German strategy in the Middle East had failed twice. Depending on al-Husaini and his radical Arab faction of nationalist and Islamist groups to stage a revolt in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine had fizzled, with the British left in control of all these countries. Equally, the attempt to march through North Africa, capture Cairo, and advance into Palestine, spreading genocide along the way, had been defeated on the battlefield. For the fulfillment of Hitler’s and al-Husaini’s hopes only the Soviet front was left.
Ironically, the decision to attack the USSR and its timing, in June 1941, had ruined the Nazis’ best chance of conquering the Middle East. Hitler’s overconfidence about quickly defeating the Soviets had made him believe he could transfer his forces into the Middle East by year’s end. At first, though, the Germans advanced so quickly that in September 1941 von Ribbentrop told von Papen that the Soviet army was finished and once this battle was won, Berlin would conquer England and perhaps then America.1
The German plan, officially adopted by the military high command six days after the invasion of the USSR, saw that country as the Middle East’s back door.2 If Germany’s armies could advance through North Africa and capture Egypt while simultaneously marching through Russia and driving south through the Caucasus, Turkey, and Iran to India, the Middle East would fall into its lap. The two victorious armies would meet in Syria or Palestine. Not everyone in the German hierarchy liked the idea. Von Ribbentrop and navy commander Admiral Erich Raeder wanted to make the priority driving the British from the Middle East before turning to attack the Soviets.3 They proposed seizing Iraq and the Arab east, then Iran, and next marching through the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan to India.4 But once Hitler decided, debate was at an end.
Now, however, the situation had changed due to the defeat in Iraq and that of German forces in North Africa. Germany’s Muslim allies were still important, but now, instead of using Muslim soldiers in the Middle East, Germany needed Muslim soldiers to fight for the Axis in the USSR and the Balkans. This required recruiting Muslims from those areas and even sending Arab volunteers there.
The Germans organized their own Arab units in early 1941 with General Felmy in command. His Special Command F (for Felmy) was located at Cape Sounion in Greece, an hour’s drive from Athens. That July, training was moved to Doeberitz near Brandenburg. It prepared Arabs for small, fast-moving commando units that could sabotage bridges, railroads, and oil wells behind Allied lines while blending in with the local population. Some instructors were Arabic-speaking Palestinian-Germans. On August 24 the first thirty troops were sworn into the German army, wearing a unit patch that said “Free Arabia.” After the Allies seized Syria, Arabs from the volunteer forces raised by the Germans there also joined the unit, along with—in early 1942—103 Arab prisoners-of-war who changed sides.5
In September 1942, at the peak of the German advance in North Africa and the USSR, al-Husaini promised to raise a one-hundred-thousand-man Muslim force in Iraq and North Africa. He would largely redeem that pledge, except that the Muslims he ultimately recruited for Germany were not Arabs but either Turkic peoples from the Soviet Caucasus or Bosnians and Albanians from the Balkans.6
The grand mufti’s aide and nephew, Musa al-Husaini, and his Syrian-born secretary Firhan Jandali were sent to Paris to recruit North African Muslims who had been in France’s army.7 There were also recruiting operations opened in Istanbul and Sofia.8 Still, at the moment that al-Husaini spoke of raising one hundred thousand soldiers, the Arab Freedom Corps comprised only 243 of them: 24 Iraqis, 112 Syrians and Palestinians, and 107 North Africans.9 Al-Husaini told these men they would be sent to the Middle East. But the Germany army, not himself, was in command and ordered them to the Caucasus, a largely Muslim area but far from their homes. Al-Husaini tried but failed to overturn this decision. In the end, he could only send a liaison officer to the men’s base in Stalino as a symbol of his leadership.10
The real material support for the German war effort would take place in the German-captured Muslim areas in the USSR. Rosenberg, the Cabinet minister with whom al-Husaini had the best relations, was in charge of ruling these areas, and the Germans made a concerted effort to turn the Muslims there into allies.11 Nazi broadcasts directed at the Arab world boasted with some truth about how German forces treated these Muslims better than the Soviets had done.12 Soldiers were told to win trust and sympathy by reopening mosques closed by the Soviet regime, respecting property, safeguarding the honor of women, and paying for any goods taken. If harsh measures were required their motives must be explained to local Muslims.13
An example of the success of Germany’s Soviet Muslim policy in the Caucasus came in October 1942 when German troops hosted Muslims in the town of Kislovodsk to celebrate an Islamic festival held there for the first time in a quarter-century. With drums and music, prayers in Arabic were said to Allah and for Hitler’s victory. Muslim residents treated the elated German soldiers like heroes. The town’s two religious leaders, Mullah Ramazan and Qadi Ibrahim, thanked them for the liberation from the Bolsheviks. Muslim peasants declared the hated collective farm system abolished and a 107-year-old man told the crowd that the German troops’ arrival had been the best day of his life. The German commander, General Ernst Köstring, thanked the people for their support in the “joint battle.” Cheering Muslims lifted him onto their shoulders and tossed him into the air in celebration. As a token of gratitude, they donated a large number of sheep and cattle.14 Many or most Soviet Muslims preferred the Germans to their Russian masters, as did a dozen Christian peoples, ranging from Armenians to Ukrainians, who also collaborated.15
To rule, administer, and exploit these lands, Rosenberg assembled a team of experts. One was Gerhard von Mende, a thirty-seven-year-old German born in the Baltic city of Riga. His father had been killed by the Bolsheviks during the revolution, and von Mende had gone to Germany where he had studied Turkic languages and worked at Berlin’s Economics College. The day before Germany invaded the USSR, on June 21, 1941, von Mende was hired by the Foreign Ministry. He was fully briefed on the planned genocide of Jews at the March 6, 1942 follow-up meeting of the Wannsee Conference, since he would help implement that policy in the Caucasus.16 Von Mende worked for Otto Bräutigam in the Department of Alien Peoples. The forty-six-year-old Bräutigam, who had been German consul in four Soviet cities, was brought home to prepare for the invasion. He produced a leaflet telling Turkic peoples that the Germans were coming as liberators from the Bolsheviks.17
At first, though, the Germans viewed Soviet Muslim peoples as inferior races whose support was not needed.18 During the invasion’s early days, German forces killed many Muslims because they mistook them for Jews. As a high-ranking SS official told a colleague, his organization hadn’t known that Muslims were also circumcised.19 But as they swiftly advanced into the Soviet Union, the Germans understood that many Muslims were ready to collaborate given their grievances against Communist mistreatment and ethnic Russian domination. One German official wrote of how he witnessed in October 1941 Soviet Muslims, whom he described as endless lines of “brown masses,” fleeing to the German side. By 1942 the Germans were seeking to recruit tens of thousands of Soviet Turks for their army.20
Alim Idris was a leading figure in this effort. Born in Kazakhstan in 1887, he studied Islam and philosophy in Bukhara and Istanbul for a decade. In the Ottoman capital he also worked with the Young Turk magazine Türk Yurdu, advocating a Pan-Turkish state incorporating those living under tsarist rule. During World War I, Idris was an imam for prisoners of war and editor of the Tatar-language edition of al-Jihad magazine when von Oppenheim hired him to recruit Russian Muslim prisoners. After the war, he stayed in Berlin to build networks and edit publications for anti-Communist Muslims in the USSR. The Nazis hired Idris for translation, propaganda, and radio work where he incited hatred against the “Judeo-Bolshevists” who ruled his people.21 Shortly after the invasion, Idris suggested that Berlin create a German-backed, independent Turkestan.22
Von Papen proposed recruiting Soviet Turks in July 1941 and parachuting them back to their homelands behind Soviet lines.23 His proposal was accepted, and Operation Zeppelin, as it was called, recruited about sixteen hundred Uzbeks, Tadjiks, Kirgiz, Tatars, Turks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Chechens, and Kazakhs as fifth columnists.24 Aside from sabotaging railroads, oil facilities at Ufa, and inciting Islamist uprisings their longer-term task was to prepare bases for larger commando operations in the Soviet hinterland. Another such plan, codenamed Mammut, was to do the same thing in Iraq, possibly with cooperation from the Kurdish leader Mahmud Barzani. In June 1943, a group led by Gottfried Müller set out from the Crimea to land near Mosul, but the British discovered the plan and arrested those involved.25
Another German goal was to win over Turkey as an ally or at least gain its cooperation in using its territory to launch covert operations. To further this effort, von Papen encouraged Turkish leaders to visit Berlin. One of the first was ex-general Nuri Killigil, brother of Germany’s World War I Ottoman partner, Enver. In September 1941 Killigil offered to organize an anti-Soviet, Pan-Turkish uprising in the Caucasus, but the Germans, uncertain of his loyalties, demurred.26
Preferring to make deals with Turkey’s military, von Papen got Hitler to invite a delegation to visit Germany’s armies in October 1941. It was led by two generals who had fought alongside the Germans in World War I, Ali Fuat Erden and Hüsnü Erkilet. They visited prisoner of war camps, the front line, and newly captured Sevastopol (just across the Black Sea from Turkey). They were warmly received by German officers who had been their comrades two decades earlier. “Everywhere we went,” they recounted, “we were greeted with feelings of affection mixed with respect and admiration, which Germans all feel for the Turkish nation.” They were impressed by a German army “which has won victory upon victory for three years.”27 The Germans promised Turkey military equipment to compete with U.S. and British aid. At the end of the generals’ trip, Hitler hosted them on October 28 at his headquarters near Rastenburg. They urged him to use Muslim prisoners for a jihad against the “godless Soviet regime,” and Hitler formally accepted the plan on November 15, 1941.
But dealing with Soviet Muslims also posed a delicate problem for Germany. They might prove useful allies but Hitler considered them racially inferior, preferring to expel all Turkic Muslims from the Crimea and resettle it with Germans.28 There was also a political problem. Hitler stressed that if Soviet Muslims helped destroy the Communist regime they would make political demands after the war, tying his hands regarding the conquered territory’s future. Such recruits did ask some difficult questions, particularly whether the Caucasus would be a German colony and whether Muslims could participate in governing it.29
Hitler suggested instead that volunteers become workers, freeing Germans to fight. A good worker in a factory, he explained, was better than an unreliable soldier in battle.30 But Hitler changed his mind under the pressure of war and mounting German casualties. He decided that “pure Turkic Muslims” had been good soldiers in their nineteenth-century battles against Russians and could be so again in his army.31 The search for candidates began in the prisoner of war camps, with prospects being sent to Camp Wustrau near Berlin32 were they were organized by ethnic group.33 In part of the camp at Luckenwalde, a half-hour south of Berlin, the best recruits were gathered for training by German intelligence.34 The resulting force, the East Turk Unit, was assigned to rear areas in the USSR.
Once having gone down this road, Hitler became enthusiastic. On December 22 he agreed to create an Indian Legion; an Arab Legion was to come next, but the Italians objected since they had their own unit of that name.35 So Berlin and al-Husaini instead called it the German-Arab Training Group, later the Arab Freedom Corps, the Arab Brigade, and finally the Islamic Division.36 With al-Husaini’s help, starting in February 1942, six East Turk Units were formed from Muslim and Christian ethnic minorities: the Turkestan, North Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Volga Tatar, and Armenian units, each with its own uniform and national insignia. Four of them were made up of Muslims.
This was no marginal effort. By the end of 1942, such units had a total strength of fifty-three thousand men, equal to four German divisions. The list of Muslim units fighting for the Germans included the 162nd Turcoman Division (incorporating the Volga Tatar Legion), the 450th Infantry Battalion (largely Azeri), the Azerbaijani Legion, the Caucasian Muslim Legion (mainly Chechens, Daghestanis, and Ingushes), and the 34th Turkestan Battalion (Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Turcomans). They fought in the Soviet Union, Italy, and France but never in the Middle East. Al-Husaini established an institute in Dresden to train Muslim chaplains for these units. Graduates were commissioned as Waffen SS captains. Idris worked closely with him and taught courses there.37
In May 1942, Bräutigam became the official responsible for governing the Caucasus and nearby regions. The Azerbaijan, Caucasus, Crimea Tatar, Volga Tatar, and Turkestan departments were all run by people from these areas, such as the Caucasus German Walter Zeitler or the Crimea German Boris Müller. These departments established commissions of former Soviet soldiers that went into prisoner of war camps to recruit for the German occupation government and army.38 The ministry’s long-term plan was to develop German-led governments for new German provinces, including the Caucasus and Turkestan, but not independent states.39
Figure 17. Bosnian Muslim soldiers of the Handžar SS Division reading al-Husaini’s “Appeal to All Muslims of the World” of 1937, in which he claimed that the holy texts, al-Qur’an and the hadith, showed that the Jews were Islam’s foremost foes, and called on Muslims to fight for their religion and never stop until all Muslim lands were Jew-free: “Palestine, an Arab land, shall remain for ever Arab.” The Nazis distributed the appeal to their Muslim troops in the Middle East, Soviet Asia, and the Balkans.
On April 5, 1942, Hitler ordered a summer offensive to crush the remaining Soviet forces, reach the Caucasian oil-producing region, and open the way through the mountains into the Middle East.40 In August, as his troops raised their swastika flag on Mount Elbrus in the borderland between Europe and Asia,41 Rosenberg led a delegation on a two-week trip to Turkey to investigate how the Middle East and India should be invaded.42 The result was a plan to establish Iraqi, Palestinian-Jordanian, Iranian, and Indian governments in exile.43
Felmy’s small Arab military command, formally part of the Abwehr rather than the regular army,44 would quickly expand to become the German Middle Eastern Formation (Deutsches Orientkorps) consisting of six thousand men, including eight hundred Arabs, and 1,640 vehicles. Al-Husaini’s Arab unit, based in the Ukrainian town of Stalino, was to advance through Tbilisi into Iran and then Iraq.45 Canaris and al-Husaini met monthly to coordinate planning.46 The Germans assured al-Husaini and al-Kailani that once Iraq was taken they would cooperate in wiping out the Jews there and everywhere else their armies reached.47
Figure 18. Amin al-Husaini inspects a parade of Bosnian SS Handžar troops in Silesia, which he had helped recruit, in November 1943. The twenty-thousand-man Handžar Division became known for atrocities against Jews and partisans in the Balkans and France.
Aside from Soviet Muslims, al-Husaini also recruited their Balkan counterparts in Albania and Bosnia. In his role with these Balkan Muslims, as with the Soviet Turkic ones, al-Husaini had moved far beyond being only a Palestine Arab, Arab in general, or even an Islamist leader to project himself as head of all Muslims.48 His work in Albania yielded the 21st SS Waffen Mountain Division, or Handžar Division, so named after a type of scimitar wielded by Turks in the Balkans. During 1942, al-Husaini twice met with Bosnian Muslims in Rome to discuss recruiting.49 He predicted to the German government that this group could yield up to twenty thousand volunteers.50
On March 14, 1943, al-Husaini traveled from Berlin to Zagreb, Croatia’s capital. There, on April 1, he met the head of the pro-Nazi Croatian government, Ante Pavelić, leader of the Ustaša fascist organization. Pavelić, a Christian, welcomed al-Husaini’s help to ensure Muslims’ loyalty to his pro-German regime.51
Al-Husaini was there to recruit Muslims into a new Bosnian SS division and German-controlled police units which, he told them, would lead to a Bosnian Islamist state. His effort succeeded. The Germans in his entourage wrote of the great impression he made on Muslim audiences that saw him as a descendant of Muhammad and the liberating Muslim hero of their era.52 The result was an impressive twelve thousand volunteers. Al-Husaini told them in his speeches that being in SS units meant they were “better” than ordinary soldiers.53
When al-Husaini spoke on April 9 at the Begova Mosque in Sarajevo, a beautiful building dating from 1531, he was protected by two dozen security men because of a rumored assassination plot. But the audience was completely on his side. Many wept with joy at his eloquence.54 Al-Husaini told listeners they had lost their way but returning to Islam was the compass guiding them to success. He spoke of how the Axis would help them realize their dreams. When a local delegation asked for ten thousand marks a month for Osvit (Daybreak), the only Muslim weekly in Croatia, al-Husaini quickly paid them from his German-supplied budget.
On his way back to Berlin, al-Husaini stopped in Vienna where the governor, former Nazi youth leader Baldur von Schirach, had deported 185,000 Jews to the death camps, calling this “a contribution to European culture.” Von Schirach gave al-Husaini tickets for the musical Troubadour.55
Returning to Berlin on April 15, al-Husaini reported on the trip to SS General Gottlob Berger, the official responsible for recruiting non-German volunteers. Berger had already read glowing reports from SS commander Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, who had accompanied al-Husaini and assured Berger that the grand mufti had stuck to the agreed script.56 Berger became an admirer of al-Husaini. The forty-seven-year-old Berger had been wounded in World War I and in 1922 was one of the first to join the Nazi Party. Berger told Hitler that al-Husaini had, exceeding all expectations, “rendered us an extraordinary political and military service.”57 On April 19, Hitler received Berger personally to thank him. Within a month, Hitler ordered that al-Husaini be helped to prepare the force and train its imams.
While al-Husaini was championed by Himmler, Berger, Goebbels (who praised his “great work” to Hitler), and the Foreign Ministry generally, some were not so captivated.58 These officials noted that during World War I al-Husaini had broken his Ottoman officer’s oath, changed sides, and fought against the caliph.59 They feared he would gain too much power, or that a Muslim SS division might become a pan-Islamist force and ally itself with the British or Japanese. Moreover, if war broke out between the Axis powers and Turkey a Bosnian SS division might prove loyal to its Turkic identity.60
These warnings were ignored. The grand mufti had the support of all the truly important leaders including Hitler, who took a personal interest in the division’s success.61 As the war went against Germany and casualties grew, the need for such troops became ever stronger. Thus, when al-Husaini asked Berger and Himmler to talk to Hitler about creating an Arab Brigade made up mainly of Palestinian Arabs, Hitler agreed, choosing November 2, 1944, the Balfour Declaration’s anniversary, for the announcement.
In recruiting Muslims for the German army, al-Husaini was already thinking of the postwar situation, foreseeing the future battle against the Zionists and wanting Nazi-trained soldiers for his side. He later wrote that the Nazi regime’s training and equipment had indeed laid the basis for a Palestinian Arab army.62 In 1943, al-Husaini had suggested anticivilian commando operations as their main military tactic, a strategy later adopted by the PLO. His recruitment of Arabs for German commando operations marked the first step in the new war the grand mufti would begin less than a year after World War II ended.
The elite of that nascent army was a commando paratrooper unit. In August 1943, al-Husaini visited the sabotage school in The Hague for a week, meeting sixty Arabs there,63 including defected Soviet Turkic officers training to parachute into the USSR.64 Three of these Arab units would be deployed for combat missions.
The first was led by Hasan Salama. Born near Ramla, Salama had fought in the Palestine Arab uprising under the nom de guerre Abu Ali.65 He trained with al-Husaini’s men for the 1941 Iraqi revolt, and then fled through Turkey to Germany where he attended the commando course before going on to the sabotage school. On October 6, 1944, his five-man team took off in a German plane from Rhodes and parachuted over Jericho to wage war on the Jews and the British, but they were dropped into a heavy wind, scattered, lost their equipment, and landed in an area heavily patrolled by the British.66 Ten days later, three of them were caught: the commander, Lieutenant Kurt Wieland, another German, and Dhu al-Kuffar Abd al-Latif, one of al-Husaini’s aides.
Figure 19. Insignia of Germany’s six so-called Eastern Legions, in four of which—those of Azerbaijan, the North Caucasus, Turkestan, and the Volga Tatars—Muslims served. Al-Husaini trained imams and mullahs for these German units.
The British interrogated them in Cairo. Since they were all wearing German uniforms under Arab clothing, the British decided they could not be prosecuted as spies. From the interrogations, the British concluded that the team’s mission was to gather intelligence, raise Arab guerrilla bands, and launch terror attacks on Jewish civilians. There was suspicion, never confirmed, that the team was to be supplied with ten containers of toxin to poison Tel Aviv’s water system.67
Two others escaped, the Palestinian-German Friedrich Deininger-Schaeffer and Salama, who broke a leg in the jump.68 Deininger-Schaeffer eventually made his way to Australia after Germany’s defeat while Salama would be one of the main organizers of the grand mufti’s army in the 1948 war.69
The second Arab commando unit’s assignment was to set up a weapons depot in the Egyptian desert—according to the grand mufti, with thirty thousand rifles, but this seems exaggerated—for the planned uprising in Cairo against the British and to massacre the Jewish and Christian minorities there.70
The third unit, wearing German uniforms, landed at Tall Afar in northern Iraq on November 28, 1944. Local police quickly captured the three Iraqis and a Palestinian Arab. They carried, among other things, German soldiers’ identification books; swastika badges; small al-Qur’ans with magnifying lenses; Zeiss cameras; German rifles; loaves of “ever-fresh” bread; and French, British, and Belgian gold coins worth £12,000 sterling to pay those willing to join an anti-British revolt.71
Given the success of the Bosnian SS and Soviet Turkic units, al-Husaini also worked with SS and Foreign Ministry support to develop Soviet Muslim SS units, too. In January 1944, the Turkestan unit, led by an SS officer Reiner Olzscha, was established in Dresden. The Germans had some problems with it due to factional infighting. Consequently, on July 20, 1944, Himmler ordered the unit merged into the SS East Turk Armed Formation. By the end of 1944 this formation included three thousand Muslim SS men.72
Al-Husaini opened two schools for training imams to serve both SS and regular Muslim units: one in Dresden for Soviet Turkic recruits, and another in Guben for those from the Balkans. Among the teachers in Dresden were Professors Richard Hartmann, sixty-three, of Berlin University and Munich University’s Bertold Spuler, thirty-three. They trained forty Turkic Muslim imams at a time for both SS and regular units in six courses lasting two to four weeks each.73
The Guben imam school opened on April 21, 1944, in ceremonies presided over by al-Husaini and Berger. Al-Husaini spoke about the common fight of Nazism and Islam against world Jewry and the Bolsheviks who had subjugated forty million Muslims. The graduates were told to preach Islam in their units, bond Germans and Muslims together, and make their soldiers into good SS men.74 The teachers were four more senior Bosnian clerics, the best-known being Husain Sulaiman Djozo, and seventeen younger men. Three of al-Husaini’s aides—Shaikh Hasan, Abu as-Saud, and Mustafa al-Wakil—helped with the courses and al-Husaini himself often lectured there, too.75 The school trained fifty SS imams in two courses of four months each.76
Djozo, thirty-two years old at the time and an al-Azhar graduate, became the SS division’s chief imam. In 1943, Djozo had published a pro-Nazi text entitled The Anticapitalist Views of Islam. Ironically, when he later served a Communist regime, this booklet came in handy to prove his socialist credentials. In his classes, Djozo described Islam’s “deep enmity toward Jews,” who were rightfully excluded from society because of their “materialism and infidelity.” In another article, Djozo explained that the SS soldier must “eliminate from life all negative forces” in order to create a new world.
So important had volunteer, and especially Muslim, units become for the German army on the Eastern Front, that when Hitler asked for two more divisions to operate in the Balkans he was told that one unit was only 60 and the other just 30 percent German citizens. The rest were either ethnic Germans from other countries or foreign—largely Muslim—volunteers.77
The basis for successful recruitment was propaganda, and due to al-Husaini’s helpful advice, Germany’s effort was about as effective as it could have been. The most ambitious project was launched in May 1943 when Himmler ordered Berger to find Qur’anic verses that seemingly predicted Hitler’s role as an Islamic hero. Two academics, Johannes Schubert and Otto Rössler, were assigned to this task with al-Husaini as consultant. Schubert, then forty-seven years old, was a librarian at Leipzig University. In 1951, he was promoted to professor and later taught at the Free University of Berlin. Rössler, thirty-six years old, was an Africa expert who worked for the SS and had a successful academic career for two decades after the war ended.
Their recommendation was to focus on the belief that at the end of time there would be a great battle between Muslims—one of whose leaders would be an anti-Christian Jesus—and infidels. The current war was to be portrayed in that framework. Rössler’s boss, Ernst Kalten-brunner, the SS’s Berlin chief, objected to Hitler being portrayed as an Islamic messiah but would agree to Hitler being identified with Jesus. The evil forces’ leader, the one-eyed false messiah, would be equated with world Jewry.78 Kaltenbrunner suggested that this story be used for leaflets in the Balkans and Middle East. Himmler and al-Husaini agreed, as did SS adviser Walther Wüst, a forty-two-year-old professor at Munich University, who also had a successful postwar academic career. After opening with the appropriate Qur’anic quotation,79 the leaflet told the story of the curly black-haired giant, the “Jewish” king Dajjal who steals all the Arabs’ land, then asks the Arabs to recognize him as their ruler. Then Jesus/Hitler emerges, fights Dajjal, kills him, and sends the demon, the Jews, and all of their allies to Hell.80
In a real sense, al-Husaini’s allies were already sending the Jews of Europe into a replication of the Hell on earth he also wanted to create in the Middle East: the Nazi death camps. Although details of what was going on in such places and the mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe were secret, the Germans kept al-Husaini briefed on their progress. On July 4, 1943, Himmler hosted al-Husaini at his private spa in East Prussia and told him that three million Jews had already been killed. He added that the Germans hoped to get the atomic bomb “three years before the Allies.” Al-Husaini prominently displayed in his apartment the photo taken of himself and Himmler on that occasion, telling visitors of his close friendship with Hitler’s SS leader. A few days later al-Husaini wrote Himmler, praising him as an “understanding, generous and energetic man.”81
After the war, al-Husaini wrote of his reverence for Germany because it had “fought our enemies, the colonialists and the Zionists. For the enemy of your enemy is your friend.” He was convinced that if the Axis powers had won the war, “No trace would have been left of Zionists in Palestine and Arab areas.”82
While al-Husaini’s opposition to Zionism was understandable, his anti-Jewish hatred—like Hitler’s—went beyond any rational calculation of self-interest into the realm of the pathological. Yet that was due not to some psychological malady but to the centrality of Jews in his worldview, a point that also applies to radical Arab nationalists and Islamists of later times who held the same ideology. For them, as in Nazi doctrine, Jews were the villains of all history, the eternal enemy without whose extinction salvation and a proper world were impossible.
In November 1941, al-Husaini, accompanied by Grobba, had a medical exam with the Nazi physician, Pierre Schrumpf. According to Schrumpf’s account, the three men conversed about Turkey. Al-Husaini said he didn’t like the Turkish government. The reason, he explained, was the evil influence of Tevfik Rüstü Aras, a former Turkish foreign minister and wartime ambassador to Britain. Aras was clearly an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, but al-Husaini claimed Aras was one of many disguised Jews in the Turkish government. Grobba, who was never a Nazi Party member, responded that not all Jews were bad and that he had met many pleasant ones in Iraq.83 Angrily, al-Husaini replied that he’d never met a good Jew. They were all equally bad.84
Like many Muslims and Arabs, al-Husaini often asked himself why his communities had fallen behind the West in wealth and power. This question paralleled that asked by Hitler and his comrades regarding Germany. They found the same answer, one al-Husaini later summarized as “as-Sudma al-Kubra,” the “Big Clash.”85 To the Nazis, that clash was between Jews—who might take on the guise of British or Bolsheviks—and Aryans; for al-Husaini’s comrades and successors it was the battle between the Jews and the Muslims, democracies and dictatorships, moderates and militants. For Islamists, hostility to Jews and other infidels was rooted in their reading of Muslim texts but they identified the modern turning point as the 1924 Turkish decision to abolish the caliphate. Ignoring the fact that this system had not functioned for centuries, al-Husaini argued that to dissolve Islam’s unique global bond was suicidal, especially given its clash with Anglo-American democracies and their “Jewish advocates.”
In immediate terms, al-Husaini blamed the British, but behind this stab in the back were the Jews. This is precisely how the Nazis saw their equivalent betrayal, Germany’s defeat in World War I. Both of these events related to the downfall of the German-Ottoman alliance partners, for whose cause both Hitler and al-Husaini had fought. Al-Husaini claimed that in the 1921 negotiations securing Turkish independence London insisted on abolishing the caliphate and creating a secular republic. One of his sources for this belief, al-Husaini said, was a 1943 meeting with General Kemal Dogan Bek, who had been an aide to Atatürk.86 In fact, though, it was Atatürk’s choice to take that course because he believed it the only route to modernity.87
For al-Husaini, though, this was not a sufficient explanation. He quoted a poem by Ahmad Shauqi who asked why Atatürk, victor in the post–World War I battle to expel the occupying Allied armies, abolished the caliphate and so injured Islam. Al-Husaini’s answer was that a Jewish conspiracy lay behind Atatürk’s policy. Just as Hitler saw Jews who were Communists, Social Democrats, or liberals as plotting against his people, so al-Husaini identified as master manipulator in this plot a man named Haim Nahum.
Born in 1872 in Izmir, Nahum studied Islamic law in Istanbul and linguistics in Paris. Back in Istanbul he taught at the military academy where he met many cadets who would become Young Turk leaders. In 1909, he became the Ottoman Empire’s chief rabbi and in 1923 a member of Turkey’s delegation that signed the Lausanne peace treaty. That year he then became chief rabbi of Egypt and senator in that country’s parliament. There was, of course, no evidence that Nahum played any wider role. But al-Husaini claimed that Nahum had coordinated with Jewish leaders in London and New York as well as with a small group within Turkey who pretended to be Muslims but were really secret Jews. They worked to corrupt the Ottoman Empire, organize the 1908 Young Turk revolution, and turn Turkey into a secular state.
According to al-Husaini’s story, once Turkey came under Jewish control, Nahum went to Cairo to destroy Islam and ensure the victory of Zionism there.88 So while Hitler and the Nazis blamed the Jews for the fate of Germans and “Aryans” generally, al-Husaini and the radical nationalists and Islamists did the same thing regarding the fate of Arabs and Muslims. They did not need the Nazis to teach them this idea. They had already invented stories using elements from their own religious, cultural, and historical traditions.
But the Jews were not the only leaders of the alleged conspiracy to destroy Islam. For al-Husaini, Nahum’s partner was nineteenth-century British Prime Minister William Gladstone. Al-Husaini said that Gladstone wanted to destroy Islam so Christians could permanently dominate the Middle East.89 Today, such groups as al-Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Iranian government have built further on such material.
Al-Husaini had no proof for any of this tale except for the tsarist Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.90 He also claimed that an unidentified 1936 article in the Zionist newspaper Haaretz revealed the secret plan.91 He added that Britain’s part in the conspiracy was confirmed to him by the Egyptian Abd al-Wahhab Azzam, cousin of al-Husaini’s agent and future Arab League head, Abd ar-Rahman Azzam.92 Abd al-Wahhab’s grandson and Abd ar-Rahman’s nephew, Aiman az-Zawahiri, would later be one of al-Qaida’s top leaders and a planner of the September 11, 2001, terror attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Due to his worldview, al-Husaini advocated genocide against the Jews as passionately as did Hitler and his involvement in the Holocaust was quite extensive. In 1937, al-Husaini had urged all Muslims to rid their lands of Jews. That same year he proposed a deal to Hitler in which the Arabs would support German aims if the Germans would stop Jews from leaving their country and help him destroy the Jewish home in Palestine “by all means.”
It is logical to believe that the Holocaust was a decision based on fanatical ideology rather than on German self-interest. Of course, Hitler’s virulent hatred of Jews and talk of wiping them out had begun in the 1920s. If al-Husaini or some counterpart had not existed, the Nazis would probably have acted in a similar fashion. But the influence of al-Husaini, al-Kailani, and their movements also reinforced, made more necessary, and accelerated a policy of genocide in Europe that the Axis’s partners intended to spread to the Middle East.
Al-Husaini’s relationship to the timeline of Nazi decision making on the Holocaust was revealing. Despite Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, given international concerns and other priorities his government embraced the idea of deportation. Between 1933 and 1941, the Nazi government allowed about 537,000 Jews to leave, receiving in return $9.5 million from the émigrés themselves and from foreign Jewish donors paying ransom.93 Hitler might have been satisfied if Germany and the lands it ruled—but not the world—would be cleansed of any Jewish presence.
By closing this escape route for the Jews and discouraging any alternative strategy al-Husaini helped make the “Final Solution” inevitable.94 Before 1941 imprisoning and murdering Jews in concentration camps did not benefit Germany. That changed as the alliance with Arabs and Muslims became important, Al-Husaini’s and al-Kailani’s stance and the advantage of a Muslim-Arab alliance turned Hitler’s personal obsession from a handicap for German foreign policy into a valuable geopolitical strategy, mobilizing Muslim military units at the fronts and Islamist commandos in the enemy’s rear, and raising hopes that jihad mobs might disrupt Allied colonies.
In February 1941 Hitler had received al-Husaini’s proposal for an alliance of which one condition—paragraph seven—was that Germany stop Jewish emigration from Europe.95 After Hitler promised al-Husaini on March 11 to do so, Germany’s expulsion of the Jews was impossible and only mass murder remained. After agreeing in early June to meet al-Husaini to discuss the issue, Hitler ordered SS leader Reinhard Heydrich on July 31, 1941 to prepare an “overall solution for the Jewish question in Europe.”96 On October 31, he ended the legal emigration of Jews from German-ruled areas.97 But the specific final decision had not yet been taken.
At four P.M. on Friday, November 28, Hitler met with al-Husaini, beginning the occasion with a warm on-camera handshake. Their talk in the Nazi leader’s office in the presence of von Ribbentrop, Grobba, and the French-language translator Paul Schmidt lasted one hour and thirty-five minutes, ending just after 5:30.98 Behind closed doors, Hitler promised al-Husaini that Arab aspirations would be fulfilled. Once “we win” the battle against world Jewry, Hitler said, Germany would eliminate the Jews in the Middle East, too.
According to the official record of the meeting, Hitler explained:
Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. . . .
Germany was now engaged in very severe battles to force the gateway to the northern Caucasus region. At some moment which is impossible to predict exactly today but is not distant, the German armies would reach the southern exit of the Caucasus Mountains. The moment that Germany’s tank divisions and air squadrons had made their appearance south of the Caucasus, the public appeal requested by the grand mufti could go out to the Arab world.99
The Führer would announce that the Arab world’s hour of liberation had arrived and the grand mufti, the Arab world’s new leader, would implement the task, already secretly prepared, of eliminating all the Jews in his domain.
In his account of the conversation, the grand mufti echoed this theme, recalling that Hitler told him: “The road from Rostov [in southern Russia] to Iran and Iraq is shorter than the distance from Berlin to Rostov. . . . When we shall have arrived in the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived. And you can rely on my word.” Hitler asked al-Husaini to keep this confidential declaration secret—to lock it deeply in his heart—until the time was ripe.100
After the meeting, Hitler called in Foreign Ministry official Emil von Rintelen, to whom he dictated “four points following the reception of the grand mufti,” including a brief press release on his “important talk” with al-Husaini “about the future of the Arab people” and coordination of the next steps with Mussolini in regard to al-Husaini.101 Hitler fulfilled that last provision in a meeting with Rome’s foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, whom he told that the war against Russia was in principle won, so that now German troops would march across the Caucasus to conquer Iraq and Iran, followed by Syria and Palestine.102
At this same moment, Hitler made a fifth decision that would end millions of lives. He ordered Heydrich to organize a conference within ten days to prepare the “final solution of the Jewish question.” Thus, Hitler made his key decision to start the genocide with al-Husaini’s anti-Jewish rhetoric and insistence on wiping out the Jews fresh in his ears.
The next day Heydrich signed invitations for thirteen high-ranking Nazis to meet at the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on December 9. Just two days before that gathering, however, an event disrupted the timetable. On December 7, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing America into the war. From Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima, Hitler had known about this in advance. But the fallout from Japan’s attack gave so much more work for officials involved in the Wannsee meeting that on December 8 the conference was postponed to January 20, 1942.103
The day after the conference’s postponement, December 9, al-Husaini witnessed Hitler’s declaration of war on America at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House.104 Later he was an honored guest at the Sport Palace to hear Hitler’s speech proclaiming that while Britain now had America on its side, Germany, too, had new, equally important allies in the Middle East to match that. To underline the point, that same day the Germans published for the first time the photo of the al-Husaini–Hitler meeting as confirmation of Hitler’s claim. This sequence shows how much importance the Germans gave to al-Husaini and the alliance with his forces.
Another significant link was that Adolf Eichmann, who had prepared the background briefing for the genocide discussion at Wannsee, was ordered to give al-Husaini a preview before any high-ranking Germans had heard the briefing. Probably on Thursday, December 4, Eichmann took al-Husaini into the map room at the Reich Main Security Office’s Jewish Affairs division to explain how Germany would “solve the Jewish question.” Al-Husaini was so impressed that he asked to have one of Himmler’s aides—likely Dieter Wisliceny—sent to Jerusalem after Germany won the war in order to make a similar plan for wiping out the Middle East’s Jews. Both men expected this to happen in 1942 or, at the latest, in 1943.
Meanwhile, Hitler told Nazi leaders on December 12 that he was determined to “solve the Jewish question now.”105 When the Wannsee Conference met in January 1942 it concluded with the decision to deport all Jews under German control to concentration camps where they would be murdered.106 Eichmann told his aide Wisliceny that the Final Solution meant the “biological extermination of the Jewish race.”107 Wisliceny’s story, including his statement that Hitler gave an oral order for implementing the mass murder, is supported by other sources,108 including Eichmann himself during his interrogation.109
One of the items discussed at the meeting was a memorandum of “wishes and ideas for an overall solution of the Jewish question in Europe” that included the list of countries whose Jews would be murdered. Franz Rademacher, von Ribbentrop’s “officer for Jewish affairs,” had prepared this at the request of Luther, who would be al-Husaini’s liaison on Holocaust-related matters. At the meeting, four countries with large Muslim populations and in which al-Husaini would soon be active—the USSR, Croatia, Bosnia, and Turkey—were included in the list.110 Just a dozen years later, when Rademacher was a fleeing war criminal, al-Husaini helped arrange for him to find a safe haven in Syria.
The relationship between Martin Luther and al-Husaini was another sign of the grand mufti’s involvement in the genocide project. Luther was the Foreign Ministry official responsible for the Final Solution and for liaison with the SS. After the Wannsee Conference he coordinated the involvement of Germany’s allies and client states in the genocide plan. In virtually every case other than that of al-Husaini and his colleagues, the Nazis had to apply force or heavy pressure—including on Mussolini and Vichy France—to get anti-Jewish measures carried out, let alone mass killings. Aside from local fascist movements in other places, only the Arab and Islamist allies were eager supporters. And this policy was politically beneficial for the Nazis above all in Muslim regions.
Once the Wannsee meeting ended and other attendees left, Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, and Eichmann had a glass of cognac and spoke of the “killing, elimination, and annihilation” to come.111 The following day, Grobba met al-Husaini to brief him on what had been decided. Al-Husaini must have been pleased that his request had been so speedily fulfilled by Hitler, but nonetheless asked for written agreement to create a Jew-free Greater Syria consisting of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan that he would rule. He reminded Grobba that Hitler had already promised this to him.112
Hitler fulfilled al-Husaini’s request. On April 28, the German government sent secret letters to al-Husaini and al-Kailani agreeing to their wish to liquidate the Jews living in Palestine. The pledge to kill all of the Jews in the Middle East was repeated on July 15 when Hitler met al-Kailani in his Russian front headquarters and offered him rule over Iraq.113
Thus, the visits of Germany’s Arab allies to extermination camps were a first step toward instituting a Middle Eastern Holocaust.114 According to Wisliceny, the aide whom al-Husaini wanted to employ for this project, Eichmann personally took al-Husaini to visit the Auschwitz and Maidanek concentration camps.115 The Hungarian Jewish leader Rudolf Kastner testified that Wisliceny told him in 1944—when he would have had no motive to make such a story up—about al-Husaini’s visit to the Auschwitz gas chambers.116 The story seems credible, especially after the discovery of pages in Himmler’s office calendar that prove beyond reasonable doubt that the two men met in the Ukrainian town of Zhitomir, near Auschwitz (see Figure 22). And al-Husaini was traveling back and forth through Poland in June and July 1943.
Al-Husaini had also already chosen his own future Eichmanns: three Iraqis—Naji Shaukat, Muhammad Hasan Salman, and Kamil al-Kailani—along with one of his nephews, probably Safwat al-Husaini, his security expert.117 He had sent men to the SS training course to be instructed by the world’s leading experts on mass murder.118 Al-Husaini’s men also participated in killing Jews in North Africa, and would have been ready to do so in other countries if they had had the opportunity.
As it became obvious that they weren’t winning the war, some German officials began to worry about facing punishment for their crimes following defeat. A few sought to help some Jews escape as insurance for their own futures, but al-Husaini saw this self-interested mercy as a threat to be blocked. No Jews must escape at all. Whenever the prospect arose of Nazis letting some Jews go free, al-Husaini campaigned to stop it. At the end of 1942, ten thousand Jewish children were to travel via Romania to Palestine in exchange for the Allied release of interned German civilians. With Himmler’s consent, Eichmann ordered that they be kept at Theresienstadt, least oppressive of concentration camps, until they were deported. The first group had already arrived. Suddenly, Wisliceny was called to Berlin. Eichmann told him that al-Husaini had heard of the plan and protested to Himmler, who had then reversed his decision and sent them back to almost certain death.119
The same pattern prevailed on other occasions. Al-Husaini helped convince Mussolini to persecute Italian Jews, in 1942 to hand over Croatian Jews living under Italian control to Germany, and to give Germany a free hand to imprison and kill Jews in his colony of Libya.120
Likewise, in May 1943, al-Husaini wrote von Ribbentrop warning that the Americans and British were talking secretly with some of Berlin’s Balkan clients about releasing a few Jews. The British colonial secretary Oliver Stanley unwisely told Parliament publicly that four thousand Jewish children and five hundred accompanying adults were being let go by Bulgaria to go to Palestine. He hoped, Stanley said, similar deals could be worked out with Romania and Hungary. Al-Husaini told von Ribbentrop that this threatened Arab interests. Many Arabs had taken the Axis side, expecting Germany “to solve the Jewish problem globally by taking Jews under their closest control.” He asked von Ribbentrop to ensure Jews didn’t get away,121 reminding him of Germany’s commitment to ensure there would never be a Jewish state in Palestine.122 Al-Husaini also visited the Bulgarian ambassador to Germany, SS headquarters, and Germany’s Foreign Ministry to complain. In the end, the Bulgarian government stopped the plan, dooming the forty-five hundred Jews to death.123 Al-Husaini thanked the ambassador for his cooperation.124
Al-Husaini’s strategy generally worked. When 1,681 Hungarian Jews were allowed to leave that country in 1944 as a trial balloon to see if the Allies might make deals with Nazi Germany,125 Eichmann insisted that they not go to Palestine since this would anger the Arabs and also violate a personal promise to his friend al-Husaini.126
Another time, in July 1944, al-Husaini learned that some Jews might be exchanged for Germans interned by the British in Palestine. He protested to Himmler and to the Italian, Hungarian, Rumanian, and Turkish foreign ministers, urging them to let no Jews leave or pass through their countries. Jews were responsible for the war, he told them, and intended to use Palestine as a base to dominate the world.127 Letting Jews escape Europe would “not solve the Jewish problem.” Rather they would link up with “racial brethren” in enemy lands to continue their war against civilization. If forced to stay in Poland, the mufti added, Jews would be better supervised; he knew full well that this meant the death camps.128
After the war, al-Husaini recalled that his attempts to keep Jews from escaping had a “positive effect” for the Palestinian cause.129 But when, after the war, Zionist groups charged that his letters and actions had helped condemn hundreds of thousands of Jews to death, al-Husaini reversed course.130 He challenged the testimonies of two Eichmann aides, Hermann Krumey and Wisliceny, that detailed his discussions with their chief. Although he called Eichmann a “noble-minded and honest man,” al-Husaini claimed never to have met him.131
Al-Husaini claimed that Krumey had been lying in an attempt to save his own life but was executed anyway. In fact, Krumey was spared the death penalty precisely because he had helped free several hundred Hungarian Jews despite al-Husaini’s attempts to block the operation. Released from prison in 1948, Krumey was returned to jail with a life sentence only in 1969 when new information surfaced about his involvement in killing eighty-one Jewish children and others.132 He died in prison in 1981.
The SS men had no motive to drag al-Husaini into the story falsely. The Allies were simply not after al-Husaini. They never even made any attempt to discredit him after the war and in the almost three decades he lived after Hitler’s fall, no Western government agency tried to bring him to justice or to document his war crimes. Further, the two SS men were consistent; Wisliceny—who described al-Husaini as Eichmann’s colleague, partner, and adviser—repeated his same story on at least four occasions over the years.133 Both were in a position to know first-hand the information they imparted.134 Finally, the report that al-Husaini and Eichmann met on November 9, 1944 is supported by the fact that al-Husaini’s personal diary for that day contained one word: “Eichmann.”135 Other documents show he was in Berlin that day, also meeting with Wilhelm Melchers, head of the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East desk.136
When al-Husaini asked Eichmann as a personal favor to set free a Muslim being held at the Mauthausen camp, he complied, referring to their personal friendship, as he did when al-Husaini asked him to send Jews to concentration camps—or keep them there. Al-Husaini’s advocacy of the mass murder of Jews convinced the Nazi leadership this would be popular among Muslims not only in the Middle East but also in the USSR and the Balkans. In light of all of his actions, nothing could sum up the situation better than the SS officer Wisliceny’s remark about al-Husaini to Kastner in 1944, that he “surpassed us in anti-Jewish attacks.”137
While genocide against the Jews was a high priority for al-Husaini and his radical nationalist and Islamist colleagues, their main goal was to help Germany win the war. Al-Husaini gave extensive aid and comfort to the Nazi cause, raising forces that delayed the war’s end and thus increased the number of victims. Aside from his activities in the USSR, Balkans, and Middle East, al-Husaini’s effort to help Germany extended into India and the Far East. India was often on the Nazis’ mind, though distance made it hard for them to do anything effective there. Still, attempts were made to stir revolt among the subcontinent’s Muslim population. In May 1941, the high water mark of German influence in the parts of the Middle East closest to it, Hitler thought often of establishing an Indian government in exile in Berlin.138 Another plan was to instigate an Indian revolution from bases in Afghanistan and Tibet, an idea the Germans had tried during World War I.139 From Tibet, Ernst Schäfer, an SS man and explorer, had just returned to Germany with his four-man expedition in 1940, when he offered to go back to prepare a revolt in neighboring India.140 But as preparations dragged, Ribbentrop dropped this project.141
A new twist was added, however, to the old idea of using Afghanistan as a base against British India. The Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of 1939 was in fact an alliance that Stalin was prepared to continue infinitely. If Hitler had delayed attacking the USSR or had never done so, the Germans might have captured the Middle East and won the war. As late as April 1941, according to German reports, Stalin told Berlin’s military attaché that Russia and Germany would march forward together.142 Only Germany’s invasion disrupted this alliance.
While the alliance was in effect, the German government approached Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov for a partnership to help exiled Afghan King Amanullah and his foreign minister, Ghulam Siddiq Khan, launch a jihad against India.143 Two decades earlier, the Soviets had asked Berlin to do precisely the same thing; now it was Germany’s turn. When Italy, under whose protection Amanullah lived in Rome, discouraged him from participating, the Germans revised the plan to base it on local tribes and an Indian government in exile in Afghanistan. The Soviets would provide supply lines and bases; the Germans, troops and weapons.144 Hitler showed no interest when he reviewed the idea on November 1, 1939, but in a meeting with a German foreign official Molotov told the Germans he liked the idea but needed more information. The project remained mired in rivalry between Rosenberg, who opposed it, and von Ribbentrop, who supported it, and by the time von Ribbentrop’s envoy returned to Moscow for more talks in February 1940, the Soviets had lost interest.145
During the period of rapid German advances inside the USSR, Berlin’s thoughts again turned to India. As its troops approached the Caucasus and thus the Persian Gulf, the German military discussed airlifting troops into India to kindle a revolt. In February 1941, Hitler ordered General Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of operations, to make preliminary studies for an invasion of Afghanistan and then India after the Soviets were defeated.146
The Germans hoped that supporting independence could persuade many Indians in the British army to desert and Indian prisoners of war to join the Axis forces. To further this goal, the Nazis backed the idea of an Indian Legion to be deployed as close as possible to India.147 In 1940, there were about eighty million Muslims in India. The German assessment—proven correct just two years after the war—was that they would ultimately rebel against Hindu rule, seize the country’s northwestern part, and create a Muslim state.148 In this strategy, al-Husaini was to play an important role. Whether true or not, the Nazis reported that he controlled seventy-two revolutionary cells in India.149
Besides working secretly with his network of Islamists in India, in mid-1942 al-Husaini used German and Italian transmitters to make a personal appeal for Indian Muslims to revolt. He spoke of the alleged historical unity of Arabs and Indians. To arouse religious passions, al-Husaini claimed the Jews would steal the al-Aqsa Mosque unless Muslims united against British oppressors, fought for liberation, and won.150
One of al-Husaini’s most promising contacts was his counterpart, India’s mufti Kifayatullah Dehlavi, a supporter of the caliphate, the Muslim Brotherhood, and al-Husaini’s Palestine Arab movement. The British Indian government acted decisively to block al-Husaini’s influence by arresting Dehlavi’s aide and intermediary with al-Husaini, Muttahida at-Tarrazi.151 They also refused an entry visa in 1943 to al-Husaini’s own emissary, Salih Mustafa Ashmawi, editor of a Muslim Brotherhood publication. Ashmawi had previously carried messages and propaganda materials from al-Husaini to Islamists in the Punjab region.152 Ashmawi’s reaction showed why some Germans didn’t want to use Islamists in India. In addition to complaining about the British Indian government, he also condemned the Hindu majority there as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.153
Did Germany need to choose between Hindu Indian nationalists and Muslim Islamists, or could it support both sides despite their growing rivalry? Foreign Ministry Under Secretary Wilhelm Keppler favored a Hindu strategy and opposed using al-Husaini or supporting the Muslim League secessionists and their leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah.154 However, another under secretary, Theo Habicht, whose task was to subvert the British Empire from within,155 and Erwin Ettel, German intelligence’s Istanbul-based coordinator for Asian issues, backed al-Husaini’s effort to encourage a jihad against the British Raj.156
The man who might have bridged this gap for the Germans was Subhas Chandra Bose, the Hindu organizer of the Free India movement. The forty-five-year-old Bose met Hitler on May 27, 1942, and offered to recruit an Indian Tiger Legion from prisoners of war. Friendly toward al-Husaini, Bose proposed a joint Arab-Indian Committee to incite uprisings. In addition to Bose, it would include the Abwehr, al-Husaini, and al-Kailani.157 To Canaris, Germany’s military intelligence chief, Bose confided that he thought Germany would lose the war but that his movement’s collaboration would pressure the British to keep their promise of granting full independence afterward. In 1943, he formed a Provisional Indian Government in exile in Japanese-occupied Singapore and named himself its head of state. Bose proposed to base the operation in Basra, southern Iraq’s port which had close trade ties with India. Of course, the Germans would have to capture Iraq first.
While this plan never came close to fruition, Bose’s longer-term assessment proved correct. Just four years later some of his former soldiers marched in India’s Independence Day parade.158 By that time, though, Bose was dead, killed in a 1945 plane crash off the China coast. What might have been was depicted in a blockbuster Indian movie a half-century after his death, showing Hitler as sympathetic and Bose leading an expedition by a forty-thousand-strong army to free India.159
There were many marginal schemes in which al-Husaini was eager to participate to spread Germany’s, and his own, influence eastward. In 1943 he exchanged letters with the Faqir of Ibi whose real name, according to Grobba, was Saadi al-Kailani, a German-subsidized Islamist from Afghanistan who lived in Damascus, urging him to get Indian Muslims to rise in jihad.160 Al-Husaini assured him of assistance in his fight against the British and other “foes” of Islam.161
Another German connection was with al-Mashriqi, the Islamic alternative to Bose as pro-German leader in South Asia. Although generally forgotten today, al-Mashriqi was one of the first to advocate a separate Muslim state of Pakistan carved from India. One German expert on the region suggested that al-Mashriqi was a great leader like Hitler, whose troops supposedly numbered in the hundreds of thousands, including men ready to undertake suicide missions.162
Sultan Muhammad Shah, better known as the Aga Khan, a co-founder of the Indian Muslim League that favored the creation of Pakistan, was a key contact for Hitler with Shia Muslims in India and Iran. He visited the Führer in 1937 for a cup of tea at Hitler’s vacation home near Berchtesgaden. The visitor was impressed by wonderful views of the Untersberg Hill, dark woods, and lush meadows. Hitler openly explained his plans for conquering Europe. The Aga Khan liked him very much and told him that if the Christians had not defeated invading Arab Muslims in 732 at the battle of Tours, in what is now France, Europe would have become Muslim and thus have enjoyed peace and unity.163 Hitler was equally impressed with his visitor.164 In mid-1942, Hitler returned to the same theme. Extolling Islam as a religion glorifying heroism and promising warriors great rewards in heaven, Hitler said that if the Germans had become Muslims—rather than being restrained by Christian morality—they would have conquered the world.165
Hitler and the German Foreign Ministry maintained links with the Shiite leader in later years.166 They viewed him as a good source of information on what was happening in London (where he knew Churchill and many other leaders), as a Muslim leader of some value to their plans to gain influence in India, and as a possible agent.167
The Aga Khan’s personal politics were relatively liberal. He had opposed the Ottoman jihad during World War I and his son served in the British army.168 His motives toward the Germans were opportunistic. He seemed mostly interested in getting them to lend him money to support his gambling, and of course there was always the chance Germany would win the war.169 He also had an idea that he might serve as a peacemaking intermediary between Germany and Britain. A few days after Paris fell to the Germans in June 1940, he proposed that plan to Hitler, who was not interested in pursuing it.170
Through one of his German friends, Prince Max Hohenlohe, with whom he met frequently in Switzerland, the Aga Khan passed to Hitler his views on what was happening in Britain.171 He told Hitler that the British were not the Führer’s enemies but were fighting only because Churchill was in the pay of the Jews.172 Although annoyed at the German confiscation of some of his French racehorses, the Aga Khan offered Hitler his services to help if Germany conquered India but urged the German leader in 1940 to put a priority on taking Egypt and the Middle East. If Hitler ever did arrive as victor in London, the Aga Khan offered to share a bottle of champagne with the two pro-Nazi Egyptian royals, the exiled Abbas Hilmi and Faruq.173
While adventurers like the Aga Khan produced little of value for the Germans, al-Husaini genuinely tried his best to advance an Axis victory even in East Asia. There were sixty million Muslims in Dutch-ruled Indonesia, seized by al-Husaini’s ally Japan in 1942, and about fifty million in western China, territory Japan hoped to conquer.174 Al-Husaini had good relations with Japan’s ambassador in Berlin Hiroshi Oshima,175 and was in contact with Japanese Muslim leader Muhammad Abd al-Hai.176
Al-Husaini sought to ensure that a Japanese-ruled Asia had some Islamist flavor. During the war, he praised Japan for its policies, including support for Indian independence. Repeatedly, he urged the Japanese to ally themselves with Muslims against what he called the outside imperialist powers. In February 1943, he proposed that Japan establish an “Islamic Army” to fight against America.177 In mid-1944, he personally signed—both as grand mufti and as president of the World Islamic Congress—an Islam-Japan pact that included a call for this army’s creation.178
His other pet project was asking the Japanese to recognize Indonesia as an independent Muslim republic. The Japanese answered by proposing autonomy, but nothing ever came of it.179 Despite its polite responses Tokyo never had much interest in these ideas since, like the Germans in the USSR, it wanted to rule and exploit conquered lands, not create potentially troublesome client states.
For any of al-Husaini’s dreams to come true, however, all depended on Axis victory. By 1944—as even some of al-Husaini’s fanatical Nazi colleagues were recognizing—this wasn’t going to happen. A few tried to save themselves by cutting personal deals involving saving some Jews. Several courageous German officers tried to assassinate Hitler and paid with their lives. Al-Husaini, however, remained loyal to the end. He and his colleagues believed that their cause required a total Axis victory or else the British would still control the Middle East and the Jews might get their state. Yet al-Husaini and the other Arab and Muslim collaborators would emerge from the war not only unscathed but with their political careers intact. Indeed, their prospects actually improved.
In 1944 and 1945, of course, nobody knew this would happen. As the vice closed on Germany’s ever-shrinking empire, al-Husaini became increasingly desperate for an Islamic uprising. But why should others—even those eager to rebel in 1940—want to leap aboard a sinking ship? Al-Husaini kept issuing repeated appeals for all Muslims to drive the Jews and British from their countries.180 He wrote leaflets to Arab soldiers in the Allied armies urging them to desert from the side of the Muslims’ enemies and the Jews’ protectors. Only a martyr’s death or joining the Germans, he wrote, could save their souls.181 But like many of those—including modern-day Islamist leaders—who urge others to become martyrs, al-Husaini had no intention to become one himself. This led to another seemingly fantastic—but by no means inconceivable—turn history might have taken.
Goebbels was one of the Nazis al-Husaini had charmed. The Third Reich’s propaganda genius was so taken with his Arab ally that he told Hitler, the day after their May 1944 meeting, what a great asset al-Husaini was. In response, Hitler ordered Goebbels to support all of al-Husaini’s activities.182 The Führer’s renewed backing was timed perfectly to protect al-Husaini against the mounting German suspicion that he was jumping ship. Just two days earlier, SS troops had captured a Yugoslav Communist guerrilla camp where they found letters al-Husaini had written to the Communist leader, Tito, asking the latter to put him in touch with the Soviets. Having concluded that Germany might not win, al-Husaini was exploring options, despite the fact that he’d always decried the Communists as part of the international Jewish conspiracy.
After receiving this information Himmler, one of al-Husaini’s strongest backers, distanced himself from the Arab cleric.183 When al-Husaini asked for permission to send his two secretaries on a trip to Switzerland in early 1945, Himmler refused, expecting he was plotting to meet with Germany’s enemies.184 The Germans made clear to al-Husaini that they knew of his back-channel communications and demanded that they cease. Al-Husaini gave up this effort. But while he never switched from German to Soviet patrons many of his Egyptian, Iraqi, and Syrian allies did so in the 1950s and 1960s, with Arafat, his anointed successor as Palestinian Arab leader, among them.
The end was drawing near. On November 24, 1944, U.S. intelligence began hunting for al-Husaini and al-Kailani, as well as their archives. In early December, security officers of the 12th U.S. Army were told to search for al-Husaini in the villas of Bad Gastein, Austria. Their orders said: “He should be arrested and this Headquarters notified immediately.” By early 1945 many of his papers had fallen into U.S. hands and reports on their contents had been written, including documentation of his close collaboration with the Nazis and German intelligence.185 As late as January 20, 1945, as Germany crumbled, al-Husaini was still supervising the training of soldiers for a projected Arab Brigade headquartered at the Adolf Hitler School in Dresden.186 This priority reflected the fact that he was preparing for what he rightly expected would come next: an Arab and Islamist war against the Jews.187
But it was not the Americans who finally caught al-Husaini. In February 1945, Eichmann and al-Husaini met in Linz, where Eichmann had gone to high school and begun his Nazi career. The likely topic was how to survive the war’s end and what to do afterward.188 Many plans were made and abandoned. In April, for example, German officers proposed that al-Husaini travel by submarine to Libya. The Nazis paid al-Husaini’s salary for the last time on April 5.189 On May 4, he crossed into Switzerland, where he had previously stored ample funds with German permission. But for some reason, perhaps because he needed to make more arrangements, al-Husaini returned to Germany. At last, on the very day Nazi Germany surrendered, May 8, al-Husaini took one of the last planes to Berne. When he came down the stairs, Swiss officials told al-Husaini that he was on a list of thirty-two men, including Hitler himself, to whom Switzerland had decided not to give asylum. Al-Husaini boarded a train back to Germany and was taken into custody by the French army in Konstanz.
Al-Husaini was hosted in a villa near Paris until the French decided what to do with him. Well guarded but free to receive guests, he stayed there for a year. But just as they had employed him after World War I to subvert British influence in the Middle East, the French again played that game. And so he was simply freed.
