Johann von Leers

Omar Amin (born Johann Jakob von Leers; 25 January 19025 March 1965) was an Alter Kämpfer and an honorary Sturmbannführer 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 Johann von Leers was born in Vietlübbe, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 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. He joined the Viking League, the Freikorps and then Adler und Falke. Leers became actively involved in Völkisch politics during the Weimar Republic and joined the Nazi Party in 1929.

Career 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, 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. He was praised by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a Nazi wartime ally, for his loyalty to Arab nationalism. 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.