Hitler's Foreign Executioners (52 page)

In October 1941, the Mufti, disguised as a woman, fled through Turkey to fascist Italy. Here he had a brief meeting with Mussolini then boarded a train to Berlin. He arrived in the capital of the Third Reich on the night of 6 November 1941, and was whisked off to a suite in the Adlon Hotel on Unter den Linden. Two weeks later, Foreign Office officials moved the Mufti and his entourage into a splendid villa on fashionable Klopstock Strasse that runs through the Tiergarten not far from the ‘English Garden’.

As well as the inept architect of the Iraq uprising Fritz Grobba, el-Husseini’s most enthusiastic backer in the German Foreign Office was Erwin Ettel – an ardent National Socialist. Ettel had worked as an aviation expert for Junkers in Turkey and then joined the NSDAP a year before Hitler seized power. He joined the Foreign Office and served in Rome between 1936 and 1939. At the end of October 1939 Ettel was dispatched to Tehran, where he first met the Mufti and his entourage, who had just fled Baghdad. A few German diplomats had some involvement with the chaotic and ineffectual resistance to Hitler. Ettel was not one of them. In 1937, he had joined the SS and by the time he began cultivating the Grand Mufti he had reached the rank of SS-Brigadeführer. He assured el-Husseini that German interests and his were ‘completely overlapping’ ‘in this struggle against world Jewry’. Throughout the war, the Germans invested heavily in radio propaganda to the Arab world.
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Once the Grand Mufti and his entourage had been comfortably installed in their Berlin villa, his supporters in the Foreign Office lobbied for a conference with Hitler. The Grand Mufti did not have to wait long. In the early afternoon of 28 November, Ettel escorted the man British intelligence referred to as the ‘Arab Quisling’ in a large Mercedes across the Tiergarten to 6 Voss Strasse, Hitler’s
Chancellery. The big car with its fluttering pendants pulled into the enormous Court of Honour. Two hundred black-clad duty guards of the SS ‘Leibstandarte’ Adolf Hitler’ snapped to attention and a military band began playing. Ettel led the Mufti up a grand marble staircase into a small reception room where they met the ubiquitous Grobba. From here, 17ft high double doors opened into a mosaicked hall that led through a domed space into a gallery 480ft long and sheathed with mirrors. The Mufti’s long walk through this succession of ever more overbearing spaces to Hitler’s colossal study provided, as its architect Albert Speer intended, a wordless demonstration of the power of the Reich.
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The Mufti was left in no doubt that he was in the presence of a great leader who could, if he chose, liberate the Arab world from its British and Jewish oppressors.

Haj Amin el-Husseini had courted Hitler’s favour ever since the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. He had dispatched a stream of long-winded pleas to Berlin for help to throw off the British yoke and throw back the Jews. Now as the long-awaited meeting began, Hitler remained silent, sipping lemonade, as the Mufti lisped his way through a wordy account of the long Arab struggle. Finally, he urged Hitler to issue a joint statement with Mussolini that committed the Axis powers to the defeat of the British and their Zionist allies. Then it was Hitler’s turn. He spoke, or rather lectured, without interruption, for over an hour. Hitler assured the Mufti that he fully supported the Arab cause. But Hitler refused point blank to issue any official Axis proclamation. He dismissed the Mufti’s rather vague aspirations for a pan-Arab alliance. After all, if German armies pushed into the Middle East and Central Asia, he had no desire to confront a modern reincarnation of Saladin. Hitler’s message to the Mufti was to be patient. He sketched his plan for a ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’: ‘My struggle is with the Jews. The elimination of the Jewish people is part of my campaign. The Jews want to establish a state which will be the basis for the destruction of all nations of the world.’ He promised that this ‘Final Solution’ would not neglect to deal with the Jews of Palestine.

At the end of the meeting, Hitler promised:

Hitler’s promise was not merely diplomatic flannel: he meant what he said. But as they worked out what to do with him in the short term, the Germans would use
the Mufti as a radio propagandist. Several times a week he was driven south from the Tiergarten across the Berlin Ring to Zeesen, where a giant short-wave radio mast transmitted Nazi poison to the world.

At Radio Zeesen, the Mufti shared his microphone with a squalid crew of collaborators like William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) and the American Mildred Gillars (Axis Sally). The Mufti rammed home to huge Arab audiences the perfidy of Jews: it was they who tried to poison the ‘praiseworthy prophet’ and ‘plotted against him’.
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German diplomat Wilhelm Keppler (who also promoted the cause of the Indian nationalist Bose) was impressed by the Mufti’s impassioned rhetoric and encouraged him to think about reviving Berlin’s Islamisches Zentral-Institut, which had been founded in 1927 but was now moribund. It was a flattering offer that the Mufti could not resist. The institute would become both campaign headquarters and pulpit. At well-attended weekly sermons, el-Husseini demonstrated how well he had grasped Nazi racial rhetoric:

SS Chief Himmler lavished time and attention on the Mufti. He invited him to stay at his lavish East Prussian estate and introduced him to top SS dignitaries and generals like Gottlob Berger. Himmler and the Mufti reputedly spent hours discussing the nature of Jewish ‘evil’ and the insidious way they provoked conflict and war. According to the Mufti, Himmler disclosed that Germany was developing fearsome new atomic weapons. Final victory, he assured the Muslim cleric, was certain.

The Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini was not content merely to preach and broadcast. Like every other nationalist who came cap-in-hand to Hitler’s court, he hoped to persuade the Germans to recruit armed militias to fight their shared cause. He turned first to General Hellmuth Felmy who had also taken part in the failed coup in Iraq. With Hitler’s permission, Felmy set up the Deutsch-Arabische Lehrabteilung (German-Arab Training Department) to recruit and train an Arab legion. The Mufti rounded up a few eager Arab students in Berlin, and dispatched them to a training camp at Cape Sounion near Athens. These young Jihadists never saw action of any kind but, as they sunned themselves on the Aegean, back in Berlin a war of words erupted between the Mufti and his former ally Rashid Ali el Gaylani. Their venomous quarrel split the German diplomatic community into factions that supported one or the other Arab leader, with the exasperated Grobba
trying to act as a mediator. This episode drove the Mufti and his party closer to the SS and its sister organisation the RSHA, whose ‘Special Section Arabia’ was headed by Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Beisner, a Middle East expert. In early 1942, Beisner assigned his deputy Obersturmführer Hans-Joachim Weise to liaise with the Mufti and to organise his personal security on trips to German-occupied territory.

Haj Amin el-Husseini may also have sought out the man who would become, in David Cesarani’s words, ‘the managing director of the greatest single genocide in history’ – Adolf Eichmann. When the fugitive Eichmann was captured and brought for trial to Jerusalem, his former subordinate Dieter Wisliceny (who organised the deportation of the Jews of Slovakia) claimed that the Mufti visited the notorious Referat IV B
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at Kurfürstenstrasse 77 one day early in 1942. Here Eichmann spent a few hours explaining to his esteemed Arab guest, with maps and lists of figures, how Germany proposed solving ‘the Jewish problem’. Eichmann himself vehemently denied Wisliceny’s allegation and asserted that he had met the Mufti only once and at a reception, not at his Berlin headquarters. The Mufti’s meeting with Eichmann may be apocryphal. It hardly matters. We know that the Mufti was directly involved with another murderous plan hatched up by the Germans to murder the Jews of North Africa.

In 1492, Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews of Spain. They had fled to every corner of Europe and across the Straits of Gibraltar into North Africa. Now, five centuries later, this vast desert land had become a battleground between the Allies and the Axis. Once protected by the Ottoman caliphate, the Sephardic Jews who had settled here after 1492 now faced a terrible peril. In Morocco and Algeria, French officials of the anti-Semitic Vichy regime closed the gates of the old ghettoes and, under pressure from Berlin, passed a series of discriminatory laws. They began to evict middle-class Jews from their homes and forced them to work in labour camps. But it was further east in Libya and Tunisia that the blow would fall hardest. At their meeting in Berlin, Hitler had promised the Mufti that he would actively seek the destruction of ‘the Jews living in the Arab space under the protection of British power. Historians Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers have now shown that Hitler’s promise came perilously close to fulfilment.

On 21 June 1942 Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Panzer Army Africa (Afrika Korps) had swept through Libya and seized the deep-sea port of Tobruk, capturing 28,000 British troops. Soon after this spectacular triumph, at the end of the month, Rommel had penetrated on as far as El Alamein in Egypt, just 60 miles west of Alexandria. Here he would face the British 8th Army. Beyond, tantalisingly close, lay the Suez Canal – and the desert road to Palestine.
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On
20 July, SS-Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff flew to meet Rommel in Tobruk. Already well known as a technical expert, the 36-year-old Rauff had pioneered the use of ‘gas vans’ and mobile gas chambers to ‘take the burden off’ German execution squads and naturally to make economies. He was short and irascible. At Rommel’s headquarters, Rauff received ‘necessary instructions’ regarding the deployment of a Special Commando (Einsatzkommando) in North Africa. The idea had in fact been suggested by the late RSHA Chief Reinhard Heydrich the year before. (The ‘Blond Beast’ had been assassinated in Prague in May. The new RSHA chief was the Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrunner.) Under Rauff’s leadership, the commando would undertake the same kind of ‘special tasks’ as the SD Special Task Forces had in Poland and, after 22 June 1941, on the Eastern Front. As the Mufti discovered from his RSHA contacts, the Rauff Kommando would be deployed to begin with in Tunisia. But as soon as Rommel’s army had captured the Suez Canal and begun to cross the Sinai desert, the Rauff Kommando would target the Jews of Palestine.

Rauff had very few men at his disposal: just twenty-four. But the Einsatzgruppen reports had suggested that, in the right circumstances, suitable local ‘partisans’ could be enrolled to help carry out the mass murder of Jews and communists. In Egypt and Palestine, the Mufti assured his German friends, Arabs would welcome Rommel’s forces as liberators – and many would be eager to take on other auxiliary tasks. The Mufti’s oft repeated claim was widely believed by the Germans. According to Walther Schellenberg, Himmler’s spy chief: ‘The exceptionally positive attitude among Arabs toward Germans is largely connected with the hope that “Hitler will come" to drive out the Jews … Thus it is that Arabs today long for a German invasion, and repeatedly ask when the Germans will arrive.’ A German liaison officer based in Syria reported that:

On 1 July, Schellenberg briefed Himmler concerning the tasks of the Rauff Kommando. Later on the same day, Himmler travelled to Hitler’s military headquarters at Rastenburg, where he brought up the matter of the ‘Einsatzkommando Egypt’. Hitler authorised Rauff’s mission soon afterwards: ‘the SS Einsatzkommando will receive its operational orders from the chief of the SIPO and SD, and carry out its assigned tasks on its own responsibility. It is authorized, in the framework of its writ, and on its own
responsibility, to undertake executive measures against the civilian population.’
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Rauff now brought in other veterans of the Special Task Forces to join his ‘Egypt Kommando’ – including Hans-Joachim Weise, who was assigned to liaise with the Grand Mufti.

El-Husseini was, naturally, delighted to hear that Rauff was already in North Africa and preparing his campaign. He offered to travel to Egypt to prepare the ground and even transfer his own staff to Cairo once the British had been driven out. The Mufti urged Weise to:

The Mufti’s message was in effect a Jihad – a call to arms. Everything hinged on Field Marshall Rommel and the Deutsches Afrikakorps.