa. Cairo radio, under the control of German propaganda specialists, has become the main mouthpiece of anti-Israeli propaganda in the Arab world. It should be noted that it was the German emigrants who played the main role in the formation and development of the propaganda machine of the Egyptian state in the 1950-s.
The positions of the German military advisers from among the former Nazis especially strengthened in Egypt after the military coup, the July revolution of 1952, which resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a military regime under the leadership of the Arab nationalists. The Arab nationalist officers who carried out the coup back in the war years sympathized with Hitler's Germany, in which they saw a natural ally in the fight against Great Britain. So, Anwar Sadat, who later became the president of Egypt, spent two years in prison on charges of having links with Nazi Germany. He did not leave sympathy for the Nazi regime even after the end of the Second World War.
In particular, in 1953, the Egyptian magazine al-Musawar published a letter to the deceased Hitler by Sadat. In it, Anwar Sadat wrote “My dear Hitler. I greet you with all my heart. If you, apparently, have now lost the war, you are still a real winner. You managed to drive a wedge between old Churchill and his allies - the offspring of Satan ”(Soviet Union - auth. Note). These words of Anwar Sadat clearly demonstrate his true political convictions and attitude towards the Soviet Union, which he demonstrated even more clearly when he came to power and reoriented Egypt to cooperate with the United States of America.
Gamal Abdel Nasser also sympathized with the Nazis - during the war years the young officer of the Egyptian army was also dissatisfied with the British influence in the country and was counting on Germany’s help in freeing the Arab world from British colonial control. Both Nasser, Sadat, and Major Hassan Ibrahim were another important participant in the coup. During the Second World War, they were associated with the German command and even provided German intelligence with information about the location of British units in Egypt and other North African countries. After Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power, Otto Skorzeny, a renowned German specialist in reconnaissance and sabotage operations, arrived in Egypt and assisted the Egyptian military commanders in the formation of Egyptian special forces. Abribert Heim, another Doctor Death, a Viennese doctor who entered the SS Army in 1940 and engaged in brutal medical experiments on prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, was also hiding in Egypt. In Egypt, Aribert Heim lived to 1992, naturalized under the name Tariq Farid Hussein, and died there in the 78 age from cancer.
Syria and Saudi Arabia
In addition to Egypt, Nazi war criminals also settled in Syria. Here, as in Egypt, Arab nationalists had strong positions, anti-Israeli sentiments were very common, and the Palestinian mufti al-Husseini enjoyed great influence. Alois Brunner (1912-2010?) - Adolf Eichmann's closest ally, one of the organizers of the deportation of Austrian, Berlin and Greek Jews to concentration camps, became the “father of the Syrian secret services”. In July, 1943, he sent 22 transport with the Jews of Paris to Auschwitz. It was Brunner who was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 56 000 Jews from Berlin, 50 000 Jews from Greece, 12 000 Slovak Jews, 23 500 Jews of France. After the defeat of Germany in the Second World War, Brunner fled to Munich, where, under a false name, he got a job as a driver, moreover in the trucking service of the American army. Later, he worked for some time at the mine, and then decided to finally leave Europe, because he feared the risk of a likely capture in the process of intensified hunting by the French special services for Nazi war criminals who had been operating during the war on French territory.
In 1954, Mr. Brunner fled to Syria, where he changed his name to “Georg Fisher” and contacted the Syrian special services. He became a military adviser to the Syrian secret services and participated in the organization of their activities. The location of Brunner in Syria was established by both French and Israeli secret services. Israeli intelligence has begun a Nazi war criminal hunt. Twice Brunner received parcels of bombs by mail, and in 1961, he lost his eye during the opening of the parcel, and in 1980 - four fingers on his left hand. However, the Syrian government has always refused to recognize the fact of Brunner’s residence in the country and claimed that these were slanderous rumors spread by the enemies of the Syrian state. However, Western media reported that before 1991, Mr. Brunner lived in Damascus, and then moved to Latakia, where he died in the middle of the 1990-s. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Alois Brunner died in the 2010 year, living to a very old age.
In addition to Brunner, many other prominent Nazi officers also settled in Syria. Thus, the Gestapo officer Rapp led the organizational work to strengthen the Syrian counterintelligence. Former Colonel of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht Krieble led the mission of military advisers who led the training of the Syrian army. Hitler's officers established close ties with radical Arab nationalists, many of whom were senior and senior officers of the Syrian army. During the reign of General Adib al-Shishakli, 11 of German military advisers, former senior and senior officers of the Wehrmacht, worked in the country and helped the Syrian dictator to organize the unification of the Arab states in the United Arab Republic.
Saudi Arabia was also of great interest to Hitler’s officers. The ultra-conservative monarchic regime existing in the country quite suited the Hitlerites by seeing Israel and the Soviet Union as their main enemies. In addition, Wahhabism in the years of the Second World War was considered by the Nazi special services as one of the most promising areas in Islam. As in other countries of the Arab East, in Saudi Arabia, the Nazi officers participated in the training of local special services and the army, in the fight against communist sentiment. It is likely that in training camps created with the participation of former Nazi officers, over time, militants from fundamentalist organizations that fought throughout Asia and Africa, including against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, were trained.
Iran, Turkey and the Nazis
In addition to the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa, in the pre-war years, the Nazis worked closely with the ruling circles of Iran. Shah Reza Pahlavi accepted the doctrine of the Aryan affiliation of the Iranian nation, in connection with which he renamed the country from Persia to Iran, that is, into the “Aryan Country”. Germany was seen by the Shah as a natural counterweight to British and Soviet influence in Iran. Moreover, in Germany and Italy, the Iranian Shah saw examples of the creation of successful national states, focused on the rapid modernization and increasing military and economic power.
The Shah considered fascist Italy as an example of an internal political system, seeking to create a similar model of society organization in Iran. in 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Nazi propaganda intensified in Iran.
Iranian military personnel began to undergo training in Germany, at the same time receiving an ideological load there. In 1937, the leader of Nazi youth Baldur von Schirach visited Iran. National-socialist ideas were widely spread among Iranian youth, which alarmed the Shah himself. Reza Pahlavi saw the spread of Nazism in Iranian society as a threat to their own power, since the Nazi youth groups accused the Shah regime of corruption, and one of the ultra-right groups even prepared a military coup. In the end, the Shah ordered the prohibition of the activities of Nazi organizations and print media in the country. Some particularly active Nazis were arrested, especially those who acted as part of the armed forces and posed a real danger to the political stability of the shah of Iran.
Nevertheless, the influence of German Nazis in the country persisted during the Second World War, helped by the activity of the German intelligence services and propaganda tricks of the Nazi party, which, in particular, spread disinformation among Iranians that Hitler had converted to Shiite Islam. Numerous Nazi organizations emerged in Iran, spreading their influence, including the officer corps of the armed forces. Since there was a very real danger of Iran being included in the war on the side of Nazi Germany, the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition occupied part of Iranian territory. After the end of the Second World War, Nazi groups appeared in Iran, created on the model of the NSDAP. One of them was called the National Socialist Iranian Workers Party. It was created by Davud Monshizadeh - a member of the defense of Berlin in May 1945, a staunch supporter of the "Aryan racism" of the Iranian nation. The Iranian ultra-rightists acted with anti-communist positions, but unlike the Arab politicians who sympathized with Hitlerism, they also negatively viewed the role of the Islamic clergy in the life of the country.
Back in the prewar period, Hitler Germany tried to develop ties with Turkey. The nationalist government of Ataturk was considered by the Hitlerites as a natural ally and, moreover, even as a certain model of the “national state”, which can serve as an example to follow. Hitler's Germany all the pre-war period sought to develop and strengthen cooperation in Turkey in various fields, emphasizing the long tradition of interaction between Turkey and Germany. By 1936, Germany had become Turkey’s main foreign trade partner, consuming up to half of the country's exports and supplying up to half of all imported products to Turkey. Since Turkey was an ally of Germany during the First World War, Hitler hoped that Turks would join Germany in the Second World War. Here he was wrong. Turkey did not dare to take the side of the “Axis countries”, while at the same time drawing off a large part of the Soviet troops that were stationed in Transcaucasia and did not engage in battles with the Hitlerites precisely because of the fears of Stalin and Beria that the Turks might attack to the Soviet Union in the event of withdrawal of combat-ready divisions from the Soviet-Turkish border. After the end of the Second World War, many Albanian and Bosnian as well as Central Asian and Caucasian Muslims who fought on the side of Nazi Germany in the Muslim units of the SS found refuge in Turkey. Some of them took part in the activities of the Turkish security forces as military specialists.
The ideas of Nazism are still alive in the countries of the Middle East. Unlike Europe, which Hitler's Nazism brought only the suffering and death of many millions of people, in the East to Adolf Hitler - a dual attitude. On the one hand, many people from the East, especially those living in European countries, do not like Nazism, because they have had sad experiences with modern neo-Nazis who are followers of Hitlerism. On the other hand, for many Eastern people, Hitler’s Germany remains a country that fought with Great Britain, which means it was on the same line of barricades with the same Arab or Indian national liberation movements. In addition, sympathies for Germany of the Nazi period may also be associated with political contradictions in the Middle East after the creation of the state of Israel.
Amin al-Husseini and the SS troops
Germany had the strongest ties with Palestinian and Iraqi political and religious figures in Germany before the war. The great mufti of Jerusalem at that time was Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), who really didn’t want the mass movement of Jews, inspired by the Zionist movement, from Europe to Palestine. Amin al-Husseini, a native of a rich and noble Jerusalem Arab family, graduated from the famous Islamic University Al-Azhar in Egypt, and during the First World War he served in the Turkish army. At about the same time, he became one of the authoritative leaders of the Arab nationalists. In 1920, the British authorities sentenced Al-Husseini to ten years in prison for anti-Jewish riots, but were soon pardoned and even made in 1921, just at 26, by the great mufti of Jerusalem. In this post, he changed his half-brother. Back in 1933, the mufti contacted Hitler’s party, from which he began to receive financial and military assistance. The NSDAP saw in the muftis a possible ally in the fight against British influence in the Middle East, for which it organized the delivery of funds and weapons to it. In 1936, in Palestine, there were major Jewish pogroms, staged not with the participation of the Nazi intelligence services, who collaborated with Amin al-Husseini. In 1939, Mufti Husseini moved to Iraq, where he supported the rise to power of Rashid Geylani in 1941. Rashid Geylani was also a longtime ally of Hitler's Germany in the fight against British influence in the Middle East. He opposed the Anglo-Iraq Treaty and openly focused on cooperation with Germany. 1 April 1941 The city of Rashid Ali al-Gheylani and his associates from the Golden Square group - Colonels Salah al-Din al-Sabah, Mahmoud Salman, Fahmi Said, Kamil Shabib, Iraqi Army Chief of Staff Amin Zaki Suleiman made a military coup. British forces, seeking to prevent the transfer of Iraqi oil resources into German hands, launched an invasion of the country and on May 2, 1941 began fighting against the Iraqi army. Since Germany was distracted on the eastern front, she was unable to provide support to the government of Geylani. British troops quickly defeated the weak Iraqi army and 30 in May 1941. The Geylani regime fell. The overthrown Iraqi prime minister fled to Germany, where Hitler granted him political asylum as head of the Iraqi government in exile. In Germany, Geylani stayed until the end of the war.
With the beginning of the Second World War, cooperation between Hitler's Germany and Arab nationalists intensified. Hitler's intelligence agencies allocated large sums of money every month to the Jerusalem mufti and other Arab politicians. Mufti Husseini arrived in October 1941 from Iran in Italy, and then moved to Berlin. In Germany, he met with senior management of security services, including Adolf Eichmann, and visited the concentration camps Auschwitz, Majdanek and Sachsenhausen for excursion purposes. 28 November 1941 was a meeting of Mufti al-Husseini with Adolf Hitler. The Arab leader called Hitler Führer "defender of Islam" and said that Arabs and Germans have common enemies - the British, Jews and communists, so they will have to fight together in the war that has begun. Mufti appealed to Muslims to fight on the side of Nazi Germany. Muslim volunteer formations were formed in which Arabs, Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, representatives of the Caucasian and Central Asian peoples of the Soviet Union, as well as smaller groups of volunteers from Turkey, Iran, and British India served.
Mufti al-Husseini became one of the main supporters of the total extermination of Jews in the countries of Eastern Europe. It was he who complained to Hitler about the authorities of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, who, according to the mufti, did not effectively solve the “Jewish question”. In an effort to completely destroy the Jews as a nation, the mufti explained this by the desire to preserve Palestine as an Arab national state. So he became not just a supporter of cooperation with Hitler, but a Nazi war criminal who blessed the Muslims to serve in the SS punitive divisions. According to the researchers, the mufti is personally responsible for the death of not less than half a million Eastern European Jews who went from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia to death camps located in Poland. In addition, it was the Mufti who inspired Yugoslav and Albanian Muslims to slaughter Serbs and Jews in Yugoslavia. After all, al-Husseini was at the forefront of the idea of forming in the composition of the SS troops special units that could be recruited from representatives of the Muslim peoples of Eastern Europe - Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, angry at their neighbors - Orthodox Christians and Jews.
East SS Divisions
The German command, having decided to create armed formations from among ethnic Muslims, first of all paid attention to two categories - the Muslims living on the Balkan Peninsula, and the Muslims of the national republics of the Soviet Union. Both had long-standing scores for the Slavs — the Serbs in the Balkans, the Russians in the Soviet Union, so the Hitler generals counted on the military prowess of the Muslim divisions. The Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina formed the 13-i SS Mountain Division "Khanjar". Despite the fact that Bosnian spiritual leaders from among the local mullahs and imams opposed the anti-Serb and anti-Semitic actions of the Croatian Ustash government, Mufti Amin al-Husseini urged Bosnian Muslims not to listen to their own leaders and fight for Germany. The number of divisions was 26 thousand people, of which 60% were ethnic Muslims - Bosnians, and the rest - Croats and Yugoslavian Germans. Due to the predominance of the Muslim component in the division, pork was eliminated in the unit’s ration and five times prayer was introduced. Fighters of the division wore a fez, and on the buttonholes a short sword was depicted - “hanjar”.
Nonetheless, the commanding staff of the division was represented by German officers who belonged to ordinary and non-commissioned officers of Bosnian origin, recruited from simple peasants and often not at all separating the Nazi ideology, very arrogantly. This more than once became the cause of conflicts in the division, including the uprising, which became the only example of a soldier’s rebellion in the SS forces. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the Nazis, its initiators were executed, and several hundred soldiers sent for demonstration purposes to work in Germany. In 1944, most of the fighters of the division deserted and went over to the side of the Yugoslav partisans, but the remnants of the division, mainly from among the Yugoslav ethnic Germans and Croats - Ustashi, continued to fight in France and then surrendered to British troops. It is the Khanjar division that bears the lion’s share of responsibility for mass atrocities against the Serbian and Jewish population in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Serbs who survived the war say that Ustashi and Bosnians committed atrocities much worse than the actual German units.
In April, 1944, as part of the SS forces, another Muslim division was formed - the 21-I Mountain Division “Skanderbeg”, named for the national hero of Albania, Skanderbeg. This division the Nazis manned 11 with thousands of soldiers and officers, most of whom were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and Albania. The Nazis sought to exploit the anti-Slavic sentiments among the Albanians, who considered themselves aborigines of the Balkan Peninsula and its true owners, whose lands were occupied by Slavs - the Serbs. However, in reality, the Albanians did not particularly want and did not know how, so they had to be used only for punitive and anti-partisan actions, most often for the destruction of the peaceful Serbian population, which the Albanian soldiers did with pleasure, given the long-standing hatred between the two neighboring nations. The Scanderbeg division became famous for its atrocities against the Serbian population, cutting out thousands of Serbian civilians, including several hundred Orthodox priests, for 40 during the year of their participation in the fighting. The actions of the division were actively supported by the mufti al-Husseini, who called on the Albanians to create an Islamic state in the Balkans. In May 1945, the remnants of the division surrendered to the Allies in Austria.
The third major Muslim unit in the Wehrmacht was the “Neue-Turkestan” division, created in January 1944 on the initiative of Mufti al-Husseini and staffed by representatives of the Muslim peoples of the USSR from among Soviet prisoners of war who had fallen to the side of Hitler Germany. The overwhelming majority of the representatives of the peoples of the North Caucasus, the Transcaucasus, the Volga region, Central Asia heroically fought against Nazism and produced many Heroes of the Soviet Union. However, there were also those who, for whatever reason, whether it was the desire for survival in captivity or the settling of personal accounts with the Soviet authorities, went over to the side of Nazi Germany. There were about 8,5 of thousands of people who were divided into four waffen groups - “Turkestan”, “Idel-Ural”, “Azerbaijan” and “Crimea”. The emblem of the division were three mosques with golden domes and crescents with the inscription "Biz Alla Billen". In the winter of 1945, the Azerbaijan-Waffen Group was withdrawn from the division and transferred to the Caucasian Legion of the SS. The division took part in battles with Slovenian partisans in the territory of Yugoslavia, after which it broke into Austria, where it was taken prisoner.
Finally, with the direct assistance of Mufti Amin al-Husseini, the Arab Legion "Free Arabia" was created in 1943. It was possible to recruit about 20 thousands of Arabs from the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa, among whom were not only Sunni Muslims, but also Orthodox Arabs. The legion was stationed in the territory of Greece, where it fought with the Greek anti-fascist partisan movement, then transferred to Yugoslavia - also to fight the partisan formations and the advancing Soviet forces. The Arab division, which did not distinguish itself in battles, completed its path on the territory of modern Croatia.
The defeat of Germany in the Second World War had an impact on the political situation in the Muslim world, especially in the Arab East. Mufti Amin al-Husseini flew from Austria to Switzerland on a training plane and asked political asylum from the Swiss government, but the authorities of that country refused the odious mufti to the asylum, and he had no choice but to surrender to the French military command. The French brought the mufti to the Cherche Midi prison in Paris. For committing war crimes on the territory of Yugoslavia, the mufti was put on the list of Nazi war criminals by the leadership of Yugoslavia. However, in 1946, the mufti managed to escape to Cairo, and then to Baghdad and Damascus. He took up the organization of the struggle against the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands.
After the end of the Second World War, the mufti lived for almost thirty years and died in 1974 in Beirut. His relative Muhammad Abd ar-Rahman Abd ar-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussein entered history under the name of Yasser Arafat and became the leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Following the mufti of al-Husseini, many German Nazi criminals - generals and officers of the Wehrmacht, the Abwehr, and the SS troops moved to the Arab East. They found political asylum in Arab countries, having come closer to their leaders on the basis of anti-Semitic sentiments, which are equally inherent to the Nazis and Arab nationalists. The beginning of the armed conflict between the Arab states and the Jewish state of Israel created is a great reason for the use of Hitler's war criminals in the countries of the Arab East as military and police specialists. Much Nazi criminals created a patronage in the Middle East, Mufti al-Husseini, who continued to enjoy considerable influence in the circles of Arab nationalists.
Egyptian Nazi Way
One of the most important locations for the Nazi war criminals who moved to the Middle East after the war was Egypt. In Cairo, as you know, Mufti al-Husseini moved. Behind him, and rushed many German officers. An Arab-German emigration center was created to deal with the organizational issues of the relocation of Nazi officers to the Middle East. The center was headed by a former army officer of General Rommel, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Muller, who naturalized in Syria as Hassan Bey. For several years, the center managed to transfer 1500 Nazi officers to Arab countries, and the entire Arab East received at least 8 thousands of Wehrmacht officers and SS troops, and this without considering Muslims from the SS divisions created under the patronage of the Palestinian mufti.
Johann Demling, who led the Gestapo of the Ruhr area, arrived in Egypt. In Cairo, he took up work in his specialty - led the reform of the Egyptian security service in 1953 year. Another Hitlerite officer, Leopold Glaim, who led the Gestapo in Warsaw, led the Egyptian security service under the name of Colonel al-Nacher. The propaganda department of the Egyptian security service was headed by the former Obergruppenführer SS Moser, who took the name of Hussa Nalisman. Heinrich Zelman, who led the Gestapo in Ulm, became the head of the Egyptian secret state police under the name Hamid Suleiman. The political department of the police was headed by former SS Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Bender, aka “Colonel Salam”. With the direct participation of Nazi criminals, concentration camps were set up in which Egyptian communists and representatives of other opposition political parties and movements were housed. In the organization of the concentration camps system, the invaluable experience of the Hitlerite war criminals was very necessary, and they, in turn, did not fail to offer their services to the Egyptian government.
Johann von Leers - the closest associate of Joseph Goebbels and the author of the book “Jews Among Us” - also found refuge in Egypt.
Leers escaped from Germany through Italy and originally settled in Argentina, where he lived for about ten years and worked as the editor of a local Nazi magazine. In 1955, Mr. Leers left Argentina and moved to the Middle East. In Egypt, he also found a job "in the specialty", becoming the curator of anti-Israel propaganda. For a career in Egypt, he even accepted Islam and the name Omar Amin. The Egyptian government refused to hand over Leers to German justice, but when Leers died in 1965, his body was transported to its homeland in Germany, where it was buried according to Muslim custom. In the propaganda work, Leers was assisted by Hans Appler, who also converted to Islam under the name Salab Gafa. Cairo radio, under the control of German propaganda specialists, has become the main mouthpiece of anti-Israeli propaganda in the Arab world. It should be noted that it was the German emigrants who played the main role in the formation and development of the propaganda machine of the Egyptian state in the 1950-s. The positions of the German military advisers from among the former Nazis especially strengthened in Egypt after the military coup, the July revolution of 1952, which resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a military regime under the leadership of the Arab nationalists. The Arab nationalist officers who carried out the coup back in the war years sympathized with Hitler's Germany, in which they saw a natural ally in the fight against Great Britain. So, Anwar Sadat, who later became the president of Egypt, spent two years in prison on charges of having links with Nazi Germany. He did not leave sympathy for the Nazi regime even after the end of the Second World War.
In particular, in 1953, the Egyptian magazine al-Musawar published a letter to the deceased Hitler by Sadat. In it, Anwar Sadat wrote “My dear Hitler. I greet you with all my heart. If you, apparently, have now lost the war, you are still a real winner. You managed to drive a wedge between old Churchill and his allies - the offspring of Satan ”(Soviet Union - auth. Note). These words of Anwar Sadat clearly demonstrate his true political convictions and attitude towards the Soviet Union, which he demonstrated even more clearly when he came to power and reoriented Egypt to cooperate with the United States of America. Gamal Abdel Nasser also sympathized with the Nazis - during the war years the young officer of the Egyptian army was also dissatisfied with the British influence in the country and was counting on Germany’s help in freeing the Arab world from British colonial control. Both Nasser, Sadat, and Major Hassan Ibrahim were another important participant in the coup. During the Second World War, they were associated with the German command and even provided German intelligence with information about the location of British units in Egypt and other North African countries. After Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power, Otto Skorzeny, a renowned German specialist in reconnaissance and sabotage operations, arrived in Egypt and assisted the Egyptian military commanders in the formation of Egyptian special forces. Abribert Heim, another Doctor Death, a Viennese doctor who entered the SS Army in 1940 and engaged in brutal medical experiments on prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, was also hiding in Egypt. In Egypt, Aribert Heim lived to 1992, naturalized under the name Tariq Farid Hussein, and died there in the 78 age from cancer.
Syria and Saudi Arabia
In addition to Egypt, Nazi war criminals also settled in Syria. Here, as in Egypt, Arab nationalists had strong positions, anti-Israeli sentiments were very common, and the Palestinian mufti al-Husseini enjoyed great influence. Alois Brunner (1912-2010?) - Adolf Eichmann's closest ally, one of the organizers of the deportation of Austrian, Berlin and Greek Jews to concentration camps, became the “father of the Syrian secret services”. In July, 1943, he sent 22 transport with the Jews of Paris to Auschwitz. It was Brunner who was responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 56 000 Jews from Berlin, 50 000 Jews from Greece, 12 000 Slovak Jews, 23 500 Jews of France. After the defeat of Germany in the Second World War, Brunner fled to Munich, where, under a false name, he got a job as a driver, moreover in the trucking service of the American army. Later, he worked for some time at the mine, and then decided to finally leave Europe, because he feared the risk of a likely capture in the process of intensified hunting by the French special services for Nazi war criminals who had been operating during the war on French territory.
In 1954, Mr. Brunner fled to Syria, where he changed his name to “Georg Fisher” and contacted the Syrian special services. He became a military adviser to the Syrian secret services and participated in the organization of their activities. The location of Brunner in Syria was established by both French and Israeli secret services. Israeli intelligence has begun a Nazi war criminal hunt. Twice Brunner received parcels of bombs by mail, and in 1961, he lost his eye during the opening of the parcel, and in 1980 - four fingers on his left hand. However, the Syrian government has always refused to recognize the fact of Brunner’s residence in the country and claimed that these were slanderous rumors spread by the enemies of the Syrian state. However, Western media reported that before 1991, Mr. Brunner lived in Damascus, and then moved to Latakia, where he died in the middle of the 1990-s. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Alois Brunner died in the 2010 year, living to a very old age.
In addition to Brunner, many other prominent Nazi officers also settled in Syria. Thus, the Gestapo officer Rapp led the organizational work to strengthen the Syrian counterintelligence. Former Colonel of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht Krieble led the mission of military advisers who led the training of the Syrian army. Hitler's officers established close ties with radical Arab nationalists, many of whom were senior and senior officers of the Syrian army. During the reign of General Adib al-Shishakli, 11 of German military advisers, former senior and senior officers of the Wehrmacht, worked in the country and helped the Syrian dictator to organize the unification of the Arab states in the United Arab Republic.
Saudi Arabia was also of great interest to Hitler’s officers. The ultra-conservative monarchic regime existing in the country quite suited the Hitlerites by seeing Israel and the Soviet Union as their main enemies. In addition, Wahhabism in the years of the Second World War was considered by the Nazi special services as one of the most promising areas in Islam. As in other countries of the Arab East, in Saudi Arabia, the Nazi officers participated in the training of local special services and the army, in the fight against communist sentiment. It is likely that in training camps created with the participation of former Nazi officers, over time, militants from fundamentalist organizations that fought throughout Asia and Africa, including against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, were trained.
Iran, Turkey and the Nazis
In addition to the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa, in the pre-war years, the Nazis worked closely with the ruling circles of Iran. Shah Reza Pahlavi accepted the doctrine of the Aryan affiliation of the Iranian nation, in connection with which he renamed the country from Persia to Iran, that is, into the “Aryan Country”. Germany was seen by the Shah as a natural counterweight to British and Soviet influence in Iran. Moreover, in Germany and Italy, the Iranian Shah saw examples of the creation of successful national states, focused on the rapid modernization and increasing military and economic power.
The Shah considered fascist Italy as an example of an internal political system, seeking to create a similar model of society organization in Iran. in 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Nazi propaganda intensified in Iran.
Iranian military personnel began to undergo training in Germany, at the same time receiving an ideological load there. In 1937, the leader of Nazi youth Baldur von Schirach visited Iran. National-socialist ideas were widely spread among Iranian youth, which alarmed the Shah himself. Reza Pahlavi saw the spread of Nazism in Iranian society as a threat to their own power, since the Nazi youth groups accused the Shah regime of corruption, and one of the ultra-right groups even prepared a military coup. In the end, the Shah ordered the prohibition of the activities of Nazi organizations and print media in the country. Some particularly active Nazis were arrested, especially those who acted as part of the armed forces and posed a real danger to the political stability of the shah of Iran. Nevertheless, the influence of German Nazis in the country persisted during the Second World War, helped by the activity of the German intelligence services and propaganda tricks of the Nazi party, which, in particular, spread disinformation among Iranians that Hitler had converted to Shiite Islam. Numerous Nazi organizations emerged in Iran, spreading their influence, including the officer corps of the armed forces. Since there was a very real danger of Iran being included in the war on the side of Nazi Germany, the forces of the anti-Hitler coalition occupied part of Iranian territory. After the end of the Second World War, Nazi groups appeared in Iran, created on the model of the NSDAP. One of them was called the National Socialist Iranian Workers Party. It was created by Davud Monshizadeh - a member of the defense of Berlin in May 1945, a staunch supporter of the "Aryan racism" of the Iranian nation. The Iranian ultra-rightists acted with anti-communist positions, but unlike the Arab politicians who sympathized with Hitlerism, they also negatively viewed the role of the Islamic clergy in the life of the country.
Back in the prewar period, Hitler Germany tried to develop ties with Turkey. The nationalist government of Ataturk was considered by the Hitlerites as a natural ally and, moreover, even as a certain model of the “national state”, which can serve as an example to follow. Hitler's Germany all the pre-war period sought to develop and strengthen cooperation in Turkey in various fields, emphasizing the long tradition of interaction between Turkey and Germany. By 1936, Germany had become Turkey’s main foreign trade partner, consuming up to half of the country's exports and supplying up to half of all imported products to Turkey. Since Turkey was an ally of Germany during the First World War, Hitler hoped that Turks would join Germany in the Second World War. Here he was wrong. Turkey did not dare to take the side of the “Axis countries”, while at the same time drawing off a large part of the Soviet troops that were stationed in Transcaucasia and did not engage in battles with the Hitlerites precisely because of the fears of Stalin and Beria that the Turks might attack to the Soviet Union in the event of withdrawal of combat-ready divisions from the Soviet-Turkish border. After the end of the Second World War, many Albanian and Bosnian as well as Central Asian and Caucasian Muslims who fought on the side of Nazi Germany in the Muslim units of the SS found refuge in Turkey. Some of them took part in the activities of the Turkish security forces as military specialists.
The ideas of Nazism are still alive in the countries of the Middle East. Unlike Europe, which Hitler's Nazism brought only the suffering and death of many millions of people, in the East to Adolf Hitler - a dual attitude. On the one hand, many people from the East, especially those living in European countries, do not like Nazism, because they have had sad experiences with modern neo-Nazis who are followers of Hitlerism. On the other hand, for many Eastern people, Hitler’s Germany remains a country that fought with Great Britain, which means it was on the same line of barricades with the same Arab or Indian national liberation movements. In addition, sympathies for Germany of the Nazi period may also be associated with political contradictions in the Middle East after the creation of the state of Israel.
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