The Grand Mufti wrote letters to European countries asking them to send Jewish children to concentration camps in Poland.
In 1943, there was an effort to move some Jewish children from Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to Mandatory Palestine. The Mufti wrote the foreign ministers and told them not to. Instead, he asked the Jewish children be sent to Poland where they would be under โactive control.โ
He had been in Berlin since 1941, paid lavishly by the Germans. He maintained a close friendship with Heinrich Himmler. He even visited Sachsenhausen in 1942. The Mufti was well aware of the Jewsโ extermination. In December of 1942, the Allies announced publicly that the Nazis were exterminating Jews in camps in Poland.
By โactive controlโ in Poland, the Mufti was telling European leaders to send their Jewish children to their deaths before letting them escape to Mandate Palestine.
On this dayโOctober 3, 1944
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wrote to Heinrich Himmler and asked for an Arab-Muslim army to fight the Jews beside the Reich.
He had already know the Holocaust architect well. In his memoirs, the Mufti called Himmler his โclose friend,โ and described taking tea with the Reichsfรผhrer-SS. On one such occasion, Himmler signed a photo of the two of them together: โTo his eminence the Grand Mufti, a memento.โ
Germany was losing. The Red Army was already in Poland. Meanwhile, the Nazis kept the gas chambers running. The Mufti had been in Berlin since 1941, on the German payroll, broadcasting for the Nazis in Arabic, and pleading with European leaders to send Jewish children to Poland where they could be murdered rather than allowing them passage to British Mandate Palestine.
The Mufti had already helped recruit the 13th SS Mountain Division, Handschar. Now he wrote to Himmler asking for an Arab-Islamic army in Germany where volunteers would be merged with the units already in existence. All, of course, to be trained and armed by the Reich. He wrote that the effect in the Arab and Islamic countries would be โthe most favorable.โ
That same month, the SS dropped a five-man German-Arab commando into the Jordan Valley with weapons, explosives, and German-Arabic dictionaries. The British caught them. Under interrogation, they said the Mufti had briefed each of them, compared Islam with National Socialism, and told them the fight in Mandate Palestine would help Germany.
On November 2, the German Foreign Office issued a statement. Al-Husseini complained to Ribbentrop that it was not enough. They had cut the word โMuslim.โ The Nazis were happy to use Muslim volunteers, but would not endorse the Muftiโs army.
He flew out of Germany on May 7, 1945, the day of the surrender. Yugoslavia listed him as a war criminal for the SS recruitment, but he was never tried. The Arab Higher Committee took him back as its leader just in time to work to continue the Holocaust by annihilating the Jews of Mandate Palestine who were getting ready to declare their state.
He lost there too.