Leopold Gleim

[steve248]

A person called "Leopold Gleim" has 36,000 hits on google and just one entry on this Forum
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... eim#p73847

On google all the entries described this person as "SS Colonel Leopold Gleim, chief of the Gestapo department for Jewish Affairs in Poland" who, in the 1950s, was one of the people setting up the Egyptian security services for Nasser.

I can find no record of him in any SS DALs, in no books or primary sources involving "Jewish Affairs in Poland". In fact I can find no record of him at all other than his connection to the Egyptian security service.

So who is Leopold Gleim?

[Mors]

"Ulbricht's Protectors in Cairo", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 1st 1965:
"... Leopold Gleim was an SS officer in Poland. In 1955 he went to Egypt where he now serves, under the name of Col. Namalnashr (sic), as the second man of Nasser's security police. If he were to return to Germany now, he would have to expect a trial because of his activities in Poland...."

[steve248]

Mors, thanks for your contribution.
However, it basically echos what I posted.

To repeat the last line of my post "So who is Leopold Gleim?"

[lazybather]

Hi Steve,

Is it possible that your Leopold Gleim is actually Dr. Aribert Heim, (Tarek Hussein Farid)?

Stuart.

[steve248]

An interesting idea.
The more interesting point is the Polish angle where mis-identification with Dr. Heim is not possible!

[DavidFrankenberg]

Leopold Gleim was a SS-Standartenführer in Warsaw during the Second World War.

He was for a time head of the Gestapo Department for Jewish Affairs in Poland. After the war, he converted to Islam, taking the name of Ali al-Nahar, and served with the Egyptian state services.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Gleim

https://books.google.fr/books?id=SlSDYm ... 22&f=false


He was spirited to Egypt in 1945 by the “Spider,” a group organized to help Nazi brass escape Allied justice.
http://archive.macleans.ca/article/1967 ... nazi-elite

[steve248]

I am sorry David but the sources you mention all repeat one another and offer no real identity to who was Leopold Gleim.
By the way he was not a SS-Staf. and has no SS-officer file and is not mentioned in the SS-Dienstaltersliste (1935 to 1944).

[George_W]

https://books.google.fr/books?id=SlSDYm ... 22&f=false

Obviously no Leopold Gleim was "the head of Gestapo in Poland (whatever that means!)" - this information is totally incorrect and false.

I've never heard about the man named "Leopold Gleim" in connection with Gestapo anywhere in occupied Poland.

George

[DavidFrankenberg]

He is supposed to have been in the "most wanted" list after 1945 !
Is it possible that special services were wrong (esp. israelian services) ?

True that the idetification with Aribert Heim is very plausible to me because Aribert Heim was on the "most wanted" list after the war.
But there is still a gap between Leopold and Aribert ! and aother gap between Gleim and Heim.

[steve248]

I doubt whether Aribert Heim was on a wanted list - he was not "famous" until 1962 when the West German police decided he was work looking at.
Until then he lived in southern Germany working as a gynacologist under his own name.
Gleim - whoever he was - allegedly made it to Egypt before the end of 1945.

[DavidFrankenberg]

Tthe 15th march of 1945 Heim is captured by the US.
He is jailed.
Prisoners of camps accused him. But the procedure was suspended... Heim is freed but when ? He is not in april 1946 at the trial of Mauthausen's turmentors. Was he freed in 1953 ?

[steve248]

No idea and not someone I have an interest in.

[Mors]

Hi Steve. You've certainly set a hare running with the strange case of Leopold Gleim. 'Gleim' clearly existed, in his Islamic guise of Lt-Colonel Al Nacher, deputy head of the Egyptian State Security Cadre, who arrived in Egypt in 1955 as one of a group of Gestapo-trained officers to reshape the Mukhabarat. Another, better documented, example is Joachim Deumling, who after a stint working for British intelligence in the Rhineland, was shipped out to Egypt in 1954 by Wilhelm Voss, then head of the so-called German Advisory Group in Cairo, on behalf of Nasser's minister of the interior, Mohiedden. We know Deumling had been an SS-Obersturmbannführer towards the end of the war, and that he later went on to mastermind Nasser's concentration camps. But Gleim's identity in the Gestapo? Well, he's variously described as former "SS-Grossaktionsleiter" in charge of solving the "Jewish Question" in Warsaw, and also a member of the SD-Geheimsgarde. The GrossAktion, sometimes known as Einsatz Reinhard (after its inspiration, Heydrich, head of the RSHA), seems to have been specifically concerned with the railway logistics of shipping thousands of Jews from Warsaw main station to death camps such as Sobibor. But Gleim, if he existed in that identity, certainly wasn't the main man: that was Odilo Globocnik. As for an SD Secret Guard, no idea. Does anyone else? There's no documentation on a Leopold Gleim that I can find, so it's unlikely he landed in the hands of the British or Americans in 1945. Was he, perhaps, operating out of the Soviet bloc? As for the pseudonym, it kind of suggests an Austrian or Sudeten background.

It's clear, as you imply Steve, that the secondary sources have been parroting a lot of nonsense about Nasser's Nazi advisors, sometimes mixed with the odd accidental truth. For example, though Deumling assuredly existed, he is often quoted in the company of Oscar Dirlewanger, the sadistic 'Butcher of Warsaw' (one of several, alas). Which is strange, because we now have pretty convincing evidence he died in June 1945. The earliest reference I can find for the "Gleim" identity (as well as Dirlewanger's presence in Cairo) is Sedar & Greenberg's opus, Behind the Egyptian Sphinx, published in 1960. But then, S & G also assert as a fact that Otto Skorzeny was the Svengali behind the scenes. About the only truth in that is he visited Egypt a couple of times, got to know Nasser and seems to have sold him a few arms from time to time.

[Mors]

Update on my last post, and an even earlier reference to the mysterious Leopold Gleim. It's from Hansard, which records House of Commons speeches, and is dated February 25, 1957:

Mr. Janner
asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he is aware that many Nazi propagandists, whose activities in the Hitler régime were directed towards millions of Jewish victims, are at present in the public service of Egypt as propagandists of racial attack and that amongst these are such persons as Johannes Von Leers, Otto Ernst Remer, S.S. General Moser, now known as Nalisman, Leopold Gleim, now known as Colonel Alnacher; and whether he will ask the United Nations organisation to inquire into this propaganda so that it may have information of the violation of the United Nations organisation Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights by Egypt before coming to a decision in respect of what guarantees will be available to Israel for her security against fedayeen and others who are trained and indoctrinated by Egypt.

The Mr Janner in question was Barnett Janner, father of Greville, who at the time was MP for Leicester North West. The source of his information? Possibly the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, though I can find no record on its site of Gleim.

[steve248]

I know who the late Lord Janner was.
Simply because he stated it in the House of Commons (the elected members of the British Parliament) does not necessarily make it true.
And Janner possibly did get his information from Wiesenthal or the other "Nazi hunter" of the time, Tuvia Friedman.
They obviously didn't know the truth behind Leopold Gleim than we do!