Both before and during World War II, al-Husaini and the Arab nationalist-Islamist faction stood at the very center of Germany’s strategy. In effect, they sought to become the Axis’s fourth member, alongside Germany, Italy, and Japan. But how did that group promote its interests and build its ideology in the collaborationist era, and what other nationalist and Islamist forces developed during the war?
In their September 27, 1940, agreement that al-Husaini and al-Kailani had originally proposed they were granted admission into the Axis as a full partner with Germany. The plan was that once Egypt, Iraq, and al-Husaini’s personal empire made up of Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, and Syria were under German allies’ control these states would enter into such a formal alliance. Ultimately, the Islamists and radical Arab nationalists did not achieve this status because they were unable to deliver the armies, uprisings, and territory they had promised. If not for German military failures and clever, energetic British strategies the grand mufti would have become ruler of a substantial state and the region’s leading figure.
Nevertheless, al-Husaini and his colleagues were treated as highly important for the Axis’s interests. Al-Husaini regularly met with the Nazi regime’s highest-ranking figures: Hitler, Himmler, von Ribben-trop, Rosenberg, Göring, and Goebbels. They listened to him and usually followed his advice on propaganda, recruiting Muslim soldiers, and other matters. The Germans and Italians both viewed him as the most important figure among Arabs, among Muslims in general—including in the USSR, the Balkans, and India—and in the Middle East region.1 So highly did Hitler value him that Grobba was fired when he displeased the grand mufti.2 The Germans also sidelined al-Kailani, his sole rival. Al-Husaini was the single most important foreign collaborator with the Nazis and certainly the most prized non-European one.
Yet al-Husaini was no mere puppet of the Germans but had his own strong support base. Indeed, he had a better chance of becoming caliph than any other individual since the old Ottoman line ended in 1924. His qualifications included his descent from Muhammad lineage; high religious office as grand mufti of Jerusalem, generally considered by Muslims as a holy site ranking alongside Mecca and Medina; connections with every corner of the Muslim world; a charismatic personality and excellence as a speaker and writer; the ability to combine Islamism and nationalism; lack of any serious competitor; possession of the Palestine card; and Axis backing.
In 1942, German military intelligence agreed that al-Husaini would take the lead on a wide range of espionage activities including information gathering, propaganda, sabotage, managing Arab intelligence agents, and organizing uprisings.3 On December 2, German military intelligence and the SS discussed taking supervision of the grand mufti away from the Foreign Ministry and making him their official chief agent in the region. The file of these exchanges is entitled “The Mufti as co-worker” (Mitarbeiter), less than a colleague but far more than a simple employee.
When Grobba was fired to please al-Husaini, he was replaced by Curt M. Prüfer. Sixty-one years old in 1942, Prüfer was well qualified to be the grand mufti’s handler. Speaking Arabic, Turkish, and French, he had served the German Foreign Ministry for thirty-five years as a Middle East linguist and expert. During World War I, Prüfer had been stationed in Istanbul where he headed von Oppenheim’s operation, and had later fought alongside the Ottomans in Palestine. In his work for von Oppenheim, Prüfer had helped organize several jihad congresses.4 He joined the Nazi Party in 1937.
Prüfer had the perfect argument to assure al-Husaini of Berlin’s reliability for his cause. Germany, he said, had studied empires having distant colonies—the British and French model—and concluded that this type of imperial system didn’t work. Consequently, Nazi Germany “only intends to expand in Europe and not to have any colonies [abroad].”5 Al-Husaini was convinced that the Germans would support Arab independence rather than seek to replace the old colonial masters.
Despite the failures of his 1941 Iraqi and 1942 North African campaigns, in September 1942 al-Husaini developed an even more ambitious proposal that he presented to Walther Schellenberg, an intelligence official whom al-Husaini described as “Himmler’s well-known deputy.”6 Calling himself, “One of the most influential Arab freedom fighters,” al-Husaini bragged that he had fought the Jews long before the Nazis took power.7 Having already put himself up as future leader of a Greater Arab Empire including Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, he now added Egypt, Libya, and French North Africa to his projected domain.8 The basis for this Pan-Arab, Pan-Muslim grand unity scheme came from Islamic doctrine, regional history, and Hitler’s own strategy of uniting all Germans in one great empire.
While sometimes giving preference to Vichy French or Italian demands, Hitler generally supported al-Husaini, treated him as a virtual head of state, and funded him lavishly. Even before the war al-Husaini had been receiving German subsidies to pay to various groups including the Muslim Brotherhood.9 The Germans gave him 150,000 marks in foreign currency every month just to subsidize between 125 and 150 Arab students in Paris.10 One of al-Husaini’s agents there was Maruf ad-Dawalibi, later prime minister of Syria and al-Husaini’s successor four decades later as president of the World Islamic Congress.11
Al-Husaini’s immediate entourage, financed by the German government, included about sixty officials. His monthly payroll for the most important aides totaled 11,450 marks paid to twenty-three people, each receiving 200 to 700 marks a month.12 To put this amount in perspective, al-Husaini’s German liaison Grobba, a high-ranking official, earned 1,000 marks a month.13
Among the entourage were at least three nephews: Musa, the intelligence and security chief; Salim; and Safwat, the liaison with students. Others were senior members of al-Husaini’s Higher Arab Committee who had fled to Berlin. Some were involved in military activities, like Fauzi al-Qutb, his explosives expert. Dhu al-Kuffar Abd al-Latif was trained in sabotage and parachuted into Palestine with an elite German-Arab military unit.14
Not all the Germans’ propaganda, intelligence, and military assets among Arabs and Muslims worked for al-Husaini. While accepting al-Husaini’s primacy, Hitler wanted to leave the door open for Arab monarchs to join him. His dream was a Berlin-based Council of Arab Leaders including Egypt’s King Faruq and King Ibn Saud.15 There would also be separate groups representing non-Arab Muslims from the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and India.
A good example of one of the many Arab collaborators independent of al-Husaini or other groups was Yunus Bahri, the most popular Arab broadcaster. In 1931 he had traveled to Berlin and met Goebbels, and in 1939 he began radio work for the Germans. His opening line, “This is Berlin” (Huna Barlin) became famous in the Arabic-speaking world, as did his oft-repeated slogan, “Hayy, ja aiyuha al Arab!” urging the Arabs to “get ready” to launch a revolt. Aside from on-air activity, Bahri worked for the SS to build spy rings.16
But the only potential competitor for al-Husaini was Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose separate operation focused on Iraq. This was no ideological dispute, merely a battle for personal rank and power. Al-Kailani contested al-Husaini’s primacy but never with any real success. He was the one who signed the September 1941 agreement to create an Arab Freedom Corps, but it was al-Husaini who led it.17 Al-Kailani repeatedly failed with proposals for a German-Arab pact to make himself leader of the whole Middle East.18 The Germans’ preference for the grand mufti was understandable. Al-Husaini had a wide international reach while, at best, al-Kailani only had support in Iraq. Moreover, al-Husaini had impeccable Muslim credentials and, as World Islamic Congress president,19 he assured Hitler that hundreds of millions of Muslims would cooperate closely with Germany.20 Al-Kailani’s effort to strike back was restricted to petty maneuvers. He ordered his entourage to address him by the same title used for Hitler, as their “Führer.”21 He also called himself the United Arab States prime minister.22 In retaliation, al-Husaini successfully campaigned for Berlin and Rome to recognize him as head of the multinational Arab Nation Party.23 The Iraqi scored a point on July 15, 1942, getting a personal meeting with Hitler at his headquarters near the Russian front. The grand mufti retaliated by putting a Pan-Arab flag on his car to show that he represented the whole Arab world.24
In September 1942, the Germans and Italians brought al-Husaini and al-Kailani together with their own respective spy chiefs in Rome. Al-Husaini emerged the victor in the encounter and the Italians officially recognized him as the main Arab leader.25 The four parties agreed that if Axis troops reached Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, they would create a Pan-Arab army for al-Husaini and a separate Iraqi army for al-Kailani. Both would have Arab generals but would be under the German military’s overall command. Within six months after the war’s end Axis troops were to leave all Middle Eastern lands.26
Al-Husaini was never shy about reminding the Germans of his real or alleged help for their cause and, on that basis, asserting his primacy as the Arab and Muslim leader. In a late 1943 letter to the Foreign Ministry, for example, he claimed to represent all Arabs and Muslims, taking credit for organizing revolts against the Jews and British while leading his people into an alliance with Germany.27 When the BBC condemned al-Husaini as a Nazi collaborator, he went on Radio Berlin and quoted the 1936 British government’s Peel report on Palestine which described him as a powerful figure who had 150,000 people within his network of charities and clerical institutions.28
That doesn’t mean that al-Husaini always got his way with the Germans. He unsuccessfully suggested at least four times that the Foreign Ministry start a Department of Islamic Affairs, proposing as its chief Ettel, who had rescued him in Iran and from Turkey.29 This was a political miscalculation since Ettel was really an intelligence man under cover as a diplomat, and the Foreign Ministry would never have accepted him in such a post. The Foreign Ministry also rejected al-Husaini’s idea of building a large separate army of Muslims from French colonies, since Germany had given primacy in that area to Italy. Germany also used Muslim troops to suit the Reich’s immediate needs, ignoring al-Husaini’s pleas to send them to North Africa.
Still, al-Husaini obtained most of what he wanted. One of the main institutional bases the Nazis gave him was Berlin’s Central Islamic Institute. Founded in 1927, this was largely Goebbels’s project. After briefly visiting Egypt three years earlier, Goebbels became fascinated by Islam and, later, with al-Husaini personally.30 Goebbels saw in al-Husaini a fellow master propagandist with a similar worldview who spoke in the name of millions of Muslims and Arabs.31 Al-Husaini, Goebbels wrote in his diary, was intelligent and had good judgment. If the Nazis worked properly with him they would win over four hundred million Muslims.32
Under al-Husaini’s guidance, the Islamic Institute became a network for propagandists, diplomats, military officers, and intelligence agents. The institute steadily expanded, establishing branches in Göttingen, Dresden, Guben, and Radom.33 The Italians started a similar project in 1942 and invited al-Husaini to its opening in Rome, along with al-Kailani and Afghanistan’s exiled former King Amanullah.34
The Institute’s secretary, the Egyptian Abd al-Halim Najjar, an employee of German Arabic-language radio, was a figurehead. The real chief was the journalist Kamal ad-Din Jalal, who worked with both Goebbels and von Ribbentrop.35 At the December 18, 1942 opening ceremony in Berlin, which took place in the Air War Ministry building, al-Husaini said the Institute would serve not only the two thousand Muslims living in Germany but all of the world’s four hundred million Muslims, who were with Germany in the fight against their joint enemies: Jews, Bolsheviks, Great Britain, and America. He quoted al-Qur’an as showing that Jews were terrorists, the Muslims’ most spiteful enemies, and haters of Muhammad.36
Next to the “Jews, with their race-hatred and capitalism,” al-Husaini continued, the British were the worst enemies, who crushed Arab protests by terror, blood, and fire. Such a brutal foe must be fought with brutality. His audience would have recognized the last phrase as a variation on Hitler’s “Terror can only be broken by terror.”37 Al-Husaini added that he was personally doing his best for the cause by convincing Muslims to join the German army and the SS. Already, he continued, there were twelve thousand volunteers in Bosnia, many of them with military experience. And if the Allies invaded the Balkans, up to fifty thousand Muslims might rise to fight against them.38 Goebbels was very impressed with al-Husaini’s speech, and German newspapers covered it with such headlines as “This War Can Bring Freedom to Islam” and “Against Terror and Slavery,” because the war was a fight to the death between Islam and the Jews.39
A few months later, Rosenberg invited al-Husaini to see his Institute for Research into the Jewish Question in Frankfurt. Al-Husaini admired the Nazis’ chief ideologue as a great philosopher. They agreed on every point, including viewing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the core document explaining world history. Al-Husaini’s visit to Rosenberg’s institute lasted for three full days starting April 12, 1943, and both sides were quite pleased with the result. The institute, founded in 1939, had seventy researchers and six hundred employees studying Europe’s Jews, including academics from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and France. The director, Hans Hagemeyer, flattered al-Husaini, calling him a pioneer in the struggle against Zionism, a man from whom the Nazis could learn much about Jewish perfidy.40
As a result of these meetings, al-Husaini decided that he wanted his own Jewish institute. He sent an aide, the Syrian Adil Maski, to work for Rosenberg’s institute to gain experience, his main task being to translate its fortnightly anti-Semitic magazine, Weltkampf: Die Juden-frage in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Battle for the World: The Jewish Question Past and Present), into Arabic.41 With three thousand marks a month from the German government, al-Husaini began his own Jewish Institute in Berlin, mixing hatred of Jews with promoting Islamism. He specifically requested and received a confiscated Jewish apartment to house the institute.42
Al-Husaini wrote Rosenberg, thanking the Nazi ideologue for showing how the “democracies consider the protection of the Jewish parasites as their holy duty.” He commended Rosenberg for revealing that the Jews wanted a state as a base for subordinating and destroying all the other peoples of the world, and concluded, “Our common fight against world Jewry makes the Germans and Arabs allies.”43
There was no clearer proof of how the radical Arab nationalist and Islamist worldview paralleled that of the Nazis than al-Husaini’s “stump speech,” written in 1943 and used in his talks to SS soldiers and imam training courses.44 One of his translators, Zvonimir Bernwald of the Bosnian SS Hanžar Division, testified that he heard al-Husaini give this speech to classes of Muslim SS soldiers in Zagreb and Banja Luka in occupied Yugoslavia, and later in an imam training course at Potsdam near Berlin.45 Al-Husaini made a similar speech to Bosnian SS division imams in October 1944.46
Nazi Germany, said the grand mufti, was the Muslims’ natural ally. It had never invaded an Islamic land; it fought world Jewry, the archenemy of Islam; and it battled against England, the power that had destroyed the caliphate and the Islamic empire in India. Nazi Germany also fought against Communism, which tyrannized forty million Muslims and tried to destroy Islam.
These things would be sufficient to justify a strong Nazi-Muslim alliance, al-Husaini continued, but there was something else that brought the two sides together: the parallels between the Islamic world view and National Socialism. He gave a long list of such parallels, backing each assertion with quotes from al-Qur’an and Muhammad’s sayings:
• Belief in one God taught the need for a single, all-powerful leader. When Muhammad died, a caliph was chosen as sole ruler whom all Muslims must obey. Order, discipline and obedience were central to Islam: the imam led the prayer; the commander led the soldiers. This leader makes decisions alone, not bound by anyone else including voters or a parliament. National Socialism was built on this same principle, with Hitler as the German equivalent of the caliph.
• Islam saw its people as a single global community (umma) that should live within a single powerful state. The Nazis had the same view of the Germans.
• Jihad was one of Islam’s main duties. Every Muslim saw jihad and martyrdom as the crown to his deeds of faith. Many verses of al-Qur’an asked Muslims to fight and to sacrifice their livelihoods and blood. Nazism also stressed struggle, battle, and self-sacrifice.
• Islam put the community of believers first, with the common good being more important than any individual’s welfare. A Nazi Party motto, directed against the “Jewish materialistic spirit”—and even appearing on coins after 1934—was “The common good comes before the private good.”47
• Islam dealt with family as society’s basic organizational group. The father ruled the family; children must obey parents. Motherhood was revered. Having children was good; abortion was prohibited. This approach echoed Hitler’s doctrines including the idea—popular among Islamists—that a woman’s main job was to produce future soldiers.
• Islam and National Socialism both fought the Jews. Almost one-third of al-Qur’an deals with the Jews, warning Muslims to distrust and battle them, said al-Husaini. The Jews tried to poison Muhammad several times and thus the prophet had no choice but to kill them or drive them from Arabia. Al-Husaini drew up a detailed program from his reading of Muhammad’s example that paralleled Hitler’s policy: Step 1: Stop tolerating Jews. Step 2: Drive out as many as possible. Step 3: Kill all the males and enslave the rest, eventually annihilating them entirely.
• Reverence for labor. Islam protected and esteemed work so that everyone gave according to his ability. This argument was the kind of claim later made by radical Arab nationalists in the postwar era when they decided that they were “Arab Socialists” and aligned themselves with the Soviet Union.
• Finally, an Allied victory would be a triumph for the Jews and a disaster for Muslims and Islam. Since the war was a jihad, all Muslims must fight alongside the Germans. If they did so, the radical Arabs’ program would succeed: the war would be won, Islam saved, the Arabs united, and the Jews destroyed.48
Islamist and Arab nationalist ideology also paralleled that of the Nazis in being racialist. Al-Husaini rejected the claim that Jews and Arabs had common ancestors. No, he said, the two groups were totally different. Arabs were generous and courageous; Jews were greedy and cowardly. He and al-Kailani protested the Nazi use of the phrase “anti-Semitism” lest people think it included the Arabs, also Semites, as well. Hitler and Rosenberg ordered German propagandists not to use that term49 and instead refer only to being “anti-Jewish.”50 Al-Husaini also encouraged the airing of a radio broadcast in late 1942, written with Grobba’s supervision, saying that the Germans viewed the Arabs as a worthy race equal to the Aryans.51
The differences between the Arab and Jewish races, al-Husaini explained, were the reason for the eternal hostility between them. The conflict had intensified with the advent of Islam because the Jews plotted against Muhammad. This enmity had continued as Muslims recognized they must liberate themselves from the Jews. The struggle “between two races” was rooted in religion and would continue until “one race” was destroyed.52 Thus, genocide against the Jews was a necessity in al-Husaini’s own ideology, not an idea borrowed from Hitler or abandoned once the Third Reich fell.
This basic approach was echoed and amplified by the forty-four-year-old Egyptian Muhammad Sabri, who had edited the German translation of al-Husaini’s prewar appeal for Muslims to cleanse their lands of Jews, to which Sabri added his own thoughts.53 The Nazis distributed the booklet as widely as possible in several languages.54
In explaining why Muslims were uninterested in Communism, Sabri pointed out that their society lacked both proletarians and industry, while Islam as a religion was at odds with atheistic Communism. Indeed, the Communists, guided by the Jews, had decided to destroy Islam. In this conspiracy, Sabri provided the enemy with a surprising ally: African-Americans from Harlem—presumably American Communists studying in the USSR—were allegedly training to destroy Islam in Africa.
Figure 20. Heinrich Himmler and Amin al-Husaini meet on July 4, 1943 near the Ukrainian town of Zhitomir. On that occasion, as al-Husaini admitted in his 1999 memoirs, Himmler confided to him that he had killed three million Jews.
Muslims know, continued Sabri, that “as Muhammad said: ‘You will never see a Jew and a Muslim together without the Jew trying secretly to destroy the Muslim.’” Even before Nazism, Arabs and other Muslims had placed restrictions on the Jews who lived among them. God had revealed Islam; Jews had created Communism.55 Sabri even adapted the Nazi term of Jews as subhuman, Untermenschen. Consequently, he concluded, “The German steps against the Jews nowhere found so much sympathy and support as with the Muslim people.”56
While there were many later attempts to revise or explain away the rhetoric of al-Husaini and his colleagues, they were always totally unrepentant. For al-Husaini, the Arabs and Muslims were engaged in a “struggle for liberation [against the] dirty race” of Jews.57 In his memoirs, al-Husaini recalls telling the students at the imam school that the Jews were full of greedy egoism and feelings of superiority, hatred, and self-hatred. All attempts to educate or improve them had failed. Consequently, the only solution was extermination.58
It was at the site of such an extermination campaign, in the village of Zhitomir, just east of Kiev, where Himmler and al-Husaini met on July 4, 1943. The previous year Jews in the area had been wiped out by the Germans. Now the village had been renamed Hochwald and was the site of Himmler’s field headquarters. He traveled there on his own private train named “Heinrich,” after himself, managed by an SS officer, Josef Tiefenbacher.
Figure 21. On page 126 of his memoirs, al-Husaini reveals Himmler’s remarks at their meeting in Zhitomir on the Jews and the Final Solution. “Every time I heard of his deep hatred of the Jews. He accused them of being offenders who allege that they are ill-treated. He said they are igniters of the fire of war. In doing so, they are selfish, as shown by the scope of harm done to Germany in the past war. They always stoke the fire of war and use it for their material interests though without injuring themselves a bit. Therefore, we have decided in this war to make them suffer and to pay attention to their activities in advance. Thus, up to now we have liquidated about three million of them (this conversation was in the summer of 1943).”
The story of this meeting between Himmler and al-Husaini can only be told now, using materials from Russian archives.59 Al-Husaini mentions it vaguely in his memoirs.60 Along the way, al-Husaini visited some places in Poland and the USSR that the Germans had captured. There is an interesting mystery here. Simon Wiesenthal, who conducted the most thorough contemporary research on al-Husaini’s wartime activities, thought the grand mufti had visited Auschwitz or other German death camps in May.61 It is also possible, however, that al-Husaini did so, accompanied by Eichmann and his aide Alois Brunner, on his way to Zhitomir.62 Also conveniently located for a possible visit along the route were the Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camps.63
Once he arrived in Zhitomir, al-Husaini saw, according to Himmler’s diary, the SS model colony, one of twenty-seven organized by Rosenberg in the plan to Germanize large areas of western Russia.64 The Arab guest was given the apartment next to the rooms of SS General Ernst August Rode, who had been leading the forces pursuing partisans in the German-occupied areas with great brutality.65 The visit was marked by two receptions, where Himmler and al-Husaini dined with the SS generals Berger, Fritz von Scholz, Rudolf Brandt, and Werner Best. Brandt would become notorious for ordering eighty-six Jews to be killed in order to create a collection of their skeletons for research.66 Best had been instrumental in persuading French officials to implement anti-Jewish measures, and would soon become German commander in Copenhagen.
Figure 22. The program of al-Husaini’s visit to Himmler at Zhitomir planned every activity down to the minute, including morning and afternoon refreshments, a one-hour conversation followed by a luncheon with the Reichsführer-SS, alternative clement and inclement weather afternoon activities, and exactly which leading SS officers (mostly known as mass murderers of Jews) were to attend at each stage. Copy of Heinrich Himmler’s office calendar, 1943–44, in the possession of the German Historical Institute, Moscow.
Figure 23. The program of the Oybin meeting between Himmler and al-Husaini once again included many SS officers known as perpetrators of genocide. Given that al-Husaini traveled widely in occupied Poland, the Oybin and Zhitomir meeting schedules make Simon Wiesenthal’s findings on al-Husaini’s visits en route to the death camps of Auschwitz, Maidanek, and Treblinka all the more plausible. Copy of Heinrich Himmler’s office calendar, 1943–44, in the possession of the German Historical Institute, Moscow.
After dinner and a stroll around the grounds, al-Husaini, Himmler, Berger, Best, and von Scholz went to Himmler’s home at Hegewaldheim.67 They watched a film, Walter von Molo’s The Never-Ending Way, about the life of the German economist Friedrich List, who a half-century earlier had argued that Germany didn’t need colonies in the Middle East.68 Himmler told al-Husaini, not so tactfully it seems, that the Germans had played the leading role in defeating Muslim invasions of Europe in the past, referring to the battle at Poitiers that stopped them in 732 and the two sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Al-Husaini replied that this was a pity as it “took away from Europe the spiritual light [of Islam] and the blooming Islamic civilization.”69
As if to make up for this potential discord, the Germans asked al-Husaini to tell them more about Islam and Arab history. They praised the religion, and Himmler told him that SS men, like Muslims, were not permitted to drink alcohol.70 Getting down to business, Himmler informed al-Husaini that the Nazis had already killed three million Jews and were making great progress on developing nuclear weapons. He was trying to persuade his guest that Germany would win the war and make him ruler over much of the Middle East.
This argument was harder to make when Himmler and al-Husaini met again on May 8, 1944 in Germany, near the town of Oybin in Saxony where al-Husaini was living. By this point, the Allies were bombing Germany daily and the Red Army was advancing on the eastern front. Just ten days earlier, Eichmann had begun the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz.
In the afternoon, al-Husaini met SS leader General Hermann Fegelein, brother-in-law of Hitler’s companion Eva Braun.71 According to al-Husaini, they spoke about horses and the grand mufti recited some Arabic poetry.72 Al-Husaini does not record whether he discussed Fegelein’s experience leading his men in their murder of about fourteen thousand Jews in the area between Brest and Pinsk. Before dinner, al-Husaini talked with General Hermann Reinecke and Colonel Adolf Westhoff for two hours. The two men had been involved in organizing and leading the Muslim units al-Husaini had helped raise.73 This included the Hanžar Division, which had participated in massacring thousands of Bosnian Jews, Christian Serbs, and Roma (“Gypsies”).74
Attending the two sessions of discussion held that evening were Berger; SS Sturmbannführer Grothmann; Sturmbannführer Hans Weibrecht, who had commanded units executing Jews in Poland and Russia and had been appointed al-Husaini’s personal aide for the occasion; Horst Wagner from the Foreign Ministry, who had worked with al-Husaini on Balkan issues; and Hanns Johst, a friend of Himmler and one of Hitler’s favorite writers.75
All of these interactions showed that both sides in the alliance saw their relationship as a true partnership and not merely a minimum cooperation conducted for convenience. This was made possible by the fact that the worldview and ideology of the Nazis and their radical Arab and Islamist allies was so compatible.
Still, their utmost efforts and mutual help could not bring victory. Yet while the Nazi ideology collapsed in 1945 and virtually vanished from German and European life, the radical Arab nationalist and Islamist ideologies flourished thereafter. Their basic concepts changed surprisingly little despite the passage of decades, events, and generations. Often the word “Israel” was substituted for the word “Jew.” Nevertheless, the profoundly doctrinal hatred for Jews and the belief in the necessity of destroying them remained the core reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict’s enduring and irresolvable nature.76
While these ideas and activities would continue to be powerful in the Middle East, Berlin would no longer be at their center. SS Hauptschar-führer Erich Mansfeld did not know, on April 30, 1945, that this would be his last day of work. The thirty-two-year-old German policeman was a guard at Hitler’s Berlin bunker. The main entrance was through a tunnel from Hitler’s offices on the Wilhelmstrasse. But there were also an emergency exit and an escape hatch behind the building, a few yards from Hermann-Göring-Strasse. That day, Mansfeld was assigned to a small concrete tower next to the escape hatch when another guard dropped by at 4 P.M. to borrow a gun. As Mansfeld leaned out the tower’s window to hand it down, he saw four members of Hitler’s bodyguard run out the emergency door ten yards away.77
He went over to see what was happening. Out came Hitler’s personal aide followed by two SS men carrying the Führer’s body wrapped in a carpet. Immediately behind came another guard holding the body of Hitler’s companion, Eva Braun. Accompanied only by Goebbels and Hitler’s secretary, Martin Bormann, they walked a few steps from the exit. An officer ordered Mansfeld back to his post. He complied but continued watching through the observation slit. He saw men pour gasoline onto the two bodies and set them aflame.
But the Third Reich’s Arab and Islamist allies were just getting started in conducting what would become the longest war of all.
