Hamas’ Nazi roots

Hamas has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood which was founded in March 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, who in turn drew much inspiration from Hitler. From Hitler he learned the importance of using propaganda to incite hatred of Jews. In the 1940s, the Muslim Brotherhood sent hundreds of members for “education” by the Nazi regime.

The Muslim Brotherhood sent hundreds of its members to be “educated” by the Nazi regime in the 1940s, reported The New Arab in 2015. Photo: Commons wikimedia

As early as 1935, the Brotherhood had created its own propaganda department and from the mid-1930s onwards, Hasan al-Banna sent delegations to the Nazi meetings in Nuremberg. They organized demonstrations against Egyptian Jews in the late 1930s and distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion during a conference of Muslim countries in Cairo, according to The Times of Israel.

When the Second World War then broke out, the Nazis received their full support. When King Farouk granted asylum to Nazi war criminal Haj Amin al-Husseini on June 20, 1946, al-Banna hailed the former Mufti of Jerusalem as a hero. Haj Amin al-Husseini was an important link between the Nazis and the Brotherhood.

On March 31, 1933, Haj Amin al-Husseini made his first official visit to the new Nazi German Consul General Heinrich Wolff in Jerusalem. Al-Husseini had his first meeting with Hitler in November 1941, when they discussed the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe and in the British Mandate of Palestine. As early as January 1941, al-Husseini recruited Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen SS.

Egypt’s former Grand Mufti Shiekh Ali Gomaa also confirmed that the Muslim Brotherhood sent hundreds of its members to be “educated” by the Nazi regime in the 1940s, reported The New Arab in 2015.

Shiekh Ali Gomaa, a member of Egypt’s parliament since 2021, said on his religious TV- program Wallahu Alam that the Brotherhood was originally founded as a proselyte movement before becoming a political party.

– They sent 700 members to train under Hitler. This came to light much later in documents released by German authorities, he added.

Gomaa said the Brotherhood had “changed its skin” from a religious movement to a power-hungry political party with ambitions to take control of Egypt.

Egypt’s former Grand Mufti has previously claimed that Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna coordinated with Hitler to establish a military branch with the help of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between 1921 and 1937.

After the defeat of Adolf Hitler in May 1945, many leading Nazis disappeared from Europe to be received as heroes in the post-war Arab world. Egypt was one of the main destinations for German Nazis fleeing to the Arab world.

Aribert Heim, known as “Dr. Death” for his grotesque experiments on Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps, converted to Islam and became “Uncle Tarek” Hussein Farid in Cairo, where he lived a life as a doctor for the Egyptian police, according to The Times of Israel.

As a Nazi doctor, he performed surgical procedures including organ removal without anesthesia, injecting gasoline and beheading Jews with healthy teeth so he could boil the skulls clean to make desk decorations.

Two of Goebbels’s propaganda experts, Alfred Zingler and Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh and Omar Amin, respectively, and worked in the Egyptian information department. In 1955 Zingler and von Leers helped establish the deeply anti-Semitic Institute for the Study of Zionism in Cairo. And Hans Appler, another of Goebbels’ collaborators, took the name Saleh Shafar and became an expert for an Egyptian unit specializing in anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hate propaganda.

Gestapo agent Erich Altern, Himmler’s coordinator in Poland, became Ali Bella, who worked as a military instructor in training camps for Palestinian terrorists. Franz Bartel, an assistant Gestapo chief in Katowice, Poland, became El Hussein and a member of Egypt’s Ministry of Information. Hans Becher, a Gestapo agent in Vienna, became a police instructor in Cairo. Wilhelm Boerner, a brutal Mauthausen guard, became Ali Ben Keshir, who worked in the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior and as an instructor for a Palestinian terrorist group.

In Iraq, pro-Nazi Iraqi Islamists, supported by Nazi Germany and the SS man Haj Amin al-Husseini, attempted to overthrow the pro-Western monarchy in the spring of 1941, but failed. The Iraqi coup plotters then decided to attack Baghdad’s Jews who had lived in the country since the captivity in Babylon 2500 years earlier.
Hundreds of Jews were cut down with swords or shot with rifles, some beheaded in what came to be known as Farhud. Babies were cut in half and thrown into the Tigris River. Girls were raped in front of their parents. Parents were mercilessly killed in front of their children. Hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses were looted and burned down.

Kibbutz Be’eri on the border with Gaza was founded by Iraqi Jews who fled after the Farhud massacre in Iraq during World War II. The kibbutz was hit hard by Hamas’ terrorist act on October 7 last year and lost more than 130 of its residents in the massacre.