The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem-- A role in the Holocaust?

[Jaboschrek]

A 2-part article "The Mufti's Legacy of Hatred and Intransigence" from a Jewish paper on the Mufti's apparently pivotal role in the Holocaust.

The Jewish High Commissioner to Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, is flayed for having appointed Al Husseini as Mufti.

(small size pdf download links)

pt1
http://www.datafilehost.com/download-4652baec.html
http://www.datafilehost.com/download-f04008e2.html

pt2
http://www.datafilehost.com/download-3a2b77b5.html
http://www.datafilehost.com/download-97e3ce52.html

[Marcus]

In which "Jewish paper" was athat article published and when?

/Marcus

[Jaboschrek]

In the (Orthodox) London Jewish Tribune 11 and 18 December 2008.

Are there any errors of note in the article, or is it basically correct?

[Jaboschrek]

Author Wolfgang Schwanitz replies to a report in the Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? ... 7114855652

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite? ... 2FShowFull


"Etgar Lefkovits asks if the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is whitewashing the grand mufti's biography on-line ("US museum draws flak for pro-Nazi mufti bio," March 18). Not at all. It's not bad intention, but the wrong approach that has led to the thesis of "ideological and strategic incompatibility between Nazism and Arab nationalism."


The Mufti of Jerusalem meets with Adolf Hitler to appeal for his help in implementing the "Final Solution" in Mandate Palestine.

The main events of Hajj Amin al-Husseini's life were kept in the dark before the millennium. Then the mufti's memoirs and other studies appeared in Arabic. Obviously the museum's authors - surely not Middle East historians - do not know those books or that language.

Big chunks of knowledge have been left out in the museum's narrative. Almost nothing relates to the 29 years he lived after World War II, though there is the fairy tale of his "escape" from Paris to Cairo in 1946. But escape? Before this happened, the French said he was free to go.

Missing is his help in getting thousands of Nazis jobs in the Middle East in the military, security or propaganda (most converted to Islam). You wonder from where the deadly ideology came that pushed Israel into a spiral of struggle for survival. Here you learn nothing about the mufti's bases in Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Indonesia or Pakistan. Nor is anything said about his involvement in the murder of those willing to come to terms with the young Jewish state, people like Jordan's King Abdullah I.

Missing is the mufti's worldwide incitement of terror against Israel and Jews, the support for his protégé Yasser Arafat and his role in finding retreats for Muslim Brothers in cities like Geneva or Munich. You don't read anything about the global Islamic organizations he built until his death in 1974.

Even the mufti's year of birth is in quotation marks, although he stated clearly it was 1897. It goes on with misguiding sections, mistakes and omissions. Hitler certainly recognized the Arabs' wish for independence, and the mufti as their foremost speaker. He stressed his basic position in a 1939 meeting with Ibn Saud's envoy, and publicly at the end of 1940, giving further secret assurances to the mufti in person a year later. The text of the museum misrepresents facts and evidence.



Berlin and Rome had already done a joint broadcast declaring support for Arab aspirations. Hitler repeated it orally and in writing. The dictator was most compatible with the mufti. Until the very end, Hitler ordered full support for him - as explained by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1944. They even prepared a new financial agreement with the mufti as late as April 5, 1945.

Hitler needed the mufti as an accomplice in the Holocaust planned for the Middle East and as an adviser in Muslim affairs. For his part, the mufti found much common ground with Hitler. Just read his appeal of 1937 to all Muslims (not mentioned in the text). In a time when even Berlin still had various projects on the table about "how to solve the Jewish question," the mufti called on Muslims for jihad to rid their lands of Jews. In a mixture of religious and racist hatred, he likened them to "microbes and scum of all countries."

No chance that close relations arose at the end of 1937 when Adolf Eichmann traveled to Cairo, because he failed to meet the mufti in Palestine. So Husseini approached the Nazis in turn with a deal: For German help and weapons to prevent the rise of a national Jewish home, he would spread Nazi ideology and "keep up the terror in all Mandatory areas."

Though the relations went through various phases, he soon had liaison officers in the four most powerful German offices. He enjoyed a steady relationship with the SS since 1937 (not 1943, as the museum claims). So close did the mufti feel to Hitler that he offered him a risky venture in September 1944: a mediation between Hitler and Stalin. The mufti's protests against the release of Jews to Palestine had the desired impact. He discusses this and more in his memoirs, without mercy or regret.

It is also wrong to say Husseini conditioned his call for a general uprising on some declaration. On the contrary, he was the Nazis' most willing executioner among the Arabs. In the Middle East he also kept a wide institutional basis for authority over Muslims in other parts of the world. He got plenty of money and aides.

Displaying a biography today and not mentioning what happened in Germany in the middle of 1943 is astounding. In his memoirs, the mufti admitted that Heinrich Himmler, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, told him secrets of the German empire. Besides "research for a nuclear bomb," he told him on the persecution of Jews: "Up to now we have exterminated [abadna] around three million of them." This admission discovered in his memoirs in 1999 ended decades of heated debate on what the mufti knew about the Holocaust.

All in all, the museum displays a deeply flawed text. Carol Greenwald of Holocaust Museum Watch has alerted us rightly (for the second time) and the museum has homework to do in reaching a respectable academic standard.

The writer is working on a biography of the Grand Mufti."

[Von Schadewald]

Netanyahu's comments on any Al Husseini-Holocaust connection has caused some agitation

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/ ... io-pJu6Hn4

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... -holocaust

http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Confl ... fti-429800

[David Thompson]

Von Schadewald -- Since AHF is an apolitical forum, current affairs are off-topic.

[pugsville]

The root question is historical,

These claims have been laughed at by most historians.

Yad Vashem’s chief historian Prof. Dina Porat (Israel's holocaust museum's chief historian)
“The mufti had nothing to do with fomenting or developing the Final Solution.”
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Netany ... ans-428670

The idea that Hitler was influenced by the Mufi are nonsense. The Mufti probably had some influence stopping some transfer of Jews from Germany to Palestine, but such deals could have been scuppered by the Allies (the Germans wanted something pretty tangible to do so)

The Mufti was a nasty piece of work/ pretty despicable and arguably did much to destroy any chance of decent Palestinian leadership.

[little grey rabbit]

Given the decision making leading up to the decision to implement a final solution by extermination is something of a black hole, I don't see that it is impossible that a silver tongued Grand Mufti could have persuaded Hitler - it is at least as plausible as any of the other explanations.

I think Dieter Wisliceny gave a lot of testimony in this regard:

In my opinion, the Grand Mufti, who has been in Berlin since 1941, played a role in the decision of the German government to exterminate the European Jews, the importance of which must not be disregarded. He has repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution for the Palestine problem.

In his messages broadcast from Berlin, he surpassed us in anti-Jewish attacks. He was one of Eichmann's best friends and has constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he has visited incognito the gas chamber in Auschwitz."

[??Rudolf] Kastner, a leader of the Hungarian Jewish community also confirmed the central role of the Grand Mufti

Shortly after the war Kastner submitted an affidavit to British authorities in which he claimed that Eichmann's subordinate Dieter Wisliceny had told Kastner he was convinced that the mufti had "played a central role in the decision to exterminate the Jews." Rather than indict Husseini at Nuremberg, the British dismissed this and other charges as Zionist propaganda. (Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem [NY: Columbia University Press, 1988], pp. 105-107)

[Originally posted here: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=181493]

The wonderful thing about the Holocaust, you can prove anything you like depending on the source material you use. If you feel that Dieter Wislicency is a reliable witness and in absence of any firm records of the November 1941 meeting or even any firm date when the final solution was finally determined on, then the Grand Mufti was influential in making the decision. Why not? In the wider perspective it is no more incredible than Treblinka.

If you think Dieter Wislicency was lying, you would need to provide a motive for him providing such a firm and unequivocal account.

[ChristopherPerrien]

In your own citing of a quote. Which seems to contradict what you (or people in the past)are implying(I think?), and nullifies this whole topic, beside what Yad Vashem’s chief historian Prof. Dina Porat said.

Rather than indict Husseini at Nuremberg, the British dismissed this and other charges as Zionist propaganda.

Seems to be both the motive and the end result. Not sure about who "the British" are. If it means the group of Nuremberg prosecutors, I rely on Dodd's assessment/POV of them.

The wonderful thing about the Holocaust, you can prove anything you like depending on the source material you use.

How true, and also a very disturbing thing about whole Holocaust in general, when being used to equate Arabs with Nazis, today; As it covertly? implies, wished for genocide of Jews by one Arab leader in the past, gives right to real genocide of Arabs by Jews today.

[Von Schadewald]

"Historian: The Mufti planned to burn Jews"
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/ ... i2aO5u6Hn4

[4thskorpion]

Farhud - the pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on June 1–2, 1941.

The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust by Edwin Black.

The Farhud.png

BBC: Farhud memories: Baghdad's 1941 slaughter of the Jews

[Paul Lantos]

Farhud - the pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on June 1–2, 1941.

That argues more for inspiration FROM the Nazis, not the reverse.

For nearly 2 years by this point the Nazis had been starving the Jews of Poland in closed ghettos and had forbidden emigration. They had been fantasizing about all sorts of exterminatory policies during this time -- the Madagascar plan was exterminatory -- it was a plan to bottle up millions of Jews on an undeveloped island guarded by the SS. The Nisko plan during this time was a micro-scale realization of this resettlement in which 95,000 Jews were deported in the 1939-1940 winter to a "reservation" in Poland with absolutely no provisions for their survival. During this pre-Barbarossa era there were already extermination programs in effect in Aktion T4, its corollary in occupied Poland, and in the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia. AND the regime was planning for their war of annihilation, in which the narrative painted "Judaeo-Bolshevism" as an existential threat.

BTW the nephew of the Mufti was apparently given a tour of the Birkenau crematoria:

High-ranking guests occasionally visited the crematorium to observe the killing operation. Do you remember any visit in particular?

One day the Mufti came. He was right next to me. The Kapo said that it was the Mufti. This was in August 1944. He wore a strange hat. He came to watch the cremations. Maybe he thought about doing something similar in Palestine. The Germans explained to him how the murder mechanism at the crematoria worked. They'd dressed him in German uniform except for the hat, which was his. I saw him outside, in front of the building. At that time, we were pulverizing the bones and the Kapo was working in the crematorium. I don't know how he blurted out that it was the Mufti.

Testimony by Shaul Chazan in:
Gideon Greif. We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz.

In a footnote Greif mentions:

The "Mufti" mentioned here is not the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, but his nephew, Mussa Abdalla al-Husseini, who visited Auschwitz in 1944 accompanied by a German called Grobe. In 1951, the latter al-Husseini was responsible for the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan. He was hanged in Amman. Author Jennie Lebel of Ramat Aviv gave me this information, for which I thank her.

[AJFFM]

Farhud - the pogrom carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on June 1–2, 1941.

The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust by Edwin Black.

The Farhud.png

BBC: Farhud memories: Baghdad's 1941 slaughter of the Jews

Again, the "Mufti" was a nobody who inherited his "daddy's" old job and had little if any influence either in Palestine or outside of it. Making him this legendary figure who toyed with the world is no less idiotic than the conspiracy theories about Freemasonry and the Protocols of the Elder of Zion.

The Farhud (which was not limited to Jews as propaganda would tell you but none the less affected them disproportionately) was perpetrated by Rashid Ali Al Kailani (or Al-Gaylani) who was no stranger to stirring up ethno-religious tensions for political gain as he did by rallying the Kurds against the Assyrians in the infamous massacres in Nineveh in the late 20s early 30s. Of course there was anti-Jewish sentiment in Iraq for various reasons but the prime mover was defeat of Al-Gaylani who thought the Nazis would win and "liberate" Iraq.

As for the rest of Arab nationalists who courted Nazi Germany, they were no different than any other European nationalist who did that nor were they in power when Israel was created and the exodus began (an exodus that began well before WWII but that is a different story). They majority of them never reached power and those who did (Sadat) were simply too minor players to have had any influence during the war.

Indeed the majority of Arab nationalists at the time were socialists/communists rather than fascists and were firmly in the Allies camp for ideological reasons.

[AJFFM]

"Historian: The Mufti planned to burn Jews"
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/ ... i2aO5u6Hn4

From the "Historian":"Haj Amin al-Husseini was an officer in the Turkish army"" and the gem "He took that idea from the Turks"

He never served in the Ottoman Army, he was conscripted as a private before being immediately discharged due to "sickness" and then fled to Palestine where he volunteered for the British managed Arab-Revolt Army. He was actually quite pro-British even after the Balfour declaration. What changed him was Herbert Samuel and the confiscation of thousands of hectares of land, including his family's, and giving them to Jewish immigrants.

[Paul Lantos]

Hitler was also inspired by the Ottomans.

Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?