Many Nazi war criminals evaded justice, but only in the Middle East did this fact have major political implications, and almost exclusively in that region were they able to continue their careers in government, the military, and propaganda work. No Arab country ever expelled any of them for their past war crimes or views, but instead shielded from prosecution all of the German war criminals who fled to them.
South America was also a destination for Nazis to flee and flourish but they were only able to do so in smaller numbers and generally for shorter periods of time than in the Middle East. Indeed, while Argentina’s president Juan Perón invited some to settle in his country, his reign did not last long. When he fell in 1955, a number of those fugitives also moved to the Middle East.1 Outside cooperating Arab countries it was hard for Nazis to keep their presence a secret or to rely on government protection. In effect, old Arab nationalist and Islamist allies functioned as part of the international Nazi underground in helping such people escape and find safe haven. Even Eichmann’s escape to Argentina was largely due to al-Husaini’s help.2
The number of former German officials or officers involved in the war or war crimes who went to the Middle East was over four thousand. In comparison, it is estimated that only between 180 and 800 Nazis escaped to Latin America, mostly Argentina.3 Wiesenthal estimated in 1967 that there were between six and seven thousand ex-Nazi regime officials and officers living in Arab lands.4 For those who still sought to carry out Hitler’s genocidal project or create an ideal totalitarian state, Arabs were the obvious allies and Muslim countries the indispensable refuge.5
Former Nazi government officials and foreign collaborators who worked on Middle East issues were able to revive their fortunes in postwar West Germany after the first wave of prosecutions ended by 1950. In their revived careers, they continued to be sympathetic to other former Nazis, Nazi-era officials, radical Arab nationalists, and Islamists. One of the most influential of these was Hans Globke, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s national security adviser who had helped write the laws giving Hitler unlimited power and denying citizenship to Jews.6 Reinhard Gehlen,7 head of West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, was the most important ex-Nazi official working with Western intelligence.8 His operation was mainly directed against the USSR but he also did some work involving the Middle East, where Grobba became one of his main agents.9 During the war, Gehlen had been on the staff of army General Staff chief Franz Halder, who also worked for U.S. army intelligence starting in 1946, debriefing captured German officials including Grobba.10
West Germany’s employment of former Nazis, especially SS men and those accused of war crimes, was a source of friction with the United States. The CIA worried about embarrassing public exposure of this fact, and CIA officials discussed as early as May 1950 how to persuade West German intelligence to limit the practice. The CIA proposed to infiltrate Gehlen’s operations to get rid of ex-Nazis there, but in the end, Gehlen was deemed too valuable to sacrifice.11
Another career survivor was Fritz Grobba. Released from a Soviet camp in 1956 after a decade of imprisonment,12 the seventy-year-old Grobba restarted his career, working for both West Germany and the Saudis, beginning with a visit to Baghdad that year.13 The Saudi envoy Midhat al-Ard, a former al-Husaini aide, met Grobba in Berne in 1957 and asked him to set up a West German–Arab Friendship Society. He also invited Grobba to meet Saudi King Khalid, whose kingdom Grobba as ambassador had tried to persuade to join the Axis. After seeing the king, Grobba went to the Middle East to recruit sponsors for the friendship society.14 The plan failed because of Arab anger at West Germany’s decision at the time to pay compensation to Israel for losses and suffering during the Holocaust.15
Aside from hiring Grobba, Gehlen also reportedly consulted with ex-SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who visited Cairo frequently in his job representing Austrian steel companies.16 There he met al-Husaini in early 1953. The two men shared such mutual friends as Eichmann and François Genoud, the Swiss Nazi banker.17 Skorzeny may have later spied for Israel’s Mossad and the CIA against ex-Nazi circles in Cairo.18
Gehlen’s was not the only West German operation based largely on ex–World War II agents. Leverkuehn, a von Oppenheim veteran from World War I and Abwehr chief in Istanbul during World War II, maintained a Lebanon-based network with the help of the Christian Democratic Party, the Foreign Ministry, and the prime minister’s office.
A former Nazi in a particularly key position to help Islamists was Adenauer’s minister of refugees, Theodor Oberländer. A history teacher, Oberländer had joined the Nazi Party and worked in military intelligence. In 1940 he had urged the elimination of all Polish Jews and the next year helped round up and kill seven thousand Jews in Lvov. Later, Oberländer led Abwehr teams in Caucasian Muslim units, recruited with al-Husaini’s help, which committed atrocities in Poland. In his postwar work for the West German government, Oberländer employed other ex-Nazis and assisted Muslim collaborators to remain in the country.
East Germany waged periodic campaigns to discredit West Germany by exposing the Nazi background of government officials there,19 and on November 12, 1958 it released a book that documented Oberländer’s involvements.20 In 1960, he resigned, one of the few former Nazis in key positions who lost their jobs.21
Those who did face prosecution were often able to escape, helped by an underground railroad of sympathizers and former colleagues. The most important such group was ODESSA—Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen (Organization of Former Members of the SS), founded by 1947. Another organization, Stille Hilfe (Silent Aid), was set up in Munich by Helene Elizabeth von Isenburg in 1951. On the board were two bishops, Theophil Wurm of Württemberg and Johannes Neuhäusler of Munich, as well as ex-SS men like Wilhelm Spengler and Heinrich Malz, the latter an aide to Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The complex network involved anti-Communist Catholics, the International Red Cross, and also its Islamic equivalent, the Red Crescent.
Figure 25. The postwar Nazi Middle Eastern network: A CIA report from 1959 gives the basic “curriculum vitae” of the ex–SS officer and anti-Semitic propa-gandist Johann von Leers, including his journey from defeated Germany via Argentina to Egypt to become adviser on propaganda to an-Nasir’s regime.
The Middle East escape route ran through Italy, Spain, or Portugal, usually ending in Algeria, Egypt, or Syria. ODESSA’s goal was not merely to rescue Nazis but to rebuild the Nazi movement and work to create a Fourth Reich.22 ODESSA’s regional headquarters was in Cairo where it was directed by Johann von Leers.23 In hundreds of dispatches American agents reported regularly about ODESSA activities starting February 26, 1948. Wiesenthal heard about it for the first time in November 1950, from a former Abwehr man operating under the alias “Hans.”24
Figure 26. The postwar Nazi Middle Eastern network: A CIA report describes von Leers’s contacts and activities in Cairo. Note his close relationship with al-Husaini, his precautions against West German surveillance, and his hatred of that country’s democratic government.
Figure 27. The postwar Nazi Middle Eastern network: A 1964 CIA report details some of the activities of ODESSA, the Organization of Former SS Members, in helping wanted Nazis escape from Europe and establish themselves overseas. Note the cooperation of a German prison guard in helping the SS officer Hans Zech-Nentwig make a successful jail break, and of an official at the West German embassy in Peru in transmitting forged dollar bills to von Leers.
The case of Hans Walter Zech-Nentwig is a good illustration of how Nazis went to work for Western intelligence agencies and the West German government, evaded punishment for many years, reestablished links to Islamists, were helped to escape when facing prosecution, and ended up in Arabic-speaking countries.
Born in 1916, Zech-Nentwig was a German official in Poland whose activities were so brutal that in April 1943 the Nazis put him in a Warsaw prison charged with rape and smuggling. Escaping to neutral Sweden using the alias Hermann Böttcher, Zech-Nentwig claimed that he had been jailed because he was helping the resistance. British intelligence hired him and Zech-Nentwig plied them with fantastic stories like that of an alleged opposition group led by relatives of SS General Fegelein, brother-in-law of Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun.25
Zech-Nentwig was put to work for the British agent Sefton Delmer’s group in Soldier’s Radio, supposedly located in German-occupied France but actually broadcasting from northern England.26 Pretending to be a genuine German station, it provided doctored news to undermine Axis morale. One of Zech-Nentwig’s colleagues there, Otto John, whom the Allies put in charge as first chief of Bonn’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 1950, turned out to be a Soviet agent, and he defected to East Berlin in 1954.
After the war, British intelligence helped Zech-Nentwig—now living under the alias Sven Nansen—to find work as an aide of Robert Lehr, later West German minister of interior. But Zech-Nentwig also maintained secret ties with Nazi underground groups. In 1954, fired by the British and by Lehr, Zech-Nentwig became director of a department in Bavaria’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in Munich. Among his duties was dealing with Soviet and Middle Eastern Muslims who had collaborated with Germany during the war and wanted to stay in the country.
One of Zech-Nentwig’s colleagues was Gerhard Wolfrum, another former SS member.27 Wolfrum told Zech-Nentwig in 1957 about the establishment of an “Islamic community” in Munich that had two secret goals. One was to help former Nazi allies; the other was to rebuild the radical Islamist movement in Europe created by al-Husaini and his colleagues before the war. The community’s leader was Nur ad-Din Namanjani, who had fought in both world wars on the German side and became an associate of al-Husaini. “If we succeed in building a true religious community,” wrote Wolfrum to Zech-Nentwig, “we succeed also in gaining political sway.” The result was a renewed partnership. Former Nazis provided financial help and, as West German officials, assisted in dealing with their own government. For their part, al-Husaini and the Muslim Brotherhood cooperated in taking over the Munich mosque.28
Wolfrum was correct. As Ian Johnson shows in his detailed study, A Mosque in Munich, this mosque created by former Nazi collaborators helped by unrepentant Nazis would be the base for an Islamist movement that largely dominates the ever-growing Muslim communities in Europe today.29 At times, this Munich group also worked with U.S. intelligence, for example by providing Muslims to go to Mecca on the 1956 pilgrimage and find out from Soviet counterparts about conditions behind the Iron Curtain.30
Zech-Nentwig, however, did not fare so well personally. Losing his government job, he tried journalism, business, and even asked the East Germans if they would like to buy his services. Finally, some SS men turned him in for the reward. Even Zech-Nentwig’s connections with the powerful Globke couldn’t save him from a trial for the murder of two Jews in Poland.31 Though Globke himself took the witness stand, saying, “It was impossible to reject the order to kill Jews,” Zech-Nentwig was sentenced to four years in prison. But the courts were not yet finished with him. A second trial was scheduled on charges that he had killed fifty-two hundred Polish Jews in Pinsk.32 The ODESSA network engineered his escape from Braunschweig prison to Egypt on April 22, 1964,33 made possible by the fact that a prison guard, Dietrich Zee-mann, was a fellow Nazi.34
Not only did the effort to capture war criminals basically end by 1950, but many such people received pardons and some returned to old jobs in government, the police, and other influential positions.35 Efforts to investigate war criminals and put them on trial were hampered by competition between East and West Germany, sabotage by Nazi sympathizers, and bureaucratic infighting. While monitoring their activities closely—in 1956 the CIA compiled a list of the one hundred most wanted Nazis and there was a global watch list of two thousand former SS men—the victorious Allies were unenthusiastic about catching war criminals.36
The only ones who seemed to be avidly seeking to find Nazi war criminals were Arab governments that wanted to offer them jobs. Von Leers was the most important of these men. Born in 1902, von Leers had been one of Goebbels’s most prolific propagandists.37 After imprisonment by the U.S. Army for eighteen months at war’s end, von Leers, like Eichmann, fled from Hamburg to Argentina. In Buenos Aires he edited pro-Nazi texts for the monthly magazine Der Weg (The Way) and in 1954 published a booklet, entitled Imperial Traitors, condemning those Germans who had opposed Hitler’s regime.38 He wrote articles praising Juan Perón’s dictatorship and expressing passionate anti-Semitism under such pen names as Hans A. Euler, Karl Neubert, Felix Schwarzenborn, and Fritz Büttner.39
Finally the Egyptian embassy in Argentina hired von Leers for a 1956 anti-Jewish campaign. The military attaché, General Hasan Fahmi Ismail, was so pleased with his work that he offered von Leers a well-paid job in Egypt.40 In April 1956, von Leers moved to Cairo. His wife and daughter followed on June 21. Soon after his arrival, al-Husaini converted him to Islam, and in honor of his patron von Leers took “Amin” as part of his own Muslim name, Umar Amin von Leers.41
One of von Leers’s first tasks, in June 1956, was to provide information about which West German government officials were Jews. He worked with another ardent Nazi supporter, Paul Schmitz-Kairo. Von Leers obtained credentials as a journalist, attended the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung—where al-Husaini was also present—and unsuccessfully proposed a resolution there designating Allied-occupied Germany as a colonial area that should be liberated.42
Moving to Egypt’s Ministry of Information and Voice of the Arabs radio station, von Leers carried on his mission of spreading anti-Semitism.43 The CIA reported that he was becoming a religious zealot advocating Islam’s expansion into Europe.44 He founded a publishing company, Umar’s Sword,45 and tapped into al-Husaini’s network through the latter’s associate Mahmud Salih, self-styled head of the anti-Zionist movement in Cairo. He met with Egyptian dictator Abd-an Nasir and made a good impression on that former collaborator with Germany.
One scheme von Leers was involved in was a plan to create an Amnesty International–type group on behalf of ex-Nazis, neo-Nazis, and Third World nationalists, or in his words, a German “national aid society to support the members of nationalist groups imprisoned by courts or prosecuted for their beliefs.”46 And to tie everything together he became the head of ODESSA’s Middle East branch.47
While a February 1959, U.S. intelligence report exaggerated in saying von Leers was “chief propaganda adviser” to Abd an-Nasir, another such evaluation accurately depicted his excellent access to the president.48 Abd an-Nasir certainly saw him as a respected counselor.49 In October, perhaps at von Leers’s suggestion, the Egyptian president read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which von Leers tirelessly promoted. Thereafter, Abd an-Nasir echoed the book’s themes, telling an Indian interviewer, for example, that “Europe was in the hands of three hundred Zionists” and calling the Holocaust a lie.50 His brother Shauqi translated the Protocols into Arabic and championed its message for decades.51
Von Leers’s other high-level Egyptian contacts included as-Sadat; Ali Sabri, state minister of presidential affairs; Muhammad Khaliq Hasuna, Arab League secretary-general; General Abd al-Azim Ibrahim Fahmi, director of general investigations for the Ministry of Interior; and Hafiz Abd al-Karim, secretary general of the economics ministry.52 For his work, von Leers received a good salary of eighty to a hundred Egyptian pounds monthly.53
One mission von Leers undertook for Abd an-Nasir in October 1957 was to locate former German tank officers to work in Egypt and other Arab countries.54 The Arab League’s representative in Bonn, Hasan Fakhusa, came to Cairo to ask von Leers’s advice on how to effectively lobby West Germany for Arab interests. The Egyptians also used von Leers for anti-British counterintelligence operations.
Von Leers also became an employment agency for escaped Nazis. For instance, he helped Schmitz-Kairo, now known as Abd al-Majid Amin, get an Arab League job. In October 1958 the forty-five-year-old Nazi concentration camp physician Hans Eisele—who had tortured inmates at Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Natzweiler, and Dachau—was a guest at von Leers’s house after fleeing Germany. Eisele, alias Carl Debouche, nursed an ailing von Leers back to health. Cairo granted Eisele asylum, licensed him to practice as a physician, and rejected German attempts to extradite him for trial. After surviving an assassination attempt, in which an Egyptian postman was killed, Eisele died on May 3, 1967 due to unknown causes.55
Von Leers also worked with al-Husaini and his secretary, Hasan Kirkut, on a joint book, The Truth about the Palestine Question, which was to be published in West Germany in a series, “The World Fight against Imperialism and Colonialism,” by the ex-SS man and neo-Nazi publisher Karl-Heinz Priester of Wiesbaden. The book, serialized in the Egyptian newspaper al-Misri in 1954, appeared in Arabic and quickly went through three printings.56
Von Leers’s cover was blown when he ran into a Canadian journalist, William Stevenson of the Toronto Star, who promptly reported on July 3, 1956 that this “former propaganda adviser to Hitler and Perón, now in Cairo, advises Nasser and the Arab League.” Von Leers told him that in postwar Germany, “Americans were Jews running the concentration camps.” He added that Israel must be destroyed because it caused trouble, was not a proper state, and was behind all opposition to Abd an-Nasir and Egypt.57
The British journalist Anne Sharpley also interviewed von Leers in his Ministry of Information office where he poured out his anti-Jewish hatred. She counted two hundred ex-German officers working for the Egyptians.58 Embarrassed, the Egyptians expelled the two Western journalists. Al-Husaini’s Jerusalem daily newspaper al-Jihad reported as well that von Leers was doing propaganda work for Egypt.59 To conceal his government activities, von Leers took a nominal post as German language instructor at Cairo University.
American intelligence discussed the possibility of exploiting “the role of von Leers and other ex-Nazi advisers” to subvert the Egyptian regime. Might Arabs and Muslims be persuaded that Abd an-Nasir was a new Hitler who intended to terrorize and enslave them? But the idea was dropped since, U.S. officials concluded, associating Abd an-Nasir with the Nazis was likely to make him more, not less, popular in the Arab world.60
Meanwhile, von Leers held court in Cairo, bringing together Nazis with important Arab and Islamist figures, some of whom they had worked with during the war. Among von Leers’s many visitors was Vagner Kristensen, an SS man who had helped him escape in 1946.61 Von Leers also met regularly with other ex-Nazi converts to Islam like Ahmad Huber and helped the unrepentant Nazi Ludwig Zind to flee from West Germany to Egypt in 1958. Zind had openly continued to advocate Hitler’s ideas in Germany, including claiming the Jews were guilty for the loss of World War I and Germany’s decline thereafter. Zind even defended the gassing of Jews. When this became known, he was prosecuted.62 During the proceedings, Zind said Israel was a “plague spot” that had to be wiped off the map. He was sentenced to one year in prison but fled on November 28, 1958 to Cairo, then Tripoli, Libya, where the authorities offered him asylum and a teaching post.63 He was later twice briefly arrested during trips to Europe but got off due to technicalities.
Von Leers also dealt with Algerians; with Salah Ben Yusuf, leader of the radical nationalist forces in Tunisia; and the old Moroccan rebel Abd al-Karim. He helped the Algerians in their independence war against France by discouraging West Germans from joining the French Foreign Legion,64 and did research for a book about the conflict, Algeria in Flames.65 Abd an-Nasir also sent ex-Nazis as advisers to the Algerians.66 The story of one such Nazi, who had participated in the Final Solution, was the model four decades later for Algerian writer Boualem Sansal’s book, The German’s Village, which showed how Nazi, Soviet, and Islamist influences would blend together to create so much bloodshed in his country.67
The news of Eichmann’s capture, announced by Israel on May 23, 1960, worried von Leers and his colleagues, who discussed the matter extensively, but he continued to live unmolested in Cairo until his death there on March 5, 1965. Among his close friends was Ludwig Heiden, alias Louis al-Hajj, and John W. Eppler alias Husain Jaffar. Eppler had been a spy for Rommel in Cairo, who had been captured by the British in 1942 when he was liaison to the pro-German underground. One of his main contacts, as-Sadat, was now Egypt’s vice president.68
Heiden worked with both von Leers and al-Husaini.69 He produced a new translation of Mein Kampf into Arabic. In the 1950s it was published in five installments, then in 1963 it appeared as a book that sold well over a million copies. It was so popular that by 1999 the seventh edition appeared, edited by no less than Mustafa Tlass, Syria’s veteran defense minister.
One of the other Nazis who went to Egypt was Ferdinand Heim, a doctor on the Wiesenthal Center’s list of the ten most-wanted war criminals for having tortured concentration camp prisoners.70 Born in 1914, Heim joined the Nazi Party and SS and then, starting in 1940, worked in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen camps. After two years’ incarceration in U.S. custody, he returned to Germany to work as a physician in 1947. When Eichmann was on trial in Israel in 1961, Vienna issued an arrest warrant for Heim, who fled via France, Spain, Morocco, and Libya to Egypt. Although he was one of the world’s most-wanted war criminals, efforts to trace his whereabouts repeatedly failed. In fact, having converted to Islam and acquired the name Tariq Farid Husain, Ferdinand Heim lived for decades hidden in Cairo. Reportedly, he died in 1992.
Many of the Germans who moved to the Middle East were exsoldiers who worked for Egypt’s government in training, intelligence, prison administration, and propaganda. Some were from among the six thousand German prisoners of war who stayed in Egypt after the war.71 Starting in mid-1947, the Egyptian government began to hire them. Recruiters like Haddad Said, a German with a Syrian passport, with help from the Red Crescent, systematically recruited German prisoners from camps in Germany and Cyprus.
After the 1948 war with Israel began, Arab recruitment of German military advisers moved to Turkey.72 Between 1948 and 1956 the Egyptians had two units of German military advisers. Ex-general Wilhelm Fahrmbacher led the Armed Forces group with thirty-one men, while Wilhelm Voss of the Nazis’ wartime Škoda factories led the Research Center for Explosives and Weapons unit, with fifteen. Their Egyptian counterparts later judged them superior to the Soviet technicians who eventually replaced them.73
The Americans received reports in 1952 that Voss had helped Otto Ernst Remer to escape to Cairo. Remer had been a key figure in blocking the anti-Nazi coup against Hitler following the attempted assassination of the dictator on July 20, 1944, and denouncing those involved, who were executed as a result. In Cairo, the adviser for Egyptian paratroops, Gerhard Mertens, who was paid 144 Egyptian pounds a month, helped Remer get on the Egyptian payroll at 50 Egyptian pounds a month. Remer met al-Husaini and worked with the Muslim Brotherhood as a military adviser until he returned to Germany under a 1954 amnesty. There, he became a leading Holocaust denier.74
German war criminals were also important as advisers to the Egyptian secret police. Gleim, the former SS commander in Poland, and his aide, Bernard Bender alias Ben Salam, held leading posts in the security police and greatly assisted Abd an-Nasir in gaining and holding power. Another SS official in Poland and Ukraine, the physician Heinrich Willermann alias Naim Yachim, supervised jails in Alexandria and ran the Samara concentration camp in the Western Desert.
Joachim Doemling of the SS became police adviser Ibrahim Mustafa.75 He had joined the main office of the security police in Berlin in 1939 and, in March 1943, became an adviser to al-Husaini’s Muslim troops in Croatia. In 1957 he returned to Germany. Ten years later he was jailed on charges of having murdered 3,823 people, but he escaped and fled to Egypt. There, one of his aides was Heinrich Sellmann, formerly head of the secret police in Ulm who, as Hamid Sulaiman, became political chief of Egypt’s secret police.
On one occasion, Israel was able to exploit these networks through the work of Max Bineth.76 Born in 1917 in Hungary, Bineth grew up in Cologne, but in 1935 his family moved to Palestine. In 1949 he joined Israeli intelligence and served on a secret mission in Iraq, and in 1952, under cover of being a German salesman and engineer sympathetic to Nazism, he moved to Cairo.77 In this guise, he met many Egyptian leaders and obtained much information from German advisers on Egypt’s army and military industries. Bineth was so successful that the Egyptians even offered him a job. In 1954, though, Bineth was arrested but committed suicide before his trial.78
German advisers also managed Egypt’s highest-priority military projects. Abd an-Nasir hired Willy Messerschmitt, the aircraft designer and manufacturer, and Wolfgang Pilz, a missile expert who had worked for the Nazi regime. In 1964, Messerschmitt produced Egypt’s first jet fighter, the Hulwan 300. Eventually, however, the Egyptians ran out of money and Israeli threats discouraged German scientists from working there. Cairo dropped the plan. The same pressure was applied against the missile project. Pilz, working under the name Ben Amman, designed two missiles, al-Qahir and as-Safir, first shown publicly in a 1962 military parade. That July, Abd an-Nasir announced that Egypt had made four successful tests of missiles capable of striking anywhere “south of Beirut”—that is, in Israel. Israel’s military intelligence quickly learned that Egypt had built a secret facility in the desert known as Factory 333, staffed by German scientists who had built the V1 and V2 rockets that had devastated London. Even the project’s security chief was an SS veteran.
The Egyptians planned to build some nine hundred missiles, which posed a major security threat to Israel. Israeli intelligence focused on the program’s weakness, Egypt’s need for help from German scientists, and the Mossad initiated Operation Damocles. The missiles were indeed a sword of Damocles hanging over Israel, but Israel would turn the tables on the German scientists, who would be made to choose between quitting and risking death. In September 1962, Heinz Krug, head of a Factory 333 front company called Intra, vanished in Munich. In November, two parcel bombs arrived at Pilz’s office, maiming his secretary and killing five Egyptian workers. In February 1963 another Factory 333 scientist, Hans Kleinwächter, narrowly escaped an ambush in Switzerland. In April of that year, two Mossad agents in Basel accosted Heidi Goerke, the daughter of project manager Paul Goerke, and threatened to kill both her and her father. The two agents were briefly jailed. The West German government was upset about the Israeli operations so Israel shared its intelligence, and Bonn then pressured the scientists to quit, offering them jobs at home instead. Nearly all accepted and Egypt abandoned the project. Pilz returned to West Germany in 1965.
Many other Nazis went to Syria. Franz Rademacher, alias Tomé Rosello, is a good example of this group. Born in 1906, during the Nazi era he was an aide to Under Secretary of State Luther, al-Husaini’s liaison in the Foreign Ministry. He had close ties to Eichmann and was probably the one who handled al-Husaini’s request for an Arab delegation to visit the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.79 Rademacher had also signed the Foreign Ministry’s position paper for the Wannsee Conference, supporting mass deportations of Jews to be murdered and, as al-Husaini had requested, barring them from immigrating elsewhere.80 On March 6, 1942, Rademacher attended the Wannsee Conference’s follow-up meeting, reporting the next day to his superiors on further steps planned against “mongrels” and later on the sterilization of seventy thousand people.81 On March 20, 1942, he approved Eichmann’s request to deport six thousand French and stateless Jews to Auschwitz.82
Rademacher was in American hands in 1947 and 1948 and was then turned over to German custody. In 1952, convicted for involvement in murdering thirty-two hundred Jews in Serbia, he fled to Spain and then to Syria. In Damascus he worked first in a foreign trade business but fell out with the Syrians and was imprisoned by them. He returned to West Germany in 1966 and was due to be tried for war crimes when he died in 1973.83
Walter Rauff was the most notorious of the Nazis who went to Syria. He had been involved in developing mobile gas vans, and had killed Jews in Tunisia and Italian civilians in Milan, Turin, and Genoa. After being hidden by Bishop Giuseppe Siri of Genoa, he fled to Damascus in 1947. For the next two years he worked with at least forty-seven other ex-Nazis in reorganizing Syrian intelligence.84 When their patron, President Husni az-Zaim, was overthrown in 1949, his German mercenaries were all fired.85 but Rauff was allowed to leave the country and used Red Cross papers under the alias of Bauermeister to flee through Genoa to Ecuador where he worked for the Bayer Company. In 1960 he returned to his homeland under his real name and lived unmolested. When the Eichmann trial began, however, Rauff’s many murders were also remembered. Indicted for crimes against humanity, he fled through Italy, Ecuador, and Argentina to Chile where he was protected by the government.
According to newly released records, the West German secret service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, hired Rauff in 1958. It was a sign of the BND’s continuity from the Nazi era that the men who gave Rauff a job were two former SS officers whom he had known during the war. Wilhelm Beisner had been a member of Rauff’s commando in Athens and was considered an expert on the Balkans and the Middle East. Rudolf Oebsger-Roeder had served Eichmann in deporting Hungarian Jews to the death camps in 1944. He wrote for such prestigious newspapers as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Islamic subjects, and during the 1960s, he served the BND as an adviser to Indonesian dictator Muhammad Suharto and also worked in Bangkok.86
One of Rauff’s tasks was to gather information on Fidel Castro and how far he had moved toward the Soviet bloc. Although a West German court issued a federal detention order against Rauff in 1960, he visited the country several times secretly to participate in study courses of the secret service. Rauff’s alias was Enrico Gomez, his agent number was V-7.410, and his monthly pay was two thousand marks. The service even paid part of his lawyer’s fees as it tried to keep him from being indicted in Germany. All in all, he received seventy thousand marks by the time he was arrested in Chile in 1963. According to Chilean law, however, his crimes were not prosecutable because of a sixteen-year statute of limitations,87 so he remained free and became a wealthy man after founding a fish-processing factory. When he died a natural death in 1984, his funeral turned into a Nazi rally.88
But the Syrians’ longest-running Nazi associate was Alois Brunner, born in 1912 in the Austro-Hungarian town of Nádkút. Eichmann called Brunner the “best man” on his staff; Wiesenthal dubbed him “Eichmann’s right-hand man with brains.”89 He was held responsible for deporting one hundred thousand European Jews to their deaths. Brunner also led commandos in France to hunt down the Reich’s enemies and deliver them to concentration camps. There was a good reason that al-Husaini did not mention Brunner in his memoirs, as he was the German officer who—along with Eichmann—reportedly accompanied al-Husaini on his tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp around June 1943. But they encountered each other a number of other times, for example in mid-September 1943 at the Hotel Excelsior in Nice and in mid-October 1944, when al-Husaini visited Budapest.90
After the war Brunner worked under a false name for the unknowing Americans in Munich. From 1947 to 1954, using the alias Alois Schmaldienst, he was a miner in Essen. That year, a French tribunal sentenced him to death, but Brunner escaped to Egypt, allegedly with Gehlen’s help. There he met von Leers and al-Husaini, who advised him to go to Syria.91
Despite the fact that Brunner gave interviews in Damascus and was seen living in one of the government’s official guest houses, the Syrians always insisted they knew nothing about his whereabouts and refused Interpol’s extradition request. In fact, under the name Georg Fischer he was working for Syrian intelligence. On the side, he made money with foreign trade companies in Austria and Germany. His brother-in-law, Rudolf Schneeweiss, worked as his agent in Vienna.
During the Eichmann trial, Brunner and his fellow ex-Nazi officials plotted to kidnap the Jewish leader Nahum Goldmann to exchange him for Eichmann. The action, to be carried out by veterans of the elite German Brandenburger unit, was to take place in late 1960 when Goldmann was going to meet Adenauer in Bonn. Some Algerians were also recruited and, according to Wiesenthal, Arab sources collected 300,000 marks to pay for the operation, but they never went through with it because former Brandenburger commander Arthur Meichanitz refused to be involved.92 One of those Brunner asked to participate was a Lebanese Arab secretly working for Wiesenthal,93 and Brunner later confirmed in an interview that this man was one of those he tried to recruit.94
In 1977, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin reactivated the campaign against escaped Nazi war criminals. An attempt was made to kill Brunner with a letter bomb but though badly injured, Brunner survived.95 A decade later, American politicians became aware of Brunner’s presence in Damascus. Now seventy-five, he lived quietly at 7 rue Haddad, protected around the clock by Syrian government bodyguards. In a brief phone conversation, reported an American newspaper, Brunner said of the Jews he had killed, “All of them deserved to die because they were the devil’s agents and human garbage.”96 In other talks he showed no remorse about his role in the Holocaust.
These events, and a Canadian official’s encountering Brunner in October 1987 led to the Canadian government’s briefing U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, who also gathered information from German prosecutors and Israeli intelligence reports. But no U.S. government found any effective pressure to use against Syria to obtain Brunner’s extradition.97 At the end of 1987, when East German head of state Erich Honecker wanted to visit the United States to obtain financial assistance, the Israelis secretly told Honecker that if he used his ties to Syria to extradite Brunner and free some captured Israeli soldiers they would support his efforts in Washington. As a result East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer almost succeeded in getting Brunner, but the East German regime’s rapid decline and fall ended this effort.98 In 1991, French, German, and Austrian extradition requests to Syria backed by the United States had no effect either.99 Nor did a European parliament resolution.100 Brunner reportedly died in 1999.101
Soviet Turkic Muslims who had fought for Germany and escaped deportation to the USSR also flourished. They formed committees in Berlin to carry on their nationalist battle against the Soviets. These people were useful Cold War assets for the West and many also remained connected with al-Husaini as well. Those who built the foundation for Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe came from this group.
The most important of them to flee to the Middle East was Abd ar-Rahman Fatali Beyli-Dudanginsky. Born in 1908 in Azerbaijan, he attended military schools in Baku, Leningrad, and Moscow, graduating as an officer in 1933. Having distinguished himself in battle and won the Red Star medal, he was promoted to deputy chief of staff of the 27th Soviet Army. On September 28, 1941 Beyli-Dudanginsky was captured by the Germans and spent eight months in a prisoner of war camp. Recruited to the German army’s new Turkic units in mid-1942, he became commander of the Azerbaijan Legion fighting the Soviets.102 In late 1943, he was elected president of the Azerbaijan National Committee in Berlin. During this period, Beyli-Dudanginsky developed close relations with al-Husaini. Both pushed the Nazis to recognize Azerbaijan’s independence, which happened only on March 17, 1945.
Fearing what would become of himself and his men if taken by the Soviets, Beyli-Dudanginsky managed to transfer his Muslim troops to Denmark and Italy in 1944. There they surrendered to the Americans and the British on the understanding that they would not be forcibly returned to the Soviets. This promise was broken and most were shipped back to the USSR in September 1945, though many escaped en route. While working from Italy in 1947 with refugees from Azerbaijan and other Turkic Muslims from the Caucasus, Beyli-Dudanginsky reconnected to al-Husaini in Cairo. On January 29, 1948 he visited Egypt as al-Husaini’s personal guest and, in effect, employee. Fearing that a Jewish state would become a Soviet colony in the region—a common misperception at the time—Beyli-Dudanginsky offered his military expertise to al-Husaini for raising an Arab army.
The Egyptian government, which had always opposed letting al-Husaini organize any independent military force in the country, vetoed the plan but let Beyli-Dudanginsky remain in the country along with about one hundred followers trying to create their own organization to fight the Soviets. A U.S. intelligence report described him as a “fanatical Caucasian patriot with no scruples of any kind.”103
All these efforts, of course, required money. At the war’s end some Nazis managed to hide funds for later use, and with Hitler’s consent, al-Husaini had sent a large amount to Switzerland during the war to fund his operations in other countries. His main banker was François Genoud, who had known the grand mufti since 1933. Born in 1915, Genoud worked with German military intelligence in World War II and thereafter as financier, benefactor, and literary executor for Nazis on the run in the ODESSA network. In 1958, he founded the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva, specializing in lending for political rather than—despite its name—commercial purposes. In 1960, he bankrolled Eichmann’s legal defense in Jerusalem, in 1962, he became director of the Arab Peoples Bank in Algiers, and in 1965, he sponsored a meeting between Swiss convert to Islam Ahmad Huber and al-Husaini. In the late 1960s he promoted weapons deals to Palestinian terror groups, especially George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was also secretary general of the International Organization of Friends of the Arab World.104
In February 1943, al-Husaini, through Göring as trustee, invested about 18.4 million marks (about $920,000 at the time) through a Berlin branch of the Handels-Gesellschaft in Swiss banks and German companies.105 After being rejected for Swiss asylum on May 8, 1945,106 al-Hasaini destroyed the investment agreement and receipts lest the British capture it and demand the money. And there matters rested until February 26, 1959 when, his financial resources drying up, al-Husaini launched a lawsuit to reclaim the funds. He worked with François Genoud who, if successful, would get 75 percent after paying all costs. The total value of al-Husaini’s shares was estimated that year at about 150 million marks, approximately $60 million. A victory at the time the case ended in 1974 would have brought al-Husaini a fortune. But the case dragged on for years.
The Berlin court asked al-Husaini for witnesses to prove his claim. His attorneys produced Hans Rechenberg, a former Nazi official; Göring’s wife, Emma; and Walter Funk, Hitler’s economy minister and president of the Central Bank who was released from prison on health grounds in 1957, all of whom testified that al-Husaini had made such a deal with Göring.107
In 1970, al-Husaini and his aides Munif al-Husaini and Saad ad-Din Abd al-Latif said they had discovered a notebook in which they had noted the shares supposedly purchased during the war. It showed an investment of almost half a million dollars in eight companies including the automaker Daimler Benz and the chemical company I. G. Farben. But since the evidence was far from complete, on June 25, 1971 the court decided against al-Husaini108 and on April 3, 1974 it finally rejected al-Husaini’s appeal.109
During the fifteen-year legal battle, the West German Foreign Ministry debated whether it would be in the country’s interest to pay the money. One of al-Husaini’s most active advocates in this struggle was Hans-Ferdinand Linsser of the Legal Department, who had served in the Middle East. He and others argued in 1967 that helping al-Husaini would improve West Germany’s influence because many Muslims held him in high esteem. Moreover, Germany should not show people in the area “that we let down this best-ever friend of Germany.” In their arguments, officials used the word “reparations” for the return of al-Husaini’s funds, equating them with Bonn’s payments to Jews and Israel for property confiscated by the Nazis.110 Linsser added that even while it was difficult legally to justify paying al-Husaini the funds, the government might as a good will gesture give some money to pay for a Sunni mosque in West Germany.111
Those opposed argued that al-Husaini had continued his anti-Jewish activities and had no real influence in the Arab world that might benefit Bonn. In the end, the Foreign Ministry faction that opposed payments won and no money was handed out. Yet nobody noted the profound and revealing irony that most of the money given to al-Husaini by the Nazis had come from looted Jewish gold and the possessions of those sent to the death camps.
The Americans kept a close eye on Genoud. In the mid-1970s, the CIA noted that he still had close ties to Nazi circles and escaped war criminals living in Arab countries.112 He was barred from the United States after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote to the U.S. embassy in Switzerland about Genoud’s “long and unsavory record of Nazi and Fascist associations.”113 Genoud’s career also demonstrated the continuing alliance between neo-Nazi forces and radical Arab nationalist and Islamist ones. He worked with the radical French lawyer Jacques Vergès, who defended the Palestinian terrorist leader George Habash, the Nazi Klaus Barbie, and the ex-Communist convert to Islam and Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. He always retained his close association with al-Husaini, visiting him in Beirut in October 1970. Genoud also helped bankroll Khomeini when he was in France during the 1970s before his victorious return to Tehran as leader of the Iranian Islamist revolution. By 1994, Genoud was financing the courtroom defense of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the forty-five-year-old Venezuelan terrorist known widely as Carlos the Jackal, who worked with Habash in various terror attacks including the raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna and the bombing of cars, banks, and El Al airplanes in Paris in 1975. In 1997 Carlos was found guilty of the murder of two policemen in Paris and sentenced to life in prison.
The main constant in Genoud’s life was his passionate hatred of Jews and Israel.114 Swiss authorities claimed that Genoud built the Lugano-based At-Taqwa Bank, which helped fund al-Qaida and Hamas, and was shut down after the September 11 attacks. In 1996, as the Swiss authorities were reportedly about to arrest him for hiding Nazi gold, he committed suicide at age eighty-one.115 Such was the man who was al-Husaini’s main banker. His Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva became a focal point for Islamist networks in Europe in the years before Ramadan and others succeeded in building their own banking system. Al-Husaini also sent his men, in this case his Egyptian aide Ahmad Husain, from the fascist Young Egypt Party, as far away as America to raise money.
Later, the Islamists built their own banking system, partly based in their Munich headquarters. Among the key Muslim Brotherhood bankers were Ghalib Himmat and Yusuf Nada, both named as financiers of terrorism in the post–September 11 investigations.116 When Munich became too hot for him, Himmat left the Islamic Center there and moved to the secondary center in Switzerland to become head of the Lugano Islamic Center in 2004, and was thereafter not bothered by the authorities.
In sharp contrast to the former Nazi officials and SS men, Germany’s Hitler-era diplomats did not have to go underground. Many of them continued their professional careers, like von Hentig, who worked from 1954 as King Saud’s adviser and accompanied him to the Bandung Conference, once again meeting up with al-Husaini. Grobba also worked for the Saudi king. But most entered West Germany’s service. Adenauer declared that their expertise was indispensable despite their past, and by October 1952, there were 195 former Nazi Party members in West Germany’s Foreign Ministry, of whom 106 had served under von Ribbentrop. Of these, fifty-seven, more than half of the veteran diplomats, had been involved in the Middle East and Islamic matters. Thus, a large proportion of the new government’s Middle East expertise, responsible for devising policy toward the Arabs, Muslims, and Israel, had been enthusiastic supporters of Hitler.117
One of al-Husaini’s foes in the wartime Foreign Ministry had been Wilhelm Melchers. Born in 1900 in Bremen, he studied law and fought briefly in World War I. Joining the Foreign Ministry, he served in Ethiopia, Japan, Iran, and just before World War II, as consul in Haifa where he joined the Nazi Party. During the war he led the ministry’s Middle East section and afterward was promoted to head the all-important personnel department where he could help former comrades obtain jobs. He became successively West German ambassador to Iraq, Jordan, India, and Greece until his retirement in 1965.
Of particular importance was Hermann Voigt, who grew up in the German Templers’ religious settlement near Tel Aviv where he was born in 1889.118 Voigt studied law and Turkish, serving as a translator at the German embassy in Istanbul during World War I. He joined the Nazi Party and served in the Foreign Ministry during World War II. In 1953 he began a decade-long posting as Adenauer’s desk officer for the Middle East.119
Germany’s ambassador to Turkey in the early 1970s was Gustav Adolf Sonnenhol. Born in 1912, Sonnenhol joined the Nazi Party as a student in 1929. In 1939 he joined the Foreign Ministry and then worked in Paris for a time in the section coordinating the deportation of Jews. Between 1942 and 1944 he served in the North African cities of Casablanca and Tangiers where Berlin and al-Husaini were planning the murder of all of the Jews. Beginning in mid-1943, while in Tangiers, he also worked for Himmler in SS intelligence.120 Sonnenhol had good relations with Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who headed von Ribbentrop’s radio propaganda section where he worked with al-Husaini promoting anti-Jewish agitation.121 This link helped to ensure Sonnenhol’s rise in the postwar Foreign Ministry, especially during Kiesinger’s years as West Germany’s chancellor from 1966 to 1969.122
The case of Günther Pawelke was more complicated. A World War I veteran, he studied afterward in Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Washington, earning a doctorate. Pawelke entered the Foreign Ministry in 1927, served in Baghdad between 1934 and 1937 as Grobba’s deputy, but was forced out when he refused to become a Nazi Party member. Joining the army when the war broke out, he flew bombing missions over Britain and France but, given his knowledge of Arabic, was sent as part of the military aid mission to help Iraq’s 1941 revolt. While Pawelke’s plane was coming in for a landing in Baghdad, it was mistakenly shot down by the Iraqis, but he survived. From 1952 to 1955, Pawelke became West German ambassador to Egypt and Yemen.123 He was denounced in the Israeli media, inaccurately, as a Nazi and a former pay-master for the grand mufti.124 In later years he served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
While virtually none of those who had helped Hitler’s Foreign Ministry in its many deceptions and conquests paid for their deeds, the situation was even worse in academia.125 Professors who had enthusiastically participated in Nazi Middle East efforts flourished in the postwar years. Berthold Spuler, a Nazi Party member since 1933 who had helped manage Muslim SS units, continued at Göttingen University. When information about his Nazi past began to surface in the late 1960s and some students criticized him, he shouted back, “You all belong in a concentration camp.”126
This tirade illustrated the broader problem of these postwar Nazis and Hitler-era officials. While the West German government as a whole made a break with the past, these individuals in its ranks continued to hold their pre-1945 views and to advocate similar Middle East policies. They remained hostile toward a Jewish state and soft on radical Islamism and Arab nationalism.
