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Johann von Leers

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Johann von Leers
Omar Amin
Johann 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 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

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Johann von Leers was born in Vietlübbe, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin,[3] Germany on 25 January 1902. He studied law at the universities of Berlin, Kiel, and Rostock, and eventually worked as an attache in the German Foreign Office.[4] He joined the Viking League Free Corps[5] and then Adler und Falke. Leers became actively involved in völkisch politics during the Weimar Republic and joined the Nazi Party 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

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Weimar Republic

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During the late 1920s, Leers 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

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Supporting himself by writing freelance articles for the Nazi Party press,[5] after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Leers was summoned by Joseph Goebbels to work in the propaganda ministry, where he was assigned to proliferate party propaganda, eventually penning 27 books between 1933 and 1945.[4]

Leers was a proponent of realpolitik, advocating a race-free foreign relations policy on the basis of relationship and alliance. He wrote the memo which led to the exemption of non-Jewish racial minorities from race laws in the Third Reich in 1934, 1936, and 1937.[9]

In 1936, Leers was commissioned into the Waffen-SS as an under-Sturmbannführer, eventually becoming a full honorary Sturmbannführer.[1][5][10] He went on to serve as a lecturer at the University of Jena.[1]

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

Jeffrey Herf reports that in December 1942 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 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... 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 ....[11][12]

After the Second World War

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In 1945, Leers fled from Germany to Italy, where he lived for five years, then in 1950 migrated to Argentina, 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, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi wartime ally, for his loyalty to Arab nationalism.[4] Thereafter he moved from Argentina to Egypt.[6]

In Buenos Aires, Leers became editor of Der Weg and praised the American neo-fascist Francis Parker Yockey and his book Imperium for its understanding of Russia, which was heavily influenced by Oswald Spengler's concept of "pseudomorphosis".[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 leader of the Swedish fascist movement, who created an escape route for Nazis from all parts of Europe. This route passed through northern Germany and Denmark, leading to Malmö in Sweden. From there, the fleeing 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".[15]

Leers was later persuaded to migrate to Egypt by Haj Amin al-Husseini, who by then was a Palestinian leader living in Egypt, with whom he was in close contact. There, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin, as a gesture to his benefactor, and became the political adviser to the Information Department under Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser,[4] as well as being friendly with al-Husseini.[16] Eventually he became the head of President Nasser's 'Israeli' propaganda unit[15][17] and served as head of the Institute for the Study of Zionism, managing anti-Israeli propaganda.[18] Leers 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]

Leers died in Egypt on 5 March 1965, aged 63.[1] His remains were returned to Germany at the expense of the Egyptian government and in June 1965 were buried in Schutterwald, in an islamic funeral.[21]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d "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. ^ a b c d e Robert Solomon Wistrich, Who's who in Nazi Germany (Psychology Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-415-26038-1, pp. 152-153
  5. ^ a b c Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and Der Angriff (University Press of Kentucky, 1994, ISBN 978-0-8131-1848-2) p. 30
  6. ^ a b c Description of Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism since 1945, Middletown, CT Wesleyan University Press, 1967, II, p. 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. ^ "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
  10. ^ "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
  11. ^ "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
  12. ^ As quoted in Victor Klemperer Tagebuch as author of an article "Schuld ist der Jude" in no. 143 of Freiheitskampf Review (1943), where he accuses the Jews of having 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".
  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. ^ a b 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. ^ 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.
  17. ^ "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
  18. ^ a b "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.
  21. ^ Hanspeter Achmed Schmiede, "Lebenslauf. Abschrift der Ehefrau Gesine von Leers", 8 June 1965

Further reading

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