Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, spent most of the Second World War in Berlin as a German ally. He met with Hitler, broadcast antisemitic propaganda to the Arab world over German radio, recruited Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian volunteers for the Waffen-SS, and lobbied the German Foreign Ministry to ensure that no Jewish refugees from Europe were allowed to reach Palestine. He escaped to Egypt at the end of the war, was protected from extradition by successive Arab governments, and died in Beirut on 4 July 1974, having never been tried.
The Hitler meeting
The Mufti met Hitler at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 28 November 1941, with Ribbentrop and the German interpreter Paul Schmidt also present. The minutes, taken by Schmidt and surviving in the Foreign Ministry archive, record that Hitler told the Mufti that Germany’s strategic objective was the destruction of the Jewish presence in Europe and, in due course, the extension of the same policy to the Jewish population of Palestine when German forces reached the Middle East. The Mufti, in his side of the conversation, encouraged this position and asked for German support for the post-war Arab nationalist project. The Foreign Ministry minutes are one of the cleaner pieces of documentary evidence on the Mufti’s relationship with the regime. The conversation was not a tactical political meeting; it was an explicit alignment between the German racial doctrine and the Mufti’s pan-Arab antisemitic position.
The radio broadcasts
The Mufti broadcast in Arabic from Berlin’s shortwave radio service from 1941 to 1945. Recordings of the broadcasts and surviving German Foreign Ministry transcripts establish the content. He repeatedly called on Arab listeners to kill the Jews wherever you find them. He praised the German killing programme. He blamed the war on international Jewry. He encouraged Arab volunteers to join the German cause. The broadcasts reached audiences across the Middle East and North Africa during the war. The Foreign Ministry maintained the operation specifically because of the Mufti’s prestige in the Arab world and the value of broadcasts that combined religious authority with the German political line.
The Bosnian Muslim SS divisions
The Mufti was the principal religious and political legitimator of the recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS. The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (Croatian No. 1) was a Bosnian Muslim formation of around 21,000 men recruited in 1943 and used for anti-partisan operations in Yugoslavia. The 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (Albanian No. 1) was a Kosovo Albanian Muslim formation of around 6,000 men recruited in 1944. The Mufti personally inspected both divisions. He gave speeches to the recruits framing their service as a religious duty. The Handschar Division participated in atrocities against Serbian and Jewish civilians in Bosnia. The Skanderbeg Division, in its short operational life, conducted round-ups of Kosovan Jews who were deported to Bergen-Belsen.
The blocking of Jewish escape
The Mufti lobbied repeatedly with the German Foreign Ministry, Eichmann’s office, and the SS to ensure that no Jewish refugees from Europe were permitted to reach Palestine. Specific cases include his protests in 1943 against any plan to allow Jewish refugees from Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria to transit through neutral countries to Palestine. The Foreign Ministry correspondence on these protests, which survived, includes cables from the Mufti directly to Ribbentrop and to Eichmann arguing that any Jewish escape from Europe to Palestine would damage the German position in the Arab world. The Bulgarian transit operation that would have moved several thousand Bulgarian Jewish children to Palestine via Turkey was blocked partly through Mufti pressure.
The post-war record
The Mufti escaped from Berlin in May 1945 to Switzerland, was held briefly by French authorities, then released and allowed to escape to Egypt in 1946. The Yugoslav government requested his extradition for war crimes related to the Handschar Division’s atrocities. The British government, holding the Palestine Mandate, declined to support the Yugoslav request, on the calculation that arresting the Mufti would inflame the Arab population in Palestine and the wider region. The decision was strategic rather than legal. The Mufti was never tried.
He spent the rest of his life in Cairo, Damascus and finally Beirut, active in Palestinian and Arab nationalist politics through the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He played a senior role in the Arab opposition to the United Nations partition plan of 1947 and in the early Palestinian leadership of the 1948 war and after. He died in Beirut on 4 July 1974, aged 76 or 77, having outlived almost all the European perpetrators with whom he had worked.
What he was
The Mufti is the most prominent non-European figure in the Holocaust perpetrator record. His operational contribution to the killing was modest in absolute terms compared to the senior SS officers, but it was real: the Bosnian and Albanian SS divisions did real damage in Yugoslavia, the radio broadcasts reached real audiences, the lobbying against Jewish escape blocked real rescue attempts. His significance is also political. He had aligned the prestige of Islamic religious authority and Arab nationalist politics with the German racial doctrine in a way that has continued to have consequences in the Middle East. The Mufti was the case in which the Holocaust’s ideological appeal and operational reach extended beyond Europe into the Arab world, and the consequences of that reach are part of why the Mufti remains a contested figure in the politics of the region today.
See also
Sources
- Klaus Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis, Vallentine Mitchell, 2011
- Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Yale University Press, 2009
- Hitler-Mufti conversation minutes, 28 November 1941, Foreign Ministry archive
- Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, Norton, 1986
- USHMM: Haj Amin al-Husseini