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 along which the Nazis' flight from Europe was carried out was the "road to the East." Arab countries became one of the final destinations of the Nazis, especially the German ones. The settlement of fugitive war criminals in the Middle East was facilitated by the long-standing ties that existed between Nazi Germany and Arab nationalist movements. Even before the start of World War II, the German intelligence services 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 full control over Arab countries.
Amin al-Husseini and the SS troops
Germany's strongest ties were established in the pre-war period with Palestinian and Iraqi political and religious leaders. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at this time was Hajj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), who hated the mass resettlement of Jews, inspired by the Zionist movement, from Europe to Palestine. Amin al-Husseini, who comes from a wealthy and noble Jerusalem Arab family, graduated from the famous Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Egypt, and during the First World War he served in the Turkish army. Around the same period, 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 was soon pardoned and even made in 1921, only 26 years old, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In this post, he replaced his half-brother.
Back in 1933, the mufti got in touch with the Hitlerite party, from which he began to receive financial and military assistance. The NSDAP saw the mufti as a possible ally in the fight against British influence in the Middle East, for which it organized the supply of funds and weapons to him. In 1936, large Jewish pogroms took place in Palestine, orchestrated not without the participation of Hitler's special 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-Iraqi treaty and openly focused on cooperation with Germany. On April 1, 1941, Rashid Ali al-Geylani and his comrades-in-arms from the "Golden Square" group - Colonels Salah al-Din al-Sabah, Mahmoud Salman, Fahmi Said, Kamil Shabib, chief of the Iraqi army's staff, Amin Zaki Suleiman, carried out a military coup. British troops, seeking to prevent the transfer of Iraq's oil resources into the hands of Germany, undertook an invasion of the country and on May 2, 1941 began hostilities against the Iraqi army. Because Germany was distracted on the eastern front, she was unable to support the Geylani government. British forces quickly defeated the weak Iraqi army and on May 30, 1941, the Gaylani regime fell. The ousted Iraqi prime minister fled to Germany, where Hitler granted him political asylum as head of the Iraqi government in exile. Geylani stayed in Germany until the end of the war.
With the outbreak of World War II, the cooperation of Nazi Germany with Arab nationalists intensified. Hitler's intelligence services allocated large sums of money monthly to the Jerusalem mufti and other Arab politicians. Mufti Husseini arrived in Italy from Iran in October 1941, and then moved to Berlin. In Germany, he met with the top leadership of the security services, including Adolf Eichmann, and visited the concentration camps Auschwitz, Majdanek and Sachsenhausen on sightseeing tours. On November 28, 1941, a meeting between Mufti al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler took place. The Arab leader called the Fuhrer Hitler "the defender of Islam" and said that the Arabs and Germans have common enemies - the British, Jews and Communists, so they will have to fight together in the outbreak of the war. The mufti appealed to the Muslims with an appeal 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 Eastern Europe. It was he who filed complaints to Hitler against the authorities of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, which, in the opinion of the mufti, were insufficiently effective in resolving 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 nation-state. So he turned not just into a supporter of cooperation with Hitler, but into a Nazi war criminal who blessed Muslims to serve in the punitive SS units. According to researchers, the mufti is personally responsible for the death of at least half a million East European Jews who were sent from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia to death camps located in Poland. In addition, it was the mufti who inspired the Yugoslav and Albanian Muslims to slaughter Serbs and Jews in Yugoslavia. After all, it was al-Husseini who was at the origin of the idea of forming special units within the SS troops that could be recruited from representatives of the Muslim peoples of Eastern Europe - Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, angry with their neighbors - Orthodox Christians and Jews.
Eastern SS divisions
The German command, having decided to create armed formations from among ethnic Muslims, first of all drew attention to two categories - Muslims living in the Balkan Peninsula, and Muslims of the national republics of the Soviet Union. Both those and others had long-standing scores with the Slavs - Serbs in the Balkans, Russians in the Soviet Union, so the Hitlerite generals counted on the military prowess of Muslim units. The 13th SS Mountain Division "Khanjar" was formed from the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Despite the fact that Bosnian spiritual leaders from among the local mullahs and imams spoke out against 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 to fight for Germany. The number of the division was 26 thousand people, of which 60% were ethnic Muslims - Bosnians, and the rest were Croats and Yugoslav Germans. Due to the predominance of the Muslim component in the division, pork was excluded from the division's diet, and a five-fold prayer was introduced. The fighters of the division wore fez, and a short sword - "khanjar" was depicted on their collar tabs.
Nevertheless, the command staff of the division was represented by German officers, who treated privates and non-commissioned officers of Bosnian origin, recruited from ordinary peasants and often completely disagreeing with 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 revolt in the SS troops. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the Nazis, its initiators were executed, and several hundred soldiers were sent for demonstration purposes to work in Germany. In 1944, most of the division's fighters deserted and went over to the side of the Yugoslav partisans, but the remnants of the division, mainly from the Yugoslav ethnic Germans and Ustasha Croats, 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 the mass atrocities against the Serbian and Jewish population on the territory of Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Serbs who survived the war say that the Ustashi and Bosnians committed atrocities much worse than the actual German units.
In April 1944, another Muslim division was formed as part of the SS troops - the 21st mountain division "Skanderbeg", named after the national hero of Albania Skanderbeg. This division was manned by the Nazis with 11 thousand soldiers and officers, most of whom were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and Albania. The Nazis sought to exploit anti-Slavic sentiments among the Albanians, who considered themselves the aborigines of the Balkan Peninsula and its true masters, whose lands were occupied by the Slavs - Serbs. However, in reality, the Albanians did not particularly want and did not know how to fight, so they had to be used only for punitive and anti-partisan actions, most often to destroy the civilian Serbian population, which the Albanian soldiers did with pleasure, given the long-standing hatred between the two neighboring peoples. The Skanderbeg division became famous for its atrocities against the Serbian population, killing 40,000 Serbian civilians in a year of participation in hostilities, including several hundred Orthodox priests. The actions of the division were actively supported by 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 large Muslim unit in the Wehrmacht was the Noye-Turkestan division, created in January 1944 also on the initiative of Mufti al-Husseini and staffed with representatives of the Muslim peoples of the USSR from among the Soviet prisoners of war who had defected to Nazi Germany. The overwhelming majority of representatives of the peoples of the North Caucasus, Transcaucasia, the Volga region, Central Asia heroically fought against Nazism and gave many Heroes of the Soviet Union. However, there were also those who, for whatever reasons, be it the desire to survive in captivity or the settling of personal scores with the Soviet regime, went over to the side of Hitler's Germany. There were about 8, 5 thousand such people, who were divided into four Waffen groups - "Turkestan", "Idel-Ural", "Azerbaijan" and "Crimea". The division's emblem was three mosques with golden domes and crescents with the inscription "Biz Alla Billen". In the winter of 1945, the Waffen-group "Azerbaijan" was withdrawn from the division and transferred to the Caucasian SS Legion. The division took part in battles with Slovenian partisans on the territory of Yugoslavia, after which it broke through to 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. They managed to recruit about 20 thousand 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 on the territory of Greece, where it fought against the Greek anti-fascist partisan movement, then transferred to Yugoslavia - also to fight the partisan formations and the advancing Soviet troops. The Arab unit, which did not distinguish itself in battles, completed its path on the territory of modern Croatia.
Germany's defeat in World War II also influenced the political situation in the Muslim world, primarily in the Arab East. Mufti Amin al-Husseini flew from Austria to Switzerland on a training plane and asked the Swiss government for political asylum, but the authorities of this country refused to grant asylum to the odious mufti, and he had no choice but to surrender to the French military command. The French transported the mufti to the Chersh-Midi prison in Paris. For the commission of war crimes on the territory of Yugoslavia, the mufti was included by the leadership of Yugoslavia in the list of Nazi war criminals. Nevertheless, 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 the Palestinian lands.
After the end of the Second World War, the mufti lived for almost thirty more years and died in 1974 in Beirut. His relative Muhammad Abd ar-Rahman Abd ar-Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini went down in history as Yasser Arafat and became the leader of the Palestinian national liberation movement. Following Mufti al-Husseini, many German Nazi criminals - generals and officers of the Wehrmacht, Abwehr, and SS troops - moved to the Arab East. They found political asylum in Arab countries, drawing close to their leaders on the basis of anti-Semitic sentiments that are equally inherent in the Nazis and Arab nationalists. An excellent reason for the use of Hitler's war criminals in the countries of the Arab East - as military and police specialists - was the beginning of an armed conflict between the Arab states and the created Jewish state of Israel. Many Nazi criminals were patronized in the Middle East by Mufti al-Husseini, who continued to enjoy considerable influence in Arab nationalist circles.
The Egyptian way of the Nazis
Egypt became one of the most important points of accommodation for Nazi war criminals who moved to the Middle East after the war. As you know, mufti al-Husseini moved to Cairo. Many German officers also rushed after him. An Arab-German emigration center was created, which dealt with the organizational issues of the relocation of Hitler's officers to the Middle East. The center was headed by the former army staff officer of General Rommel, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Müller, who naturalized in Syria as Hassan Bey. For several years, the center managed to transfer 1,500 Nazi officers to the Arab countries, and in total the Arab East received at least 8 thousand officers of the Wehrmacht and SS troops, and this does not include Muslims from SS divisions created under the patronage of the Palestinian mufti.
Johann Demling arrived in Egypt, who headed the Gestapo of the Ruhr region. In Cairo, he took up work in his specialty - he led the reform of the Egyptian security service in 1953. Another Hitlerite officer, Leopold Gleim, who headed the Gestapo in Warsaw, headed the Egyptian security service under the name of Colonel al-Naher. The propaganda department of the Egyptian security service was headed by the former SS Obergruppenfuehrer Moser, who took the name Hussa Nalisman. Heinrich Zelman, who led the Gestapo in Ulm, became chief of the secret state police of Egypt under the name Hamid Suleiman. The political department of the police was headed by the former SS Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Bender, aka Colonel Salam. With the direct participation of Nazi criminals, concentration camps were created in which Egyptian communists and representatives of other opposition political parties and movements were housed. In organizing the system of concentration camps, the invaluable experience of Hitler's war criminals was very needed, and they, in turn, did not hesitate to offer their services to the Egyptian government.
Johann von Leers, a former close associate of Joseph Goebbels and the author of the book "Jews Among Us", also found refuge in Egypt.
Leers fled Germany via Italy and initially settled in Argentina, where he lived for about ten years and worked as an editor for a local Nazi magazine. In 1955, Leers left Argentina and moved to the Middle East. In Egypt, he also found work "in his specialty", becoming the curator of anti-Israel propaganda. For a career in Egypt, he even converted to Islam and the name Omar Amin. The Egyptian government refused to extradite Leers to the German justice system, but when Leers died in 1965, his body was transported to his homeland in the Federal Republic of Germany, where he was buried according to Muslim tradition. In his propaganda work, Leersu was assisted by Hans Appler, who also converted to Islam under the name of Salab Gafa. Cairo radio, which operated under the control of German propaganda specialists, became the main mouthpiece of anti-Israel propaganda in the Arab world. It should be noted that it was German emigrants who played a major role in the formation and development of the propaganda machine of the Egyptian state in the 1950s.
The positions of German military advisers from among the former Nazis were especially strengthened in Egypt after the military coup - the July Revolution of 1952, as a result of which the monarchy was overthrown and a military regime led by Arab nationalists was established. Even during the war years, the Arab officers of nationalist views who carried out the coup sympathized with Hitler's Germany, which they saw as a natural ally in the fight against Great Britain. Thus, Anwar Sadat, who later became the president of Egypt, spent two years in prison on charges of having ties 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, a letter to the deceased Hitler authored by Sadat was published in the Egyptian magazine al-Musawar. In it, Anwar Sadat wrote “My dear Hitler. I greet you from the bottom of my heart. If you now seem to have lost the war, you are still the true winner. You managed to drive a wedge between old Churchill and his allies - the offspring of Satan”(Soviet Union - author's note). These words of Anwar Sadat clearly testify to his true political convictions and the attitude towards the Soviet Union, which he demonstrated even more clearly when he came to power and reoriented Egypt towards cooperation with the United States of America.
Gamal Abdel Nasser also sympathized with the Nazis - during the war years, a young officer of the Egyptian army, also dissatisfied with the British influence in the country and counting on Germany's help in liberating the Arab world from British colonial rule. Both Nasser, Sadat, and Major Hassan Ibrahim are another important participant in the coup; during the Second World War they were associated with the German command and even supplied 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 well-known German specialist in reconnaissance and sabotage operations, arrived in Egypt, who assisted the Egyptian military command in the formation of Egyptian special forces units. Aribert Heim, another "Doctor Death", a Viennese doctor who entered the SS troops in 1940 and was engaged in atrocious medical experiments on prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, was also hiding in Egypt. In Egypt, Aribert Heim lived until 1992, naturalized under the name Tariq Farid Hussein, and died there at the age of 78 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 widespread, and the Palestinian mufti al-Husseini enjoyed great influence. The "father of the Syrian special services" was Alois Brunner (1912-2010?) - the closest associate of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the deportation of Austrian, Berlin and Greek Jews to concentration camps. In July 1943, he dispatched 22 transports with the Jews of Paris to Auschwitz. It was Brunner who was responsible for the deportation to death camps of 56,000 Jews from Berlin, 50,000 Jews from Greece, 12,000 Slovak Jews, 23,500 Jews from France. After the defeat of Germany in World War II, Brunner fled to Munich, where, under an assumed name, he got a job as a driver - moreover, in the American army's trucking service. Later, he worked at the mine for some time, and then decided to finally leave Europe, as he feared the risk of probable capture in the process of the intensified hunt by the French special services for Nazi war criminals who operated on French territory during the war years.
In 1954, Brunner fled to Syria, where he changed his name to "Georg Fischer" and got in touch with the Syrian special services. He became a military adviser to the Syrian special services and was involved in organizing their activities. Brunner's whereabouts in Syria were identified by both French and Israeli intelligence services. Israeli intelligence began hunting down a Nazi war criminal. Twice Brunner received parcels with bombs by mail, and in 1961 he lost an eye while opening the parcel, and in 1980 - four fingers on his left hand. However, the Syrian government has always refused to acknowledge the fact that Brunner lived in the country and claimed that these were slanderous rumors spread by the enemies of the Syrian state. However, Western media reported that until 1991 Brunner lived in Damascus, and then moved to Latakia, where he died in the mid-1990s. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Alois Brunner died in 2010, having lived to a ripe old age.
In addition to Brunner, many other prominent Nazi officers settled in Syria. So, the Gestapo officer Rapp led the organizational work to strengthen the Syrian counterintelligence. Former Colonel of the Wehrmacht General Staff Kribl led the mission of military advisers who led the training of the Syrian army. Hitler's officers developed close ties with radical Arab nationalists, who were numerous among the highest and senior officers of the Syrian army. During the reign of General Adib al-Shishakli, 11 German military advisers worked in the country - former high and senior officers of the Wehrmacht, who helped the Syrian dictator in organizing the unification of Arab states into the United Arab Republic.
Saudi Arabia was also of great interest to Hitler's officers. The ultra-conservative monarchical regime existing in the country quite suited the Nazis by seeing Israel and the Soviet Union as the main enemies. In addition, during the Second World War, Wahhabism was considered by Hitler's special services as one of the most promising trends in Islam. As in other countries of the Arab East, in Saudi Arabia, Hitler's officers participated in the training of local special services and the army, in the fight against communist sentiments. It is likely that the training camps, created with the participation of former Nazi officers, eventually trained the militants of fundamentalist organizations who fought throughout Asia and Africa, including against Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
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 adopted the doctrine of the Aryan identity of the Iranian nation, in connection with which he renamed the country from Persia to Iran, that is, to the “Country of the Aryans”. Germany was viewed 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 nation states focused on rapid modernization and building up military and economic power.
The Shah considered fascist Italy as a model of the internal political structure, trying to create a similar model of the organization of society in Iran. in 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Nazi propaganda intensified in Iran.
Iranian servicemen began to undergo training in Germany, at the same time receiving an ideological load there. In 1937, the leader of the Nazi youth, Baldur von Schirach, visited Iran. National Socialist ideas became widespread among Iranian youth, which alarmed the Shah himself. Reza Pahlavi saw the spread of Nazism in Iranian society as a threat to his own power, since youth Nazi groups accused the Shah's regime of corruption, and one of the ultra-right groups even prepared a military coup. In the end, the Shah ordered that Nazi organizations and print media be banned in the country. Some particularly active Nazis were arrested, especially those who acted in the armed forces and posed a real threat to the political stability of Shah's Iran.
Nevertheless, the influence of the German Nazis in the country persisted during the Second World War, which was facilitated by the activity of the German special services and the propaganda tricks of the Nazi party, which, in particular, spread disinformation among the Iranians that Hitler had converted to Shiite Islam. Numerous Nazi organizations arose in Iran, which extended their influence, including to 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 troops of the anti-Hitler coalition occupied part of Iranian territory. After the end of the Second World War, Nazi groups appeared again in Iran, modeled on the NSDAP. One of them was called the National Socialist Iranian Workers' Party. It was created by Davud Monshizadeh - a participant in the defense of Berlin in May 1945, a staunch supporter of the "Aryan racism" of the Iranian nation. The Iranian far-right took an anti-communist position, but unlike the Arab politicians who sympathized with Hitlerism, they also had a negative attitude towards the role of the Islamic clergy in the life of the country.
Even in the pre-war period, Nazi Germany tried to develop ties with Turkey. The nationalist government of Ataturk was viewed by the Nazis as a natural ally and, moreover, even as a certain model of a "nation state" that could serve as an example to follow. Throughout the pre-war period, Hitlerite Germany strove to develop and strengthen cooperation in Turkey in various fields, emphasizing the long-standing traditions of Turkey's interaction with Germany. By 1936, Germany had become Turkey's main foreign trade partner, consuming up to half of the country's exports and supplying Turkey with up to half of all imports. Since Turkey during the First World War was an ally of Germany, Hitler hoped that the Turks would enter the Second World War on the side of Germany. Here he was wrong. Turkey did not dare to take the side of the "Axis countries", at the same time drawing on itself a significant part of the Soviet troops that were stationed in Transcaucasia and did not enter into battles with the Nazis precisely because of the fears of Stalin and Beria thatthat the Turks could attack the Soviet Union in the event of the withdrawal of combat-ready divisions from the Soviet-Turkish border. After the end of World War II, many Albanian and Bosnian, as well as Central Asian and Caucasian Muslims who fought on the side of Nazi Germany in the Muslim SS units 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, to which Hitler's Nazism brought only suffering and death to many millions of people, in the East there is a double attitude towards Adolf Hitler. On the one hand, many people from the East, especially those living in European countries, do not like Nazism, because they had a sad experience of communicating with modern neo-Nazis - followers of Hitlerism. On the other hand, for many Eastern people, Hitlerite 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, sympathy for Germany during the Nazi period may be associated with political contradictions in the Middle East after the creation of the state of Israel.
