Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust: The Origins, Nature and Aftereffects of Collaboration

Abstract

In the fall of 2015, when the Palestinian Authority claimed that the State of Israel posed threats to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, public attention in Israel turned again to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a collaborator with Nazi Germany and the leader of Palestinian nationalism before and immediately after World War II. Some historians and, briefly, Israel’s Prime Minister also attributed to Husseini a significant decision-making role in the Holocaust in Europe. The following essay draws on scholarship on Holocaust decision-making in order to demonstrate that Husseini did not have an impact on Hitler’s decisions to murder the Jews of Europe. Rather his historical importance may be found in the texts of his speeches and essays of the 1930s and 1940s. They offer abundant evidence of his impact on Nazi Germany’s Arabic language propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East during World War II and the Holocaust. Before, during and after his presence in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism by offering an interpretation of the religion of Islam as intrinsically anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist and in connecting that version to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of modern European history.

I. The Grand Mufti’s Collaboration with Nazi Germany: Defining the Historical Problem

Haj Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974) collaborated extensively with Nazi Germany but had no impact on Nazi decision making concerning the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe. He did have a profound impact on Nazi Germany’s Arabic language propaganda to the Arab societies during the Holocaust. He left a legacy of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that remains an enduring element of Palestinian and Arab politics. If we are to understand his importance for the history of politics and ideas in the Middle East, we must draw a clear distinction. On the one hand, the Mufti was an important regional leader and Nazi propagandist. In this capacity he engaged in lethal incitement against the Jews, and this is now recognized under international law as a crime because it is an essential step in the process leading to genocide. On the other, the Mufti did not participate in the decision-making process which led to the Holocaust. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate this proposition by making use of verifiable historical evidence.

Most recently, the issue of the Mufti’s historical responsibility became a subject of public controversy when, on October 20, 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, stated in an address at the 37th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that Haj Amin al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of forced emigration to one of extermination. Mistakenly, he claimed that Husseini “was one of the leading architects of the Final Solution,” but later he retracted this statement.1 It is important to note that authoritative historians of the decision-making sequence leading to the Holocaust found no such role for Husseini. The implication of their work is that, had he never arrived in Hitler’s Berlin in 1941, the Holocaust would still have taken place.

Husseini was a leading figure of the Palestinian national movement from the time of his appointment as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 to his leadership of the Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948.2 After the defeat of 1948, his political star declined but his rejection of any compromise settlement with Israel had a continuing ideological impact on Palestinian politics. He claimed that Zionism was a threat to Arabs and the religion of Islam and that Zionists and later, Israelis would destroy or eliminate the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. During World War II and the Holocaust, having been chased out of the Middle East by the British, he found refuge in Hitler’s Berlin. His rejection of Zionism was inseparable from his enthusiasm for National Socialism. However, Husseini did not influence Hitler’s decisions to launch the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.

Yet if some exaggerate Husseini’s importance for developments in Europe, it would be equally misguided to minimize the depth of his collaboration and its deep roots in his political and religious convictions. In Hitler and the Nazis he recognized ideological soul mates who shared his profound hatred of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism. He expressed his enthusiasm to German diplomats in Jerusalem as early as March 1933.3 In his confidential conversations with German diplomats and then in a major public speech in Syria in 1937, Husseini made clear that his opposition to Zionism was rooted in his interpretation of the religion of Islam. Husseini’s importance in the history of politics and ideas lay in his ability weave together an interpretation of the religion of Islam with the secular language of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism. In his reading of the Koran and the commentaries on it, Islam emerges as a religion that is inherently anti-Semitic and is hostile both to the religion of Judaism and to the people who follow it. He was one of the founding fathers of the ideological tradition known as radical Islam or Islamism. That tradition, which continues in our own time, has Sunni and Shia variations. Its original base was in the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood that inspired subsequent organizations such as Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS but there also is a Shia variation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Despite their differences, they both share a conviction that, among other things, the message of Islam is inherently anti-Jewish and anti-democratic and that it provides justification for terrorism against Jews, “non-believers” and “infidels” such as Christians, as well as Muslims who take a different view of the Islam. It is “Islamist” because its key texts rest on selected readings of the Koran, the commentaries on it and the Hadith. It is, of course, only one interpretation of Islam but however plausible or distorted its interpretations of the texts of Islam, it could not exist without those texts.

II. The Islamist Message of the Mufti

The first of Husseini’s canonical texts, “Islam and the Jews,” was delivered in Bludan, Syria at an Arab political conference held on September 8-9, 1937.5 It took place four years before he arrived in Nazi Berlin and the fact that it was not yet dependent on the Third Reich is important. The speech displays the Islamist message that he brought with him to Berlin and was the product of his very own beliefs. In 1938, a press controlled by the Nazis published a German language translation in Berlin. It became one of the founding texts of the Islamist tradition, one that defined the religion of Islam as a source of hatred of the Jews. By 1938, the Nazi political elite were able to read Husseini’s message. An Arabic edition was made available in the Middle East. As Israeli historian Zvi Elpeleg noted in his 1993 study of Husseini, following delivery of “Islam and the Jews,” the 400 delegates in Syria elected Husseini as honorary president of the pan-Arab organization gathered at the meeting.6

As Husseini was in hiding in order to avoid capture by the British, the text was read in his absence. He wrote:

   The battle between Jews and Islam began when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina…In those days the Jewish methods were exactly the same as they are today. Then as now, slander was their weapon. They said Mohammed was a swindler…They tried to undermine his honor…They began to pose senseless and unanswerable questions to Mohammed…and then they tried to annihilate the Muslims. Just as the Jews were able to betray Mohammed, so they will betray the Muslims today…the verses of the Koran and the Hadith assert that the Jews were Islam’s most bitter enemy and moreover try to destroy it.7

While anti-Jewish passages are present in classic Islamic texts, Husseini’s distinctive contribution was to give them greater importance than had previously been the case and thereby to define Islam as a religion inherently hostile to the Jews. He engaged in what historians and literary scholars call the labor of selective tradition, that is, the selective interpretation of texts in light of contemporaneous concerns. That effort is not possible if the original texts lack relevant material. Husseini’s reading of the Koran drew legitimacy and authority from the ancient texts.

Between 1941 and 1945, Husseini became a major contributor to the Third Reich’s Arabic language propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East. In the process, his speeches and essays of the 1930s and 1940s became canonical texts of the tradition of Islamism and were distributed in thousands of print editions and to hundreds of thousands of listeners through Arabic language radio broadcasts of the Nazi regime. In one of the successor trials in Nuremberg after World War II, Otto Dietrich, Nazi Germany’s Reich Press Chief was indicted and convicted for crimes against humanity due to his role in the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns.8 Husseini’s key role in producing Arabic language anti-Semitic propaganda could have served as the basis of a similar indictment. In 1946-1947, the United States delivered 3,914 persons for trial to sixteen European countries, two-thirds to France and Poland.9 Husseini was not among them.

In June 1945, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) examined the willingness of Arab governments to bring Husseini and other Arab collaborators to trial. It concluded that “in the Near East the popular attitude toward the trial of war criminals is one of apathy. As a result of the general Near Eastern feeling of hostility to the imperialism of certain Allied powers, there is a tendency to sympathize with rather than condemn those who have aided the Axis.”10 Therefore, it was not likely that an Arab country would have put him on trial while Britain, France and Yugoslavia (where he played a role in organizing a Bosnian SS Division) declined to do so. Had such a trial taken place, the centrality of Husseini’s role in spreading anti-Jewish hatred and his open appeals for murdering Jews in the Middle East would have become better known to a global audience. His role in Nazi propaganda alone would have justified indictment in Nuremburg either as a crime against humanity or under the terms of the incitement clause of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.11

In June 1947 American intelligence officials reported that Husseini “promised to produce documents disproving his ‘alleged pro-Axis activities as claimed by the Jews and proving his ‘innocence,’ but he never did so. To neutralize any U.S. effort to pursue him as a war criminal, al-Hussaini lied by claiming he had ‘never spoken against America’ in his Berlin radio talks.”12 Neither the United States nor Great Britain indicted him. The government of Yugoslavia which could have indicted him for his role in helping to form the Bosnian SS Division also declined to press charges. In the absence of a trial, Husseini and his apologists have had an easier time obscuring his record of collaboration with Nazi Germany or in excusing or misrepresenting it as due to desperate opportunism rather than ideological conviction. It was not until 2009 and the publication of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World that the extensive record of his most important collaboration with the Nazis became adequately known. Among much else, that record also confirms that beginning in the 1930s, Husseini’s efforts to make the Arab-Israeli clash also a Muslim-Jewish clash included a focus on supposed Zionist designs on the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. If the same standards were applied to Husseini as to Dietrich, the former’s role in Nazi Germany should have led to an indictment and a trial for crimes against humanity and incitement to the newly named crime of genocide.

- See more at: http://jcpa.org/article/haj-amin-al-husseini-the-nazis-and-the-holocaust-the-origins-nature-and-aftereffects-of-collaboration/#sthash.uZzQhw3X.dpuf

There is much more to read on the link but I will post up also the part on his lasting legacy which is fundemental to the problems will still see continue today:




VII. The Mufti’s Long-Lasting Legacy

From that time to the present, Islamists have asserted that the religion of Islam is an inherently anti-Jewish religion and that this hatred of Judaism and the Jews has everything to do with the classic texts of the Koran and the Hadith.55 As we have seen, in light of the Bludan text, Husseini brought these convictions with him to Berlin in 1941. These beliefs and an uncompromising opposition both to the Allied coalition as well as to Zionism constitute part of the foundation for his collaboration with Hitler. As the archives of the Nazi regime made very clear, not only was Hitler but also officials in the German Foreign Office, the Propaganda Ministry, the SS officials in the Reich Security Main Office and the German military intelligence officers fighting in North Africa pleased to learn that there was an indigenous form of Islamic, that is, a non-Christian, non-European tradition of hatred of the Jews with apparent theological foundations. For Husseini and the Islamists of the 1930s and 1940s, the secular political battle against Zionism was inseparable from the religious battle against the Jews. Starting from very different cultural and ideological first premises, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism converged at the same time in Bludan, Syria and in Nazi Berlin. Hitler, Himmler and others in the Nazi regime displayed an admiration for what they understood Islam to be, namely a warrior religion in contrast to pacifist currents in Christianity and one that shared their animus against their Jews.56

Following World War II, Husseini received a hero’s welcome in Egypt and Palestine, In 1946, Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (1906-1949) called Husseini a “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.”57 It was Husseini’s experience fighting the British and his collaboration with Nazism that al-Banna and his fellow members of the Muslim Brotherhood found so inspiring. So did the members of the Arab Higher Committee and the Palestine People’s Party which chose Husseini as their leader in 1945.58 Following the Arab-Palestinian defeat of 1948, Husseini’s political fortunes declined, yet he remained a revered figure in parts of Arab and Palestinian societies. The evidence of his collaboration with the Nazis was either forgotten, ignored or excused as a form of justified anti-colonialism in an alliance of convenience, not shared ideological passion, against a common enemy.

To repeat, the historical importance of Haj Amin al-Husseini did not consist in his contribution to the decision to carry out the Holocaust in Europe. Rather it lay in his collaboration with Nazi Germany’s unsuccessful effort to win the war in North Africa and the Middle East and to extend the Holocaust to the Jews of the region. By doing so, he created his most important and longest lasting legacy. It was both by creating some of the canonical texts of the Islamist tradition and in combining elements of European and Islamist Jew-hatred. He thus founded a tradition of absolute and uncompromising rejection of Zionism and later, of the State of Israel. The impact of Husseini the ideologue is as important and as destructive as Husseini the political figure. His own texts before and during the crucial years of exile in Nazi Berlin reveal the real Husseini, the unifier of an extremist but influential interpretation of Islam and its founding texts with the modern secular language of anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. His target, first and foremost, was the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East, and subsequently, the State of Israel. They were the objects of his greatest hatred and of his considerable political energy. Husseini played a vital role in spreading the falsehood that a Jewish state would be determined somehow to threaten the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Though Haj Amin al-Husseini was not a decision maker in wartime Berlin, he certainly was in the post-war Middle East. In this regard, Rubin and Schwanitz make a convincing case about his destructive impact on events up to and including the war of 1948. They refer to the impact of Husseini’s charisma, determination to avoid any concessions to the Zionists, ability to incite his followers to violence “as well as internal pressures from Islamist and nationalist radicals who incited flammable public opinion.” While acknowledging pressure from other groups that made war in 1948 seem inevitable, the war of 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have taken place “without al-Husaini and his allies…No one individual made this outcome more likely than him…Without al-Husaini’s presence as the Palestinian Arabs’ and [as] a transnational Islamist leader there might have been other options. And al-Husaini was well funded by money and well-armed with rifles that had been provided by the Nazis…Once al-Husaini was allowed to reestablish himself as unchallengeable leader of the Palestine Arabs, this ensured that no compromise such as Partition or the “two-state solution” would be considered, while making certain that Arab leaders would be intimidated and driven to war.”59 We cannot know how events would have transpired if Husseini had been absent in the crucial years before and during the 1948 war. He was, after all, one of a number of Arab leaders who decided on war rather than partition and compromise in 1948. We do know that he was an emphatic opponent of compromise and that he had the means, the arms and the men with which to exert his will in post-war Palestine. The logical outcome of the views he expressed before during and after his collaboration with Nazi Germany, from the Bludan speech of 1937 to the speeches from the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin and the post-war calls for war against the Zionists, was a determination to expel all or most of the Jews living in Mandatory Palestine. This was a policy that could be achieved only by a war to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.60

One precondition for a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in an Arab and Palestinian rejection of the reactionary Islamist political theology that Husseini did so much to create. A frank and well-grounded coming to terms with the history of his collaboration with Nazi Germany should be part of that reckoning. In the fall of 2015, Palestinian leaders repeated the falsehood that Israel was threatening the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Those assertions in their own right are evidence of the continuing impact on elements of Palestinian and Arab political culture of the no longer under-examined history of the origins, nature and after-effects of Haj Amin el-Husseini’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.

Now this is where there was more than a colloboration but an alliance, recruiting thousands to join the waffen SS, to the tune his policies are what make up much of the Jewish hate today, fueling antisemitism