Already in 1943: Himmler to Palestine's Mufti: "We have so far managed to destroy three million Jews"

Submitted by Charles (United States), Nov 17, 2022 at 19:15

The following is about the Mufti's memoirs book [Mudhakkirat al-Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni - مذكرات الحاج محمد أمين الحسيني] by his very secretary Abdel Karim al-Nasser [عبد الكريم الناصر] 25 years after his boss' death and the article, is by the Arab Palestinian writer for Haaretz Atallah Mansour.
Which means that multiple revisions by the Mufti, according with events as they happen, Haarerz's bias agenda (especially since the early 2000s) all should be taken into account.

However, of course, in 1945, the total fatalities via different method were: 6 Million victims, as also Eichmann stated.

[American prosecutors presented and discussed an affidavit by Wilhelm Höttl, who said Eichmann had told him that the Nazis killed approximately six million Jews—the first time this statistic had appeared. A major article in the New York Times brought the name Adolf Eichmann to millions of people.

"Trial Data Reveal 6,000,000 Jews Died," New York Times, December 15, 1945, p. 8.
https://www.nytimes.com/1945/12/15/archives/trial-data-reveal-6000000-jews-died-evidence-at-nuremberg-cites.html].

Nor should be there any doubt about the Mufti's full knowledge about the ongoing Holocaust before and during his intervention against Jewish children reaching Palestine (in a deal, in exchange deal with Nazi Getmany), which doomed their tragic fate. (In addition, since 2017 we have all seen photos of him touring with Nazi officials at concentration camp in 1942).

_ _ _ _

Atallah Mansour, Haaretz May 21, 2001

A single leader even after his death

Mudhakkirat al-Haj Amin Muhammad al-Husayni

Brought to print by: al-'Omar, 'Abdel Karim. Publisher: Al Ahali, Damascus 1999, pp.554.

During my childhood days in the Galilee, we Arab children used to sing loudly on school trips, like our parents at weddings, a rhyme of a single line. A kind of national slogan: "[Seif] Sayf al-Din, Hajj Amin (ie: the sword of religion) is the Mufti Hajj (Amin)". The term mufti in the hierarchy of the Muslim clerical establishment.. like an "arbiter," meaning the man who interprets and rules in matters of religious law.

But Amin al-Husseini was not satisfied with the role of a teacher of religious law. At the beginning of his public career, he tried to head the activities of the anti-Jewish Arab youth in Jerusalem, and surprisingly won the first prize when he captured - with the help of the first British High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel - the political and religious leadership of all the Palestinian Arabs. He was not elected to his position following a vote in an election held by some body. His promotion path until he won the "first million" was paved and short: he reached his high position, the position of mufti of Jerusalem, in 1921, following a decision by the British Mandate authorities.

He made the surprising Nachshonite jump with record speed: only one year after he was sentenced by the British government in Israel (in his absence) to ten years in prison with hard labor for his part in organizing violent activity against Jews. He was pardoned by the same commissioner... Herbert Samuel, and it was he who appointed the fugitive criminal to the high position, who paved his way to the status of absolute heir to the Arab public's crown and its undisputed leader.

The young junior officer from the defeated Turkish Sultan's army, only 24 years old, overnight became a position of decisive influence on the course of affairs in the country, and not only from a religious point of view. His high office included the management of the Muslim religious services, including the appointment of thousands of teachers and clergy, and supervision of the property manager of the Muslim Waqf which covered hundreds of thousands of dunams, and thousands of economic assets in all the cities of the country. There were Palestinians who resisted - and paid the full price for it - but the absolute majority enthusiastically followed the mufti until the days of the "Nakba"[sic] - or the tragedy - of 1948.

The disaster of the Palestinians was also a partial disaster for the mufti. He continued to head the "Higher Arab Committee," but the Arab League, which used to finance the activities of this committee, and allocated it an annual budget and the status of a member state, decided to dry up the "all-Palestine government" that the Mufti and Egypt had taken pains to establish in Gaza.

The mufti himself succeeded, thanks to his extensive connections with conservative Muslim regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, to add and raise funds to finance his personal existence and the minimal activity of the Higher Arab Committee - including participation in international conferences - until his death in Beirut in 1974. But his position in the general public weakened, and many blamed him, and the extreme line he led throughout his political life, for the downfall of the Palestinians. He tried until the end of his life to defend and stubbornly preach his views that rejected any compromise, mainly through a small monthly, under the name "Falastin", which he published in Beirut.

The mufti's memoirs, which appeared in the summer of 1999 in Damascus, 25 years after his death, is an attempt by his secretary, Abdel Karim al-Nasser, to lay a hand on his memory. There is no reference in the book to the decision of the British-Zionist High Commissioner; Here, another member of the Husseini family served as the mufti of Jerusalem before Haj Amin, and was appointed to the position as his successor. But while the mystery of the close relationship between the High Commissioner and the Mufti remains unsolved, this thick book, on its 544 pages, reveals much about the activities of the Palestinian leader throughout the British Mandate period, including the period when he found refuge in Nazi Germany and aided its war effort.

The chapter on his relations with Nazi Germany opens with an apologetic introduction by the mufti, in which he claims that the Arabs' sympathy for the Germans was due to the fact that they were not partners in the European colonialism campaigns in the Muslim countries, and that the Germans were allies of the Ottoman sultans in the First World War. The Mufti tells the readers of his daily that the general public in Iraq gave Adolf Hitler the revered name of the Prophet of Islam Muhammad, and added to him the badge of honor of Hajj (pilgrimage) which all Muslim dignitaries boast about when they return from visiting their holy places in Mecca and Medinah. According to the mufti, the Iraqi crowd at the beginning of World War II used to repeat and memorize the slogan: 'Allah hai, Allah hai, Hajj Muhammad Hitler jai,' [i.e. 'Allah lives, Allah lives, Hajj Muhammad Hitler Live," p.73). He even tells us that the Nazi Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, personally apologized for the participation of the German soldiers in repelling the invasions of the Muslim armies at the gates of Vienna in the east, and in the south of France in the west, which prevented Germany from benefiting from the penetration of Muslim spirituality and culture into Europe (p. 126).

... The German ambassador in Ankara maintained close ties with the Iraqi government (and with the mufti who was exiled in this country), and hence the appeal of the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to Germany with a request to supply the Iraqis with the weapons that the English and Americans refused to supply. The Germans accepted the offer and a large arms deal was signed between Iraq and Nazi Germany "under favorable conditions", notes the Mufti. But the German planes were unable to participate in the defense of the Iraqi government in its attempts to block England's retake of the country, in May 1941, due to a lack of fuel. The heads of government in Iraq were forced to flee their country, and with them the Palestinian exile, the mufti. He fled to Iran, where he lodged in the Japanese embassy, ​​and when the British took over Tehran, he was smuggled to Turkey, and through it to Italy and Germany. Upon his arrival in Rome, the mufti was received by Mussolini (October 1941), and in Berlin he met with the heads of the Nazi regime, including Hitler (January 21, 1941).

The mufti and the exiled Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani worked together to convince their hosts in Berlin to issue a statement recognizing the Arabs' rights to independence - but it was not until April 1942 that the Germans were ready to sign a secret document signed by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, which refers only to the countries of the Middle East. The Nazis refused to consider African countries due to the control of their ally Italy in Libya and of France in the Maghreb countries. They also kept their recognition of Syria's rights to independence a secret, so as not to provoke anger in Turkey.

But the mufti was not deterred. Even after getting to know the Germans closely, he tried to act in their service in Israel. He selected from among the Muslim prisoners in the Allied armies and from among the Arab exiles who joined the Axis countries young people suitable for sabotage courses and commando operations - and later in the summer of 1944, in the Jericho area, a lot of military equipment and five Arab and German saboteurs - under the command of Hassan Salama - were dropped in order to store the weapons and to train commando units "to prepare for the battle that will take place at the end of the war". This operation was done under the command of a Nazi officer named Schellenberg ("Himmler's right hand"). But the operation failed and ten thousand rifles, machine guns, small arms and much ammunition fell into the hands of the British. The Germans also stored large quantities of weapons for the benefit of the Palestinians in Rhodes, and thirty thousand rifles and small arms in Libya, but the use of these warehouses failed with the fall of Rommel.

There was complete agreement between the mufti and his hosts in only one area: the pathological hatred of the Jews. He "believes" that the famous anti-Semitic book, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", contains the practical plan [he wrote] of the Zionist movement (p. 94) and that the United Nations established its seat in New York, near the largest Jewish concentration in the world... He blames the Jews in every disaster that befell Turkey (in whose army he was an officer) and in every cause he sympathized with.

... In a conversation, out of many, that he had with Himmler, in the summer of 1943, he heard about the massacre that the Nazis were conducting against the Jews. Himmler probably admired the Mufti as the Mufti admired him, Hitler, and Nazi Germany in general, and used to sweeten a secret with him. For example, he told the mufti that the Nazis were going to acquire the nuclear weapons necessary to end the war in a short time, and that they had managed to eliminate three million Jews, because "the Jews have a regular practice of igniting the fires of wars... We have so far managed to destroy three million Jews."

The mufti tells a lot in his book about the conversations he had with the leaders of the Nazis and their hatred for the Jews, and also about the actions of the Nazis to exterminate them. But in only one case does he tell of a "great trait" that existed among the Jews in 1944, more than two years after he arrived in Berlin. He writes about a mass movement of Jewish immigration from the countries of the Nazi occupation and Germany, and these things aroused his concern. When he addressed his hosts with a question, he learned from them that the international pressure on Germany forced the Nazis to allow the Jews to leave, but they reassured him that they intended to plant spies among the immigrants (p. 189). These things did not calm the mufti, and on July 25, 1944 he wrote an angry letter to the German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, and other letters to all the foreign ministers of the Nazi-occupied countries, including Hungary, which was about to sign a deal with the Jews for the release of 400,000 Jews in exchange for receiving equipment and vehicles.

The mufti does not tell us what happened to these transactions, but his intervention in the matter put him personally at risk at the end of the war. Jewish organizations demanded that he be prosecuted as a war criminal, but he managed to escape from France to Egypt - and from there, by remote control, he tried to lead the struggle of the Arabs in Israel against the establishment of Israel. The mufti does not shed tears over the fall of Germany, and he describes the last days of the Reich in a dry matter-of-fact tone while showing admiration for German resilience and suffering. He consoles himself with the fact that the Germans lost only 8-10% of their people in this war, while the common enemy of Mufti and the Nazis - the Jews - lost 30% of all their people (p. 162).

Another surprising position of the mufti is his testimony regarding the power of the Vatican and its influence in World War II. Pope Pius XII, according to the mufti, knew Hitler and had debates with him, and came to the conclusion that Nazism was a danger to the Catholic Church. Hence the Holy See fought Nazism, and helped the "fifth column" who allowed the sinking of supply ships to Rommel's African Corps in North Africa. The mufti, as part of his travels in the Muslim areas of the Nazi occupation (Bosnia, Albania and POW camps in Greece and France) for the purpose of recruiting Muslim volunteers to the side of the Nazis (travels which, according to him, yielded 200,000 fighters), noticed a burning hatred of Nazism among the Catholics (for example, in Croatia)...

He also reveals to the readers of his diary that he was involved in the connection between the Nazis and the Egyptian king. According to him, in the period leading up to the Battle of El Alamein, King Farouk agreed to encourage an anti-British uprising in Egypt, and to welcome the Nazi armies when they appeared near the Egyptian border.

He was supposed to hear three calls on Berlin radio that were agreed upon with him through the Egyptian embassy in Ankara, and immediately after the third signal he was supposed to act. The Mufti himself sounded the signals twice, but refused to sound them a third time, with the news of the fall of the Germans in the battle against General Montgomery in El Alamein, even though he was required to do so. King Farouk was grateful to the mufti and hosted him in Egypt after the fall of the Nazis.

And in general, the mufti does not regret any action he did. He puts all the blame for the actions that led to the disaster of the Palestinians on the English, the Jews and the Arab League...

The mufti's book describes the 1948 war up to the "occupation" of Safed only, by the way praising local commanders and describing their plight in the face of the treachery of his opponents. He takes out most of his anger against the Arab League, which handed over the command of its forces to British General John Bagot Glubb - Chief of Staff of the Jordanian Army, among his army officers was a British officer whose brother served in the ranks of the Israeli army (!).

The main part of the book was written by the mufti, apparently, immediately after 1948, but he did not put the book down. He later returned to add, complete and renovate it - including mentioning various events after the Six Day War in 1967. But there is not even one line in this book, in a footnote, that mentions Yasser Arafat, or the Fatah movement, which was founded and operated before the Six Day War (and some say that it contributed greatly to the outbreak of this war).

Ahmad Shukeiri, the first chairman of the PLO, and his replacement, attorney Yahya Hamouda, are also given a two-line footnote in the mufti's book (p. 322). He also completely ignores all PLO organizations. The Mufti saw himself in his lifetime as the sole leader of the Palestinians. His personal secretary signs the book with a typical sentence: "Hajj Muhammad Amin went to Husseini and his memory remains. He said 'no' throughout fifty years of holy war. 'No' to bargaining, 'no' to taking lightly the rights of the homeland and the citizen."

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".