16. Hitler’s Mufti

Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP

A half-century after Max von Oppenheim’s prediction and at a time when he became again a top German agent, this time under the Nazis, Rashid Ali al-Gaylani—an ally of Mufti al-Husseini and a descendant of one of von Oppenheim’s agents, Abdul Qader al-Keilani, and who was part of Subhas Chandra Bose’s joint Arab-Indian Committee—would lead a pro-German coup that took over Iraq in May 1941. As noted by Rubin and Schwanitz, although al-Husseini has been largely remembered as just a Palestinian Arab leader, and tainted by his association with the Nazis and subsequent disgrace following the humiliating Arab defeat by Israel in 1948, “Actually, however, he was the main chief of international radical Arab forces, both Islamist and nationalist, during the 1930s and 1940s.”[1] Al-Husseini became the father of modern Arab and Islamist politics when, already Before World War II began, and even before Hitler came to power, he and his allies took control of Muslim communities in Europe, with Germany and Switzerland as their headquarters.[2]

Disputes over the control of religious sites in Jerusalem had led to Arab violence that soon engulfed Palestine in 1928–1929. That violence was soon followed by the Arab Revolt and general strike that broke out in April 1936 and lasted until the summer of 1939. Although he was not directly involved, al-Husseini soon came to support violence against Britain and, in particular, against the Jews in the wake of Britain’s efforts to suppress the revolt. Al-Husseini decided to assume the presidency of a newly established Arab Higher Committee, the central political organ of Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine established 1936. Al-Husseini denounced the Peel Commission’s July 1937, which reported that that the League of Nations Mandate had become unworkable and recommended partition of Palestine into nominally independent Arab and Jewish states. He demanded full cessation of Jewish immigration. The Arab Higher Committee was outlawed by the British Mandatory administration in September 1937 after the assassination of a British official. As the violence in Palestine intensified after publication of the partition plan, and fearing arrest by the British authorities, al-Husseini fled to Lebanon in October 1937, from which he tried, though unsuccessfully, to continue leading the revolt.[3] The British crushed the Arab Revolt in the autumn of 1938.

The new German consul general in Jerusalem, Walter Döhle (1883 – 1963), observed that the immediate cause of the revolt and general strike was the substantial increase in Jewish immigration into Palestine, in part a result of Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany since Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933.[4] In March 1937, Döhle wrote in a memo to the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry that, as a consequence of the previous four years of Jewish immigration facilitated by the Transfer Agreement, “we have done little to strengthen and preserve the sympathy that the Arabs have for the new Germany” and “have neglected the danger that the Arabs could become our adversaries as a result of our assistance to the construction of a Jewish national home and Jewish economy.”[5] On July 15, 1933, al-Husseini, then both the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the chairman of the Arab Higher Committee, told Döhle that in the “battle against the Jews,” Arabs hoped for support “from those great powers,” such as Germany and Italy, “whose interests move in the same direction.” He stressed “Arab sympathy for the new Germany and hoped that Germany would be sympathetic to the Arab struggle against Jewry and would be prepared to support it.”[6]

Beginning in 1933, al-Husseini regularly met with local Nazi representatives and openly expressed admiration for Hitler’s ideas. Al-Husseini was a friend to the Swiss financier and devoted Nazi, Francois Genoud (1915 – 1996). As a teenager in 1932, Genoud met Adolf Hitler in a hotel while studying in Bonn.[7] He joined the Swiss pro-Nazi National Front in 1934, and two years later he travelled to Palestine where he met the al-Husseini. Working for both Swiss and German intelligence agencies, Genoud travelled extensively in the Middle East.[8] Genoud’s friends included one-time Gestapo agent and Interpol head Paul Dickopf (1910 – 1973), SS general Karl Wolff (1900 – 1984), Nazi Economy Minister Hjalmar Schacht.[9] Mussolini financed al-Husseini starting in 1935.[10] By 1936, al-Husseini was sending envoys to Grobba, then German ambassador to Iraq, to request arms and money.[11] Grobba answered that Germany wasn’t ready to back armed Arab uprisings for fear that it could to confrontation with Britain. As an alternative, the Germans agreed to a plan proposed by al-Husseini to send the weapons instead through Saudi Arabia, whose king agreed to serve as middleman to hide German involvement.[12] Between 1936 and 1939, Adolf Eichmann (1906 – 1962), then an obscure German official considered a top expert on the Jews, while he was also head of the Judenreferat, tasked with overseeing Jewish affairs and evacuation, also oversaw funding from the SS to al-Husseini and his associates to aid their efforts in encouraging a revolt in the region against the British.[13]

In September 1938, Wilhem Canaris (1887 – 1945), head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence, and thereafter contact man for al-Husseini’s military and espionage activities—provided Germany’s first donation, £1,000 sterling, to the Saudi envoy, Deputy Foreign Minister Fuad Hamza, himself of Palestinian origin.[14] On the second trip to Iraq in 1938, Canaris asked Grobba to become Abwehr chief in Iraq, in addition to his ambassadorial duties. Grobba established German relations with Saudi Arabia. In 1933, Ibn Saud had proposed granting Germany a concession to drill for oil. Hitler refused, believing he could not secure the fields in wartime. On November 5, 1937, Ibn Saud sent his secretary Yusuf Yasin to meet Grobba in Baghdad to request a new treaty and a German mission to his country, promising he would be a “benevolent neutral, if not more, in case of a war.”[15] The Ibn Saud also offered to be middleman for sending German weapons to al-Husseini’s Palestine revolt. Talks eventually successfully concluded in 1939. On January 13, Grobba was named ambassador to Saudi Arabia. With approval by Hitler and von Ribbentrop, Germany provided a six-million-mark credit for the Saudis for the purchase of weapons.[16] Also in 1939, Canaris recruited Major Ernst Bloch, a decorated German army officer of Jewish descent, who was put in command of a group of Mischlinge (“mixed-breed”) officers, to locate Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s father-in-law, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (1880 – 1950), the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, and escort him safely to freedom.[17]

In March 1938, Ibn Saud sent Khalid al Hud al Gargani (1882 – 1971), Shakib Arslan’s business partner and one of Ibn Saud’s most influential advisors, to Berlin to negotiate closer ties with Germany. The Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP (APA) received with enthusiasm Gargani’s request for German military assistance, stating in a memorandum of July 23: “Germany’s policy in the Near East could be effectively supported through Saudi Arabia, the center of the Mohammedan world. The APA has therefore tried for a long time to establish ties with Saudi Arabia through the neutral means of economic exchange.”[18] Ibn Saud had promised his country’s neutrality should war break out in Europe, in return for help in developing his country and its defensive capabilities. On June 8, 1939, Gargani was received by von Ribbentrop who agreed to the Saudi request for a large quantity of German rifles and the construction of a munitions factory in Saudi Arabia.[19] During his meeting with Hitler in Berlin that June, Gargani criticized the Nazi’s Jewish emigration policy for its contribution to increasing Jewish immigration in Palestine.[20] However, support remained limited because Hitler disapproved of “weapons deliveries to hostile countries or to countries whose position in a war is doubtful.”[21] According to Nicosia, Grobba concluded that because of his racism directed against both Arabs and Jews, “and a geopolitical determination that gave primacy to both England and Italy, Hitler in the end never accepted the idea of Arab independence and national self-determination.”[22]

Islam Institute in Berlin

At the end of the World War I, Arslan had gone into exile in Switzerland, where he served as the unofficial representative of Syria and Palestine to the League of Nations.[23] Stranded in neutral Switzerland after 1918, Arslan did not legally belong to any country, and was unable to travel until Ibn Saud granted him honorary Hijazi citizenship and a passport.[24] With Abbas II’s financial support, Arslan and Abdul Aziz started the Orient Club in 1920 for Muslims living in Germany. Jawish had also worked for von Oppenheim and maintained good contacts with revolutionary movements in his home country, including Hasan al Banna.[25] In 1924, Arslan moved his base to Switzerland, visiting Berlin often, and keeping al-Husseini well informed. Jawish became the movement’s leader in Berlin, assisted by the Syrian-born Muhammad Abd an-Nafi Shalabi (1901 – 1933). Al-Husseini supplied funds for Arslan, Jawish and Shalabi to establish the Islam Institute in Berlin in 1927, with Shalabi as its leader.[26] Franz von Papen, head of the institute’s honorary board.[27] According to Rubin and Schwanitz, the institute was largely Joseph Goebbels’s project.[28] After briefly visiting Egypt three years earlier, Goebbels developed a fascination for Islam and, later, with al-Husseini as well, considering him a fellow master in propaganda. Al-Husseini, Goebbels wrote in his diary, was intelligent and had good judgment. In working closely with him, the Nazis could win the support of four hundred million Muslims.[29]

Through Shalabi’s mediation, the relationship with the Islamic Community of Berlin, composed mainly of mainly Ahmadiyya followers in 1922, following the basis of the Woking Muslim Mission in London.[30] Arslan and Shalabi, as well as the Ahmadiyya leader Muhammad Ali (1874 – 1951), delivered the main speeches.[31] Marmaduke Pickthall wrote a review of Muhammad Ali’s book The Religion of Islam when it was published in 1936, stating, “Probably no man living has done longer or more valuable service for the cause of Islamic revival than Maulana Muhammad Ali of Lahore.”[32] In 1928, Shalabi and his associates ejected the Ahmadiyyas from the mosque leadership, and in 1930, they officially took over the German Muslim Community. The world view of Shalabi’s movement was articulated in an article he wrote in 1931 for Ludendorffs Volkswarte (“Ludendorff's Peoples’ Viewpoint”), a magazine of Thule Society member General Erich Ludendorff.[33]

In the same year, along with Abbas II, Arslan was involved in al-Husseini’s World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem organized by Shaukat Ali.[34] An Iranian student, Husain Danish, founded the Berlin chapter of the World Islamic Congress, in the mosque’s meeting room in 1932. The twenty founders from eight countries chose Danish as their leader and a former Ottoman officer from Syria, Zaki Kiram, his deputy. Shalabi was placed on the board of directors. Their platform included the creation of Islamic schools in Germany based on the Sharia. Danish became editor of the Nazi-backed, French-language magazine, La Jeune Asie. In September 1935, sixty-six Muslim delegates met in Geneva, home base of both Abbas II and Arslan. Also participating was Bosnian mufti Salim Muftic who would serve there as al-Husseini’s representative.[35] Finally, in 1939 the Nazis completely took over the Islam Institute with the help of its leading figures.[36]

Under al-Husseini’s guidance, explain Rubin and Schwanitz, “the Islamic Institute became a network for propagandists, diplomats, military officers, and intelligence agents.”[37] The institute expanded steadily, establishing branches in Göttingen, Dresden, Guben, and Radom. The Italians started a similar project in 1942 and invited al-Husseini to its opening in Rome, along with Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and Afghanistan’s exiled former King Amanullah Khan, the son of Habibullah Khan, who had been part of the Niedermayer–Hentig Expedition. The Institute’s secretary, the Egyptian Abd al-Halim Najjar, an employee of German Arabic-language radio. In charge was the journalist Kamal ad-Din Jalal, who worked with both Goebbels and von Ribbentrop. At the opening ceremony in Berlin on December 18, 1942, which took place in the Air War Ministry building, al-Husseini said the Institute would serve not only the two thousand Muslims living in Germany but all of the world’s four hundred million Muslims, who supported Germany in her fight against their joint enemies: Jews, Bolsheviks, Great Britain, and America. He quoted the Quran as stating that Jews were terrorists, the Muslims’ most devoted enemies, and haters of the Prophet Muhammad.[38]

Berlin Arab Radio

Arslan wrote to the German Arabist and diplomat Curt Prüfer (1881 – 1959), then director of the ministry’s personnel division in the German Foreign Office, to inquire whether it was possible to send a qualified and prominent Arab scholar to Germany for a few years to get acquainted with Western scholarship.[39] When Hitler fired Grobba to please al-Husseini, he was replaced by Prüfer.[40] During World War I, Prüfer had been stationed in Istanbul where he headed von Oppenheim’s Jihad plan, and had later fought alongside the Ottomans in Palestine. In his work for von Oppenheim, Prüfer had helped organize several Jihad congresses. He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. The man that Arslan was recommending to Prüfer was his and Husseini’s friend, the Salafi scholar Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali, a student of Rashid Rida, through whose recommendation Ibn Saudi hired him as teacher and supervisor of the faculty at the Prophet’s mosque in Medina.[41] To increase his credibility as a global authority on Islam, al-Hilali had decided he needed to undertake graduate studies in Europe.[42]

Prüfer passed Arslan’s letter on to German Orientalist Paul Kahle (1875 – 1964), who offered al-Hilali a position of lecturer in Arabic and Arabic literature at the University of Bonn, in Nazi Germany in the fall of 1936.[43] Kahle’s friend and assistant was Polish rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg (1884 – 1966).[44] Weinberg is known as the Seridei Eish, recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest posekim, a legal scholar who determines the application of Halakha.[45] Weinberg taught at and eventually became rector of the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin, where he ordained Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902 – 1994) the most recent Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty.[46] Under Kahle’s guidance, many of his students devoted themselves to the study of the Cairo Genizah, a vast collection of Jewish manuscripts and fragments, including piyyutim, found in the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. In 1924, Kahle wrote an opinion defending the Talmud against the libels of Theodor Fritsch, founder of the Germanenorden, whose members later founded the Thule Society. Because of his and his wife’s pro-Jewish activities following Kristallnacht, the family had to seek refuge in England in 1938, where Kahle continued his work at Oxford University.[47] The correspondence between Kahle and al-Hilali between 1939 to 1956, reports Roberto Tottoli, reflects the deep relationship between them and the high respect they held for each other.[48]

In early 1939, al-Hilali had relocated from the University of Bonn where he worked with Paul Kahle, to the German capital to work as a speaker for the Berlin Arabic Radio, a shortwave radio station established by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda. The broadcasts were the result of a cooperative effort including German officials working in the Division of Political Radio in the Foreign Ministry of Joachim von Ribbentrop with some assistance from Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. They received assistance from Orientalists in the cultural division of Himmler’s Reich Security Main Office, and from German Orientalists who advised the Foreign Ministry and worked in the SS research offices.[49] Al-Husseini spoke frequently.[50]

“At the political level,” reports Lauzière, “al-Hilali had a marked preference for National Socialism and spoke highly of Hitler and the Nazi government.”[51] Al-Hilali considered Nazi ideology superior to democracy. He went so far as to propose that the example of Nazi Germany was so positive and so similar to the ideal of Islamic governance suggests that the Nazis must have borrowed some of their principles from Islam.[52] He regretted that Muslims had “no Hitler, no nation, and no hope” to rescue them from colonial oppression as Hitler had done with Sudetenland.[53] Although he condemned racism, he argued that most Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Berbers were in fact white.[54] Al-Hilali became head of the culture section of al-Husseini’s Islam Institute and a lecturer University of Berlin, where he earned his PhD in 1940, becoming its first Moroccan graduate.[55] In Berlin, he rented a room from Anna Wogatzki, whom he eventually married.[56]

In March 1942, Al-Hilali decided to return to his native Morocco for the first time in twenty years. He was on a mission from al-Husseini, who asked him to go to Tetouan to deliver an oral message to Abd al-Khaliq al-Turris (d. 1970), the leader of the Party of National Reform in the Spanish zone. Al-Hilali never revealed what the message was. He only said that it was political in nature and that it had to do with the welfare and higher interests of Muslims.[57] Al-Hilali claimed that al-Husseini, who was benefitting from a generous subsidy from the Nazis, offered him large sums of money in Berlin, paid for his trip to Morocco, and continued to send him funds afterward.[58] Umar Ryad has suggested that al-Husseini was seeking to establish a center for Arab legions in North Africa.[59] Though the two never met in person, al-Hilali had been in contact with Hasan al-Banna in the 1940s. Al-Banna asked al-Hilali to become the Moroccan correspondent for al-Ikhan al-Muslimun, the Brotherhood journal. Al-Hilali wrote a few articles under a pseudonym until the British and Spanish colonial authorities discovered the plot and ended the scheme. In his memoirs, al-Hilali still praised al-Banna. According to a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Hilali continued to maintain a connection with the organization later in life.[60]

Anglo-Iraqi War

In Iraq, al-Husseini reportedly received funding from both the Allies and the Axis, as well as from the Iraqi government.[61] In June 1940, al-Husseini wrote von Papen to offer his services. His plan was to obtain from the Axis in World War II what the Arabs had failed to gain from the British in World War I, an extensive, independent state, led by himself, including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq.[62] After World War II began, increased French surveillance in Lebanon forced al-Husseini to move to Iraq, which was nominally independent. When al-Husseini left Beirut and arrived in Baghdad on October 15, 1939, the nationalists there welcomed him as a hero.[63] For an alignment of the Arab with the Axis, the nationalists and Islamists established the secret Arab Committee for Cooperation among Arabs. The Iraqi participants included Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, Justice Minister Shaukat, and as-Sabawi, translator of Mein Kampf into Arabic. Ibn Saud sent his trusted private secretary, Yusuf Yasin, and his political adviser Gargani.[64]

Arslan, who was European representative, worked closely with von Oppenheim, who called him the “best political head on Middle Eastern affairs.”[65] By summer 1940, after France’s fall to the Nazis, von Oppenheim was in Syria, traveling often to Baghdad to coordinate with al-Gaylani and al-Husseini on their plan for pro-German coups in Iraq and Syria.[66] On July 25, 1940, von Oppenheim presented to the German government with a detailed plan he titled “Union Jack,” on how to foment unrest in British-ruled areas. Theo Habicht, an agent of von Oppenheim who had backed al-Husseini’s effort to encourage a Jihad against the British Raj, along with Ribbentrop, von Papen in Ankara, and Foreign Ministry’s Ernst von Weizsäcker (1882 – 1951) in Berlin, were all consulted.[67] A month later, al-Husseini submitted his own version, which was largely a copy of von Oppenheim’s. Six days afterwards, al-Husseini wrote a lengthy letter to Hitler further defining the proposed alliance. The situation in Palestine, explained al-Husseini, united them in their joint hatred for the British and Jews. He asked Germany and Italy to support the merger of most Arabs into a single state called the Greater Arab Empire, Greater Arabia, or United Arab State. Later, he added Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf emirates to his projected empire. And later still, al-Husseini added in Egypt, North Africa, and Sudan as well.[68] The Germans completely accepted al-Husseini’s grandiose claims, regarding him, according to internal documents, as the legitimate spokesman for the whole Arab East. Hitler wrote al-Husseini on April 3, further affirming his support.[69]

On April 1, 1941, as the Nazis began their advance into Yugoslavia and Greece, al-Gaylani and several pro-Axis officers in the Iraqi army. On April 1, 1941, they overthrew the pro-British Iraqi regime and formed a government with al-Gaylani as Prime Minister and al-Husseini as the key contact to Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. When al-Gaylani’s regime refused to permit transit rights through Iraq to British troops from India, the British invaded. As British troops approached Baghdad, al-Gaylani and al-Husseini, who had failed to secure significant Axis assistance, fled to Iran on May 29. That Fall, Italian authorities smuggled al-Husseini from Iran to Italy, where he arrived in Rome on October 11, 1941. In the Spring of 1941, the German Foreign Office approved use of al-Husseini’s network for sabotage operations, and authorized funding from the Abwehr. In response to requests for military and financial support as British troops moved on Baghdad, the German Foreign Office supplied al-Husseini with the first major cash payments, for which he was supposed to “carry out a large operation in Palestine in the near future.”[70] On May 9, al-Husseini issued a Fatwa on Baghdad radio, urging the Muslims of Iraq to support a Jihad against the British. The British occupied Baghdad on June 2, 1941.[71] Gaylani then fled to Italy. Later he was received by Hitler in Berlin, and he was recognized as the leader of the Iraqi government in exile. Upon the defeat of Germany, Gaylani again fled and found refuge, this time in Saudi Arabia.[72] When he met al-Husseini six months later, Hitler apologized for having failed to send sufficient support. Al-Husseini, for his part, later excused the defeat by claiming the revolt had been a failure due to the infiltration of Jewish fifth column of saboteurs and spies.[73]

As always seems to be the case with Salafist agitation, the British took full advantage of Arab incompetence and German indecision, and reaped total victory. First, the British invaded Iraq with help from the Transjordanian army led by British officers, which crossed the desert from Amman, easily defeated Iraq’s army, reached the outskirts of the capital on May 30, and installed a pro-British government under Nuri al-Said. Additionally, with help from Free French and Zionist volunteers, including a young Moshe Dayan, the British attacked Syria and Lebanon. Despite resistance from much larger force led by Darlan’s commander in Syria, General Henri Dentz, and the German-backed Arab Legion, the British easily gained control of the country by July 14. Al-Husseini’s soldiers fled through Turkey to German-held territory where they joined the Nazi army. Lastly, the Soviets, now at war with Germany, and British seized Iran in a three-week operation beginning August 25. The Allies exiled the Shah, who had made overtures to Germany, and put on the throne his young son, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919 –1980) who would rule until overthrown by Khomeini in 1979.

Final Solution

“At any rate,” noted Rubin and Schwanitz, “the failures in Iraq, Iran, and Syria did not disillusion the Germans and Italians regarding al-Husseini’s importance or reliability.”[74] Particularly troubling is the alignment of al-Husseini’s manoeuvres with the Nazi’s Final Solution. To begin with, the second part of a-Husseini’s purported plan included in his demands to the Nazis involved the mass murder of Jews in the Muslim-populated regions. Rubin and Schwanitz indicate:

It is logical to believe that the Holocaust was a decision based on fanatical ideology rather than on German self-interest. Of course, Hitler’s virulent hatred of Jews and talk of wiping them out had begun in the 1920s. If al-Husseini or some counterpart had not existed, the Nazis would probably have acted in a similar fashion. But the influence of al-Husseini, al-Kailani [Rashid Ali al-Gaylani], and their movements also reinforced, made more necessary, and accelerated a policy of genocide in Europe that the Axis’s partners intended to spread to the Middle East.[75]

On November 4, 1941, al-Husseini stopped in Venice to visit Mussolini, and asked him to urge Hitler to attack Egypt, then seize Palestine, and install him as ruler and liquidate the Jews there.[76] The most effective way to mobilize the Arabs, al-Husseini advised, was to preach hatred of the Jews, or as he put it, “The Jewish attack and the plagues they carry.”[77] In September 1942, at the peak of the German advance in North Africa and the Soviet Union, al-Husseini promised to raise a Muslim force in Iraq and North Africa of 100,000 men. He would largely follow through on the pledge, but the Muslims he eventually recruited were not Arabs but either Turkic peoples from the Soviet Caucasus or Bosnians and Albanians from the Balkans, who joined Himmer’s 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar.[78] The division was named after the Serbo-Croatian name for a local fighting knife or scimitar carried by Ottoman policemen during the empire’s reign in that region. Al-Husseini also wrote a pamphlet for division, titled “Islam and Judaism,” which closed with a Hadith from Bukhari-Muslim which states: “The Day of Judgement will come, when the Muslims will crush the Jews completely: And when every tree behind which a Jew hides will say: ‘There is a Jew behind me, Kill him!’”[79] Some accounts have alleged that the Handschar were responsible for killing 90% of Bosnian Jews.[80]

A purported member of the Handschar division was Alija Izetbegovic (1925 – 2003), who in 1992 became the first president of the Presidency of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[81] In 1941, Izetbegovic helped to found a Bosnian Islamist organization suspiciously named Mladi Muslimani (“Young Muslims”), which was modeled after the Muslim Brotherhood.[82] According to the New York Times, when the Young Muslims struggled to decide between supporting the largely Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Division or the communist Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito, Izetbegovic joined the SS Handschar.[83] Izetbegovic’s family denied the claim.[84] His supporters maintain that the accusation is Serbian propaganda.[85]

In February 1941, Hitler received al-Husseini’s proposal for an alliance of which one condition was that Germany cease allowing Jewish emigration to Palestine.[86] As early as 1937, al-Husseini had urged all Muslims to rid their lands of Jews. That same year, he proposed a deal to Hitler in which the Arabs would support the Germans in their aims if they would stop allowing Jews from leaving their country and help him destroy the Jewish home in Palestine “by all means.”[87] By blocking this escape route for the Jews and discouraging any alternate strategy, explain Rubin and Schwanitz, al-Husseini “helped make the ‘Final Solution’ inevitable.”[88] On July 31, 1941, after agreeing in early June to meet al-Husseini to discuss the issue, Hitler ordered Reinhard Heydrich (1904 – 1942), a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust, to prepare an “overall solution for the Jewish question in Europe.”[89] On November 28, Hitler met with al-Husseini, beginning the occasion with a friendly on-camera handshake. Behind closed doors in the Führer’s office, in the presence of von Ribbentrop, Grobba, and the French-language translator Paul Schmidt, Hitler promised al-Husseini that Arab aspirations would be fulfilled. Once “we win” the battle against world Jewry, Hitler promised, Germany would eliminate the Jews in the Middle East, as well.[90]

As reported by Shlomo Aronson, there was a rumor circulating in Germany that Heydrich was of Frankist descent on his mother’s side.[91] Rumors were spread by Heydrich’s enemies of his alleged Jewish ancestry as early as 1932. Admiral Canaris reported that he had obtained photocopies proving Heydrich’s Jewish ancestry, though these photocopies never surfaced.[92] Nazi Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan claimed Heydrich was not a pure Aryan.[93] Gregor Strasser passed the allegations on to the Nazi Party’s expert on racial matters, Achim Gercke, who investigated Heydrich’s genealogy. Gercke finally insisted that the rumors were baseless and reported that according to the Ahnenliste (“Ancestry List”) provided, Heydrich was “…of German origin and free from any colored and Jewish blood.”[94] Nevertheless, Heydrich privately engaged SD member Ernst Hoffmann to further investigate and dispel the rumors.[95] Hoffman later recalled Heydrich’s nervousness at each of their meetings, a nervousness which seemed “understandable but without foundation.”[96]

By preferring the race-minded, emigration-focused Zionists to the “assimilationists,” whom they regarded as bent on destroying National Socialism, powerful Nazis like Heydrich had backed Zionist attempts to gain ascendency over the Jewish community of Germany, echoing the official SS position that the activities of Zionists should be encouraged, at the expense of the non-Zionists who were to be discouraged.[97] According to Heydrich:

We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish state… our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them.[98]

Hitler commanded Heydrich to organize a conference to prepare the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Adolf Eichmann, who had prepared the background briefing for the discussion at Berlin suburb of Wannsee on January 20, 1942, was ordered to provide al-Husseini a preview before any high-ranking Germans had even heard of the briefing.[99] Once the Wannsee meeting ended and other attendees had departed, Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, and Eichmann had a glass of cognac and spoke of the coming plans or “killing, elimination, and annihilation.”[100] The following day, Fritz Grobba met al-Husseini and briefed him on what had been decided.[101] According to Dieter Wisliceny, the aide whom al-Husseini wanted to employ in a similar project of extermination of Jews in the Middle East, Eichmann personally took al-Husseini to visit the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Maidanek.[102]

For three full days starting April 12, 1943, al-Husseini visited Thule Society member Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the bizarre race cult of the Nazis, and the Cabinet minister with whom al-Husseini had the closest relations.[103] Al-Husseini admired Rosenberg as a great philosopher. Both agreed on the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Rosenberg had invited al-Husseini to see his Institute for Research into the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. With three thousand marks a month from the German government, al-Husseini opened his own Jewish Institute, in a confiscated Jewish apartment in Berlin, as he had requested.[104]

The real support for the German war effort would take place in the German-captured Muslim areas in the Soviet Union, where Rosenberg was in charge.[105] Rosenberg assembled a team of experts, One was Gerhard von Mende (1904 – 1963), a German born in the Baltic city of Riga, as his specialist on minorities in the Soviet Union. Mende was fully briefed on the planned genocide of Jews at the Wannsee Conference of March 6, 1942, as he was to help implement that policy in the Caucasus.[106] On July 4, 1943, Himmler hosted al-Husseini at his private spa in East Prussia and let him know that three million Jews had already been executed. A few days later, al-Husseini wrote to Himmler, praising him as an “understanding, generous and energetic man.”[107]

By 1944, as even some of al-Husseini’s fanatical Nazi colleagues were recognizing that the Nazis were doomed for defeat, al-Husseini remained loyal. The day after their May 1944 meeting, Goebbels told Hitler what a great asset al-Husseini was. In response, Hitler ordered Goebbels to support all of al-Husseini’s activities.[108] In February 1945, Eichmann and al-Husseini met in Linz, likely to discuss how to survive the war’s end and its aftermath.[109] On May 4, al-Husseini crossed into Switzerland, where with German permission he had previously stashed substantial sums of money. Al-Husseini was refused asylum by the Swiss authorities, and boarded a train back to Germany but was taken into custody by the French army in Konstanz. Al-Husseini was hosted in a villa near Paris, where he stayed for a year, and where he was even allowed to receive guests, until the French decided to set him free.[110]

“How did al-Husaini so easily escape punishment for his war crimes?” Rubin and Schwanitz ask.[111] The answer should be obvious: despite spewing the most venomous rhetoric against the British and the Zionists, al-Husseini was evidently serving as their agent the entire time as part of their Machiavellian plan. Simon Wiesenthal, who worked for US and Israeli intelligence and war crimes investigators, researching the close ties between Eichmann and al-Husseini, published his conclusions in early 1947 and later testified about al-Husseini at the Eichmann trial. The State Department considered the idea of trying al-Husseini at Nuremberg, and the CIA produced a dozen reports on his involvement in war crimes. And yet, in 1950, it was decided to let al-Husseini off Scott free, concluding that to do otherwise would arouse difficulties for the United States in the Middle East. The England and France had already arrived similar conclusions.[112]

‍ ‍

[1] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 87.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Francis Nicosia. Nazi Germany and the Arab World (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 185.

[4] Ibid., p. 79.

[5] Jeffrey Herf. Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009), p. 27.

[6] Ibid., p. 29.

[7] Peter Wyden. The Hitler Virus: The Insidious Legacy of Adolf Hitler (Arcade Publishing, 2001), pp. 111-12.

[8] David Lee Preston. “Hitler's Swiss Connection.” The Philadelphia Inquirer (January 5, 1997). Retrieved from http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/swiss-and-hitler.html

[9] Kevin Coogan. Dreamer of the day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1999). p. 585-586.

[10] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 96.

[11] Ibid., p. 96.

[12] Ibid., p. 97.

[13] Klaus Polkehn. “The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (Spring/Summer, 1976), pp. 73.

[14] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 96.

[15] Ibid., p. 117.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Larry S. Price. “The Nazi Who Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe.” Tablet (July 15, 2019). Retrieved from https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nazi-saved-lubavitcher-rebbe

[18] PA: Pol.Abt. VII, Politik 2-Saudisch Arabien, Bd. 1, Aufzeichnung des APA, Pol. VII 1061, 23. Juli 1938; cited in Nicosia. Nazi Germany and the Arab World, p. 111.

[19] Nicosia. Nazi Germany and the Arab World, p. 112.

[20] Ibid., p. 115.

[21] Ibid., p. 113.

[22] Ibid., p. 114.

[23] Nir Arielli. “Italian Involvement in the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–1939.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 35: 2 (2008), p. 188.

[24] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 136.

[25] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 81.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., p. 82.

[28] Ibid., p. 179.

[29] Ibid., p. 180.

[30] Nasir Ahmad. “Die Berliner Moschee und Mission der Ahmadiyya-Bewegung zur Verbreitung des Islam, Lahore.” (Die Muslimische Mission Berlin, 2006). Retrieved from https://berlin.ahmadiyya.org/berlin-mission-june06.pdf

[31] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 81.

[32] Islamic Culture (October 1936), pp. 659–660.

[33] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 83.

[34] Ibid., p. 84.

[35] Ibid., p. 84.

[36] Ibid., p. 84.

[37] Ibid., p. 180.

[38] Ibid., p. 180.

[39] Umar Ryad. “A Salafi Student, Orientalist Scholarship, and Radio Berlin in Nazi Germany: Taqi al-Din al-Hilali and His Experiences in the West.” In: Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad. Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 113.

[40] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 176.

[41] Ryad. “A Salafi Student, Orientalist Scholarship, and Radio Berlin in Nazi Germany,” p. 113.

[42] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 135.

[43] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 137.

[44] Simcha Krauss. “Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1966 by Marc B. Shapiro” The Edah Journal, 1:1 (2000), p. 3.

[45] Dovid Zaklikowski. “Details of the Rebbe’s Rabbinical Ordination Authenticated.” Chabad.org (January 21, 2013). Retrieve from https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/2112908/jewish/Details-of-the-Rebbes-Rabbinical-Ordination-Authenticated.htm

[46] Ibid.

[47] “Paul Ernst Kahle.” Jewish Virtual Library. Retrieved from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kahle-paul-ernst-x00b0

[48] Roberto Tottoli. “The Salafī and the Orientalist.” HIReC 2 (2024), p. 368.

[49] Jeffrey Herf. “Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust: Old Themes, New Archival Findings.” Central European History, 42: 4 (2009), p. 714. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1017/S000893890999104X

[50] Ibid., p. 718.

[51] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 145.

[52] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 146.

[53] Ryad. “A Salafi Student, Orientalist Scholarship, and Radio Berlin in Nazi Germany,” p. 134.

[54] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 146.

[55] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 137; Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 142.

[56] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 145.

[57] Ibid., p. 146.

[58] Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 147.

[59] Umar Ryad. Islamic Reformism and Christianity: A Critical Reading of the Works of Muhammad Rashid Rida (Leiden: Brill, 2009); cited in Lauzière. The Making of Salafism, p. 147.

[60] Ibid., p. 228.

[61] “Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Arab Nationalist and Muslim Leader.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-arab-nationalist-and-muslim-leader

[62] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 119.

[63] Ibid., p. 123.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Ibid., p. 124.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid., p. 125.

[69] Ibid., p. 127.

[70] “Hajj Amin al-Husayni: Arab Nationalist and Muslim Leader.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-arab-nationalist-and-muslim-leader

[71] Ibid.

[72] Editors. “Rashid Ali al-Gaylani.” Encyclopedia Britannica (January 1, 2025). Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rashid-Ali-al-Gaylani.

[73] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 131.

[74] Ibid., p. 133.

[75] Ibid., p. 160.

[76] Ibid., p. 133.

[77] Ibid., p. 138.

[78] Ibid., p. 145.

[79] Shaul Shay. Islamic Terror and the Balkans (Transaction Publishers/Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, 2009), p. 33.

[80] Michael A. Sells. “Holocaust Abuse: The Case of Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni.” Journal of Religious Ethics, 43: 4 (2015), p. 747 n. 33.

[81] “Alija Izetbegovic: A Retrospective Look at His Impact on Balkan Stability.” International Strategic Studies Association (December 8, 2003). Retrieved from http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Dec0803.htm

[82] Leslie S. Lebl. “Islamism and Security in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College (2014).

[83] David Binder. “Alija Izetbegovic, Muslim Who Led Bosnia, Dies at 78.” New York Times ((20 October 2003).

[84] Elvira Jukic. “Bosniak Leader Rejects ‘Nazi Father’ Claims.” Balkan Insight (November 28, 2014). Retrieved from https://balkaninsight.com/2014/11/28/bosniak-presidency-member-might-sue-serb-leader/

[85] Snježana Novaković Bursać. “Neutemeljene tvrdnje o Aliji Izetbegoviću kao “presuđenom pripadniku SS Handžar divizije”” IstinOmjer (November 25, 2023). Retrieved from https://istinomjer.ba/neutemeljene-tvrdnje-o-aliji-izetbegovicu-kao-presudjenom-pripadniku-ss-handzar-divizije/

[86] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 161.

[87] Ibid., p. 160.

[88] Ibid.

[89] Ibid., p. 161.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Shlomo Aronson. Reinhard Heydrich und die Anfänge des SD und der Gestapo 1931-1935 (Berlin, 1966); cited in Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 188.

[92] “Reinhard Heydrich.” Auschwitz.dk. 20 January 1942. Retrieved from http://www.auschwitz.dk/Canaris/id3.htm

[93] Robert Gerwarth. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 61.

[94] Max Williams. Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography, Volume 1—Road To War (Church Stretton: Ulric Publishing, 2001), p. 38.

[95] Gerwarth. Hitler's Hangman, p. 61.

[96] Ibid., p. 62.

[97] J. Boas. “German-Jewish Internal Politics under Hitler 1933-1938,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1984), pp. 3-25.

[98] Bloom. Arthur Ruppin, p. 353.

[99] Rubin & Schwanitz. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, p. 163.

[100] Ibid., 164.

[101] Ibid.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Ibid., p. 181.

[104] Ibid.

[105] Ibid., p. 146.

[106] Ibid., p. 147.

[107] Ibid., p. 157.

[108] Ibid., p. 173.

[109] Ibid., p. 174.

[110] Ibid.

[111] Ibid., p. 194.

[112] Ibid., p. 196.

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