Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (10 page)

There is abundant evidence to document the charge that al-Husseini was guilty of war crimes, having actively advised and assisted the Nazi regime in its determination to carry out the systematic destruction of European Jewry. In June 1944, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny told Dr. Rudolf Kastner, the Hungarian Jewish leader, that he was convinced the mufti had “played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews.”
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The importance of the mufti’s role, insisted Wisliceny, “must not be disregarded…. The Mufti had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry.”
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In his testimony at the Nuremberg trials, Wisliceny, who was subsequently executed as a war criminal, was even more explicit: “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of the plan.”
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Wisliceny’s testimony gave proof positive of the mufti’s guilt.

The mufti never attempted to disguise his Nazi beliefs or his wartime role as a mouthpiece for Hitler’s genocide in the Arab world. His role in the extermination of the Jews of Bosnia, and his oft proclaimed desire to exterminate all the Jews of Europe and Palestine, cannot be excused simply as anti-Zionism.
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It may be a coincidence that the decision to carry out the physical extermination of the Jews of Europe followed soon after his arrival in Germany.
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From the mufti’s perspective, it was providential. In fact, only two months after his initial meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941, the infamous Wannsee Conference took place, in which the Nazi leadership produced their plan to systematically exterminate European Jewry.
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Bartley Crum, a member of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine who visited Nuremberg to observe the war crimes trials, noted in his memoirs that he “spent some time talking to the American investigators who were reconstructing the Nazi conspiracy, for the prosecution from the massive archives which the Allies had unearthed.”
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Crum went on to report that “an Army intelligence officer, at three o’clock one afternoon, made it possible for me to enter a room and sit down at a table upon which was a thick file of documents. I opened the file and began to read. The record of the ex-Mufti’s intrigues was fantastic. The file showed clearly that he climaxed a record of Facism, anti-British intrigues, and anti-Semitism by helping spearhead the extermination of European Jewry.”
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The evidence against al-Husseini as a war criminal was so clear and convincing that Great Britain, France, and Yugoslavia considered moving for his indictment as part of the Nuremberg process. Each country (for its own reasons) ultimately declined to seek al-Husseini’s indictment. The new British government of Clement Attlee was afraid that putting al-Husseini on trial would stir up even greater Arab hostility to Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II. The last thing Britain needed was another uprising among the Arabs in Palestine, who continued to revere the mufti, or elsewhere in the Islamic Middle East where the British government continued to maintain a colonial presence. The British had no desire to risk Muslim ire in India, then on the verge of independence, and thus did nothing to extradite the mufti and get him on the road to Nuremberg. To be sure, many members of the British Parliament, outraged by the evidence of al-Husseini’s role in instigating and encouraging the Nazi plan of exterminating European Jewry, demanded that the government take steps to extradite al-Husseini and try him as a war criminal.
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The British government, however, took the position that the mufti “was not a war criminal in the technical sense of the term,” since he had not served in enemy armed forces himself, nor was he an enemy national at the time he served in Germany.
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It was decided that the mufti had not committed extraditable offenses under the Anglo-French treaty on extradition, and it would thus be a waste of time for the British government to seek his extradition.
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France, where anti-Semitism and sympathy for Nazi ideology remained strong even after the collapse of its pro-Nazi Vichy government, was more concerned about maintaining its presence in Muslim North Africa and the Islamic Middle East than in bringing al-Husseini to justice. Nor did the new postwar French government want to aggravate unrest among the Muslim populace of Algeria, Tunisia, or Morocco, for whom the mufti remained a hero. If they indicted him, it would likely make the mufti a martyr throughout the remaining French colonies within North Africa and the Middle East. Thus, like England, France concluded that the mufti had not committed extraditable offenses under the Anglo-French treaty on extradition.

So, too, Marshal Tito’s government in postwar Yugoslavia did not demand al-Husseini’s extradition and indictment as a war criminal at Nuremberg, despite overwhelming evidence of the mufti’s collaboration with the Nazis, his role in the murder of thousands of Bosnian Croatians and Serbs, and his recruitment and formation of the Muslim Bosnian Waffen-SS Division that had been instrumental in the extermination of 90 percent of Bosnia’s Jews. Tito understood that if he was to forge a united Yugoslav nation, the Muslims in Bosnia—many of whom had fought under the mufti during the war as members of the Handschar Division of his Bosnian Waffen-SS, and who constituted a not insignificant portion of Marshal Tito’s constituency—must not have any excuse to resist his plans. The Muslim community of Bosnia, Tito recognized, remained unswervingly loyal to the mufti, even after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Thus, although there was a consensus that Haj Amin al-Husseini was guilty of war crimes, a convergence of political realities in the postwar world prevented him from being brought to justice.

The mufti satisfied and fulfilled all four criteria for indictment and conviction—conspiracy to wage aggressive war; crimes against peace; war crimes; and crimes against humanity—upon which war crimes guilt was judged at Nuremberg. In each of these areas, it was clear that al-Husseini was subject to indictment and conviction. One can only lament the fact that Haj Amin al-Husseini escaped judgment at Nuremberg. As we have documented, there is compelling and irrefutable historical evidence to support the conclusion of
The Nation,
a major American journal of opinion of the era, which editorialized in 1947 that the mufti was “by every criterion laid down at Nuremberg, a war criminal.”
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Having reviewed all of the available evidence, this is our conclusion as well.

The Mufti’s Escape from Germany After World War II

As 1945 dawned, the handwriting on the wall seemed ominously imminent to the mufti: The eventual defeat of Hitler’s Germany by the Allies, he realized, was only a matter of time. This time, the mufti was determined to abandon the sinking ship rather than be caught by the advancing Allied armies. Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the great escape artists of the twentieth century. Time and again, he had kept one step ahead of whatever authorities were in hot pursuit of him. As Nazi Germany collapsed, he played the role of Hitler’s Houdini, preparing for his most daring escape.
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With the help of friends in the SS, a German commercial airliner, reserved in advance, was ordered to stand by for takeoff. There was widespread speculation that the mufti would seek to gain sanctuary in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, where he would be safe from extradition and indictment at Nuremberg, even though Saudi Arabia was officially at war with the Axis powers. Under the law of the Koran, once in Mecca, the mufti could not be refused sanctuary. Haj Amin al-Husseini, however, chose to seek refuge elsewhere.

When he boarded the plane in Berlin on May 8, 1945, the day after Germany surrendered to the Allies, the destination given to the pilot was neighboring neutral Switzerland. Upon landing on Swiss soil, in Bern, the mufti was not welcomed with open arms, as he had expected. Denied political asylum by the Swiss, who anticipated he would be indicted as a war criminal, al-Husseini soon proceeded to France, where he would spend the next year living comfortably in a spacious villa in Rambouillet, a suburb of Paris. The government of the new French premier, Georges Bidault, many of whose members were still devoted to the rabidly pro-Nazi Vichy government, was in no rush to seek his extradition. Even General Charles de Gaulle, who had led the Free French Forces against Germany, was not calling for the mufti’s imprisonment or extradition.
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Instead of prison, the mufti and his entourage were allowed to stay in the villa under discreet police surveillance, living in luxury. Only in the late spring of 1946, when the wartime activities of the mufti would attract renewed attention owing to the revelations at the Nuremberg trials and a series of in-depth articles about him by journalist Edgar A. Mowrer in the
New York Post,
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was al-Husseini advised by the French government that it was time to leave France. He then made his escape, flying from Paris to Cairo, where he would receive political asylum and a hero’s welcome from his friend and ally King Farouk of Egypt.

Chapter 4

The Mufti’s Reflection:
What If Germany Had Conquered Palestine and Britain?

 Between his arrival in Paris in May 1945 and his midnight escape to Cairo in May the following year, Haj Amin al-Husseini had much time and leisure to ponder his fate and his future: Over lavishly prepared meals at his villa, and during his numerous walks in the park and frequent visits to Paris, he could not help but imagine what might have been. What if the German military had been victorious at the decisive Battle of El Alamein in Egypt and had gone on to conquer Palestine and the rest of the Middle East? What if Germany had won the Battle of Britain and conquered the British Isles? What if Churchill’s government had then collapsed, to be replaced by a pro-Nazi puppet regime in London? What if Hitler had won the war? As he prepared to leave Europe to return home to the Arab Middle East, the mufti imagined a counterfactual scenario, one that very well might have happened.
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In the spring of 1941, as Hitler was making his plans to invade the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany seem poised to dominate the world. Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Luxembourg had been conquered by Germany. Hitler’s armies had gone “from one astonishing triumph to another.”
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Denmark had been defeated in three hours, Luxembourg in a day, Norway in two months, and the Netherlands, Belgium, and France within six weeks.
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All of Europe, except for Sweden and Switzerland, which were neutral, was in the hands of Hitler’s friends and allies: dictators or monarchs who ruled Fascist Italy, Vichy France, Franco’s Spain, Portugal, the Balkan countries, Finland, and the Soviet Union.
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By the end of June 1940, “Hitler was the master of the entire continent of Europe except for Russia.”
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Yet military historians have agreed that the invasion and destruction of the Soviet Union had become, against all odds, a “strategic obsession” to Hitler, “the strategic and ideological project closest to Hitler’s heart.”
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What if, al-Husseini imagined, in the late spring and summer of 1941, Hitler had postponed his invasion of the Soviet Union for a year and instead sent the bulk of his armies and air force to serve under General Erwin Rommel, who would then have been able to launch a victorious campaign of conquest throughout the Middle East? Hitler, like Napoleon Bonaparte, “seriously contemplated a military campaign throughout the Near East, following the route of another conqueror, Alexander the Great.”
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Hitler should have sent most of his army to fight with Rommel, who might very well have done what Alexander did and Bonaparte failed to do: He would have conquered the Middle East and led his armies victoriously to India.
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There he would have linked up with the Japanese. Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East might well have belonged to the victorious Axis powers. Future historians, the mufti mused, would probably agree that only Hitler’s astonishing blunder in betraying his Soviet ally and invading Soviet Russia kept this scenario from happening.
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Had Hitler postponed Operation Barbarossa and instead sent his troops to Egypt rather than to Russia, the war might have taken an entirely different direction. What if…? Reclining in his easy chair on the porch of his suburban Parisian villa, with his eyes closed, the mufti whimsically imagined what might have been.

From the beginning of World War II, Hitler had plans to conquer North Africa and the Middle East. When Germany’s Italian allies declared war on Great Britain on June 10, 1940, the Italians’ first objective had been to push the British out of Egypt. However, despite their superior numbers, the Italians were quickly defeated by the British and forced to retreat across Italian-ruled Libya. Hitler, fearing a total Italian collapse, sent an armored corps commanded by Rommel to regain the initiative in North Africa. Rommel, the celebrated desert commander who had already gained fame for his tactical genius in the German battles for Poland and France, arrived in North Africa in February 1941. Within a month, his Afrika Korps had the British on the run. By the beginning of 1942, Rommel’s desert army had crossed into Egypt and come within striking distance of Cairo and the Suez Canal.
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