Fact Sheet #2 Was the Mufti only an Arab Nationalist, as the Holocaust Museum implies, or was he a proven Nazi Collaborator?  Was he indicted for war crimes?

The USHMM web biography of al-Husayni states: “ At his first meeting with Hitler on November 28, the Mufti tried unsuccessfully to secure a public Axis declaration favoring Arab independence….He helped recruit the ineffective but highly controversial 13^th Waffen SS Division “Handschar”…it is possible that “Hanschar” personnel were involved in the capture and murder of Jews found in hiding or captured as partisans…At war’s end, with evidence that was inconclusive, calls for a war crimes trial of Amin al-Husayni were unsuccessful. Arguments that he had been a proponent of the “Final Solution” in Europe and its extension to the Middle East have not been universally accepted.”(bold added)

The Facts:

1.      According to documentation from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, Nazi Germany SS helped finance al-Hussayni’s efforts in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine. (Kuntzel,  Matthias.  Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. p. 21) “The Mufti himself acknowledged that at that time it was only due to the German funds he received that it had been possible to carry through the uprising in Palestine.” Admiral Canarsis, head of German military intelligence, later revealed he personally met with the Mufti’s secretary “to discuss the issue of transporting weapons to the Arab insurgents.” (Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem Amin el Husseini und die Nationalsozialisten,  p. 94, 234; also Encyclopedia of the Holocaust)

2.      The 1936-39 ‘Arab Revolt’, paid for and armed by Hitler and organized by the Mufti, resulted in the British closing Palestine to Jewish immigration, thereby trapping Europe’s Jews in Europe.  It was a key to the success of the Final Solution. (Ben-Sasson, H.H., editor.  A History of the Jewish People. Harvard University Press, 1976, pp1112-12, 1022)

3.      Haj Amin al-Husayni was recruited as a Nazi agent by Adolph Eichmann in Palestine in 1937.  By 1938, the Mufti was on the payroll of Abwehr II, the German counterintelligence and sabotage division. (Kuntzel; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust)

4.      “At an early stage the mufti was       aware of the extermination of the Jews and he tried to persuade the Axis to extend the extermination to North Africa and Palestine….” (Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem)

5.      At the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem the court found in its Judgements, Part 50, “ It has been proved to us that the Mufti, too, aimed at the implementation of the final solution, viz. the extermination of European Jewry.”

6.      Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny’s Nurenburg testimony: “...the Mufti had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry… and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”(Eichmann trial, doc. 281))

7.      The Mufti’s conversation with Hitler on November 28, 1941 was documented by the Germans. Husayni asked for and obtained the statement from Hitler that “Germany’s objective “is…solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.’ (Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Vol. XIII, p. 881) “The phrase used by Hitler in this conversation, ‘Vernichtung des…Judentums’, is one that was used in connection with the Holocaust.” (Walter Reich, former director of the US Holocaust Museum, interview in Haaretz, January 17, 2006)

8.      The Mufti recruited 20,000 Muslims for the Waffen SS.  The Handschar were responsible for the murder of 90% of Bosnia’s Jews, and served as the auxiliary police in rounding up Hungarian Jewry. (Jennie Lebel, “The Mufti of Jerusalem: Haj Amin el Husseini and National Socialism”, 2007; Georger Lepre, Himmler’s Bosnian Division, The Waffen-SSHandschar Division 1943-1945; David Dalin and John Rothman, Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam, 2008)

9.      The Mufti wrote letters to the leaders of Hungary and Romania and succeeding in blocking the transport of 10,000 Jewish children to safety in Palestine. “It would be appropriate and more expedient,” he wrote “to prevent the Jews from emigrating from your country and send them somewhere they will be under strict control, for example to Poland.” The children were sent to the death camps. (The Arab Higher Committee. Its Origins, Personnel and Purposes, Documentary Record Submitted to the United Nations, May 1947; letters also reproduced in Lebel (op.cit.)

10.     “Although there was ample proof to arrest him as a war criminal after the war, the Allies made not effort to do so. They were deterred by Husseini’s prestige in the Arab world. In 1946, Yugoslavia, indicted him for war crimes and asked for his extradition, but the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if the hero of Arab nationalism was treated as a war criminal.” The French allowed him to escape to Egypt. (Encyclopedia of the Holocaust)

11.     The Mufti was “by far the most committed supporter of national Socialism in the Arab and Islamic world.” (Kuentzel, op. cit. p.34)