Historiography is a strange phenomenon

Historiography is a strange phenomenon. It is often wholly or partly distorted to legitimise later events. To lay a foundation under a worldview or religion, it is often twisted entirely.

The parties involved in the Middle East have become world champions at this. So too with the founding history of the state of Israel and the attempts by the Arabs in this region to stop Jewish immigration before and after the Second World War. About 85,000 Jews already lived in what was then called the Mandate territory of Palestine (on purchased land..) and they had contributed enormously to building the infrastructure there, particularly after the British received it as a mandate territory in 1920 following the victory over the colonial Ottomans. The Jews were, after all, living in their historic homeland and worked hard towards one day founding their own state, their homeland. Antisemitism had already taken virulent forms in Europe and more and more Jews wanted to go to their ancestral land.

The British occupier, however, had already given in to the Arabs' hard demand to stop Jewish immigration. The British accommodated them greatly (they were afraid the Arabs would side with the rising Nazis). In 1939 the Arabs forced them to draw up the MacDonald White Paper, in which the earlier promise of the Balfour Declaration was reversed. Jewish immigration was drastically limited to 75,000 during and after the Second World War!

Thereby preventing the flight of millions of Jews from occupied Europe and thus actively facilitating the Holocaust. The blame demonstrably lies not only with the Germans, but also with the British and the Arabs.

But the restriction of Jewish immigration and flight was not enough. The Jews had to be exterminated. The spiritual leaders spoke openly about it, and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem threw himself into the role of active "genocide promoter" and leader of the "resistance".

He wrote to Heinrich Himmler. Asked for an Arab-Muslim army. Wanted to fight the Jews together with the Reich. Active antisemitism? Ever heard a party like DENK talk about this? Or the PRO party?

He already knew the architect of the Holocaust well. In his memoirs the mufti called Himmler his "close friend" and described how he drank tea with the Reichsführer-SS. On one of those occasions Himmler signed a photo of the two of them: "To His Excellency the Grand Mufti, a memento."

Germany was on the losing side. The Red Army was already in Poland. Meanwhile the Nazis kept the gas chambers running at full capacity. The mufti had been in Berlin since 1941, was on the German payroll, broadcast in Arabic for the Nazis and begged 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 requesting an Arab-Islamic army in Germany, in which volunteers would be merged with the already existing units. All trained and armed by the Reich, of course. He wrote that the effect in the Arab and Islamic countries would be "most favourable".

That same month the SS dropped a German-Arab commando unit of five men (Operation Atlas) in the Jordan Valley with weapons, explosives and German-Arabic dictionaries. The British caught them. Under interrogation they stated that the mufti had instructed each of them, had compared Islam with National Socialism and had said that the struggle in Mandate Palestine would help Germany.

On 2 November the German Foreign Ministry issued a statement. Al-Husseini complained to Ribbentrop that it did not go far enough. They had left out the word "Muslim". The Nazis were happy with Muslim volunteers, but did not want to officially support the mufti's army… The Arabs let themselves be willingly used.

He flew out of Germany on 7 May 1945, the day of the surrender. Yugoslavia put him on the list of war criminals because of the SS recruitment, but he was — of course — never tried. Because the UN was inclined towards the newly to be founded Arab countries and there too actively cooperated in all resolutions against the newly founded Jewish state!

The Arab Higher Committee simply took him back as leader, just in time to try to continue the Holocaust by destroying the Jews of Mandate Palestine, who were preparing to proclaim their state.

There too, he lost.

P.S. These facts are documented in primary sources (files of the German Foreign Ministry, SS archives, British interrogation reports, al-Husseini's own writings and post-war statements) and in the work of historians such as Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Martin Cüppers, Jeffrey Herf and others who have examined the Nazi-Arab collaboration files. Al-Husseini's collaboration was real, extensive and ideologically driven by shared antisemitism; it is not a post-war fabrication. At the same time, Nazi policy towards Arabs and Muslims remained opportunistic — useful for propaganda and manpower, but never full support for an independent pan-Islamic army under the mufti's leadership.

*Editorial note: this opinion piece is published as submitted by the author. Some factual points are still under editorial verification; responses and additions are welcome via bas@god.radio.*