Recent work by historians and apologists has revealed that an influential, international religious leader was also an ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler. His name was not Pope Pius XII but Hajj Amin al-Husseini. This Grand Mufti of Jerusalem recruited whole divisions of fanatics to fight and kill in the name of extremism.
Revered in some circles today as one of the fathers of modern radical Islam, al-Husseini has been the subject of a number of modern studies. Scholars such as David Dalin, John Rothmann, Chuck Morse, and others have courageously brought al-Husseini’s actions to light. "Hitler’s Mufti," as many have called him, had a direct hand in some of the darkest moments of the Holocaust, the slaughter of tens of thousands of Christians, and the formation of some of the most hate-filled generations of modern history. Al-Husseini is a testament to the way that evil finds evil.
After taking the mandatory pilgrimage to Mecca (the Hajj) in 1913, al-Husseini was drafted into the Ottoman Army. He was assigned to the College of Reserve Officers and subsequently named to an infantry regiment as a non-commissioned officer. With the onset of World War I in 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered into the bloody conflict as a member of the Central Powers with Germany and Austria. Al-Husseini found himself in an inefficient army that, compared to the highly mechanized forces of the West, was lacking in leadership and modern equipment. He soon heard of the genocide of the Armenian people—one of the most horrendous incidents in the terrible global conflict.
In 1916, al-Husseini departed the Ottoman Army on disability leave and spent the rest of the war in Jerusalem. Angered by the decision of the Allied victors to deny Arab participation in the discussions leading to the Treaty of Versailles, al-Husseini was even more infuriated by the sudden increase of Jewish immigrants into British-controlled Palestine. An ardent anti-Semite who hated Jews with a deep fervor, he first came to the attention of the British in 1920 when he organized riots against Jews. Charged with inciting violence that left five Jews dead and another 211 injured, he fled to Syria and was sentenced in absentia to 10 years’ imprisonment.
After the death of the first Grand Mufti, Mohammed Tahir al-Husseini, in 1908, the position stayed in the family when the Turks awarded the title to his son Kamil al-Husseini. Although the British assumed control of Jerusalem during World War I, Kamil al-Husseini remained in his post until his death in 1921, when the British decided that Kamil’s brother Hajj Amin would be an acceptable choice—despite his criminal past and known extremist ties. Al-Husseini remained as Grand Mufti under the British in spite of his activities and was removed only in 1948, when King Abdullah I of Jordan banned him from Jerusalem and named Hussam Al-din Jarallah as Grand Mufti.
Once in power in Jerusalem, al-Husseini was appointed by the British to head the newly established Supreme Muslim Council, created to prepare the way for Arab self-governance in Palestine. Al-Husseini took the chance given to him by the appeasement-minded British to call for the deaths of Jews and set out on a campaign of terror against the Jews in Palestine. In subsequent years, al-Husseini was involved in plots to massacre Jews, among them 60 Jewish immigrants in Hebron and 45 more in Safad in 1929. In 1936, he helped lead a rebellion in Palestine against the British. The following year the British condemned al-Husseini (though permitting him to retain the title of Grand Mufti), and he fled to Syria once more. From there he continued to plot against the British control over Palestine.
Al-Husseini deepened his outreach to the Nazis in 1937 when he met with two Nazi SS officers, including Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust in Damascus, Syria. The SS representatives had been sent at the express order of Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy head of the SS under Heinrich Himmler and chief of SS Intelligence and the Nazi security services, including the Gestapo. Heydrich recognized immediately that al-Husseini was a potentially valuable asset for Nazi interests in the Middle East and worked to cultivate him.
Four years later, al-Husseini threw his support to a pro-Nazi revolt in Iraq against the British-backed prime minister, Nuri Said Pasha. Going to Baghdad, al-Husseini issued a fatwa for a jihad against the British. Barely a month later, British troops ended the coup and occupied the country, whereupon al-Husseini fled to Iran. Although given sanctuary in the embassies of Japan and Italy, al-Husseini was again forced to be on the move when Iran was itself occupied by the British and Soviet armies. Al-Husseini made his way out of Iran with Italian diplomats who provided him with an Italian passport. He shaved his beard and dyed his hair to avoid being recognized by British agents and Iranian police.
Al-Husseini reached Rome in October 1941 and began serious discussions with the Mussolini regime. The result was twofold. First, he secured a meeting with Mussolini himself and then completed a practical agreement with the Italians. In return for Axis recognition of an Arab state of a fascist nature that would encompass Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and the Transjordan, he agreed to support the war against Britain. The Italian foreign ministry also urged Mussolini to grant al-Husseini one million lire.
At their meeting, al-Husseini requested German assistance with the Arab independence movement and Nazi support in the extermination of any Jewish homeland. For his part, Hitler promised to aid that liberation movement, but went still further, promising that the aim of Nazi Germany would be the elimination of all Jews living under British protection once such territories had been conquered. This was described by al-Husseini in his own memoirs:
Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish people in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: "The Jews are yours." (Ami Isseroff and Peter FitzGerald-Morris, "The Iraq Coup Attempt of 1941, the Mufti, and the Farhud")The Axis’ Kept Man
Satisfied with his newly concretized relations with the Nazis, al-Husseini chose to remain in the service of the Axis and settled in Berlin in a lavish mansion that had been confiscated from a Jewish family. The Nazis paid him a monthly stipend of 62,500 Reichsmarks(approximately 20,000 dollars), payments that continued until April 1945, when only the fall of Berlin to the Red Army ended Hitler’s financial support. From his post, al-Husseini headed the Nazi-Arab Cooperation Section and helped build a network of German spies across the Middle East through his followers. Scheming for a desired dark future of Nazi-Islamic leadership, the Mufti founded an Islamic Institute in Dresden to provide training for young radical Muslims who would serve as chaplains for his field units and also head out across the Middle East and the world to sow the seeds of jihadism and anti-Semitism.
The Mufti’s Final Solution
According to the testimony of Adolf Eichmann’s chief deputy Dieter Wisliceny (who was hanged for war crimes) the Mufti played a role in encouraging the Final Solution and was a close friend and advisor to Eichmann in the Holocaust’s implementation across Europe. Wisliceny testified further that al-Husseini had a close association with Heinrich Himmler and visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz, where he exhorted the staff to be even more dedicated in its important work.
To assist the practical slaughter of Jews and Christians, al-Husseini built an army of Muslim volunteer units for the Waffen-SS (the combat units of the dread SS) to operate for the Nazi cause in the Balkans. While the appeal for volunteers from among Muslims always struggled to meet the demands for new recruits, al-Husseini was able to organize three divisions of Bosnian Muslims who were then trained as elements of the Waffen-SS. The largest radical Muslim unit was the 13th Waffen-SS Handzar ("Dagger") division that boasted over 21,000 men. They were joined by the Bosnian 23rd Waffen-SS Kama Division and the Albanian Skanderbeg 21st Waffen-SS Division. The Muslim Waffen-SS forces fought across the Balkans against Communist partisans and then assisted in the genocide of Yugoslavian Jews and in the persecution and slaughter of Gypsies and Christian Serbs in 1944 and 1945. The brutality extended to Catholics as well, for the Muslim Waffen-SS cut a path of destruction across the Balkans that encompassed a large number of Catholic parishes, churches, and shrines and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Catholics. By the end of the war, al-Husseini’s fanatical soldiers had killed over 90 percent of the Jews in Bosnia.
As Pius was risking his safety and that of the Church in Italy, al-Husseini continued to call for the extermination of all Jews. On November 2, 1943, as the Nazis tried to press forward with the roundup of Italian Jews, the Grand Mufti declared on German radio of the Jewish people, "They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals."
With little effort, al-Husseini escaped from his comfortable house arrest. From there he traveled to Cairo, where he considered himself safe thanks to the patronage of Egypt’s King Farouk. Even with the fall of Farouk and the rise of Gamal Abdel-Nasser as head of Egypt in 1952, al-Husseini remained safe. His influence was felt throughout the Arab world, most so in galvanizing opposition to Zionism and the birth of Israel. He supported the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, was involved in the assassination of King Abdullah I of Jordan in 1951, and served as president of the World Islamic Congress. His last public appearance came in 1962 when he delivered a speech to that conference. He used his final opportunity to speak to the world to call for the ethnic cleansing of the Jews. He died in Lebanon in 1974, a beloved and revered figure among radical Muslims all over the world.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s legacy was to inspire generations of terrorists, Islamic jihadists, and such dictators as Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The foremost exemplar of his influence was a young terrorist and distant relative who became one of his most ardent students: Yasser Arafat, the future leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Rabbi David Dalin—one of Pope Pius XII’s greatest defenders—offers a fitting final word:
The "most dangerous" cleric in modern history, to use John Cornwell’s phrase, was not Pope Pius XII but Hajj Amin al-Husseini, whose anti-Jewish Islamic fundamentalism was as dangerous in World War II as it is today . . . The grand mufti was the Nazi collaborator par excellence. "Hitler’s mufti" is truth. "Hitler’s pope" is myth. (The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, 137)SIDEBARS
Child Murderer
The following year, al-Husseini blocked the emigration of 4,000 Jewish children and 500 accompanying adults to Palestine that was proposed by the governments of Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. The children were sent instead to the gas chambers.
Elpeleg, Zvi, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin Al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (Frank Cass, 1993)
Morse, Chuck, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini (iUniverse, 2003)
Perlman, Moshe, Mufti of Jerusalem (Pavilion Press, 2006)
Dalin, David, The Myth of Hitler’s Pope (Regnery, 2005)
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