Ahmed Huber - Life

Life

Albert Friedrich Armand Huber was born in the Canton of Fribourg, Switzerland in 1927 into a Protestant family. He joined the liberal Social Democratic Party of Switzerland in 1952, and remained a member until 1994, when he was expelled for his Right-wing political beliefs. Throughout his life, he worked as a journalist for various Swiss news services until 1989, when he lost his position as a result of advocating Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In 1959, the Party asked Huber to hide some Algerians at his home, who were illegally transporting weapons through Switzerland which were to be delivered to the rebels fighting against French colonialism in the Algerian War. During the time they stayed with Huber, they discussed Islam, and Huber, who had never taken his Protestant background seriously, was very impressed by their beliefs. He continued to contemplate Islam until 1962, when he finally became a Sunni Muslim by reciting the shahada at a Swiss Islamic center. He was then invited to visit Egypt, where he was told that the Swiss Islamic center was hostile to then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and that he should again recite the shahada at the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, which he did. It was at this time that he adopted the name Ahmed Huber.

Huber was able to meet with President Nasser during his time in Egypt. It was through his talks with Nasser, who spoke positively about German National Socialism, that Huber first began to reconsider his beliefs about Nazism and Hitler. Upon his return to Switzerland, he met a young secretary at the Egyptian embassy whom he married in 1963, and with whom he fathered two children.

Throughout the remainder of the 1960s, Huber continued to become increasingly sympathetic to both Arab nationalism and Nazism. His views were strongly influenced by his meeting in 1965 with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who had made efforts to win support for the Third Reich among Muslims during the Second World War; as well as Johann von Leers, originally a Nazi propagandist who fled to Egypt after the war (he also became a Muslim), where he continued to produce anti-Semitic propaganda for Nasser's government. Huber also claimed to have met Hitler's secretaries, Traudl Junge and Christa Schroeder; Artur Axmann, who had been a leader of the Hitler Youth; as well as several former SS officers, including Léon Degrelle. Huber also kept many Nazi relics at his home, including a fragment from Hitler's destroyed residence at Berchtesgaden. Huber was less forthcoming about his contacts among the contemporary Far Right, although it was reported that he knew Dr. William Pierce, who was the leader of the American neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance. He is also known to have been a friend of François Genoud, a Swiss financier who was active in protecting fugitive Nazis, as well as supporting various Palestinian and Islamist causes. In 1988, Genoud would become one of the founders of Al Taqwa, along with Huber.

Huber did not give up his associations with the Swiss left, however. In the late 1960s, he worked within a group known as the "Bern Nonconformists," which was a Swiss New Left organization. He used their Leftist rhetoric to advocate anti-American and anti-Israeli positions. Given Huber's actual beliefs, this activity is an example of entryism.

Huber remained an Arab nationalist until the Islamic Iranian Revolution in 1979. Huber was very interested in the idea of an Islamic government, and he began to study the writings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Huber visited Iran in 1983, during which he spoke before the Iranian Parliament. He continued to make annual trips to Iran every year thereafter, and met several times with Khomeini. The Iranians hoped that Huber would use his Right-wing contacts in Europe to foster closer ties between Iran and the European Right. Although Huber was a Sunni, he advocated the Shi'a revolution in Iran as a model which could be an inspiration to all Muslim nations.

Beginning in the 1980s, Huber attended many Islamic conferences and meetings of the Far Right around the world, including in Iran, Lebanon, the United States, France, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. At these meetings he would promote the idea of greater cooperation between Muslims and the Right. Huber particularly advocated the school of thought known as the European New Right, which he believed provided the best basis for such an alliance. In spite of these activities, nothing concrete is known to have come of them.

Huber also worked closely with the Avalon Gemeinschaft, a Swiss pagan, self-styled New Right organization which has hosted several conferences on Holocaust denial, and counts former Waffen SS veterans among its members.

Huber died at his home in Muri bei Bern in 2008.