The Mufti and the Holocaust

By John Rosenthal
Hoover Institution Policy Review, April-May 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten
By Klaus Gensicke
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 247 pages

From 1941 to 1945, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and the "father" of Palestinian radicalism, lived in Berlin as the honored guest of Nazi Germany. During this time, he collaborated with the Nazis in assembling the Muslim SS division "Handzar" in Bosnia, as well as in numerous propaganda activities aimed at Arab speakers.

The new book by German historian Klaus Gensicke provides unparalleled insight into the details of the mufti's relationship to his Nazi hosts.

In March 1933, the mufti sought contact to the new German authorities. The German general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, reported:

The Mufti explained to me today at length that Muslims both within Palestine and without welcome the new regime in Germany and hope for the spread of fascist, anti-democratic forms of government to other countries. Current Jewish economic and political influence is harmful everywhere and has to be combated. In order to be able to hit the standard of living of Jews, Muslims are hoping for Germany to declare a boycott [of "Jewish" goods], which they would then enthusiastically join throughout the Muslim world.

The German attitude toward the mufti would remain reserved throughout the first years of Nazi rule. Moreover, for at least part of the Nazi leadership, the immigration of German Jews to Palestine represented a tolerable solution to Germany's supposed "Jewish problem." This attitude was inimical to the plans of the mufti, who pleaded with German authorities to restrict Jewish immigration.

By August 1940, however, the situation had radically changed. The Germans had been quietly providing financial and material support to the mufti-led "Arab Revolt" in Palestine from 1936 to 1939. The aim of the revolt was to stop Jewish immigration. After guiding the Arab Revolt from exile in Beirut, the mufti had in the meanwhile taken refuge in Iraq. On August 26, Haddad asked for a declaration from Germany and Italy recognizing the right of the Arab countries to independence and "self-determination" and that they might resolve the "question of the Jewish element" just as Germany and Italy had done. In return, Haddad promised that Iraq would accord Germany and Italy "a privileged place" in its foreign relations.

The British military intervention in 1941 brought a provisional end to the mufti's plans of transforming Iraq into a pro-Axis beachhead in the Middle East. "Sonderkommando Junck," a German Luftwaffe mission dispatched by the Reich to support its allies in Iraq, failed to reverse the trend.

The Nazi leadership continued to accord central importance to the Iraqi "liberation struggle." The deposed Iraqi Prime Minister Gailani followed the mufti to Berlin, where he, too, took up residence in November 1941. For the remainder of the war years, the two Arab leaders competed jealously for Nazi favor.

German plans for a more muscular intervention to "liberate" Iraq were apparently contingent upon the successful conclusion of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Once the Wehrmacht had taken control of the southern Caucasus region, German troops were to sweep down into Iraq. The German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 put an end to such plans.

On November 28, 1941, three weeks after his arrival in Berlin, the mufti was received by Hitler. When the right time had come, Hitler told the mufti, the Arabs and other "non-European peoples" would be called on to "solve the Jewish problem" just as the "European nations" had done. A special SS commando unit was attached to Rommel's Afrika Korps. Its writ was in large part identical to that of the infamous Einsatzgruppen that accompanied the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union and that were responsible for the murder of upwards of one million Soviet Jews. Only the defeat of Rommel at El Alamein prevented German forces from entering Palestine and carrying out similar operations against the Jewish population there.

Among his other activities in Berlin, the mufti served as honorary chair of a newly founded "Islamic Central Institute" The institute was officially opened on December 18, 1942: during Eid al-Adha, the Islamic "Festival of Sacrifice." In a letter to Hitler on the occasion, the mufti expressed the hope that "thousands of Muslims around the world" would cooperate with Germany in the fight against "the common enemies": "Jews, Bolsheviks and Anglo-Saxons." The speech given by the mufti at the opening ceremony provides perhaps the clearest evidence that he had by this time successfully synthesized "traditional" Quranic and "modern" European Judeophobia:

The Jews and their accomplices are to be counted among the bitterest enemies of the Muslims, who made known ... their hostility since ancient times ... Every Muslim knows all too well how the Jews afflicted him and his faith in the first days of Islam and what hatefulness they displayed toward the great Prophet ... such that the Quran judged them to be the most irreconcilable enemies of the Muslims. ... They will always remain a divisive element in the world ... In England as in America, it is the Jewish influence alone that rules, and it is the same Jewish influence that is behind godless Communism.

In a talk at the Islamic Central Institute on November 2, 1943, the mufti called on Muslims to follow the example of National Socialist Germany, since the latter "knew how to save itself from the evil done by the Jews. ... It had precisely identified the Jews and decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish menace, in order to eliminate their evildoing from the world." Gensicke points to the latter remark as evidence that the mufti was "well informed" about the extermination program that was by this time long underway in the Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.

Perhaps the most shocking finding of Gensicke's research concerns the repeated efforts of the mufti after 1943 to ensure that no European Jews should elude the camps. For example, Bulgarian plans to permit some 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adult companions to immigrate to Palestine provoked a letter from the mufti to the Bulgarian foreign minister, pleading for the operation to be stopped. In the letter, dated May 6, 1943, Husseini invoked a "Jewish danger for the whole world and especially for the countries where Jews live."

According to the post-War recollections of a Foreign Ministry official, "The Mufti turned up all over the place making protests: in the Minister's office, in the waiting room of the Deputy Minister and in other sections: for example, Interior, the Press Office, the Broadcast service, and also the SS." "The Mufti was a sworn enemy of the Jews," the official concluded, "and he made no secret of the fact that he would have preferred to see them all killed."

Islamophobes will undoubtedly be tempted to point to the alleged admiration for Islam of this or that Nazi luminary to suggest that it is not National Socialism that is the source of rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim World but rather Islam that was perhaps the source or inspiration of the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists. A passage in Albert Speer's memoirs describes Hitler expressing his regrets that Arabs had failed to conquer Europe in the early Middle Ages, since their warlike Muslim religion was "perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament."

Hitler's belief in the racial inferiority of Arabs prevented him from fully utilizing the support that the mufti and his Arab nationalist allies could have provided the Nazi cause.
 

AR  What can we do but resolve anew to keep on fighting this monstrous tradition of persecuting Jews?