The Holocaust never ended.
The ideology that created the Holocaust was not defeated in 1945. Nazis from across Europe evaded punishment and instead found refuge and employment in the Middle East.
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This is a guest essay Guy Goldstein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor, and Alex Steiman. The information in this essay is based on the research for their forthcoming book, “Gen-’Z’eesen: From Nazi Radio to Digital Hate.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
For my whole life, we have told ourselves that the Holocaust is over, the Nazis are defeated, and the world has learned its lesson. For two and a half years now, every Jew has begun to sense that this wasn’t entirely true.
On January 27th, the world gathered for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. They patted themselves on the back for liberating Auschwitz, vowing that “never again” shall what happened to all those minorities and vulnerable peoples, sometimes even remembering to name the Jews, be allowed to happen again.
Some hijacked the narrative. Others accused Jews of being the new Nazis. None had the introspection to see that the ideology that created the Holocaust was alive and well in their own societies.
Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day), honored early next week, falls on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Yes, we remember the victims. One Jew, murdered for the crime of being a Jew, six million times over. Not a number, not a statistic. Each one had a face, a name, a family, hopes, dreams, loves, hates — each individual murder was a tragedy compounded six million times.
But we also remember heroism which was everywhere. Jews fought back in the forests of Belarus and the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka. They formed partisan units across Eastern Europe. They mounted uprisings in ghettos from Vilna to Białystok to Częstochowa. They chose, in the most absolute darkness our people had ever faced, to refuse to yield even when it seemed hopeless.
Yom HaShoah (Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day), honored earlier this week, is a reminder of the cost of not having an Israel, of the limitless potential of evil that exists outside the protection of sovereignty, and of the commitment to the resistance and the resilience of the Jewish People, even in our darkest hours.
These are not our darkest hours. But they are dark enough to see clearly. The ideology that created the Holocaust was not defeated in 1945. The gas chambers were shut down, but the machine that made gas chambers possible and the system that fused antisemitism with anti-imperialism and anti-Western hatred into a single integrated weapon, was packed up, shipped to new locations, and rebuilt under new management.
What every Jew has begun to sense over the past two and a half years is not a resurgence. It is a recognition.
The machine never stopped.
The machine did not begin with the gas chambers. It began with ideology and organisation, and it began earlier than most people think. In 1926, a man named Alfred Hess, brother of Rudolf Hess, founded the Nazi Party’s official foreign branch in Egypt. That was two years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo.
From Cairo and Alexandria, Hess and his network cultivated pro-Nazi and antisemitic sentiment among Egypt’s elite. By 1933, his group had identified the key strategic insight that would shape everything that followed: traditional European antisemitic pamphlets “fell on deaf ears” in Egypt.
The solution, spelled out in a letter from the Cairo branch to Berlin, was to “transplant” the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine into Egypt, weaponizing anti-Zionism as the delivery vehicle for antisemitism. That strategy, authored in 1933, is still operating today.
Nazi intelligence ran a parallel financial track. Wilhelm Stellbogen, the German intelligence operative in Cairo, paid the Muslim Brotherhood directly, subsidies confirmed by seized British intelligence documents and “considerably larger than the subsidies offered to other anti-British activists.”
The Brotherhood sent delegations to Nazi rallies at Nuremberg in the 1930s, distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and found in Hitler’s movement a model for their own totalitarian ambitions.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (and de facto spiritual and political leader of the Arabs of Palestine from 1921 to 1953), served as the coordinator between the Nazi political and covert tracks, a man who would later sit across from Hitler himself and broadcast calls for genocide over Nazi radio.
Radio Zeesen, the Nazi broadcasting station that operationalized this strategy during the war, did not broadcast only in Arabic. It broadcast in Farsi, Turkish, and Urdu as well. The system was designed from the beginning to reach the populations that would eventually become its inheritors. Iran was a target audience from 1939.
And then there was François Genoud. A Swiss financier who met Hitler in 1932 and met al-Husseini in 1936, Genoud became the financial spider at the centre of the entire post-war network.
Genoud managed the transfer of Nazi assets into Swiss bank accounts, coordinated escape networks that moved Nazi personnel to safe havens across the Middle East and Latin America, and built banking institutions in Geneva to channel funds to anti-Israel organisations for decades. He secured the publishing rights to the writings of Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery Martin Bormann, sold their propaganda to generate revenue, and used the proceeds to pay for the legal defence of SS officer Adolf Eichmann and “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie.
Genoud financed the terrorist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, personally sat at the defence table of captured Palestinian terrorists, masterminded the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight in 1972, and maintained his networks until 1996, when he killed himself just weeks before Swiss banking investigations threatened to expose the full scope of his operations.
Johann von Leers, one of Goebbels’ most prolific propagandists, as well as François Genoud and Haj Amin al-Husseini, were not strangers who found each other after the war. They were collaborators before it, during it, and after it. Their post-war work was a continuation, not an improvisation.
Nazis from across Europe evaded punishment and instead found refuge and employment in the Middle East.
Von Leers was actively recruited by Nasser’s Egypt, arrived in Cairo in 1956, and spent the rest of his life training Egyptian officials in the techniques he’d perfected in Berlin. A CIA assessment from 1953 noted that “several individuals with backgrounds in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry have secured influential advisory positions.”
Former Gestapo officers worked in what was openly called the “Jewish Department” of Egypt’s Propaganda Ministry. They embedded their techniques into the institutional systems of the state: broadcasting, education, religious training, youth organisations. The Muslim Brotherhood absorbed the frameworks and spread them. The Palestinian national movement inherited them through al-Husseini. Once the techniques were embedded in self-replicating institutions, they no longer needed the original Nazis to survive. The machine could run itself.
The Soviets professionalized what the Nazis had invented, combining the emotional manipulation perfected at Zeesen with the discipline of KGB active measures. The Palestine Liberation Organization carried the upgraded system West through conference circuits and activist training, eventually laundering it into Western universities.
Palestinian-American academic Edward Said’s book “Orientalism” made certain questions about Arab antisemitism unspeakable by reframing them as colonial prejudice, providing academic vocabulary for narratives whose genealogy ran through Palestine Liberation Organization training programs, Soviet active measures, and Nazi propaganda.
Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran carried the same system into a theocratic state willing to adopt it as governing ideology. His designation of America as “the Great Satan” and Israel as “the Little Satan” was the Zeesen system in its purest form: Jews as the visible, acceptable target for a broader civilizational war against the West. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the Palestine Liberation Organization didn’t need to coordinate. They were running the same system in parallel, inherited from the same source, exporting it through different channels to different audiences.
And all along, the embers of actual Nazism in the West were never fully extinguished. They smoldered in Skokie in 1977, where American Nazis marched through a community of Holocaust survivors. They burned quietly in networks of white supremacists and Holocaust deniers who maintained their ideology through decades when it cost them to do so. And now they are catching fire, because the other branches of the same system created the permissive environment they needed.
Anti-Zionism laundered through academia made certain forms of antisemitism respectable. The direct descendants in the Middle East kept the propaganda at full production. And in the space those two opened, old-fashioned, unashamed Nazism found room to breathe again.
American far-right political commentator and antisemite Nick Fuentes dines with a U.S. president. Nazi imagery becomes Gen Z culture. The aestheticization of Nazism among young Westerners is new in its form and old in its substance, flourishing in a garden that the Holocaust’s own progeny planted.
A Radio Zeesen broadcast in July 1942, recorded by the American Embassy in Cairo, included the incitement: “Kill the Jews before they kill you.” That exact phrase appeared in dozens of social media posts after October 7, 2023. Eighty-one years, and the words are the same.
Iran is waging a war of annihilation against the Jewish state, deploying the complete system through every proxy and every platform at its disposal. The Palestinians are waging a war of annihilation against the Jewish state. October 7th was a pogrom.
Anti-Zionism has become both a cultural force on both sides of the Western political aisle and a political ideology in almost every Western country, functioning exactly as Alfred Hess’ 1933 strategy designed it to function: as the vehicle through which an ideology whose roots run to Nazi Germany gains access to mainstream discourse.
The students chanting on campuses, the activists distributing toolkits that identify with the attackers, the academics providing intellectual cover, the Iranian proxies firing rockets, and the Gen Z social media accounts posting Nazi aesthetics don’t know they are all working from the same playbook.
They don’t know because the system was designed so they wouldn’t know. That is what 90 years of transmission, laundering, and permissive silence accomplishes. The techniques become invisible, the hatred becomes righteous, and the genocide becomes justice. The Holocaust, understood as the machine rather than just what the machine produced, never ended.
Despite all that, we are still here. We are here as a sovereign nation with the means and the will to defend ourselves — fighting a war we did not start against enemies who have stated, clearly and repeatedly, that their objective is annihilation. We are not helpless. We are not unarmed. We are still mounting a resistance, and still resilient in the face of evil.
The price of Jewish survival in a world that has never stopped trying to engineer Jewish destruction is eternal vigilance, unyielding strength, and an absolute refusal to pretend that the danger has passed.
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"Enemies who have stated, clearly and repeatedly, that their objective is annihilation" and still way too many in the West, particularly, have become predisposed to support Iranian barbarism, attempt to create a sympathetic view of murderous Hamas and the Gazaniacs, and condemn Israel for, blast it all, not wanting to die. Finally, I knew that the modern industry of "kill the Jews" started in the 1920's just after Schicklgruber joined the early Nazi Party in 1919. The more things change the more they stay the same, yes?
Powerful article. I would add one nuance. In much of the Middle East the ideology clearly never disappeared, and for Jews living in many Muslim countries the hostility never really ended. But in the West there actually was a long period when it was pushed to the margins. In places like the United States and Canada, Jews lived well and were broadly accepted in society. Antisemites existed, of course, but they were mostly on the fringes. I would say that lasted roughly from the end of the war until the late 1970s. What changed, in my view, was the rise of radical Marxist ideology and its later alliance with Islamist movements, which brought these ideas back into universities, politics, and activism. What we’re seeing today is not something entirely new — it’s the normalization of ideas that had once been pushed out of respectable society.