Johann von Leers
Omar Amin
Von Leers in 1933
Born(1902-01-25)25 January 1902
Karbow-Vietlübbe, Germany
Died5 March 1965(1965-03-05) (aged 63)
Cairo, Egypt
Allegiance Germany
 United Arab Republic
Service/branch Waffen-SS
Rank Sturmbannführer
Other workConvert to Islam

Omar Amin (born Johann Jakob von Leers; 25 January 1902 – 5 March 1965) was an Alter Kämpfer[1] and an honorary Sturmbannführer[1] in the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany, where he was also a professor known for his anti-Jewish polemics. He was one of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich, serving as a high-ranking propaganda ministry official. He later served in the Egyptian Information Department, as well as an advisor to Gamal Abdel Nasser.[2] He published for Goebbels, in Peron's Argentina and for Nasser's Egypt. He converted to Islam, and changed his name to Omar Amin.

Early life and education

Von Leers was born in Vietlübbe, Mecklenburg-Schwerin,[3] Germany on 25 January 1902. He studied law at Berlin, Kiel, and Rostock and eventually worked as an attache in the foreign office.[4] He was involved in the Bund Viking Free Corps[5] and then in Adler und Falke. Von Leers became actively involved in völkisch politics during the Weimar Republic, and he joined the NSDAP in 1929.[6] He was a district speaker and leader of the National Socialist Students' League,[4] and in 1933 signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the "vow of most faithful allegiance" to Adolf Hitler.[7]

Career

Weimar Republic

During the 1920s, he was the leading foreign policy critic of the Strasserist-wing of the Nazi Party, and was a staunch critic of Alfred Rosenberg.[8]

Nazi Germany

Von Leers supported himself writing freelance articles for the NSDAP press,[5] and joined the Waffen-SS in 1936 as a sub-Sturmbannführer, eventually becoming a full honorary.[1][5][9] He would serve as a professor at the University of Jena.[1] He eventually was summoned by Joseph Goebbels to work in the propaganda ministry. There he was assigned to proliferate party propaganda, eventually penning 27 books between 1933 and 1945.[4]

He wrote the notorious anti-Semitic tract (published and popular during the Third Reich), Juden sehen dich an (Jews Are Looking at You). Von Leers was fluent in five languages, including Dutch and Japanese.[6]

Jeffrey Herf reports that in December 1942, von Leers published an article in Die Judenfrage, a journal which belonged to the anti-Semitic intellectual world, entitled "Judaism and Islam as Opposites". As the title indicates, the author's perspective is Hegelian, presenting Judaism and Islam in terms of thesis and antithesis. This essay also reveals the ingratiating National Socialist perspective which von Leers projected on the Islamic past as well as the intensity of his hatred for Judaism and Jewry. The following passage is part of the original text:

Mohammed's hostility to the Jews had one result: Oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed. Its backbone was broken. Oriental Jewry effectively did not participate in [European] Jewry's tremendous rise to power in the last two centuries. Despised in the filthy lanes of the mellah (the walled Jewish quarter of a Moroccan city, analogous to the European ghetto) the Jews vegetated there. They lived under a special law (that of a protected minority), which in contrast to Europe did not permit usury or even traffic in stolen goods, but kept them in a state of oppression and anxiety. If the rest of the world had adopted a similar policy, we would not have a Jewish Question (Judenfrage).... As a religion, Islam indeed performed an eternal service to the world: it prevented the threatened conquest of Arabia by the Jews and vanquished the horrible teaching of Jehovah by a pure religion, which at that time opened the way to a higher culture for numerous peoples ....[10][11]

Realpolitik

Von Leers was a proponent of realpolitik, advocating a race-free foreign relations policy on the basis of relationship and alliance. He authored the memo which led to the exemption of non-Jewish racial minorities from race laws in the Third Reich in 1934, 1936, and 1937.[12]

Post-war

In 1945 he fled to Italy, living there for five years, and then moving to Argentina in 1950 where he continued his propaganda activities. During this period he was a contributor to Der Weg, a Nazi publication founded in Buenos Aires in 1947.[13] He was praised by Haj Amin al-Husseini for his loyalty to Arab nationalism.[4] Thereafter he moved from Argentina to Egypt.[6]

During his time as editor of Der Weg, he would praise the american Neo-Fascist Francis Parker Yockey and his book Imperium, for its understanding of Russia, which was heavily influenced by Spengler´s concept of "psuedomorphosis".[14]

The Swedish journalist and writer Elisabeth Åsbrink probed the reasons for Sweden's centrality in the European far-right scene in her book 1947: When Now Begins. In it she portrays Per Engdahl (1909–1994), the man who led the Swedish fascist movement. Engdahl created an escape route for Nazis from all parts of Europe. It passed through northern Germany and Denmark, and led to Malmö. From there the Nazis were smuggled to various places in southern Sweden and then sent by ship from Gothenburg to South America. Engdahl claimed to have "saved" about 4,000 Nazis in this way. One of those whom Engdahl assisted was Johann von Leers, who "arrived in Malmö in 1947, and ... got to Buenos Aires, where he edited a paper that became a communications channel between Nazis in Europe and those who ended up in Latin America. Von Leers was later brought to Egypt under the auspices of Haj Amin al-Husseini, with whom he was in close contact. Eventually he converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin as a gesture to his benefactor, becoming head of [Egyptian President Gamal Abdel] Nasser's 'Israeli' propaganda unit."[15] Von Leers was welcomed in Egypt by al-Husseini[16] and he became the political adviser to the Information Department under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser,[4] as well as being friendly with Haj Amin al-Husseini.[17] He served as head of the Institute for the Study of Zionism, managing anti-Israeli propaganda.[18] He was a mentor of Ahmed Huber and networked with Muslim emigres in Hamburg,[18] while also being an acquaintance of Otto Ernst Remer in the country.[19][20]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Jihad and Genocide", Richard L. Rubenstein. Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. ISBN 0-7425-6203-4, ISBN 978-0-7425-6203-5. p. 100
  2. ↑ The Wiener Library bulletin, Volume 15. Wiener Library. 1961. p. 2
  3. ↑ Grewolls, Grete (2011). Wer war wer in Mecklenburg und Vorpommern. Das Personenlexikon (in German). Rostock: Hinstorff Verlag. p. 5738. ISBN 978-3-356-01301-6. Here it reads: Vietlübbe (Nordwestmecklenburg)
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "Who's who in Nazi Germany", Robert Solomon Wistrich. Psychology Press, 2002. ISBN 0-415-26038-8, ISBN 978-0-415-26038-1. p. 152-153
  5. 1 2 3 "Goebbels and Der Angriff", Russel Lemmons. University Press of Kentucky, 1994. ISBN 0-8131-1848-4, ISBN 978-0-8131-1848-2. p. 30
  6. 1 2 3 Description of Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism since 1945, Middletown, CT Wesleyan University Press, 1967, II, 1115
  7. ↑ 88 "writers", from Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949, Volume 12 of Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, University of California Press 1998 ISBN 0-520-07278-2, p. 367-8
  8. ↑ Coogan, Kevin (1999). Dreamer of the day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia. p. 276. ISBN 1-57027-039-2.
  9. ↑ "Confronting the Nazi war on Christianity: the Kulturkampf newsletters, 1936-1939", Richard Bonney. Peter Lang, 2009. ISBN 3-03911-904-4, ISBN 978-3-03911-904-2. p. 120-121
  10. ↑ "Judentum und Islam als Gegensätze", Die Judenfrage, Vol. 6, No. 24 (15 December 1942), p. 278, quoted and paraphrased by Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy, p.181
  11. ↑ As quoted in Victor Klemperer' Tagebuch as author of an article "Schuld ist der Jude" in nr.143 of "Freiheitskampf" Review (1943), where he accuses the Jews to have prepared the First World War to destroy the German people: "if the Jews win, our destiny will be that of the Polish officers in Katyn".
  12. ↑ "Japanese prisoners of war", Philip Towle, Margaret Kosuge, Yōichi Kibata. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000. ISBN 1-85285-192-9, ISBN 978-1-85285-192-7. p. 120
  13. ↑ Elisabeth Åsbrink (2021). "When Race Was Removed from Racism: Per Engdahl, the Networks that Saved Fascism and the Making of the Concept of Ethnopluralism". Journal of the History of Ideas. 82 (1): 146. doi:10.1353/jhi.2021.0006. PMID 33583834. S2CID 231926387.
  14. ↑ Coogan, Kevin (1999). Dreamer of the day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia. p. 275. ISBN 1-57027-039-2.
  15. ↑ How Sweden Became a Thriving Base of neo-Nazi Ideology, by David Stavrou, Haaretz, 30 December 2017 https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-1.831763
  16. ↑ "Egyptian Islamo-Nazism and "Omar Amin" Von Leers" Archived 5 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Andrew Bostom. Family Security Matters. 31 May 2011. Accessed 1 October 2011
  17. ↑ Coogan, Kevin (1999). Dreamer of the day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia. p. 275. ISBN 1-57027-039-2.
  18. 1 2 "FTR #721 A Mosque in Munich", Dave Emory. Spitfire List. 30 August 2010. Accessed 1 October 2011
  19. ↑ "The beast reawakens", Martin A. Lee. Taylor & Francis, 1999. ISBN 0-415-92546-0, ISBN 978-0-415-92546-4. p. 151
  20. ↑ Tadros, Samuel (21 April 2014). "The Sources of Egyptian Anti-Semitism". The American Interest. The American Interest, LLC. Archived from the original on 25 April 2014. Retrieved 25 April 2014.

Further reading

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