Weimar Republic 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.
Nazi Germany Supporting himself by writing freelance articles for the Nazi Party press, In 1936, Leers was commissioned into the Waffen-SS as an SS-
Untersturmführer, eventually becoming a full honorary SS-
Sturmbannführer. He went on to serve as a lecturer at the
University of Jena. He was fluent in five languages, including
Dutch and
Japanese.
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 ....
After the Second World War 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. 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, Eventually he became the head of President Nasser's 'Israeli' propaganda unit and served as head of the Institute for the Study of Zionism, managing anti-Israeli propaganda. Leers was a mentor of
Ahmed Huber and networked with Muslim emigres in
Hamburg, Leers died in Egypt on 5 March 1965, aged 63. ==References==