Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini (Arabic: محمد أمين الحسيني, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni; born c. 1897; died 4 July 1974) was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in the Mandatory Palestine.
Al-Husseini was an ambitious Arab nationalist and following the end of the First World War positioned himself in Damascus, as a supporter of the Arab Kingdom of Syria. However, following the fiasco of the Franco-Syrian War, his early position on pan-Arabism shifted to a form of local nationalism for Palestinian Arabs and moved back to Jerusalem. From as early as 1920, in order to secure the independence of Palestine as an Arab state he actively opposed Zionism, and was implicated as a leader of a violent riot that broke out over the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. From 1921 to 1937 al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, using the position to promote Islam but also to rally a non-confessional Arab nationalism against Zionism.
In 1941, Haj Amin al-Husseini fled to Germany and met with Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and other Nazi leaders. He wanted to persuade them to extend the Nazis’ anti-Jewish program to the Arab world.
The Mufti sent Hitler 15 drafts of declarations he wanted Germany and Italy to make concerning the Middle East. One called on the two countries to declare the illegality of the Jewish home in Palestine. Furthermore, “they accord to Palestine and to other Arab countries the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and, by the same method, that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries.”
In November 1941, the Mufti met with Hitler, who told him the Jews were his foremost enemy. The Nazi dictator rebuffed the Mufti’s requests for a declaration in support of the Arabs, however, telling him the time was not right. The Mufti offered Hitler his “thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches….The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely….the Jews….”
You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion…The Mohammedan religion too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?Adolf Hitler, August 28, 1942
Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine….Germany would furnish positive and practical aid to the Arabs involved in the same struggle….Germany’s objective [is]…solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere….In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. The Mufti thanked Hitler profusely.
Al-Husseini and the Holocaust
Al-Husseini settled in Berlin in late 1941 and resided there for most of the war. Various sources have affirmed that he visited the death camps of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka and Mauthausen. Most of these allegations are completely unfounded, but the suggestion that he visited Auschwitz in the company of Adolf Eichmann, though denied by Eichmann himself at his trial, is based on an affidavit by Rudolf Kastner, drawing on testimony from Dieter Wisliceny.
It is documented that an associate of al-Husseini’s, together with three associates of former Iraqi Prime Minister visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as part of a “training course’, in July 1942. They were shown the ostensible educational function of the camp, the high quality of objects made by inmates, and happy Russian prisoners who, reformed to fight Bolshevism, were paraded, singing, in sprightly new uniforms. They left the camp very favourably impressed by its programme of educational indocrination.At the time, the Sachsenhausen camp housed large numbers of Jews, but was only transformed into a death camp in the following year.
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz notes that in his memoirs Husseini recalled that Heinrich Himmler, in the summer of 1943, while confiding some German war secrets, inveighed against Jewish “war guilt”, and, speaking of Germany’s persecution of the Jews said that “up to now we have exterminated (in Arabic, abadna) around three million of them”. In his memoirs, Husseini wrote he was astonished to hear this. Schwanitz doubts the sincerity of his surprise since, he argues, Husseini had publicly declared that Muslims should follow the example Germans set for a “definitive solution to the Jewish problem”.
On November 2, 1943, Himmler sent the following telegram to the Mufti:
- ‘To the Grand Mufti: The National Socialist movement of Greater Germany has, since its inception, inscribed upon its flag the fight against the world Jewry. It has therefore followed with particular sympathy the struggle of freedom-loving Arabs, especially in Palestine, against Jewish interlopers. In the recognition of this enemy and of the common struggle against it lies the firm foundation of the natural alliance that exists between the National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the whole world. In this spirit I am sending you on the anniversary of the infamous Balfour Declaration my hearty greetings and wishes for the successful pursuit of your struggle until the final victory. Reichsfuehrer S.S. Heinrich Himmler.’
In a speech delivered that same day at the Luftwaffe hall in Berlin, Husseini declared:”The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews . .They have definitely solved the Jewish problem.”
Al-Husseini’s attempts to block Jewish refugees
Husseini intervened on May 13, 1943, before the meeting with Himmler when he was informed of the holocaust, with the German Foreign Office to block possible transfers of Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, after reports reached him that 4,000 Jewish children accompanied by 500 adults had managed to reach Palestine. He asked that the Foreign Minister “to do his utmost” to block all such proposals and this request was complied with. According to Idith Zertal, none of the documents presented at Eichmann’s trial prove that it was the Mufti’s interference, in these ‘acts of total evil,’ that prevented the children’s rescue.A year later, on the 25 July 1944, he wrote to the Hungarian foreign minister to register his objection to the release of certificates for 900 Jewish children and 100 adults for transfer from Hungary, fearing they might end up in Palestine. He suggested that if such transfers of population were deemed necessary.
In September 1943, intense negotiations to rescue 500 Jewish children from the town of Arbe in Croatia collapsed due to the objection of al-Husseini who blocked the children’s departure to Turkey because they would end up in Palestine.
In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslim volunteers for the SS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary. He escaped from French detention in 1946, however, and continued his fight against the Jews from Cairo and later Beirut. He died in 1974.
Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! -then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism (Islam), that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.Adolf Hitler, August 28, 1942
The Husseini family continued to play a role in Palestinian affairs, with Faisal Husseini, whose father was the Mufti’s nephew, regarded until his death in 2001 as one of their leading spokesmen in the territories.