The Nazi influence in Egypt

The law of supply and demand is a powerful thing. In the aftermath of the second world war there were many thousands of suddenly underemployed German and Nazi rocket scientists, jet engine technicians, military leaders, chemical engineers, propagandists and other specialists on the international market. While many were snapped up by the Americans and Soviets, voluntarily or otherwise, there was no shortage left for countries such as Argentina and Egypt, which reckoned they could learn a thing or two from the market leaders in internal repression and weapons of mass destruction.

As the government communications specialist and Middle East watcher Vyvyan Kinross reveals in this darkly gripping story, this wasn’t a question of a handful of advisers. At its height, the colony of German experts in Cairo – working across the entire spectrum of the military and security portfolio, from rocket and missile programmes, arms manufacturing and internal security to foreign service, intelligence and propaganda – may have numbered around 6,000.

The author admits that these characters were ‘sometimes unsavoury but always compelling’. This seems an understatement when it comes to Johann von Leers, a key Nazi propagandist and ideologue, honorary Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS and a baby-faced anti-hero of Nazis on the Nile. An acolyte of Joseph Goebbels, this was a man who dashed off 27 hate-filled books, including Jewry and Knavery, Blood and Race and Jews are Looking at You, between 1933 and the end of the war.

Having spent several years spewing out anti-Semitic propaganda in Juan Perón’s regime in Argentina, in 1956 von Leers relocated to Cairo, where he served as a political adviser and anti-Israel propagandist for Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s firebrand president, until 1965. When a Toronto Star journalist ferreted him out in his office in the ministry of national guidance in 1956, after a few nervous moments the unrepentant Nazi revealed his true self, launching into tirades against American Jews, Zionist-driven press attacks on Nasser and his uncompromising position on the new Jewish state.