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- Mufti's disciple, Von Leer "Omar" activities at least in 1959 and the 1960s with the <i>United Arab Republic</i>.<ref name=haboker-1960/><ref name=berman-2010>Berman, Paul. [https://books.google.com/books?id=FDviDrXzkjsC&pg=PT63 The Flight of the Intellectuals]. United Kingdom: Melville House, 2010.</ref>
- Mufti's disciple, Von Leer "Omar" activities at least in 1959 and the 1960s with the <i>United Arab Republic</i>.<ref name=haboker-1960/><ref name=berman-2010>Berman, Paul. [https://books.google.com/books?id=FDviDrXzkjsC&pg=PT63 The Flight of the Intellectuals]. United Kingdom: Melville House, 2010.</ref> Infamous "Goebbels's adjutant at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,"<ref>Berman, Paul. The Flight of the Intellectuals. United Kingdom: Melville House, 2010. [https://books.google.com/books?id=FDviDrXzkjsC&pg=PT63].<blockquote><small>One of the mufti's principle colleagues in Berlin was Johann von Leers, who was Goebbels's adjutant at the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Von Leers made his way to Egypt after the war and was even able to resume his career</small></blockquote></ref> "one of the Third Reich's most prolific Jew-baiters,"<ref name=lee2013>Lee, Martin A.. The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2013, [https://books.google.com/books?id=sZ_cAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA128 p. 128].</ref> the Nazi Johann Von Leers move to Egyot was helped by Palestine [[Haj Amin al-Husseini|Mufti]] and [[Hassan Awad Fakoussa]].<ref>Rickenbacher, Daniel. ''Arab states, Arab interest groups and anti-Zionist movements in Western Europe and the US''. 2017, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts. [https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-153223]. [https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/153223/1/153223.pdf]. [https://www.academia.edu/37072103/Arab_states_Arab_interest_groups_and_anti_Zionist_Movements_in_Western_Europe_and_the_US].
<blockquote><small>
...Egypt, the leading power in the Arab League, was particularly interested in German investments and know-how. Thus, the pro-German, Hassan Fakoussa, who later worked as the head of the Arab League office in Bonn, already warned the Egyptian Foreign Minister in September 1952 that “the severance of economic relations with Western Germany would cause us more damage than good.” Opposition to the Luxembourg agreement was also strong among the Arabists in the Foreign Office. ..
According to a CIA source within the German far-right scene, it was however Hassan Fakoussa, the Arab League representative in Bonn since August 1956, who was mainly responsible for von Leers’ move to Cairo. . Von Leers had already worked for the Egyptian embassy in Buenos Aires, organizing an anti-Jewish campaign in the country. He was therefore the ideal person to liaise between the Egyptian propaganda infrastructure in Cairo and the far-right in Europe. Since 1955, the Arab League had opened propaganda offices in New York, Bonn and Rio de Janeiro.
The CIA saw von Leers’ recruitment as an additional sign of the expansion of the Egyptian propaganda campaign beyond the Middle East. A CIA report from October 1956 noted that “there are various indicators (…) which lead us to believe that the regional foreign policy objectives of Egypt, including the activities of the Arab League as an organ of expression of Egyptian/Arab policies, may no longer be negative regionally; but may be in process of taking the offensive both regionally and internationally.” The CIA was especially afraid that the Arab League was seeking to expand its influence in South America: “The arrival of Johann von Leers (and possibly others of lesser reputation) from South America, each of whom may have accumulated many years of experience and extensive contacts in Latin America which the GOE [Government of Egypt] can use to any possible scheme to take aggressive action in the Western hemisphere (…).”
In Egypt, von Leers was working with Mahmoud Saleh, translating writings for the AntiZionist Association, writings which were then sent to a list of far-right sympathizers.
Von Leers also collaborated with the Egyptian Ministry of Information and the Arab League. Tawfik Bakri, an Arab League official and a friend of Fakoussa, acted as von Leers’ sponsor in Egypt. Probably the first work von Leers translated for Saleh was an anti-Zionist work called ‘Frieden im Orient’ (Engl. Peace in the Orient). The book had been authored by Ahmed Moawad, a literary historian and German philologist living in Cairo. Von Leers wrote an anti-Semitic preface to the work. The preface also advocated an alliance between Arabs and Germans, who both had been “stabbed in the back by Zionism.” In 1957, von Leers also continued to publish in Der Weg, producing his flow of often bizarre anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist articles. ..
The Arab diplomats in Bonn maintained visible relations with the German far-right.
Thus, advertisements by the UAR embassy were published in the Deutsche NationalZeitung, flanking other advertisements of the far-right and pro-Nazi press. Hassan Fakoussa, the Arab-League representative in Bonn, pursued a policy of co-opting the German far-right. Fakoussa regularly wrote for such far-right newspapers as Gerhard Frey’s Deutsche National-Zeitung or Das Deutsche Wort. He used the pages of the latter to threaten the German government in 1963 that the Arab states would recognize the GDR if the FDR improved its relations with Israel. In 1964, Fakoussa published the booklet ‘Israel verfolgt deutsche Wissenschaftler’ (Engl. Israel persecutes German Scientists). The booklet extensively cited from the far-right press, in particular Gerhard Frey’s Deutsche National-Zeitung, the successor publication of the Deutsche
Soldaten-Zeitung, and from the Deutsche Wochen-Zeitung, the party organ of the NPD...
Niekisch’s geopolitics, rather than Hitler’s, inspired a significant element of the German far-right in the 1950s. It was this milieu where Johann von Leers, the Nazi propagandist working for Nasser, hailed from. The Arab diplomats in Germany, in particular Arab League representative Hassan Fakoussa, were eager to collaborate with this pro-Arab German far-right.
During the 1960s, Gerhard Frey’s Nationalzeitung worked as a non-official organ for Nasser, singing his praise.
Liberation Nationalism also influenced two journalists in Switzerland, Hans Fleig and Ahmed Huber. They were united by their sympathy for Nasser and the Soviet Union, their anti-Semitism and their hatred of Israel. Both can be counted as pioneers of antiZionism in Switzerland and collaborated with officials of the Arab League and Arab diplomatic staff. Huber’s pro-Arab sympathy was at the origin of his conversion to Islam...
In April 1956, the Secretary General of the Arab League Abdul Khalek Hassoua contacted the German Ambassador in Cairo to probe the possibilities of opening an Arab Information Office of the Arab League in Germany. The Germans reacted negatively to the plans, believing the prospective office to be tasked with enforcing the Arab boycott of Israel in Germany and putting pressure on German companies. Moreover, the Germans distrusted the Arab League’s assertion that the Arab Office would stick to its official agenda. The German ambassador in Egypt however warned that a German rejection would be perceived by the Arabs as an affront. Still, there was no official request by the Arab League, when deputy secretary Raif Bellema informed the press in June 1956 that the German authorities had permitted the establishment of the office on their soil. By presenting the Germans with a fait accompli, he probably sought to make it more difficult for them to deny the request for fear of causing an international scandal. Still, the Germans announced that they had not dealt with such a request by the Arab League and were opposed to boycott activities on their soil. Fakoussa disclaimed reports in the German press that he was sent to Bonn to enforce the Arab boycott. Bellema also accommodated the German concerns and claimed to have never spoken to the press to prematurely announce the opening of the Arab Office. Despite the small irritation, the Germans did not see any legal grounds for preventing the establishment of the Arab Office and did not wish to do so to avoid angering the Arabs. Moreover, the Germans thought that the opening of the Arab Office provided them with leverage in case the Arab states were considering recognizing the GDR. This was in line with the ‘Hallstein-Doktrin’, which stipulated that the FRG was the only legitimate German state.
Since April 1956, the Egyptian journalist Hassan Awas[t] Fakoussa was expected to fill the position as the head of the Arab League Office. The German ambassador in Egypt described him as a moderate, who was respected by the embassy. He was well acquainted with Germany and married to a German woman.
Fritz Grobba, who knew Fakoussa, considered him to be friendly to German interests, but alleged that he wrongly pretended to hold a doctoral degree. Interestingly, the AA reports on
Fakoussa only mentioned his activities after the war, when he briefly worked for a lawyer in Bonn. They however chose to omit his history in the Third Reich. In the late 1930s, Hassan Fakoussa had been working as a correspondent at the League of Nations in Geneva for the Egyptian newspapers Al Mokattam and Al Muktataf.
In 1938, he earned a degree from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies with a work on ‘The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of Alliance’. During the war, Fakoussa resided in Germany, allegedly working for German propaganda for the Middle East. He regularly wrote on Middle Eastern subjects for the Nazi press. In an article in the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik in 1940, he claimed that Britain was engaged in a “war against Islamic nationalism and the religion of Islam”.
In the same year, he also authored an article titled ‘The struggle in Palestine’ for the periodical Der Weltkampf.
In 1942, he wrote an article for the scholarly periodical Europäischer Wissenschaftsdienst, in which he challenged National Socialist pseudo-scientific theories, which claimed that “Aryan” immigration was the origin of Egyptian civilization. Fakoussa instead defended the African origins of Egyptian civilization and thus offended Fakoussa’s nationalist feeling.
Sometime after the war, he left Germany for Egypt.
Hassan Fakoussa returned to Germany in late August 1956 to launch the Arab Office. In a conversation with the AA in September 1956, he claimed that he was neither interested in Israel nor the Arab League, but solely in Germany’s interests and would work to promote German-Arab friendship.
It was difficult to distinguish whether he was working for the Arab League or Egypt or for both. Fakoussa and the Egyptian embassy in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn, closely collaborated with the Arab Office located in the same building.
During the Suez Crisis in October 1956, a wide segment of the public and the press sympathized with Nasser against Germany’s Western allies. Reflecting on this, an AA memorandum expressed concern that a further increase in pro-Arab propaganda in Germany as a result of the activities of the Arab League might be harmful to Adenauer’s pro-Western foreign policy. To counter this tendency, the memorandum raised the possibility of intensifying governmental public diplomacy efforts concerning the Middle East.
As it soon became clear, Hassan Fakoussa did not wait for his agreements with the German authorities to be put in written form, but started his propaganda activities right away, intent on creating facts on the ground. Instead of coordinating with the AA and promoting German-Arab friendship, he published material critical of Israel and sought to strengthen the pro-Arab network in Germany, being involved in the establishment of the Deutsch-Arabischer Verein in December 1956.
Moreover, he sought to collect a list of Arab students in Germany. He probably sought to exercise political influence and a measure of control over them, as the Egyptian embassy in Switzerland did.
Feeling irritated by Fakoussa’s activities, the AA proposed several measures to restrain them. In 1957, the Egyptian Embassy in Bad Godesberg made its first attempts at public diplomacy. It started publishing the Cairo-Brief (Engl. Cairo letter), a periodical that regularly reported on economic news related to the Middle East and
Egypt. In the same year, Fakoussa also launched the magazine Arabische
Korrespondenz, which added to German irritation. Many of its articles criticized the German government. They were also marked by conspiratorial and Arab nationalistic thought. The AA was therefore considering taking steps to make Fakoussa leave Germany without attracting too much attention.
In conversations with the Egyptian embassy and its ambassador Ahmed Razek, the Germans urged the Egyptians to exert a moderating influence on Fakoussa. The latter however defended Fakoussa’s polemics as an act of self-defense against propaganda emanating from the Israeli embassy and the Jewish newspaper Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland. In reply, the Germans intimated that they were also ready to advise the Israelis to tone down their rhetoric. In the aftermath of the demarche, the Germans believed that Fakoussa moderated his voice. For this reason and because the German ambassador to Egypt Walther Becker advised against expelling Fakoussa to avoid a scandal with the Arabs and for lack of a more moderate alternative Arab League representative, no further steps were taken. There was another reason for the Germans to tread with care in the matter. In January 1958, Arab League General
Secretary Abdul Khalek Hassouna informed the German ambassador in Cairo, Walther Becker, that the idea of moving the Arab Office to the GDR had been discussed during one of the League’s recent sessions. From there, Arab propaganda towards the German public could be carried out unhindered. Such a step would have afforded the GDR further legitimacy, which the AA sought to prevent. Thus, contrary to initial considerations, when the Germans hoped to gain leverage against the Arabs by allowing the opening of the Arab Office in the German capital, the Arabs now used their leverage to secure the continuation of Arab propaganda in the FDR.
The next episode also showed that Germany was susceptible to Arab pressure regarding the tolerance of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda on its soil.
In early May 1959, the German police confiscated an Arab League booklet titled ‘Palästinas Schicksal’ (Engl. Palestine’s Fate), that contained a foreword by Hassan Fakoussa. In the anglophone world, the booklet was distributed under the title ‘Palestine Destiny’. The German police decided to confiscate the magazine after an article appeared in the Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland written by a certain Mr. Kaufmann, which claimed that parts of the publication were copied from a 1957 anti-
Semitic booklet published in Cairo with the title ‘The Secrets of Zionism’ (Arab. Asrar al-Sahyuniya). Arab propaganda sought to exploit the incident, with Radio Baghdad reporting that the German government had banned all Arab propaganda against Zionism. The Egyptian Foreign Office protested the confiscation and the Moroccan ambassador in Bonn personally intervened with undersecretary Herbert Dittmann. As a result of the intervention, an indictment against the printing-house responsible for printing the booklet was halted.
After the affair, Fakoussa continued to reprint antiSemitic articles from the Arab press in his Arabische Korrespondenz. For instance, it peddled one of the favorite themes of Arab and Islamic propaganda, the J.. war [supposedly] "against religion". Thus, an article in 1963 alleged that Israel was distributing falsified[sic] Coran books in the US and Africa, which offered a pro-Zionist interpretation of the
Islamic scriptures. This was part of Israel’s plan[sic] to gain favor among the new African states. The article also accused Zionists of falsifying[sic] Christianity by asking the Catholic church to remove material characterizing Jews as the murderers of Christ.
Given his experience in the Third Reich, it is not surprising that Fakoussa showed a greater tendency to work with pro-Nazi and far-right circles to lobby Arab interests in Germany than his Arab League counterparts in New York and Switzerland. In his function as the Arab representative in Bonn, he was advised by Johann von Leers, whom he went to see in Cairo. Fakoussa also contributed regularly to the far-right
Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung. One of the more bizarre episodes was Fakoussa’s collaboration with the German Sudeten committee, which represented ethnic German expellees from Czechoslovakia. He helped put one of its leaders, Rudolf Hilf, in touch with diplomats and notables of the Arab world residing in Bonn. Hilf subsequently travelled to Egypt, where he met with former allies of the Germans like the Mufti, former SS-Handschar imam Haris Korkut and Anwar el-Sadat. Hilf strove to gain the support of the Arab state to introduce a “right to homeland” in the UN. He assumed that there was common ground between the Germans and the Arabs, as the latter would be interested in such a right because of the Arab-Palestinian refugees. But eventually, it would also serve the interests of the German expellees. Fakoussa’s Arabische Korrespondenz maintained that Germany was suffering from a “Hitler complex”, which prevented Germany from pursuing its natural alliance with the Arabs. This “Hitler complex,” as the editor in chief of an Egyptian newspaper implied in an article reprinted by the Arabische Korrespondenz, was fostered by Israel. The article claimed, “that the FRG had become the most important area of this kind of Israeli propaganda”, which sought to cultivate a feeling of collective guilt within the Germans and thereby exploit them economically, through restitution, and politically, by gaining diplomatic recognition. Fakoussa seems to have realized at some point that his collaboration with pro-Nazi and fascist elements like Priester’s Deutsch-Soziale Bewegung had become a liability and that he had to reach out to larger segments of the German population in order to make a difference: “[I] had come to Germany to promote German-Arab relations in all areas. Were I to found a German-Arab Institute, it would be in the general interest of the German-speaking peoples and of the Arab people and states, and not in the interest of individuals, parties, or circles. The Arabs are fighting against foreign interference in their politics and consequently would never think of supporting a group in some other country against its government.” Colluding with the far-right was certainly not a winning strategy to convince the German public of the justness of the Arab cause. Moreover, anti-Semites barely needed any convincing to feel sympathy for the Arabs and hatred for Israel. Thus, the German far-right continued to strongly sympathize with Arab nationalism throughout the 1960s, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.
Instead of the far-right, Arab League representatives increasingly sought to move closer to the New Left and the nascent student movement during the 1960s. Fakoussa had been interested in the presence of Arab students in Germany since the beginning of his propaganda activity. This was in line with the policy of Egypt and other Arab states of instrumentalizing their students studying in the West as propagandists, for which there is evidence from different countries. According to secret information received by the Swiss government, an experienced Egyptian propagandist, who masqueraded as a student, had established the European branch of the Union of Arab
Students (Ger. Union Arabischer Studenten) in 1956 as a front organization to secure the loyalty of Arab students to Nasser and spread his view-points. A Jerusalem Post article from 1959 likewise found that here was a system of tight political control of the Arab students in the US, which were organized in the Organization of Arab Students. The Arab students received propaganda material from the Arab embassies and the Arab League Offices. Those who did not participate in anti-Israel campaigning faced difficulties when returning home. According to the article, the Arab students had the advantage that they were more sociable and had more time at their disposal than the Israelis, making it easier for them to conduct propaganda. The main target of their activities was not Americans, but foreign students from Asian and African countries. In Germany, there were plenty of foreign student groups active in the late 1950s and
1960s, that advocated on behalf of the Third World. One such group was the AfroAsiatische Studenten-Union (Engl. Afro-Asiatic Student Union). Along with many other guests, Fakoussa was hosted by the group at the celebration of its five-year anniversary in 1962. The Arabische Korrespondenz however provided no evidence that Fakoussa ever tried to further co-opt this group. The most important Arab student organization in Germany was the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), which had operated there since the early 1960s. Its activities were first directed at the numerous Arab students located in West Germany. Between 1962 and 1964 alone, 873 events were held in Germany. This group will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. There is no information on whether the Arab League provided any support to them. In sum, one gets the impression that Fakoussa invested little effort in recruiting the student and New Left political movements into the fold of the pro-Arab scene in Germany and remained fixated on the traditional friends of the Arabs.
The conference of the Council of Arab Ministers of Information in Cairo in 1964 and the establishment of the PLO in May of the same year resulted in an emphasis of Arab propaganda on the Palestine issue and the topic of anti-Imperialism, appealing to the political Left. Arab students were thought to be important purveyors of these themes. Thus, Nasser sent an address to the yearly conference of the Arab Student Union in the US in 1964, exhorting them: “The Palestine cause is no race or religious matter, but the regaining of freedom for a people und restoration of its legitimate right, to life with honor in its own country. (…). Brothers, it is our duty, to call to the attention of all peoples, that they should not be deluded by Zionist propaganda or distorted fact. It is your difficult responsibility to be in a struggle with Zionism. You can confront it, if each one of you represents his country in its struggle and aspirations with resolve and high ideals.” In line with the greater focus on Palestine, Fakoussa and the Arab League in Germany started a new magazine in 1964 titled Palästina Nachrichten (Engl. Palestine News). In a 1965 article on the Deir Yassin, ..The events at Deir Yassin were presented as an indictment of (supposedly, it so propagated) J... character. .. still followed the commands of the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament, when God had ordered the Israelites ... The Arab mentality[sic] on the other hand, the author claimed, was free[sic] from brutality. After ten years in Germany, in mid-1966, Hassan Fakoussa was recalled to Egypt to work for the oil department of the Arab League. His interim replacement was
Hamdy Azzam...</small></blockquote></ref> With von Leers in charge, Cairo's anti-Israeli propaganda machine churned out hate literature and inflammatory broadcasts on a regular basis.<ref name=lee2013/>