Decades before the KGB launched “Operation SIG” to intensify antisemitic conspiracy lore in the muslim world, the USSR had already built the groundwork via an intermediary: Nazi Germany.
- Step one was the infiltration of the Russian emigré circles.
- In step two those emigrés spread the fake Protocols of Zion and the associated mythology about small families like the Rothschilds stealing from the noble House of Hessen and taking over the British Empire through simple loans and a private courier system.
- In step three influential Nazis made the conspiracy mythology a centerpiece of Muslim belief.
The USSR publicly denounced antisemitism for a while, at least until the party officials with various and often insignificant jewish backgrounds had been cleansed. But of course antisemitic conspiracy lore was too good an opportunity for Lenin to ignore.
Early socialists had been the group which created the modern antisemitic wave of conspiracy ideology in the first half of the 19th century. The myth of the jewish conspiracy was thought of as a gateway into socialism for non-socialist former peasants in France, rightwing Germans and ultimately Muslims. The common core was anticapitalism and the intention to overthrow all governments believed to be occupied by satanic jews. Around 1850 the socialists mysteriously dropped the overt antisemitism while keeping their concept of the “enemy” mostly intact. The eternal international capitalist was described and pictured in caricatures as a fat, disgusting, destructive pig. From 1850 onwards the rightwing in Germany and other countries copied the antisemitic lore from the left word for word. The eternal internationalist jew was subsequently pictured as a fat, disgusting, destructive pig.
For the longest time Muslims were not interested in the inconsequential, fragmented international jewish community. The vast Muslim caliphate empire had bigger fish to fry; namely the European empires which went through different stages of top-down phony enlightenment, capitalism and industrialism. France wanted to beat its arch-nemesis Britain when it came to colonial posessions. The Europeans became more sophisticated at the imperialism game while the caliphate hadn’t changed much in centuries.
The USSR wanted to split Britain from the Arab states and thus the conspiracy lore had to be amplified which made Britain look like a tool of the jewish synagogue of satan. Britain needed the lore as well because it redirected German anger over the loss in WWI towards a nonexistent jewish group. Winston Churchill in 1920 published the piece “ZIONISM versus BOLSHEVISM.A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE” where he played into the mythology but assured the reader he could differentiate between the “good jews and the bad jews”. As a valuable side effect, the lore served as a distraction from the very real and very old aristocratic spy networks of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars which had actually performed a successful takeover of the British empire.
The author Louis Kilzer described in detail how Churchill and the Crown were at the center of a massive, long-term deception operation against Germany, pretending to be compatible through anti-enlightenment ideology mixed with antisemitic conspiracy ideas. The Nazi party fell for it. And the party members from the high nobility apparently didn’t bother to explain how their ancestors ran the Rothschilds as intermediaries and how the popular myths were false.
Washed up Romanovs and high powered networks
The Russian emigré circles were highly infiltrated by Soviet intelligence and the washed up Romanovs had another massive problem: They were from the noble houses of Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein and within this particular brand of aristocracy there must have been some really high-level Soviet collaborators.
The Romanovs were not to be trusted even though they looked so legit to the right-wing internationally. They were pushed out of the seats of power by communists and they had had this old-style regime running for so long. They tried to connect with anybody who was rightwing or ultra-rightwing, including the German Nazis. They tried to connect with Brits and Americans. Especially they tried to instill this mentality into these American business people.
We know that the fake Protocols of Zion came out of Russia. But the Romanovs then made it a much bigger thing. And the role of these leftover Romanovs has been understated to a large degree. They still had money. They still had contacts and they could pay for activists. They could pay groups and they could tell them what the trends are and push these fake protocols of Zion and say that true anti-communism has to be this, that and the other. And if you deviate from that line you are the enemy.
The Romanovs could have simply asked their Western European relatives from the Houses of Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein: Is the jewish conspiracy real? Did the Rothschild family steal from the Landgraf of Hessen-Kassel when Napoleon’s forces were closing in? The true answer would have been “no”. The British crown was from the same blend of these exact same noble families. So the obvious questions could have been asked: Did the Rothschilds really manipulate the London stock exchange after the battle of Waterloo and took over the banking district “City of London”, the central bank “Bank of England” and the British Empire? The true answer would have been “no”.
In fact, it was these aristocratic intelligence circles which had dominated conspiracy media ever since the 1790s.
Lord Louis Mountbatten (whose real family name is Hessen) may have been the highest soviet mole in the British Empire and inside NATO.
The grand duke Kirill Vladimir of Russia, who was a first cousin of the last Zar, sounded very Russian but he was from these European aristocratic families. Kirill became known as the Soviet Zar because in the event of a restoration of the monarchy, he intended to keep some of the features of the Soviet regime.
Kirill found his strongest support among a group known as the Mladorossi which ultimately became heavily influenced by fascism. Kirill then had to distance himself from the organization when its founder was spotted meeting with Soviet diplomats, which probably meant Soviet spies.
Kirill Romanov, the emperor in exile, was close to members of the Nazi party when he was in Germany. He is said to have paid Ludendorff a sum of nearly half a million gold marks in 1922 or 1923.
Then there was this Russian character Cherep Spiridovich, a conspiracy author who was funded by Henry Ford, the American car mogul. Henry Ford also popularized the protocols of Zion in America.This Russian count revitalized an old fairy tale about 300 Jewish families running the big conspiracy which then influenced the book called “the conspirator hierarchy, the story of the committee of 300” by John Coleman.
And we saw a continuous relationship between American intelligence and the Romanovs in exile with people like Colonel Harris Houghton, Colonel John Jacob Astor, Major General Ralph Van Deamon, Colonel Williams Bryant, Colonel Nicholas Biddle, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and others.
Henry Ford created his own personal intelligence service and hired a substantial number of exiled Russians, so-called white Russians.
Boris Brasol had a copy of Nius’s edition of the protocols of Zion which was then passed to Harris Houghton and his group of military intelligence people. They paid for the translation of the protocols and Henry Ford then turned them into a mass phenomenon.
Infiltrating the Germans
The end result of WWI was not just a total military defeat but also a collapse of the intelligence system. Structures broke apart while foreign spy networks formed and Germany saw an influx of emigrés, often with German ancestry. It would have required a gigantic healthy intelligence apparatus to deal with these hordes of new people. Money was tight so many people could be bought cheaply.
In Germany these “white” Russian emigrés who had lost against the “reds” collaborated with the Nazis through an organization named Aufbau. A leader of German military intelligence worked with Grand Duke Romanov and of course members of the houses of Hessen, Schleswig-Holstein and others eventually joined the Nazi party. The same families that the Romanovs were from. General Ludenorff established an intelligence service for Kirill Romanov. Walter Nikolai had worked for Ludenorff as the head of the German army high command intelligence service during World War I. Russian monarchists funneled large sums of money to the Nazi party, the NSDAP. Boris Brasol and other members of the Aufbau, especially Kirill’s wife Grand Duchess Victoria, connected the German extreme right-wing to the Americans like Henry Ford. Brasol, who had an American citizenship, secretly helped organize an anti-communist congress in Germany with the support of the Gestapo. The assembly included speakers, guests from Canada, France, England, and Switzerland. Heinrich Himmler showed interest in Brasol in August 1938.
The infamous Martin Bormann must have been the spy who supplied all the military secrets of Nazi Germany to the USSR.
Spreading the mythology in the Muslim world
The Nazis sought to amplify antisemitic conspiracy nonsense within the Middle East and North Africa to undermine British and French colonial dominance.
Joseph Goebbels viewed al-Husseini and Islam in general as a natural ally. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem asserted during his meeting with Hitler in 1941,
“The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists. (The Times of Israel, 2015)”
Al-Husseini used platforms like Radio Zeesen to broadcast messages that blended Nazi racial theories with Islamic and nationalist rhetoric. These broadcasts, which reached large audiences across the Arab world, portrayed Jews as a common enemy and Zionism as a colonialist enterprise.
One of the most notable figures who aligned with these Nazi strategies was Johann von Leers, a prolific antisemitic propagandist in Nazi Germany. After the war, von Leers fled to Egypt, where he converted to Islam and took the name Omar Amin von Leers. He continued his anti-Jewish propaganda under the protection of the Egyptian
government.
The German Propaganda Ministry produced a wealth of antisemitic literature, translated into Arabic and Persian and distributed widely. This strategy included copies of “Mein Kampf” and the infamous forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” both of which found receptive audiences in the region.
The 1941 pro Nazi coup in Iraq, led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, was supported by the German military and facilitated by a shared antisemitic and anti-British agenda.
The long-term impact of Nazi antisemitism on the Islamic world is profound. This legacy persisted beyond the collapse of the Third Reich.
Propaganda and diplomacy. Germany ran Arabic, Persian, and Turkish radio broadcasts from Berlin that mixed anti-Jewish propaganda with anti-imperial rhetoric, portraying the Reich as a friend of Arab and Muslim independence. The Foreign Office and Abwehr cultivated Arab nationalists in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, promising support against the British and French.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Axis territory and collaborated with the Nazis from 1941, lobbying against Jewish refugees and urging Muslims to back the Axis. He helped recruit for Muslim SS formations in the Balkans, though his political influence beyond propaganda was limited.
Iraq’s 1941 coup attempt. Berlin encouraged (and tried to assist) Rashid Ali al-Gaylani’s pro-Axis coup against Britain. A small German mission and limited air support arrived too late; British forces crushed the revolt quickly, showing the logistical limits of Nazi help so far from Europe.
North Africa and Vichy spheres. In 1942–43, when the Wehrmacht briefly occupied parts of Tunisia, German authorities pressured local Jews and used antisemitic measures; plans existed for Einsatz units to operate farther east if Rommel broke through, but military defeats halted them. Across Vichy North Africa, German leverage helped harden anti-Jewish policies, though control was short-lived.
Iran and Turkey. Germany had commercial and political ties with Iran under Reza Shah, but the Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 ended meaningful Nazi influence. Turkey stayed neutral; both Axis and Allies courted Ankara, but it never became a German ally.
The Balkans and Soviet Muslims. The SS raised several Muslim-labeled formations (notably the 13th “Handschar” division in Bosnia and 21st “Skanderbeg” in Albania), recruited with help from Husseini; their performance and discipline were uneven, and they mainly fought partisans. The Wehrmacht also formed Ostlegionen from Soviet Muslim minorities (Azerbaijani, Turkestani, Volga Tatar units) for rear-area security—again driven by manpower need, not affinity.
Aims vs. outcomes. Berlin hoped for unrest in British/French colonies and Soviet borderlands, access to Middle Eastern oil, and a diversion of Allied resources. In practice, geography, Allied control of sea lanes, and Germany’s own defeats meant aid was minimal and short-lived. Propaganda had some resonance, but no decisive pro-Axis Muslim coalition emerged.
