The remarks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem about the role of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust have engendered a massive, and mostly critical response. It is important to define in more precise terms the role of the Mufti in those tragic days.
Prime Minister Netanyahu was incorrect in asserting in his speech that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, gave Hitler the idea of annihilating the Jews of Europe during World War II. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” said Netanyahu, stating that the Mufti protested to Hitler that “they’ll all come here,” referring to Palestine. “‘So what shall I do with them?’” Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking al-Husseini. “He said, ‘Burn them.”
The problem with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement, as several Israeli historians and politicians have pointed out, is that there is no documented evidence that such a conversation between the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler ever took place. The Nazi plans for the extermination of the Jews, predated Haj Amin al-Husseini’s arrival in Berlin and his meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941. While Haj Amin al-Husseini would play a prominent role in encouraging and accelerating the Final Solution, there is no historical evidence that the Mufti had any part in the initial Nazi decision to exterminate the Jews. Even Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s defense minister and a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, questioned the historical accuracy of the Prime Minister’s statement, saying in a radio interview that, “history is actually very, very clear. Hitler initiated it. Haj Amin al-Husseini joined him.” Yet, Prime Minister Netanyahu was correct in focusing renewed attention on the role and complicity of Haj Amin al-Husseini in the extermination of the Jews.
There is no doubt that Hitler was intent on the extermination of the Jews throughout his years in politics. From his earliest speeches in the 1920s to his infamous address to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler made no secret of his ultimate goal, the extermination of the Jews. It is also true that Haj Amin al Husseini was a notorious anti-Semite, infamous for his maniacal Jew-hatred, for many years before he met Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1941. As one of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the predecessor of Hamas, the Mufti was instrumental in inciting the pogrom-like anti-Jewish Arab Palestinian riots of 1920 and 1929, as well as the Arab Revolt or Intifada of 1936, resulting in the murder of hundreds of Palestine’s Jews. Throughout World War II he was an active collaborator in the murder of the Jews of Europe. Had Hitler’s General Erwin Rommel won the battle of El Alamein in Egypt in 1942, and had the Nazi armies subsequently gone on to conquer Palestine and the rest of the Middle East as Hitler hoped would happen, there is little doubt that the Mufti would have played a central role in exterminating the 450,000 Jews that were then living in Palestine.
Recent revelations have documented that the German government had specific plans, formulated in 1942, to build death camps, modeled after Auschwitz, in Tel Aviv and Jaffa in what they hoped to be “liberated Palestine”. SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Walther Rauff, one of Adolf Eichmann’s most trusted deputies, was assigned the task of implementing the plans for the death camps following the hoped-for German conquest of Palestine. Only the defeat of General Rommel’s German army at El Alamein, one of the decisive military engagements of World War II, prevented these plans from being implemented.
When the Mufti arrived in Berlin in November 1941 the Nazi plans for the annihilation of the Jews, contrary to what Netanyahu has asserted, had already been formulated without Haj Amin al-Husseini’s previous advice or inspiration. Did, however, the Mufti subsequently encourage and actively participate in the extermination of the Jews? The answer is an unequivocal yes.
Haj Amin’s meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941 is documented in both in the German archives and in his own diary. They shared mutual objectives: the removal of Great Britain from the Middle East and the destruction of the Jews. Hitler made the following statement to the Mufti in the course of their conversation: “He would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.” The Mufti recorded in his diary that Hitler declared, “The objectives of my fight are clear. Primarily, I am fighting the Jews without respite, and this fight includes the fight against the so-called Jewish National Home in Palestine … I am determined to find a solution for the Jewish problem, progressing step by step without cessation.” There is no doubt that the Mufti understood that it was Hitler’s goal to destroy the Jews.
Haj Amin established close relationships with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, Heinrich Himmler, the architect of genocide, and Adolf Eichmann, the man who insured the implementation of what was called “The Final Solution.” At the Nuremberg Trials, Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann’s senior deputies, testified that the Mufti “was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination process. I heard him say that accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz”. The Mufti, in the presumed privacy of his diary observed that Eichmann was a “very rare diamond, the best savior of the Arabs.” Haj Amin treasured a photo from Himmler, dated July 4, 1943, inscribed with the words, “His Eminence, the Grand Mufti. In remembrance.”
In 1943, Heinrich Himmler placed Haj Amin al-Husseini in charge of recruiting Muslims into elite units to serve in the Nazi-occupied Balkans, North Africa and the Middle East. It is an astonishing but often forgotten fact of history that as many as one hundred thousand Muslims in Europe were recruited by the mufti and fought for Germany during the course of World War II in divisions of the Waffen-SS. Under al-Husseini’s leadership and direction, two of the best-known and most infamous Waffen SS Nazi-Muslim divisions were established in Nazi-occupied Bosnia and in Croatia. To further recruitment for these divisions, he wrote a book titled Islam and the Jews, which was distributed to the members of the Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS divisions throughout the war, as part of his successful efforts to incite and carry out the mass murder of 90% of Bosnian Jews.
Based in Berlin throughout the years of the Holocaust, and working closely with Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister, the mufti organized and planned propaganda broadcasts throughout the Arab world. Many of his most passionate radio broadcasts were classically anti-Semitic, designed to incite hatred and violence against radical Islam’s greatest enemy, the Jews. In one of his most notorious radio broadcasts, on March 1, 1944, the mufti urged his fellow Arabs to murder their Jewish neighbors: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” In another radio broadcast, on September 21, 1944, Haj Amin al-Husseini revealed that he knew that five million Jews had already been exterminated.
Bartley Crum, a prominent American attorney and member of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine affirmed that the Mufti was directly responsible for “helping spearhead the extermination of European Jewry.”
Haj Amin al-Husseini should have been indicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg, but was not indicted because the British, French, and the Yugoslavian governments were afraid of a backlash from the Muslim world. Instead, in 1946, he managed to escape Europe arriving in Cairo, where he was greeted as a hero, and became the mentor of several young radical Islamists, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and the Mufti’s cousin, seventeen year old Yasser Arafat. When Haj Amin died in 1974, Arafat would attend the Mufti’s funeral and eulogize him as his hero and mentor.
So: Was Prime Minister Netanyahu correct in blaming the Mufti for the Holocaust? He would have been more precise if he had said that the Mufti had full knowledge of, encouraged, and actively collaborated in the Holocaust. While he didn’t come up with the idea, there is no doubt that the Mufti played a critical role in the extermination of the Jews.
David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann are the authors of Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam.
