In July 1982 a group of predominantly North African Muslims met in the foreign quarter of Paris. Officially, its purpose was to make up a plan for the pilgrimage to Mecca. That, at least, was what the French police were told when the group applied for the usual assembly permit. The signs posted at the meeting room, however, indicated a different purpose. There were the familiar Islamic portraits, including a gigantic poster of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Dominating the room, however, was a very strange portrait indeed: a likeness of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, Hitler's closest ally in the Arab world!
The conference, chaired by the former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella, was keynoted by the Bern, Switzerland journalist Ahmed Huber, a convert to Islam and leading spokesman for the Nazi International. The aim of the conference was to prepare for the festivities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power!
The year 1983, Huber told his audience, should be dedicated to reviving the ideas of the Grand Mufti. Huber, like Ben Bella, had befriended the Grand Mufti during the 1950s while in exile in Cairo, and he described in detail the volume of propaganda which would be required to accomplish this revival. "During the coming year, genuine Muslims must take over the Islamic world. Corrupt infidels such as Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, and hypocrites such as the Saudi royal family who claim they represent Islam, must be eliminated. Today the Iranian Islamic Revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini is the true inheritor of the ideas of the Grand Mufti. We must strive for a universal community of believers."
Even as Huber was delivering his speech, printing presses in many parts of the Islamic world were already gearing up to flood the markets with editions of Hitler's Mein Kampfin Arabic, Turkish, and other languages. A few copies of these books were later found by the Israelis in various sections of the city of Beirut. The translations were not all identical, of course; an edition from the "Marxist" Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of George Habash differed, for example, from the edition of the Muslim Brotherhood in Lebanon or in Egypt, or the Turkish fundamentalists' translation.
Today, one year later, this revival of National Socialist thought in the Arab world is in full swing. Hitler's name is once again becoming a topic for polite conversation among the many adherents of Islam. First and foremost in this regard is the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who in February 1983, in the French daily newspaper Le Matin said that "Hitler was right! He understood that the Jews were a deadly threat to the German nation. He was obliged to exterminate them'" Only a few years earlier such a declaration, even coming from someone as deranged as Qaddafi, would have unleashed a storm of indignation; now it was barely noticed. Interestingly, Time magNazine's published version of the same interview suppressed this passage without comment.
The fact that Ahmed Huber is a friend of Qaddafi, whom he praises as a "wonderful, romantic Bedouin," cannot be unrelated to Qaddafi's ability make such monstrous public statements. Huber's July 1983 "prophecy" that Arafat would soon be out of the way, is also on the verge of becoming reality. We can trace Huber's footsteps back to certain Palestinian factions in Iran, as well as to the Lebanese rebels controlled by Assad in Syria. Hidden behind Syrian President Assad's most important security advisor, a certain George Fisher, is one of Huber's closest collaborators, Alois Brunner. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's deputy during the Third Reich!
There are many other "Brunners" in the Arab world who train the Iranian "Revolutionary Guard" or certain elements within the Palestinians around the terrorist Abu Nidal. In Iran, for example, a certain Juan Jose Torres, a 35-year-old engineer and ardent admirer of Hitler who belongs to the second generation of neo-Nazis, is working as the chief designer of a new generation of anti-tank rockets. In Libya many of Qaddafi's advisors are European Nazis who have converted to Islam, just as many Islamic and Arab terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are run by people who, though they are not old enough to have been in World War II, actively support the goals of the Third Reich. Most of these individuals can be traced back to the Swiss Nazi banker Francois Genoud, a man who has been close friends with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem since at least 1935, and who at the start of 1943 began to build up what was later to be known as the "Odessa" network. It was this network which laundered the Nazi war chest through the Swiss banks, so that these funds, from 1950 on, could be used to rebuild the old networks of the Third Reich in Latin America and the Middle East. The Berne-based Huber was Genoud's contact man with Paris and to Ben Bella. In 1952 Genoud picked up Ben Bella in Cairo and built him up as a "Fuhrer" under his own control.
Few in the Middle East today want to discuss these events and facts. Even the Israeli secret service and government circles, who for years have been using the cheap propagandistic equation "Arab = Nazi," have never investigated Francois Genoud's activities in detail; they have never looked into how the Third Reich's secret service operated in the Middle East during the war, or what happened to these networks after the war. The Arab press has behaved similarly, refusing to address this question out of fear that the responsible editor's body might be found in the gutter the next day.
Their fear is well-founded. Many thousands of soldiers and officers from the Abwehr (German Army Intelligence), the security services, and the SS found secure refuge in every country in the Middle East, Israel being no exception. Hardly had the war ended when the British commander in Jordan, Sir John Glubb Pasha, released thousands of German prisoners of war from the prison camps and enrolled them as members in his Arab Legion, in order to march them against the newly founded state of Israel. The latter state, on the other hand, did not hesitate to employ a few specialists from Nazi Germany in the building of its own secret service, the Mossad. For most of the newly independent Arab states these professional soldiers and secret service experts were more than welcome.
How the Nazis Infiltrated the Middle East
Paradoxically, the defeat of the Third Reich served to boost the reputation of "former" Nazis in many countries of the Arab world. During the war the Fuhrer of the Third Reich had made all sorts of promises to the Arabs, none of which could be kept following the collapse of Nazi Germany. These Nazis gained an undeserved reputation as people who never broke those promises. As they settled down into positions as secret intelligence, security, or economic advisors, became converts to Islam, and adopted Arab names, former leaders of the Third Reich began to capitalize on more than one hundred years of German emigration into the Middle East.
This German influence began in 1835 when the young Colonel von Moltke, who later was to become the Kaiser's Chief of General Staff, was charged with the task of reorganizing and training the army of Sultan Mahmoud 1I. Those plans came to naught when the. Sultan's forces were routed by Ibrahim, son of the Egyptian viceroy, and independence leader Mohammed Ali, whose troops had been trained by French officers of the Ecole Polytechnique. However, despite this military defeat, and despite the fact that Bismarck was more preoccupied with England than with the Middle East and Turkey, Germany was able to expand its presence in Turkey and the entire region economically as well as militarily. This culminated later on in the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. The financial agreements for the project were signed by France and England in 1914.
This far-reaching economic project was only the leading edge of Germany's deep economic and political penetration of the area. Germany was not a colonial power· in the region, and was therefore widely regarded as the "natural" protector of the Muslims against "European imperialism" or against Russia. This fact assumed. great significance during the First World War, when von Moltke won the Turks over to his plan for a joint offensive against Great Britain in Egypt, while Germany's ambassadors von Hentig and von Niedermayer were negotiating with Afghanistan's Emir Habibullah to set off an Islamic rebellion against Great Britain on the Indian subcontinent, with the support of the Indian leader Mahandra Pratap. As outlined as early as 1911 by the Imperial staff, such a strategy was aimed at forming an alliance between pan-Germanism and pan-Islamicism, which would in turn bring about a Germanic Central European empire. This Mitteleuropa was to include the Balkan countries, Bulgaria and the Ukraine, which would join with Turkey in annexing the Caucasus region. Germany, Iran, and Afghanistan would proceed to carve up the Middle Eastern region among themselves.
With few significant differences, this was also the policy of the Third Reich. That was outlined in an April 1933 memorandum to Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels written by Dr. Kurt Kohler of the University of Leipzig, Dr. Oluf Kruckmann, director of the German School in Baghdad, and Dr. Wilhelm Eilers, director of the Archaeological School of Teheran. Titled "Raumpolitik-Kulturpolitik" ("Territorial Policy-Cultural Policy"), the memorandum begins:
Today we talk about geopolitics. Everyone in Germany agrees that the world is divided up into various large regions or will become so, whereby each of these regions is reserved for a master caste.... Whereas Great Britain, France, America, and even Japan possess their own Lebensraum [living space] ... Italy as well as Germany still have not attained theirs .... For Germany, therefore, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East and Egypt are the obvious prospects.... The Balkan countries, on Germany's flank, are the bridge into the Middle East.... Anatolia in turn is itself a bridge into the Middle East and to Egypt .... Germany must demonstrate that it does not intend to repeat the European imperialism of the pre-1914 era, but is looking only for peaceful and friendly collaboration .... Economic propaganda and economic expansion alone, without the corresponding cultural propaganda and expansion, are an absurdity, and would only have the effect of undermining our goals.... By disseminating cultural propaganda we are working one hundred percent for Germany; if we only do economic propaganda, we will be working thirty percent to the advantage of our competitors.
Throughout the period between Imperial Germany's defeat and Hitler's accession to power in 1933, when this memorandum was drawn up, Germany was continuously present in the Middle East. By the mid-1920s, German economic and trade missions were operating throughout the Middle East, especially in Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iran, the only semi-independent states of the region. In the late 1920s, a German economic advisor by the name of Lindenblatt became the first director of the National Bank of Iran. Because under the Versailles Treaty Germany was forbidden to trade in weapons and certain other items, the Swiss also became involved, functioning as an intermediary between the countries of the Middle East and Germany.
Another country which continued to promote the German empire's economic and political activity in the region was the Soviet Union. Both countries were playing the anti-British card in the region. Taghi-Zade, an Iranian Communist who had found asylum in Germany, was for years a mediator between Imperial Germany and the Soviet Union on Iranian questions. Taghi-Zade was a founding member of the Baku "Congress of the Peoples of the East," which had been convened by the Comintern in 1920. A mutual German-Soviet collaboration was established in Iran, and evidently continues up through the present day!
But the policy of the Third Reich was not merely a continuation of the policy of the Imperial Germany of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, even though the policies appear identical or coincide in some features. The principal difference lay in the ideology and the concept of universal fascism, or the "universal community of belief," as defined by Rudolf von Sebottendorf of the Munich-based cult group The Thule Society. Von Sebottendorf, a German with Turkish citizenship, was committed to promoting the erection of Islamic mosques in Germany, and had also struck up a friendship with the Pan-Turkish leader Enver Pasha, who would also turn up later at the Baku Conference. Pasha was an associate of the Bektashi dervish order which originated in Albania, and he maintained close contacts with Mazzini's P-1 (Propaganda Uno) Freemasonic lodge and the P-1's "Young Italy" movement. The latter movement spawned the "Young Turks," who overthrew Sultan Hamid II in 1908.
The programmatic content of such policies was laid out in a proposal put forward by Gregor Strasser during the first two years of the Hitler regime. Strasser advocated a "German-Soviet alliance" that would join up with the "league of oppressed nations like India, Arabia, China ... against the European imperialists." Hitler and his Eastern "specialist" Alfred Rosenberg initially opposed such a policy, since they preferred a German-British alliance. It was later adopted, however, in the form of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact. One of the most important advocates of this alliance was Hitler's personal secretary, Martin Bormann, who is often rumored to have been a Soviet agent. But the policy was also supported by von Sebottendorf and a key geopolitical strategist of the Third Reich, Prof. Karl Haushofer.
Under such influences, Hitler, who had written in Mein Kampf that he considered the Arabs an "inferior race," was induced to change his attitude, especially after his meeting with the blond and blue-eyed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Hitler decided to back the Grand Mufti, and after the meeting proclaimed that there were many similarities between Nazism and the Islam of the Mufti. No wonder that an Arab delegation sent to Hitler in the mid-1930s stated that if the Arabs not been defeated in 732 at Poitiers, then "Islam would have certainly taken over Europe. The German tribes would have been converted, and there is no doubt at all that the Muslim-Germanic tribe would have represented the spearhead of the Islamic movement. Islam is tailor-made for the Germans." Hitler took up these ideas in many of his musings on religion, declaring on one occasion that "We have the bad luck to have the wrong religion. Why don't we have the religion of the Japanese? .. Even Islam would more suited for us than Christianity." Ahmed Huber, in his recent recollections of the meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti, explained briefly that the Grand Mufti had attempted to do everything conceivable to induce Hitler to convert to Islam, "in order to make him realize that his goals could be better served through a universal community of belief; but Hitler was not smart enough to understand this .... "
The Third Reich and the War
When war was declared, the Third Reich had at its disposal numerous organizations in the Middle East. The most important of these was the Party of the Arab Nation of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. This was a secret organization which had branches throughout the entire region and which worked for the unification of the Arab nation under the leadership of the Grand Mufti. The concept resembled that of the Baath Party founded in the early 1940s by Michel Aflaq, who is said to have been strongly influenced by the Grand Mufti and by Nazism. In Palestine itself, a key ally of the Mufti's party was the old Temple Society, which had been founded in Stuttgart in 1856 as a splinter group of the German Lutheran Church under the influence of the later Anthroposophs. The Temple Society was an association of German settlers in Palestine who believed they were the chosen people who could return Palestine to its ancient splendor. Although they were looked upon with suspicion during the days of the empire, the order was later instrumental in altering the Third Reich's initial idea of banishing all Jews to Palestine. Several delegations of the Society traveled to Berlin to strongly protest against the immigration of Jews into the region, and they shared the Mufti's opposition to the establishment of Jewish settlements.
In alliance with the British Protector te of Palestine, the Temple Society and the Mufti saw to it that the numerous ships filled with Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazis via Bulgarian and Romanian ports were all turned back. This was a replication of the racist policy of the Harriman's Eugenics Research Association, which oversaw the drastic curtailment of Jewish immigration into the United States, and who in one instance turned back a ship full of Jewish refugees, sending them to certain death.
Another fascist organization was the secret society of the "Golden Square" under Rashid Ali Geilani in Iraq. In Egypt, there were the Young Men's Muslim Association and the Workers' Syndicate led by King Farouk's uncle, Prince Abbas Hilmi; the Green Shirt movement of Ahmed Hussein and Mohammed Ali Alaba, the theoretician behind the idea of a Great Nile Kingdom; and the Young Egypt movement. In the Syrian-Lebanese region, the Arab Clubs had been established as early as the 1930s as a vehicle for Nazi propaganda. In 1937 these clubs invited the leader of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, on a journey to the region.
A good indication of the atmosphere on the eve of the Second World War is a declaration of Sami al-Jundi, leader of the Syrian Baath Party and the League of Nationalist Action, a pan-Arabist pro-Nazi organization in Damascus:
We are fascinated by Nazism, we study its writings and intellectual sources -- especially Nietzsche, Fichte, and [Houston Stewart] Chamberlain. And we are the first to have seriously considered translating Mein Kampf. Anyone who lives in Damascus can appreciate the force of attraction Nazism exerts upon the Arabic people, and Nazism's ability to rouse the people to action. It is totally natural that the vanquished admires the vanquisher. ...
How Nazi thought was transplanted into the Arabic movement is expressed in a declaration by Dr. Sami Shawkat, the mid-1930s Director General of Education in Baghdad:
There is something more important than money and learning, which preserves the honor of a nation and prevents its debasement. This is strength .... Strength, as I use the word here, signifies the overcoming of death .... Sixty years ago Prussia dreamed of uniting the German people. What is there to prevent Iraq, which fulfilled its longing for independence ten years ago, from now realizing the dream of unifying all the Arab countries together?
With the exception of Hjalmar Schacht's visit to Iran in 1936, and von Schirach's trip to the region in 1937, very few Third Reich functionaries visited the region officially. Most Nazi visitors were secret service agents, who limited their activity there to using local organizations for collecting intelligence. It was not until 1941 that Berlin began to recognize the military importance of the Middle East; until then the Mediterranean and Middle East regions had largely been considered the sphere of influence of the Reich's major ally, Italy, even though Arabic organizations friendly to the Nazis had repeatedly stressed that Italy, with its colonialist past, could not be regarded as trustworthy. As early as October 1940, the Grand Mufti had dispatched his secretary Osman Kemal Haddad to Berlin in order to press for joint military operations against the British in the region. But it was only when Hitler realized that he could not carry out his plan for an alliance with Britain, and saw Italy's adventures in Greece and Libya end in failure, that he finally gave the green light for the deal.
On April 12, 1941, Rashid Ali Geilani seized power in a coup d'etat in Baghdad, under the direction of the ambassador of the Third Reich, Dr. Grobba. The coup was preceded by a month of feverish activity and diplomatic exchanges. In the middle of January 1941, Al Husseini's secretary Haddad returned to Berlin for the purpose of discussing the regional situation. Otto von Hentig, the same Foreign Ministry official mentioned before with respect to World War I, was sent on a probing mission to Iraq by Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; on his return the Nazi Supreme Command (OKW) decided to fully engage its forces in Iraq. Behind the coup was the plan to open a second, southern flank against the Soviet Union which was to be launched in June of the same year. Ironically, precisely because preparations for this offensive were fully under way, the Third Reich was not in a position to mobilize the necessary military forces when the British, moving from their bases on the Gulf of Basra, marched on Baghdad in order to crush the rebellion. By early May, Geilani's forces were only receiving limited military assistance from Vichy France-occupied Syria. The Vichy regime had only reluctantly and very tardily granted the Luftwaffe permission to fly over its territory in the direction of Baghdad. By May 30 Geilani was left with no choice but to flee to Teheran along with a few other leaders of the "Golden Square." The coup was foiled, and the Third Reich had missed its chance to establish a National Socialist regime in the Middle East.
The consequences of this failure were twofold. First, there was no other country where such an attempt could ever be repeated; the Nazis did not have sufficient military forces to redeploy out of the Eastern and Western fronts. Second, Berlin decided that, judging from their actions, the Arabs could not be relied upon. This motivated the establishment in July 1941 of the German-Arab Training Division (DAL) under the command of Special Staff F, which was to be associated with Italy's own Arab Legion. Complementing these new operations were the creation, in late 1942-early 1943, of two SS divisions within the Allgemeine SS, called the Kandabak and Sabre divisions, consisting of Balkan Muslims from Croatia, Bosnia, and Albania. In the Middle East the Abwehr Division II integrated its own Arab Legion into its Brandenburg Division.
It was not long before all these formations were put to the test. The creation of these special units as part of the Abwehr and of the SS clearly meant that from now on, the Arab allies of the Reich were to operate only under direct German command.
Redeployment of the Networks
In the summer of 1941, following the defeat in Iraq and in Palestine, the Mufti el-Husseini and Geilani fled into temporary exile in Berlin. Over the following six months, el-Husseini traveled back and forth between Rome and Berlin in order to obtain from the Axis nations a firm commitment that they would guarantee Arab independence in return for unconditional Arab support of the Third Reich. While Mussolini's Italy favored independence for the Middle Eastern countries, Hitler and his advisors dismissed these demands outright, doubtless on account of the Vichy regime's interest in Lebanon and Syria. An agreement could only be reached after the circulation of a secret letter in mid-1942, promising complete independence to the Middle Eastern countries and Iraq. The Mufti could boast of the existence of this secret agreement, and show the letter in case of need; the Axis powers, on the other hand, could deny their existence in the event that France became outraged.
The Mufti and Geilani were now deployed in their respective campaigns. The Mufti was put in charge of the command of the DAL in the Egyptian-Libyan theater of war which followed hard on the heels of Erwin Rommel's North African victory and the secret negotiations between King Farouk of Egypt and Berlin, negotiations which were mediated by Farouk's uncle Abbas Hilmi, who traveled to Berlin via Teheran. Geilani himself was meanwhile deployed to the Caucasus front against the Soviet Union, which only existed on paper. Berlin was well aware of the need for a division of labor between Geilani and the Mufti, both being involved in a bitter fight over who would lead the Arab world following the victory.
The next decisive battle for these forces was the Maghreb. In November 1942 the Italians demanded that the Third Reich and Vichy France release most of the Tunisian political leaders imprisoned before the war by the Popular Front government. Among these was Bourgiba, whom the Axis wanted to win over. The results of these secret negotiations have never been made public. In mid-December, the DAL, together with the Italian army under the command of Dr. R. Rahn -- a German Foreign Ministry official and a veteran of the 1941 Syrian campaign -- marched against Tunis and Algeria, where they could count on inside support from the Revolutionary Action Committee (CUAR) under J. Guilbaud. By mid-1943 this offensive was defeated.
This was the death blow to the Grand Mufti's dreams of a Grand Maghreb Unity. The Mufti turned his attention to the Balkan Muslims; but here, too, his dreams of a united Arab world in alliance with the Third Reich were dashed to pieces. The defeat of Rommel's army and of the fascists in Tunisia also put into jeopardy the biggest prize of all, Egypt.
In Egypt the Nazis not only had friends inside the Royal Court such as Prince Abbas Hilmi, but also friends within the secondary leadership of the Egyptian army such as Aziz Ali al-Masri, who had unsuccessfully attempted to escape to Rommel's forces in order to give a signal for a domestic uprising in Egypt. Anwar al-Sadat was associated with the rebellion, as was Prime Minister Ali Maher, who was subsequently kicked out by the British. When the Free Officers took over in 1952 and installed General Neguib as president, his prime minister was this same Maher.
Fortunately, most of these Nazi forces were defeated. What remained were chiefly secret-service and paramilitary groups with little strategic importance. These included the Khasghai tribesmen in Iran, who had been in contact with the Abwehr since 1940. Some of them could still be found in 1944 within the OKW's Arab Brigade, fighting alongside the special Kurdish Units on the Iraqi-Iranian border. On the Syrian-Lebanese front there remained dozens of pro-Nazi political parties which could be employed in operations such as sabotage. These included the Syrian Popular Party and the Syrian National Socialist Party, founded in 1935 by the Greek Orthodox Antun Sa'adeh and modeled on the NSDAP. There was also the National Youth and the previously mentioned National Action League; members of these parties had flocked into the Arab Brigades of the Brandenburg Division of the Abwehr. And, in Iraq, there was the underground Futuwwa, or youth movement, which was modeled on the Hitler Youth.
But the Arabs were not alone in seeking a special relationship with Berlin. In January of 1941 Otto von Hentig, while in Turkey with German ambassador Franz von Papen, met with a very strange delegation indeed. It consisted of members of the notorious Zionist Self-Defense League, Stern. They proposed an alliance with the Third Reich with the following terms: Germany would allow the German Jews to emigrate to Palestine; the Zionists, in exchange, would form an alliance with the Third Reich in order to fight against Great Britain! The answer to this proposition, dutifully communicated to Berlin, has never been made known publicly.
After the War
Following the destruction of the Third Reich, it took only two or three years for thousands of German military personnel to find secure refuge in the Middle East. Many of these had never fought in the region during the war. By the mid-1950s, one particular unit of the Egyptian secret services could count no less than six special advisors who were refugees from Germany, namely, B. Bender, former Gestapo commander in Poland; L. Gleim of the Gestapo in Warsaw; J. Daumling of the Gestapo in Dusseldorf; H. Sellmann of the Gestapo in Ulm; the former assistant to Col. Otto Skorzeny, F. Bunche; and a former Gestapo captain in France, W. Bockler. Closer to the seat of power there was Saleh Ga'afar, who served as Sadat's private secretary up until the latter's assassination. Saleh's half-brother was Johann Eppler, alias Hussein Ga'afar. Eppler, born of a German mother and an Egyptian father and educated in Germany, had operated during the war as a liaison between the group of officers around Sadat and General al-Masry, and Rommel's staff! Most of these appointments were not only well known, but were further consolidated in the beginning of 1954, when the Egyptian Interior Minister Zakharia Mohieddin, formerly of military intelligence, approached the chief of the West German federal intelligence service (BND), Reinhold Gehlen, who had served as chief of intelligence in the East during the war, for advice on reorganizing the Egyptian secret services. This created the ironic situation that the head of the Egyptian secret service, Marxist Ali Sabri, and his second-Nazi in-command, Colonel Salah Nasr (later arrested by Sadat as a KGB agent), were appointing scores of former Nazis as their advisors, on Gehlen's advice!
How such convergences were possible was the subject of Chapter 3. It should be mentioned here, however, that by 1947 the Swiss-based Nazi International leader Francois Genoud had reorganized the Maghreb and Middle East intelligence sections of the defeated Third Reich. The Grand Mufti el-Husseini, who had been placed under house arrest in Paris, succeeded in escaping and made his last trip to Cairo. In the early 1950s at the Cairo Windsor Hotel, one might regularly run into such people as Genoud, the Grand Mufti, SS General Wolff, SS Lieutenant Reichenberg, General Ramcke, and many lesser Nazi principals who were allowed to sneak in through the back door under the protection of Prince Abbas Hilmi. Old Nazis residing in Cairo reportedly still hold weekly meetings there today. Co!. Otto Skorzeny arrived in Cairo in 1952, while his father-in-law, Hjalmar Schacht, was meanwhile traveling from one Arab country to another in his capacity as economic advisor to the Shah of Iran and the Saudi royal family.
These people easily gained control over the intelligence agencies of several countries, starting with Egypt itself. It was the Egypt-based Nazis who, in collaboration with East German and Soviet intelligence, set up the preconditions for the Suez Crisis, in order to prevent Egypt from striking too close a relationship with American President Eisenhower.
To ignite the crisis, they created new terrorist groups whose aim was to provoke Israel into a retaliatory strike. Palestinian gangs in the Gaza Strip, which for decades had been raiding Palestine in order to steal cattle, were suddenly transformed into the so-called Fedayeen. In agreement with Israeli hawks such as Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan, the Egyptian intelligence officers sent by Nasser into the Gaza Strip to bring these "Fedayeen" under control and to end the unrest, were all killed -- with Israeli letter bombs! Later on, these Nazi networks attempted to sell Nasser a rocket system. Professor van Leers, brought to Egypt by Genoud, worked out a system whose only consequence was Egypt's further isolation from the International community and a tightening of the Soviet military and economic grip on the country's economy, pushing the United States into an increasingly isolated alliance with Israel.
Meanwhile, Genoud, Skorzeny, Reichenberg, and others were occupied with supporting the war of the Algerian FLN against de Gaulle's France. Here again, the sole aim was to create the conditions under which the Nazi International could take over a country in order to use it as a secure base of operations. The key person in this operation was Ahmed Ben Bella, an illiterate former soldier who fought against the French because of a personal vendetta, and who happened to be living as an exile in Cairo in 1952, where he met Genoud.
Over the years, the Nazi International apparatus reconstructed by Francois Genoud has grown in significance. Through Ben Bella's influence, it includes a significant part of the North African and Algerian Muslims in the Maghreb and in France. Through Libya and Teheran (a frequent stopover for Genoud's co-worker Ahmed Huber), these Muslims are also integrated into a broader-based international Islamic network. Huber and Genoud sponsor the Swiss-Arab Association, a grouping closely allied with the Swiss Communist Party, which, along with Huber, supports Assad's Palestinian rebels against Arafat. Another branch is Abu Nidal and his associates, who are the direct heirs of the "Fedayeen" former Gaza gangs. Underneath this umbrella, the Grand Mufti's networks are alive and well today in Iran and within the numerous radical Islamic fundamentalist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the even more radical "Hizb al Tahrir al Islamiyya," the Islamic Liberation Party, which considers Qaddafi to be "too soft." It is no accident that Huber's sympathies nowadays lie precisely with these groups.