Original subtitles

narrator: munich, locherbie,

9/11, charlie hebdo.

measuring history by a list of terrorist atrocities,

there is one thing that is certain...

the tactics used come straight out of the nazi playbook.

himmler, goering, goebbels... they knew that there had to be

a way for the war to continue without a centralized command

and that's the essence of a terrorist operation.

narrator: and, now, incredible new research reveals

how nazi disciples spread this idea

to militants across the middle east.

hubbard-hall: egypt enabled an environment where

the swastika could sit quite nicely next to the sphinx.

levenda: hitler realized that there was something

very different about islam.

islam was not a religion of slaves, but of warriors.

narrator: this is the shocking truth

of a self-replicating virus of hatred

that continues to spread hitler's dream

of death and destruction throughout the world.

this is the untold story of the...

captions by vitac... www.vitac.com

captions paid for by discovery communications

at the start of the 20th century,

1 million jews lived peacefully in the arab countries

of north africa and the middle east.

for the most part, the jews who lived in palestine were local.

they were sephardic jews who had lived and grown up

alongside arab neighbors for centuries.

so there was a commonality there,

there was a tolerance there.

narrator: but, after germany's

devastating defeat in world war i,

everything changes.

narrator: a young politician, adolf hitler,

targets the jews in europe as the people behind all

of germany's problems and, fearing violence against them,

vast numbers flee to the middle east

for the safety of a new home.

the nazi government was trying to make life very miserable

for jews in germany, in order to motivate them to leave.

it was, in a way, a policy of ethnic cleansing.

narrator: in the 1930s,

250,000 european jews immigrate to palestine

as britain agrees to make it their official homeland.

but local arabs find their whole way of life turned upside down.

it was making everyone extremely uncomfortable,

to the point of violence.

narrator: the arabs retaliate with a campaign

of strikes, sabotage, and targeted killings.

one of the leading instigators of anti-jewish unrest

is the grand mufti of jerusalem, amin al-husseini.

the grand mufti was massively anti-british

and he was a massive anti-semite as well.

he wanted the destruction of all jews.

he was quite unequivocal about it.

motadel: at the same time,

al-husseini was a very charismatic figure.

he had great rhetorical talent and could be very charming.

narrator: given the title grand mufti of jerusalem

by the british, al-husseini uses his leadership position

to transform the fight from a political war

to a religious one.

and, from 1936 to 1939, he inspires 5,000 arabs

to lose their lives, fighting to stop

the transfer of land to the new jewish settlers.

he promoted this idea

of a jewish conspiracy to destroy islam.

he tried to do whatever he could

to incite violence in that region.

he made it extremely unstable.

narrator: but number one on al-husseini's list of targets

are not the jewish settlers, but the moderate arab majority,

who still believe in a peaceful solution.

interpreter: without doubt,

the majority were certainly interested

in a peaceful reconciliation with the jewish minority,

not this radical way the mufti and others developed.

narrator: the british react to the chaos

the mufti is causing in the region

and he becomes a wanted man, soon forced to flee palestine.

on november 28, 1941,

amin al-husseini heads for nazi germany,

where he engineers a meeting with his hero, adolf hitler.

al-husseini idolized hitler, but hitler had sort of

an arms-length relationship with al-husseini.

he wasn't quite sure of the guy's racial background.

even though he was fair-haired and blue-eyed,

he still had his doubts.

narrator: hitler hands al-husseini over

to the head of the s.s., heinrich himmler,

giving birth to an islamic-nazi pact

whose legacy carries on to this day.

levenda: himmler loved the guy.

here was a man who looked aryan

and his anti-semitism was virulent, it was violent,

it was fanatic... even more so than the nazis'.

narrator: immediately impressed by his extreme anti-semitism,

himmler welcomes al-husseini as the fuehrer of the arab world.

and, soon, the leader of the s.s. is extolling islam

as a superior religion to both judaism and christianity.

both hitler and himmler realized

that there was something very different about islam,

that, compared to christianity and judaism,

which they called slave religions,

that islam was not a religion of slaves, but of warriors.

narrator: al-husseini underlines the similarities

between islamic and nazi ideals...

unity under one leader, obedience and discipline,

but, most importantly, a bitter hatred of jews.

hitler was against what he considered to be

modern decadence in art, in culture,

as well as in politics. he was against anything

that smacked of liberalism or progressive thought,

so he and al-husseini's ideals matched very closely.

narrator: the mufti makes a big impression.

the nazi high command start to realize

just how useful an islamic ally could be.

for the germans, he was a real opportunity

to further fan the flames

of anti-british sentiment in the middle east

and they made full use of him.

levenda: they wanted the suez canal,

they wanted the oil,

they wanted access, even, to central asia from there.

narrator: himmler gives the mufti

the title of gruppentfuehrer, equivalent to a nazi general.

but the mufti gets even more from the nazis

than a flattering title.

the germans paid the mufti handsomely for his services.

he also received villas, houses across berlin

and in the countryside, both for himself and his vast entourage.

narrator: april 1943.

a year and a half after his first meeting with hitler,

the arab fuehrer, al-husseini,

seizes an opportunity in the balkans

to cement the new nazi-islam relationship.

in bosnia, the grand mufti implores local muslims

to put down an insurgency led by communists

by joining a special islamic division of the s.s.

motadel: himmler was a strong believer

in the mufti's influence

and so, in early 1943, he sent him to bosnia

to help recruiting muslim volunteers into the s.s. unit.

narrator: al-husseini's impassioned speeches

drive recruitment and, soon, this muslim division

is one of the largest in the waffen s.s., with 26,000 men.

but the arab fuehrer never loses sight of his ultimate goal...

the eradication of jews in palestine.

propaganda minister joseph goebbels

has already identified the arab middle east

as an important ally in the fight against the british.

holland: the germans' main opportunity

for undermining the british there

was through arab resistance there and so there were a number

of sponsored coups, uprisings, and so on that the germans

were heavily involved in throughout the second world war.

narrator: now, al-husseini convinces the nazis

that he can use anti-semitic radio broadcasts

to exploit the simmering arab resentment of the jews.

biddiscombe: he still had followers in palestine

and still could stir up a considerate amount of trouble,

even from a distance.

narrator: several times a day over many months,

al-husseini's propaganda blasts

from public speakers across the middle east.

his messages have one aim...

to convince the arab nations the nazi fight is their fight.

imagine, if you will,

a café in a small town in egypt or in palestine.

young men sitting, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee,

and listening to the radio.

there's a voice coming at them from berlin,

talking to them in their own language,

a man that they knew, who is famous, a man they trusted,

saying that the war is coming to them

and that they should rise up and support the nazis.

"hitler is winning the war and, now, he needs your help."

narrator: al-husseini pulls directly from the qur'an

an ancient religious concept, the jihad,

and urges arabs to join the nazis in a holy war.

motadel: nazi propaganda tries to portray british, americans,

jews, soviets, as the enemies of islam,

while, at the same time, promoting nazi germany

as a great protector and friend of islam.

narrator: but the real focus of al-husseini's hatred

is the jews.

in one broadcast, husseini makes their slaughter

a religious obligation.

on march 1, 1944, on radio berlin,

al-husseini says, "arabs,

rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights.

kill the jews wherever you find them.

this pleases god, history, and religion."

an arabic translation of hitler's "mein kamph"

becomes a bestseller,

alongside a wickedly anti-semitic hoax,

the "protocols of the elders of zion."

the hatred of the jews that still pervades the middle east

can be traced back directly

to this onslaught of nazi propaganda.

even today, the charter of the political party hamas

refers to the fabricated protocols

and accepts them as fact.

it's depressing to see how many people in the middle east

believe that the "protocols of the elders of zion"

are eternal truths

and, as long as people believe in this lie,

there won't be a change for the better.

narrator: now, the mufti puts his growing influence

over the nazis to sickening use...

speeding up and expanding the jewish genocide.

he will become one of two key figures

in grafting nazi tactics and ideology to the arab world.

narrator: the height of the second world war, berlin.

the arab fuehrer, amin al-husseini,

is busy cozying up to the architects

of the final solution, himmler and eichmann,

who send the mufti's staff to report on the effectiveness

of the concentration camps north of the city.

and now, new research reveals just how close

the jews in the middle east came to suffering

the same industrialized genocidal fate

as their european relatives.

interpreter: a group of mufti followers

visits the concentration camp sachsenhausen

and if you believe the report of this s.s. officer,

the arabs had a particular interest

in the treatment of the jewish detainees.

narrator: the industrialized death camps

are killing and disposing of the bodies

of thousands of jews on a daily basis.

not fast enough for al-husseini.

levenda: it was al-husseini who thought

that they were killing too few jews and it was taking too long.

al-husseini complained about this

and thought they could do better.

narrator: witness testimonies

from the war crime hearings at nuremburg

assert that al-husseini lobbied

concentration camp chief adolph eichmann

to expand the final solution into palestine.

dieter wisliceny, an employee at adolph eichmann's head office,

told the jury of an important meeting

between the mufti and eichmann.

interpreter: the mufti was

in the notoriously famous map room of eichmann,

where he orchestrated the final solution with maps.

narrator: the mufti presses eichmann

to send so-called jew advisors to palestine,

to register jews for deportation to extermination camps.

interpreter: he was in the position to tell eichmann

that the deployment of a jew advisor for jerusalem

had already been promised by himmler.

levenda: eichmann's agenda was, of course,

to get rid of the jews entirely.

he understood immediately al-husseini's agenda was

to exterminate the jewish population...

get back palestine from this jewish occupation force,

as he saw it.

narrator: further evidence from the nuremberg trials

states the mufti had prepared to replicate

nazi-style concentration camps in the middle east.

interpreter: the mufti had planned

concentration camps for palestine.

in this communication with adolph eichmann,

this is what's being suggested.

narrator: chillingly, al-husseini had already trialed

a downscale version of the final solution in north africa.

on his suggestion,

field marshal rommel's troops in north africa

are shadowed by the chief nazi exterminator, walter rauff,

the inventor of the mobile gas chamber.

walter rauff would follow rommel through north africa,

going town to town,

looking for jews that he would round up and kill.

narrator: rauff's vans aid the murder of 2,500 tunisian jews.

it's such an effective extermination method,

al-husseini wants to unleash it across the middle east.

this was a function that was suggested by al-husseini

as something that they could do.

once the reich was in control of certain geographic areas,

get rid of the jews immediately.

that would help make the german occupation a lot easier.

narrator: rommel's troops are within 150 miles of cairo

when the allies hold firm at el alamein.

it is terrifying to imagine what could've happened

if cairo had fallen to the nazis.

egypt would've become the first islamic nazi state,

and the final solution

would've rolled out across the middle east.

this bleak outcome is hidden between the lines

of an innocuous-sounding memo.

in july 1942, rommel's afrika korps,

stationed in northern egypt, receive a telex.

interpreter: in the document, the s.s. task is authorized

to take executive measures towards the civilian population.

that doesn't sound very suspicious, at first,

but this exact passage was used

in another document from the previous year.

on the basis of this innocuous sentence,

half a million soviet jews were murdered

by the s.s. task forces.

levenda: there would've been no jews left in palestine,

had rommel made it across the suez canal.

narrator: but not even

the nazis' crushing defeat in the war

deters the mufti from his wicked pursuit of the jews.

when germany falls, the fleeing al-husseini

is briefly held by the french, but he escapes,

to return to the country where his anti-semitic,

pro-nazi radio broadcasts have made him a national hero.

the mufti of jerusalem, when he came back,

he was hailed as the new leader

of the palestinians and of the arab world.

he was the most well-known arab person, at that time.

the mufti, in fact, continued

what he did before he went to nazi germany,

and this was to spread anti-semitism

and to kill or intimidate

those who didn't share his point of view.

narrator: when rumors surface

that the moderate king abdullah of jordan

is considering making peace with israel,

first, his prime minister, and then, the king himself

are assassinated.

although there is no direct evidence

linking al-husseini to the murder,

his cousin is arrested as the mastermind.

again, the mufti snuffs out any hope of peace,

forcibly rejecting any plan to divide up palestine

into a jewish and an arab state.

it was the power and the terror of the mufti

which prevented the first partition plan.

and then, after the holocaust, it was again the mufti

which prevented the realization of the partition plan.

narrator: the arab fuehrer

is aided in this fight against israel

by former nazi officers

who are arriving in the middle east in droves.

hubbard-hall: egypt was pro-german,

but it was also anti-semitic and anti-communist,

so this enabled an environment where the swastika

could sit quite nicely next to the sphinx.

holland: for those who were trying

to overthrow british influence

and trying to get rid of the jewish state in israel,

an obvious source of help was former nazis,

for their knowledge, their military prowess,

experience, tactical knowledge, and so on.

and so a number of them get invited to come to egypt.

hubbard-hall: the number of nazis within egypt

in the 1950s is quite staggering.

and, when you look at the names,

it really reads as a who's who of nazi germany.

narrator: historian peter levenda

has unearthed a recently declassified list

that reveals the number of high-ranking nazis

who embraced islam,

many even converting and taking muslim names.

we have s.s. officer johann von leers,

a very famous nazi.

he worked for joseph goebbels in the propaganda ministry.

he moves to egypt, changes his name to omar amin,

and he starts working for the nasser government

in anti-israel propaganda.

narrator: these classified files

reveal dozens of s.s. officers attaining high-ranking jobs

in the egyptian secret police and propaganda services.

this is a shocking set of names

and it's only a very small set of names.

there are many more to be declassified.

narrator: among the nazi officers who have secretly,

and not-so-secretly, made the journey to the middle east

is the man who will help the mufti

merge nazi military training with the call of jihad...

otto skorzeny.

july 1948, darmstadt prison, germany.

here, high-ranking nazis are awaiting trial for war crimes.

in the middle of the night, two american soldiers show up.

levenda: they had papers that demanded the release

of an important prisoner from american custody.

these were americans dressed in american uniforms,

with american paperwork.

or so it seemed.

narrator: the men are actually members

of an elite corps of nazi commandos...

the werewolves.

the soldiers escort the prisoner through security

and disappear into the night.

levenda: the prisoner was taken into custody

and was never seen again.

until he turned up later in franco's spain.

the prisoner's name was otto skorzeny.

narrator: otto skorzeny is hitler's favorite commando,

a soldier described as the most dangerous man in europe.

his escape is bad news for the brand-new state of israel.

because hitler's favorite commando

will find his way to egypt.

there, he will transform the viper's nest

of hunted nazis and arab anti-semites

into a maelstrom of evil that flows to this day.

narrator: in september 1943,

italian dictator benito mussolini

sits in a 1,000-foot-high mountaintop jail,

imprisoned by his own troops.

nazi officer otto skorzeny leads 80 s.s. commandos

on a high-risk mission to rescue mussolini.

it is an eye-catching success.

a daring raid, which nazi propagandists

absolutely milk for all its worth.

levenda: this made him hitler's darling.

skorzeny suddenly became the go-to guy

for anything that was remotely concerned

with what we would call, today, terrorist operations.

narrator: in october 1944,

skorzeny is once again hailed for his heroics.

with hungarian dictator miklos horthy

on the verge of surrendering to the soviets,

skorzeny kidnaps the dictator's son.

holland: in kidnapping horthy's son,

horthy is forced to abdicate.

a new pro-axis government is put in power, instead,

and the surrender negotiations come to nothing.

narrator: again, the daring kidnap makes headlines.

otto skorzeny is something of a celebrity within nazi germany.

narrator: the charming one-man aryan propaganda machine

is as malevolent as his notoriety suggests.

levenda: he had a scar running down the side of his face,

from a duel, he claimed.

a never-say-no type who was fiercely devoted

to the nazi party, fiercely devoted to hitler.

he was also a true believer and also, you know,

a first-class fanatic.

he was a monster.

narrator: but, as the german war effort

grows increasingly desperate,

skorzeny's mission is about to change.

at the end of the war, germany is literally imploding.

whole cities have been destroyed.

you've got the russians coming from the east.

you've got the allies... the americans and the british

and french... coming from the west and from the south.

and it's like a noose that is just closing in around germany

and it's just all going to pot.

narrator: as the noose tightens, himmler looks to skorzeny

to develop a new kind of warfare,

a warfare that swaps out an army

for fanatical soldiers trained to create chaos and spread fear.

skorzeny throws away the military rule book

to create a mobile army of nazi terrorists called werewolves.

holland: the idea for the werewolves is that these

are going to be small guerrilla squads of resistance fighters

trained in disruptive tactics,

just to kind of sort of get under the skin

of the advancing attackers, the allies,

cause psychological damage, as much as actual damage.

biddiscombe: the idea was to find woods,

dig some bunkers in these woods, and station these small units,

five to six men, behind enemy lines

and then, they would harass the enemy,

once they were bypassed by enemy forces.

narrator: skorzeny pioneers the idea of guerrilla cells,

operating in isolation, leaving no upward trail of command.

levenda: they knew that himmler, goering, goebbels,

they would all be either arrested or dead

by the end of the war, including hitler,

so there had to be a way for the war to continue

without a centralized command

and that's the essence of a terrorist operation.

you have autonomous cells operating independently.

narrator: at hulchrath castle, near erkelenz,

skorzeny and his elite commandos

train the werewolves in terror tactics.

levenda: skorzeny trained up to about 400 werewolves

and he believed that these 400 commandos would be enough

to conduct an ongoing guerrilla war in germany and austria,

for at least a year or more

after the invasion had taken place.

narrator: turning the lack of seasoned soldiers

to his advantage, skorzeny realizes

that younger soldiers can be more easily manipulated.

holland: most are drawn from the hitler youth.

these are young boys.

the reason for that is twofold.

firstly, those boys are available, they're around.

the second thing is they're more biddable.

their brains, their minds,

are more easily nurtured and turned fanatical.

narrator: skorzeny writes a manual on cold sabotage,

which he then distributes to ordinary germans.

it is, in effect, the world's first terrorist handbook.

it teaches techniques for disrupting enemy communications,

destroying fuel dumps, and tying piano wire

across important roads to decapitate allied couriers.

skorzeny realized they would not be armed

with wehrmacht-style weaponry, with machine guns

and all the rest of it, bombs, hand grenades,

so they had to be sort of macgyvers about it.

they had to use duct tape and whatever else they could find,

to create weapons to kill.

narrator: most important of all, they are taught

to become invisible, to blend in with the local population.

levenda: they had to penetrate the enemy's defenses

by looking just as normal as anyone else.

they had to live among the other germans and not be noticed.

narrator: in april 1945, u.s. troops capture

25 enlisted men hiding out in an underground tunnel filled

with weapons and months of food supplies.

they are wearing civilian clothes

and claim to be werewolves.

armed forces radio remind american soldiers

that every friendly german civilian

is a disguised soldier of hate.

holland: as an attacking force, you have no idea

who is gonna be resisting and who isn't,

because they're so unknowable,

because they're not organized, in any true sense.

that makes them much harder to defeat.

narrator: and nazi propaganda minister joseph goebbels

learns quickly that even the idea of the werewolves

is a potent weapon.

in 1945, the werewolves set up a radio station

to rally local civilians and spread the news

of their deadly exploits among the allied occupying forces.

biddiscombe: this marrying together

of a propaganda element, together with

the professionalism of trained guerrillas,

this comprised something original in the werewolf idea.

narrator: the fear they stir up

gets the occupying forces to overreact,

introducing draconian rules

and turning german civilians against their liberators.

at a time when the british and the americans

could've gone into german and they might've had some success

in cultivating democracy in germany, right off the bat,

what are germans doing? germans, you know,

they're under curfew and they can't travel

any more than 5 miles from where they're living.

and all of these things imposed partly

because of allied fear about the werewolves

and i think that what does is it just expands

the psychological gulf between people living in occupied areas

and the occupiers.

narrator: otto skorzeny

is transforming the amateur world of insurgency

into highly trained professional terrorism.

his exploits will become the stuff of espionage lore

and eventually appear in a james bond novel.

but, despite the spread of fear, the reality is

that the werewolves are too few and too late.

although they cause chaos, the werewolves

never wreak the havoc skorzeny hoped for,

killing as few as 1,000 allies and their collaborators.

the reality is that they don't have the resources,

that they don't have the means of organization.

narrator: even the fanatical skorzeny

realizes that resistance is futile.

so he turns his efforts into saving

his fellow nazi commanders from the occupying forces,

setting up the most sophisticated

underground escape network the world has ever seen,

a network with the sole aim of spreading hitler's dream

of jewish genocide around the world.

many german officers head to egypt,

where they are reunited with arab fuehrer al-husseini.

together, they will launch a new era of terror.

narrator: as russian soldiers storm berlin in april 1945,

the war with germany is over.

in his bunker, adolf hitler is dead,

but thousands of his faithful disciples are making plans

to spread the nazi virus throughout the world.

1945 represented what many saw as zero hour,

a time now dedicated to reconstruction,

however, there was very much a postwar legacy,

in terms of what happened to the former

nazi intelligence officers and agents afterwards.

narrator: hitler's final orders

to his favorite commando, otto skorzeny,

was to lead a highly trained nazi terrorist army

to wage war from an alpine mountain stronghold.

but skorzeny decides the game is up.

it's time for plan b.

biddiscombe: skorzeny is holed up in the alps.

he's got kind of guerrilla units scattered throughout the area,

but he decides "i don't want to pursue this

into the postwar period" and he gives up,

presents himself to the americans.

narrator: the battle may be lost,

but, for skorzeny, the war is far from over.

from his prison cell, he marshals

his intelligence networks to activate escape routes

for senior s.s. soldiers and scientists.

levenda: the reason he was able to do that?

because he was already running agents into italy

when the war was still going on.

running his own agents, i have to emphasize...

not for the reich, but for himself.

narrator: called rat lines,

skorzeny's escape routes see hundreds of dangerous nazis

slip through the allied lines to safety.

many, including adolf eichmann,

chief of the gestapo heinrich mueller,

and dr. death, aribert heim,

are on the allies' most wanted list.

skorzeny uses nazi cash and treasure

ransacked during the war to secure forged documents

and pay off people to ease their escape.

he was able to use these finances

to get forged documents and to pay off people

along the rat lines to get them out of the country.

so, like a mafia don, was still able

to control the organization, from even within prison cells.

narrator: eventually, in 1948,

with the help of his former werewolf officers

posing as american officials,

skorzeny himself slips out of prison into the night.

biddiscombe: he'd had the option, actually,

of escaping quite a bit earlier.

he was hoping the allies would exonerate him, which they did,

but then, he finds "well, the germans are still after me

on denazification grounds," so he takes off.

narrator: after hiding out in france,

skorzeny uses his networks to go, first, to spain or italy,

and then, argentina.

his game plan is bearing fruit.

having secured the freedom of so many dangerous nazi colleagues,

he now has a skilled group of nazi elite ready

to transform hitler's postwar terrorist vision

into a professional global business.

after the war was over and the werewolf operation

was floundering, skorzeny thought,

"well, i can continue the same philosophy,

but do it in other places around the world,

where i have much more freedom of action"

and essentially farm out the terrorism all around the world.

narrator: skorzeny hires his former henchmen from the s.s.

and creates networks to move money and guns

through black markets.

as the months pass,

hitler's darling operates with increasing freedom

as the allies' attention turns from the nazis

to a chilling new threat from the east.

holland: by 1950,

there's a new enemy and that's the soviet union.

there's now cold war

and that kind of hunger for revenge

has just played itself out, to a large extent.

narrator: inevitably, in 1953,

scarface skorzeny, himself, arrives in egypt.

he's greeted like a national hero

by his old colleagues from the third reich

and is immediately appointed as egyptian leader

general naguib's personal security advisor.

he wastes no time in setting up an arab terror division,

turning dispossessed palestinian hotheads into arab werewolves.

levenda: skorzeny used the same training that he used

with the werewolves, back in 1944 and '45,

to train the guerrillas and the terrorists in egypt

in the 1950s and 1960s.

narrator: among them

is al-husseini's alleged cousin yasser arafat.

the master and the pupil will become lifelong friends,

as skorzeny schools arafat in the art of terror.

levenda: i think that arafat

learned a great deal from skorzeny.

he learned about doing assassinations

and bombings and terror activities.

nazi commandos were considered the best in that business

and so arafat was able to run his operations

according to the nazi template for terror operations.

narrator: a diehard anti-semite, arafat would rise

to head the terrorist organization the plo.

skorzeny and al-husseini

are spreading hitler's genocidal madness

throughout egypt and palestine.

you had the nazis supporting

a nascent palestine liberation movement,

sending commandos and terrorists into palestine,

and you also had the nazis

developing rockets and other types of technology

the egyptians could use against israel as well.

narrator: germany may have lost the war,

but the young jewish state of israel

is far from free of the tyranny of nazi hatred.

in june 1956, a revolution

finally ousts british troops from egyptian soil

and the fervent hitler admirer gamal abdel nasser

is now in charge.

and otto skorzeny,

the man once known as the most dangerous nazi in the world,

takes the regime change in his stride

and is appointed as the new president's military advisor.

egypt, in the 1950s,

is a very interesting, but volatile place.

nasser has just taken power by a military coup.

he has various internal opposition groups

that he is trying to contend against.

narrator: skorzeny's army of nazi sidekicks

start to train the increasingly anti-jewish regime

in the art of werewolf sabotage and terror.

ever since the arab-israeli war of 1948,

small bands of palestinians have been making raids on israel

to steal food and reclaim farm equipment lost in the conflict.

but under skorzeny's influence, the raids turn vicious,

targeting the jewish population.

the nazis have finally got a foothold in the middle east

and, now, they can launch an anti-semitic jihad

that will plague the world for decades to come.

narrator: egypt, the mid-1950s.

skorzeny's nazi commandos are providing the training

to continue the genocide

they started in europe a decade earlier.

he masterminds attacks by the terror group the fedayeen,

with the sole intention of killing jews in the gaza strip.

there were a number of raids conducted by the plo,

into gaza and into the west bank,

which were organized by skorzeny and his people out of cairo.

narrator: 260 israelis are killed or injured

in 1955, alone.

the fedayeen build on the psychological lessons

from the panic the werewolves created in postwar germany,

indiscriminantly opening fire on civilian buses, trains,

synagogues, and workers in fields.

and a whole new generation of nazis

are rallying to this fresh anti-semitic cause.

the palestinian cause attracted

not only nazis who had fought in world war ii,

but they were also attracting american neo-nazis,

younger people who had not served in world war ii,

and they were actually also being trained

by skorzeny's people

and participating in raids into gaza.

narrator: by 1960,

under hitler admirer president gamal abdel nasser,

egypt is fully molded into the shape of a nazi state.

all political opposition parties are banned,

their leaders killed or imprisoned,

and all 75,000 egyptian jews are expelled or killed.

with his seeds of hatred sown,

hitler's commando otto skorzeny relocates to spain.

from there, he starts running a middle east terror network

under the name the paladin group.

among the group's many clients,

none other than muammar gaddafi and saddam hussein.

levenda: both saddam hussein and gaddafi

had opponents to their regime

they wanted to put down as quickly as possible.

the people of the paladin group were excellent for this.

gaddafi, he admired skorzeny. he admired the nazis very much.

the fact that they lost the war

didn't seem to matter to these other individuals

because they also felt like they were underdogs as well.

narrator: in the '60s and '70s, there is a spreading network

of nonstate terrorist organizations,

from the skorzeny-trained plo to hamas, hezbollah,

jamaat-e-islami, and, of course, al-qaeda.

all bear the hallmarks of their terrorist forefathers,

the werewolves.

levenda: the werewolf operation is very similar

to what you have today in cells being run

by al-qaeda, for instance.

they are not in constant communication,

they're not getting paychecks from a central government.

the only central command structure is their ideology.

narrator: the terror tactics that continue to this day

trace directly back 70 years

to otto skorzeny and the nazis of egypt.

they gave birth to a world of jihad.

levenda: skorzeny was very much involved

in taking the werewolf operation and going global with it,

the idea of using terror

as a weapon of otherwise incapable people

who wanted to conduct military operations against an enemy.

narrator: antipersonnel and vehicle roadside bombs,

part of the werewolf armory, are a common tactic

in the recent wars in afghanistan and iraq.

narrator: the u.s. openly acknowledges the link

between modern day terrorism and werewolf methodology

and, in 2003, looked to world war ii

for answers to the insurgency in iraq.

the bush administration were very interested

in the werewolves because, once the insurgency begins

in iraq, they see that as a parallel,

these kinds of diehards who go down swinging

when a totalitarian regime is defeated.

narrator: in addition to these flames of terror

lit by the nazis,

the middle east is also still reeling

from the anti-semitic loathing they spread.

to this day, "mein kamph"

is one of the bestselling books in the arab world.

the main legacy of nazi ideology in the middle east today

is jew hatred.

if you compare the anti-semitism in the middle east

with the anti-semitism of the nazis,

you see very, very many similar symbols and pictures.

it must be the long-term influence of nazi propaganda.

narrator: and the victims of this propaganda

are getting younger and younger.

the television stations of hamas and hezbollah,

they have an anti-semitic kids' program.

they brought in, in the program, a big mouse,

but a mouse who loves to kill jews.

narrator: even though hitler's favorite commando,

otto skorzeny, and the arab fuehrer, al-husseini,

died back in the '70s,

through the work of these two monsters,

hitler's ideals live on...

al-husseini, spreading his anti-semitic poison

across north africa and the middle east,

skorzeny, training young hotheads

to kill innocent people.

the nazi legacy continues to blight our world.

sieg heil!

sieg heil!

sieg heil!

sieg heil!

sieg heil!