Muhammad al-Maadi

Muhammad al-Ma'adi (Arabic: محمد المعادى; 2 January 1902 – between 1954 and 1957) was a half-Algerian French nationalist and anti-Semite. A member of La Cagoule during the interwar period, later a collaborator, he founded the North African Legion together with Henri Lafont. After World War II he fled to Egypt.

Biography

He was the son of Caïd Mahfuz al-Ma'adi, Bachagha and Commander of the Legion of Honour, and a Frenchwoman.

Muhammad al-Ma'adi was, like Saïd Mohammedi or Muhammad Begdane (alias "Jean le Penchot", a former member of the International Brigades who called himself "von Kerbach"), a member of the Gestapo, who actively collaborated with the Third Reich during the Vichy regime. Strongly imbued with the discourse of the Croix-de-Feu, military and an active militant of the French far-right, he encouraged Muslim anti-Semitism in French Algeria, and played a crucial role in the Constantine riots from 3 to 5 August 1934. In that event, Muslims killed twenty-five Jews (fourteen men, six women, and five children; fourteen of whom were beheaded).

He temporarily left the army in 1936 to avoid serving the leftist government of Léon Blum. Later he joined the terrorist organization La Cagoule, for which he was arrested and sentenced to eight months in prison. Re-enlisting during the 1940 campaign, he was awarded the Legion of Honor. During the German occupation, he was active in the Revolutionary Social Movement (MSR), founded by former thugs. Then he became responsible for issues inherent to the Maghreb within the National Popular Rally (RNP) of his friend Marcel Déat. Muhammad was in charge of organizing the North African RNP Committee. During the same period, he came into contact with Algerian nationalist circles present in France and founded, in January 1943, a fortnightly publication, Er Rachid, which was financed by the Abwehr and had a circulation of 80,000.

In 1943, Muhammad al-Ma'adi met Henri Lafont, head of the Parisian bureau of the Gestapo, with whom he founded the North Africa Brigade, officially constituted on 28 January 1944, under the patronage of Helmut Knochen, the head of the Gestapo in France. This brigade was made up of about 300 Algerians, mainly from the Goutte d'Or neighborhood of Paris. They were responsible for several massacres in Dordogne. In August 1944, he took refuge with his wife in Germany, where he was welcomed by the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, who helped him flee Europe to the Middle East. A French court sentenced him to life in prison in absentia.

He died of throat cancer in Egypt between 1954 and 1957.