Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (9 page)

On March 19, 1943, in a radio broadcast celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the mufti invoked Muhammad as a pretext for inciting Muslim anger and violence against the Prophet’s enemy, the Jews. “Arabs and Moslems, on this occasion of the birthday of the Prophet, who crushed Jewish ambitions in the past and completely eliminated them from Moslem countries, thereby setting us an example, on such a day Moslems and Arabs should vow before God utterly to crush Jewish ambitions and prove that faith in God is greater than imperialism and far more powerful than the devilry which surrounds international Judaism.”
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His broadcasts provide irrefutable evidence that he knew about the extermination of the Jews. In a radio broadcast from Berlin on September 21, 1944, al-Husseini spoke of “the eleven million Jews of the world.” The mufti knew that in 1939 there were seventeen million Jews in the world.
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The Israeli historian Moshe Pearlman, a contemporary of the mufti living in Jerusalem, concluded that the numbers used in this broadcast revealed the full extent of the mufti’s knowledge. “Why ‘eleven million’? No one outside Germany knew at the time the scale of Jewish extermination. It was known that before the war the Jewish population numbered nearly seventeen million. The ex-Mufti’s figure was written off at the time as a slip of the tongue, or an error in the script. But now the facts are known. It was no arithmetic error. Haj Amin knew then what only Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann knew: that more than five million Jews had been liquidated.”
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Haj Amin al-Husseini, Heinrich Himmler, and the Muslim Waffen-SS

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,
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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, which had been given the status of a separate state after the German conquest of Yugoslavia.
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In April 1943, at the request of Himmler, al-Husseini traveled to the Balkans to help in the recruitment of Muslims for the Waffen-SS.
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It was to be composed entirely of Bosnian Muslim volunteers.
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Al-Husseini was more than eager to help Himmler and his deputies in the SS organize the Bosnian Waffen-SS Handschar Division, which would both contribute significantly to the German war effort and play an instrumental role in the planned extermination of Bosnia’s Jews. In a speech that the mufti delivered in March 1943, just a few weeks prior to leaving for Sarajevo, he said that “the hearts of all Muslims must today go out to our Islamic brothers in Bosnia, who are forced to endure a tragic fate. They are being persecuted by the Serbian and Communist bandits, who receive support from England and the Soviet Union…. They are being murdered, their possessions are robbed, and their villages are burned. England and its allies bear a great accountability before history for mishandling and murdering Europe’s Muslims, just as they have done in Arabic lands and in India.”
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Upon his arrival in Sarajevo, the mufti was greeted by cheering crowds and met with Bosnian Muslim leaders, who aided him in exhorting their Muslim followers to join the Waffen-SS. Bosnian Muslim religious leaders pressured their congregants, urging Muslims who came to pray at the city’s mosques to volunteer to join the proposed Muslim Waffen-SS Division.
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Al-Husseini himself visited all of the city’s mosques and reviewed the Muslim Waffen-SS troops that he helped recruit in Bosnia in 1943 and 1944. Photographs of the mufti reviewing the troops appeared in the
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung,
German newsreels, and other publications. One of several photographs of him reviewing these Bosnian Waffen-SS troops appeared on the cover of the popular Nazi magazine
Wiener Illustrierte
(
Vienna Illustrated
) January 12, 1944,
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and was subsequently reprinted on several occasions as evidence of his collaboration with the Axis.
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Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, interviewed the mufti in Cairo in June 1948 and wrote about al-Husseini’s wartime radio broadcasts from Berlin: “This picture and the recordings of radio broadcasts do indeed prove collaboration.”
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Charismatic and passionate as always, the mufti was demonstrably successful in his recruitment efforts. In his sermon at Sarajevo’s largest mosque, he brought his audience to tears. To further recruitment, he wrote a book titled
Islam and the Jews,
which was distributed to Bosnian Muslim SS units during the war,
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as part of his efforts to incite the murder of Bosnian Jews. To Himmler’s delight, al-Husseini was eminently successful in these efforts: With his encouragement and incitement, the Bosnian Muslim Waffen-SS company that he recruited, the notorious “Handschar troopers,” slaughtered 90 percent—12,600—of Bosnia’s 14,000 Jews.
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The mufti later recruited and sent other Bosnian Muslim military units to Hungary, where they aided in the killing of Jews.
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The mufti’s work in Bosnia was praised and supported by his friend Himmler, who established a special mullah military school in Dresden to train the Bosnian Muslim recruits.
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In January 1944, during a three-day visit with the Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Division, al-Husseini gave a speech in which he made clear the basis of the Muslim alliance with Nazi Germany that he had done so much to forge and shape:

This division of Bosnian Muslims established with the help of Greater Germany is an example to Muslims in all countries. There is no other deliverance for them from imperialistic oppression than hard fighting to preserve their homes and faith. Many common interests exist between the Islamic world and Greater Germany, and those make cooperation a matter of course. The Reich is fighting against the same enemies who robbed the Muslims of their countries and suppressed their faith in Asia, Africa, and Europe….

Friendship and collaboration between two peoples must be built on a firm foundation. The necessary ingredients here are common spiritual and material interests as well as the same ideal. The relationship between the Muslims and the Germans is built on this foundation. Never in its history has Germany attacked a Muslim nation. Germany battles world Jewry, Islam’s principal enemy. Germany also battles England and its allies, who have persecuted millions of Muslims, as well as Bolshevism, which subjugates forty million Muslims and threatens the Islamic faith in other lands. Any one of these arguments would be enough of a foundation for a friendly relationship between two peoples…. My enemy’s enemy is my friend….
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In recruiting the Bosnian Waffen-SS, al-Husseini played an important role in Hitler’s extermination of Europe’s Jews. It was not, however, his only direct contribution to Hitler’s Final Solution. In other ways, the mufti contributed actively to the Holocaust.

One of the ways in which he did so was to obstruct ransom negotiations that could have facilitated further European Jewish immigration to Palestine. In early 1946, the American journalist Edgar Ansel Mowrer, writing in the
New York Post,
documented a proposal made by the British government, in the spring of 1943, to permit four thousand Jewish refugee children from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia, accompanied by five hundred adults, to enter Palestine in exchange for the release of twenty thousand German prisoners of war. Himmler, Eichmann, and other German leaders were at first interested in the proposal and entered into negotiations with the British for the exchange of German POWs for the more than four thousand Jewish refugee children who might have fled to Palestine, but they subsequently withdrew from the negotiations when al-Husseini protested.
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As a result, the Jewish children were sent to death camps in Poland. In his postwar affidavit at Nuremberg, Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s deputy, testified that the mufti’s opposition had been responsible for the failure of these exchange negotiations.
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After reviewing official German correspondence about the negotiations, the distinguished Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg also concluded that there was a definite connection, proof positive, between the mufti’s protests and the end of the negotiations.
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On several other occasions, al-Husseini intervened actively with authorities of the Third Reich to prevent Jews from leaving Europe for Palestine. At one point he lobbied Hitler personally to block a plan to allow Jews to leave Hungary, again claiming that they would settle in Palestine and reinforce a new center of world Jewish power. In May and June 1943, the mufti sent letters to the Axis governments of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy in which he demanded that they withdraw their authorization for Jewish emigration and urged them instead to send their Jews to Poland,
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where they would end up in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. In his May 6, 1943, letter to the Bulgarian foreign minister, he wrote “that it would be very beneficial to prevent the Jews from leaving their country…. With this in mind one avoids the danger they would bring. And this would be a thankful deed toward the Arab people.”
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The mufti’s letter to the Italians, asking them to use their influence on Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine, interfered with talks then under way for the ransoming of Jews from Italian-occupied Croatia.
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Finally, at the urging of the mufti, Heinrich Himmler issued a prohibition against permitting any Jews to immigrate to Palestine from territories occupied by Germany.
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Exterminating the Jews of Palestine

Al-Husseini also participated in high-level Nazi discussions about the German war effort in the Middle East and in planning for the eventual extermination of the Jews of Palestine. Nazi Germany had made plans to expand the extermination of the Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine. These plans, formulated in 1942 as the German conquest of the Middle East seemed quite plausible, would have implemented the mass slaughter of the Jews of Palestine.
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In consultation with the mufti, the Nazi leadership had created a special Einsatzgruppe Egypt, a mobile SS squad, under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, which was to carry out the mass murder of Palestinian Jewry. By the summer of 1942, anticipating a German military victory in the Middle East, the Einsatzgruppe Egypt had been standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine, attached to German general Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, where it would have begun killing the close to half a million Jews then living in Palestine. This Middle Eastern death squad was led by SS Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff, one of Eichmann’s most trusted deputies and a confidant of al-Husseini’s.

According to documents found by the Allied armies in Germany when they entered the country at the end of World War II, the mufti persistently urged Himmler and other Nazi leaders to consider bombing Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where the vast majority of Palestine’s Jewish community was concentrated. One of these documents, a secret report of the German air force command dated October 29, 1943, revealed that for the previous six months, al-Husseini had been proposing an air attack on Jerusalem as well as an attack on the more heavily Jewish-populated city of Tel Aviv. The air attack on Jerusalem was to have targeted the headquarters of the Jewish Agency, the provisional Jewish government of Palestine. According to this secret report, the mufti proposed that November 2, the anniversary of the British government’s Balfour Declaration, should be celebrated by such an attack.
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At the same time, and again under pressure from al-Husseini, the German air command was considering an attack on military objectives along the Palestine coast.
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The same secret report described the mufti’s efforts to secure an attack on Tel Aviv, which would have required the mobilization of an increased number of German army troops in the Middle East.
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Hermann Göring, head of the German air force, eventually rejected the mufti’s request on the pragmatic grounds that sufficient additional military forces were not available to be transferred from Europe to Palestine to successfully carry out such an attack.
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Apparently, the mufti did not give up hopes for a German air offensive against Palestine, for on March 30, 1944, he again urged the German air force to bomb Jewish buildings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
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Again, the German air force command, under Göring, declined to carry out the mufti’s request.

Unable to persuade the German air force to act on its own initiative, in late 1944 al-Husseini organized the dispatch of five parachuters to Palestine with ten containers of a toxin to poison Tel Aviv’s water system. Fortunately, they were caught near Jericho before they could carry out their mission. A police report said that these ten containers held enough poison to kill 250,000 people.
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Escaping Indictment at Nuremberg

Had he been captured and imprisoned by the Allies at the end of World War II, Haj Amin al-Husseini would certainly have been indicted and convicted as a war criminal at Nuremberg, as were so many other leaders of Hitler’s Nazi regime.