Background
Johann von Leers was born in Vietlubbe, Mecklenburg, on 25 January 1902.
Johann von Leers was born in Vietlubbe, Mecklenburg, on 25 January 1902.
In 1929 he joined the NSDAP after studying law at Berlin, Kiel and Rostock and working for a while as an attaché in the Foreign Office. A district speaker and leader of the National Socialist Students' League, von Leers came to the attention of Goebbels and was assigned to write Party propaganda, producing a stream of twenty-seven books between 1933 and 1945 dealing in popularized form with Nazi ideology.
An expert on the Jewish question, on theories of ‘blood and soil' and the doctrine of the Germanic master-race, von Leers achieved early notoriety with his book Juden Sehen Dich an (Jews Look at You), published in 1933 and dedicated to the ‘gallant' Julius Streicher. The book featured photographs of prominent Jews like Albert Einstein, Emil Ludwig and Lion Feuchtwanger, under which appeared brief, abusive captions containing the note ‘Not Hanged Yet!'.
Appointed Professor at the University of Jena.
In 1945 von Leers fled to Italy and then to Argentina, where he lived in the colony of German exiles between 1950 and 1955, continuing his neo-Nazi propaganda. Warmly praised by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, for having ‘always championed the Arabs' righteous cause against the powers of darkness embodied in World Jewry' and for his services to German-Arab friendship, von Leers went to Cairo in the mid-1950s and converted to Islam, calling himself Omar Amin von Leers. His enthusiastic support for rising Arab nationalism and his glorification of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews led to his employment in the foreign propaganda service of Colonel Nasser. In Egypt and the Arab world, von Leers found a receptive audience for his call to build an alliance between Germans and Arabs against Zionism, which had allegedly ‘stabbed them in the back’.
He died in Cairo in early March 1965
He openly called for extermination of Jews as a necessary act.