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The truth about the Mufti and Hitler
Minimizing Haj Amin al-Husseini’s role in Holocaust history distorts the global reach of Axis collaboration. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was not the architect of the Final Solution, and serious history should not claim that he was. But neither was he a marginal spectator. He was an active Nazi collaborator who used his religious and political authority to incite antisemitism, actively promote the destruction of European Jewry, recruit Muslims for the Nazi war effort, block Jewish escape to Palestine, and help extend Hitler’s war against the Jews into the Arab and Muslim world.
That distinction matters. The truth does not require exaggeration. It also does not tolerate minimization.
The Mufti left a legacy of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Robert Wistrich concludes that “remains an enduring element of Palestinian and Arab politics and ideas in the Middle East…"
The Mufti met Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941, at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Robert Wistrich notes that the meeting formalized a relationship already developing ideologically and politically. The Mufti thanked Hitler for the sympathy he had shown to the Arab and especially Palestinian Arab cause. He told Hitler that Arabs and Germans shared the same enemies: the British, the Jews, and the Communists. He sought German support for Arab independence and for a political order that would include Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq.
The Mufti wanted a public Axis declaration endorsing a unified Arab state against Britain and Zionism. As Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers observe, Germany did not issue such a declaration until November 2, 1944-long after German forces had been pushed out of North Africa and the Caucasus, when the war was effectively lost.
Hitler had exploited Arab aspirations while pursuing his own imperial and antisemitic agenda.
Christopher R. Browning explains that Hitler made clear to the Mufti the fate he envisioned for the Jews. Germany, Hitler said, had resolved “step by step" to ask European nations to solve their Jewish problem, and at the proper time would make a similar appeal to non-European nations. Once Germany defeated Russia and advanced through the Caucasus toward the Middle East, Hitler said Germany’s objective would be the “destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power."
Browning also notes that Hitler “conveniently and deceptively" failed to tell the Mufti that he had already conceded to Mussolini influence over the final disposition of Arab-populated territories in the Mediterranean. Hitler encouraged the Mufti’s wishful thinking that assisting Germany would lead to Arab sovereignty. In reality, the Nazis intended to use him.
Yet the Mufti was not merely being used. Jeffrey Herf is right to describe the Nazi-Mufti relationship as both a matter of shared political interests and ideological agreement. The Mufti wanted Britain defeated, permanently thwart the establishment of a Jewish state, the Jewish people annihilated, and Jewish immigration to Palestine blocked. Hitler wanted Arab and Muslim support for Germany’s war and for the extension of anti-Jewish policy beyond Europe. Their interests converged.
It is also important to reject a false and distorted claim: the Mufti did not persuade Hitler to annihilate the Jews. That accusation is historically absurd and baseless. Christian Gerlach explains that Hitler made the decision in principle to murder the Jews of Europe on or around December 12, 1941, after mass shootings were already underway. On December 13, Joseph Goebbels recorded Hitler’s position: “Regarding the Jewish Question, the Führer has determined to clear the table." The destruction of the Jews, Goebbels said, was now the “necessary consequence."
The machinery of mass murder was already in motion. Operation Barbarossa had begun on June 22, 1941, and the Einsatzgruppen were already murdering Jews across Soviet territory. The Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, did not formulate or initiate the Final Solution; it coordinated a policy already underway.
The Mufti did not originate that policy. His guilt lies elsewhere: he supported it, amplified it, and worked to ensure that Jews could not escape it.
Herf identifies three central areas of Mufti-Nazi cooperation:
-Arabic-language propaganda against Britain, the Jews, and the Allies
-Recruitment of Muslim soldiers for Germany, including the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS and
-Repeated intervention to prevent Jewish refugees, including children, from reaching Palestine.
This point is essential. The Mufti was obsessed with stopping Jewish immigration. At a time when escape could mean life or death, he insisted the German government and the Axis and Axis-aligned governments not permit Jews to leave Europe for Palestine. That was not abstract political opposition to Zionism. In wartime Europe, blocking Jewish emigration meant helping trap Jews in the Nazi killing zone.
His collaboration also extended to military recruitment. In the Balkans, Heinrich Himmler and SS General Gottlob Berger used him to encourage Muslim enlistment in the Waffen-SS Handschar Division. Johannes Houwink ten Cate notes that the Mufti’s 1943 Balkan tour was designed to rebuild Muslim trust, endorse the new division, and give recruitment religious legitimacy. Thousands joined the Waffen-SS.
The Mufti told Muslims that only a German victory would give them independence from foreign rulers-British, American, French, and Russian. If Germany were defeated, he warned, the last hope for Muslim freedom would disappear. Houwink ten Cate describes this recruitment for the Wehrmacht-SS as among the most extreme forms of collaboration: unconditional collaboration.
Then there is the Mufti’s exposure to the Nazi camp system. Simon Wiesenthal revealed that the Mufti visited Auschwitz and Majdanek and praised the efficiency of the personnel.
This tour is the only known instance in the history of the Third Reich where foreigners and non-SS members were granted access to an active concentration camp, areas typically restricted even from German citizens. Officials from the Foreign Office’s Oriental Division and the "Germany" division dealing with Jewish affairs opposed the visit; specifically, Martin Luther, head of the Oriental Division who feared that the Arab delegation might leak information regarding the "death apparatus."
Members of the Mufti’s entourage and Iraq’s Rashid Ali al-Gaylani were allowed to attend SS courses and tour Sachsenhausen, near Oranienburg. Yigal Carmon of MEMRI has emphasized that the Mufti, as a Geheimnisträger-a person trusted with state secrets-had access well beyond ordinary foreign visitors. Wolfgang G. Schwanitz also published photographic evidence showing the Mufti and Rashid Ali al-Gaylani inspecting the Trebbin sub-camp in 1942.
According to Schwanitz, witnesses indicated that Arab leaders were interested in SS methods for “handling" enemies of the state and whether such methods could be applied against Jews in the Middle East. The direction of his travel is clear: the Mufti was not ignorant of Nazi brutality. He sought proximity to it.
The most powerful tool in the Mufti’s hands was propaganda. Matthias Küntzel notes that after having failed to unite Arab lands using European antisemitism because the Islamic narrative of Jewish subjugation resonated rather than a powerful conspiratorial one, he transformed a negotiable, geopolitical conflict over land and British colonial policy into an absolute spiritual war.
By framing Jewish immigration as a sacrilegious threat to holy sites like the Al-Aqsa Mosque and weaponizing religious decrees, he cast political adversaries as cosmic enemies of the faith. This ideological shift successfully mobilized the masses by turning opposition into a sacred commandment (Jihad). Ultimately, it permanently closed the door to diplomatic compromise, replaced negotiable political goals with uncompromising mandates, and branded any peaceful coexistence as a direct betrayal of divine law. , thus creating an “Islamic antisemitism".
The Germans established a special office for him in Berlin, and Arabic-language broadcasts were transmitted from Zeesen, south of Berlin, through one of the world’s most powerful shortwave systems. Matthias Küntzel calls these broadcasts the most effective vehicle of Nazi propaganda in the Arab world. Wistrich argues that they reveal a striking rapprochement between Islamic antisemitism and National Socialism.
The Oriental Service employed announcers, translators, and editors and received top priority. From 1939 to 1945, when radio was heard collectively in cafes, bazaars, and public squares, German Arabic broadcasts became highly influential. Küntzel notes that the propaganda was packaged with high-quality Arabic music and passages from the Qur’an. The message was crude but effective: the Allies were lackeys of the Jews; the Jews were the enemies of Islam; Zionism and Judaism were fused into a single demonic threat.
Herf explains that this fusion of antisemitism and anti-Zionism was a key ideological weapon of Nazi propaganda in North Africa and the Middle East. It allowed the Nazis and their Arab allies to present Germany’s war as liberation for Islam and the Arabs. The Mufti’s broadcasts gave that message religious and political authority.
British intelligence understood the danger. An October 1939 report on Radio Zeesen’s impact in Palestine observed that Arab listeners enjoyed the aggressive attacks on British figures, but absorbed especially the anti-Jewish material. “This he wants to hear and to believe; and he does both," the report concluded.
Nazi propaganda did not create Arab antisemitism from nothing, but it radicalized, systematized, and weaponized it.
On July 2, 1942, as Rommel’s Afrika Korps threatened Egypt, the Mufti broadcast that German victories in North Africa filled Arabs throughout the Orient with joy. He described the English and the Jews as common enemies of the Arabs and the Axis. Joseph B. Schechtman writes that the Mufti urged Arabs and Muslims, even in the United States, to act as a fifth column, sabotage the Allies, and kill Jews. Helping the Axis, he argued, was a religious and national obligation, even if it required martyrdom.
Radio Zeesen stopped broadcasting in April 1945. But Küntzel argues that its ideological residue remained. Anti-Jewish themes drawn from Nazi propaganda, Islamic sources, and anti-Zionist agitation continued circulating after the Reich collapsed. On November 2, 1945, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, rioters in Cairo attacked the Jewish quarter, looted homes and shops, assaulted non-Muslims, and destroyed the Ashkenazi synagogue before setting it on fire. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had grown into a mass movement in Egypt, helped initiate the violence.
The lesson is straightforward.
It is false to say the Mufti caused the Holocaust. Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and the Nazi state conceived and executed the Final Solution.
But it is equally false to sanitize the Mufti as merely an anti-colonial Arab nationalist or a symbolic wartime figure. He was a committed collaborator who aligned himself with Nazi Germany, recruited for the SS, spread total destruction propaganda, obstructed Jewish rescue, and sought to bring the Nazi war against the Jews into the Middle East.
Holocaust education fails when it edits out politically inconvenient collaborators. The Mufti belongs in the story because he exposes the broader geography of wartime antisemitism. Küntzel argues that “Islamic antisemitism has nothing to do with ethnic characteristics or cultural peculiarities. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb."
He quotes Bassam Tibi, a scholar of Islam, who declares: “only when the public takes an appropriate stand against the antisemitic dimension of Islamism, will it be possible to say that they have truly understood the lessons of the Holocaust."
Part II: The true background of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the agitator who Became Mufti
The story of Haj Amin al-Husseini is not merely the story of one radical cleric. It is the story of how a convicted agitator became the central political and religious authority of Palestinian Arab society-and how the ideology he imposed became the foundation of the Palestinian Arab posture toward Zionism and Israel.
Born in Jerusalem during the late 1890s (around 1895-1897), Haj Amin al-Husseini belonged to the distinguished al-Husayni clan, a prominent family claiming direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali.
Before he was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin was a young radical activist. Before he held religious office, he helped inflame mobs. Before he spoke in the name of Palestinian Arab nationalism, he learned that violence, intimidation, and religious incitement could elevate him politically.
That lesson would define his career.
The decisive moment came during the Nabi Musa disturbances in April 1920 during which five Jews were murdered and 211 were injured. Nabi Musa was an annual Muslim pilgrimage to a mosque near Jericho, traditionally believed to be the burial site of Moses. According to historian Zvi Elpeleg, the custom originated with Saladin after his defeat of the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. While Christians were permitted to visit holy sites during Easter, Saladin established large Muslim processions at the same time to deter any renewed Crusader ambitions.
In 1920, the festival coincided with Passover and Easter. Thousands of pilgrims crowded into Jerusalem at a moment of intense political tension, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration, and the beginning of British control over Palestine.
What began as a religious procession quickly became an anti-Jewish eruption. Inflammatory speeches transformed the return from Nabi Musa into a violent demonstration. On April 4-5, five Jews were murdered and 211 were injured.
A persistent historical error is to assume that Haj Amin was already the Grand Mufti at the time. He was not. The Mufti of Jerusalem was his half-brother, Kamil al-Husseini, who generally sought cooperation with the British authorities. Haj Amin, by contrast, was one of the radicals who helped inflame the crowd. Together with journalist Arif al-Arif, editor of Suriyyah al-Janubiyyah, he fled to Transjordan and then Damascus to avoid arrest. A British military court sentenced both men in absentia to ten years in prison.
Yet this conviction did not end Haj Amin’s career. It launched it.
In Damascus, Palestinian Arab activists treated him not as a criminal but as a nationalist hero. On May 31, 1920, they founded the Arab Palestine Society, an umbrella body for Muslim-Christian associations. Haj Amin was appointed representative for foreign relations, a role Elpeleg suggests he received because of his reputation as one of the chief instigators of the Jerusalem riots.
From the beginning, the movement he helped shape opposed the Balfour Declaration, Jewish immigration, and British policy. Its political logic was not coexistence, compromise, or constitutional negotiation. Its logic was rejection.
Then came one of the great British blunders of the Mandate period.
Sir Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, appointed Haj Amin Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on May 8, 1921. Samuel, a British Jew and committed Zionist, believed he could balance the obligations of the Balfour Declaration: support for a Jewish national home while protecting the civil and religious rights of the Arab population.
But in trying to pacify Arab nationalism, the British empowered one of its most dangerous figures.
Haj Amin’s appointment was pushed by pro-Arab British officials, including Ernest T. Richmond, a staunch anti-Zionist advisor and Jerusalem Governor Ronald Storrs, who believed the al-Husseini family could stabilize the country. Haj Amin promised cooperation. The British chose to believe him.
They also wanted to balance the rival Husseini and Nashashibi clans. In doing so, they handed the most important religious office in Jerusalem to a man barely in his mid-twenties, already convicted for incitement, and already committed to militant opposition to Zionism.
Haj Amin did not treat the office as merely religious. He used it to build a machine.
With the establishment of the Supreme Muslim Council in 1922, he gained control over Islamic courts, religious appointments, education, and the vast waqf endowments. These resources gave him political leverage, money, patronage, and the ability to reward allies and punish opponents. He turned the Mufti’s office into the nerve center of Palestinian Arab power.
Just as important, he systematically eliminated rivals. The Palestinian Arab public sphere did not develop into a pluralistic political culture. Opposition was marginalized, intimidated, and at times physically attacked. The result was devastating: one man’s rejectionist ideology became the dominant line, and alternative Arab voices were pushed aside.
That is why Haj Amin matters.
He was not an incidental figure in Palestinian Arab history. He became the architect of a political culture that treated Jewish sovereignty not as a dispute to be negotiated, but as an illegitimacy to be destroyed.
His later record followed the same pattern. During the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, he directed strikes, boycotts, and violence against Jews and against Arab opponents. The British finally removed him in 1937. But by then the damage was done. He had trained Palestinian politics to see maximalism as principle, compromise as betrayal, and terror as a legitimate tool.
The legacy did not disappear with him. The same ideological architecture remains visible in the Palestinian Arab position toward Israel today:
-refusal to accept Jewish national legitimacy,
-the use of religious language to mobilize political violence, and
-the treatment of compromise as surrender.
The Nabi Musa riots were therefore more than an early Mandate disturbance. They were the opening act in a century-long pattern. The British thought they were co-opting a radical. In reality, they elevated him. They gave religious and political authority to a man whose worldview helped set Palestinian Arab nationalism on a course of rejection, intimidation, and perpetual confrontation.
Haj Amin al-Husseini did not merely become Mufti. He became the model. His collaboration with the Nazis in Berlin during World War II was not merely a “marriage of convenience" but a strategic alignment aimed at preventing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and accomplishing the total destruction of the Jewish people.
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