Netanyahu,
Husseini, and the Historians
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Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the World Zionist Congress
in Jerusalem on October 20.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's comments about Haj Amin
al-Husseini's impact on Hitler's decision-making about the Final Solution
in Europe do not stand up to the consensus of historical research.
Husseini's importance in Nazi Berlin lay far more in assisting the Third
Reich's Arabic language propaganda toward the Arab world and in
mobilizing Muslims in Eastern Europe to support the Nazi regime. That
said, Netanayhu's comments about Husseini's lasting impact on Palestinian
political culture are very much on the mark.
In his now famous comments at the World Zionist
Congress in Jerusalem on October 20, Netanyahu claimed that Haj Amin
al-Husseini convinced Hitler to change his anti-Jewish policy from one of
expulsion to one of extermination. "Hitler didn't want to
exterminate the Jews at the time [of the meeting between the mufti and
the Nazi leader]. He wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu said.
"And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel
them, they'll all come here [to mandatory Palestine],'" continued
the prime minister. "'So what should I do with them?' He [Hitler]
asked," according to Netanyahu. "He [Husseini] said, 'Burn
them.'"
Netanyahu overreached in pushing
back against efforts to diminish Husseini's role as Nazi collaborator.
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In the Knesset in 2012, the prime minister
asserted that Husseini "was one of the leading architects of the
Final Solution," and that "he, more than anybody else,
convinced [Hitler] to execute the Final Solution, and not let the Jews
leave [Europe]. Because, God forbid, they would come here. Rather that
they would be annihilated, burned, there."
Having spent many years working on the history of
modern Germany and on the period of Nazism and the Holocaust, I was
surprised to see these quotes and this interpretation. I've never seen
these comments cited before in the vast literature on the subject. This
interpretation of the events of November 1941 is not supported by the
scholarship on Holocaust decision-making. The prime minister overreached
in his effort to push back against efforts to diminish Husseini's role as
a collaborator and ideological soulmate with Nazi Germany.
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Hitler
and Husseini in Berlin, November 1941
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As this newspaper has helpfully published
the English translation of the German record of the meeting between
Hitler and Husseini on November 28, 1941 in Berlin, I will place the
conversation in historical context. Amidst the vast scholarship on
Hitler's decisions to implement a Final Solution of the Jewish question
in Europe, the work of two historians stands out in particular. In his
1991 study, Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution,
Richard Breitman drew on Himmler's appointment calendar to make a
compelling argument for an "early" decision, that is, one that
was emerging in spring 1941 before the invasion of the Soviet Union and
became more obvious with the Einsatzgruppen murders that began
immediately after that invasion in June 1941.
Subsequently, Christopher Browning, in works that
are summarized in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of
Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, addressed in more
detail the evolution of Hitler's thinking and decision-making. Browning's
now widely accepted conclusion is that in the midst of
"euphoria" over the seeming victory over the Red Army in summer
1941, Hitler took a series of decisions to implement the Final Solution
at the latest by October 1941. The historical reconstruction of the
decision-making process is complex and well beyond the scope of a
newspaper column. There is no substitute for reading Breitman and
Browning along with the synthesis of the issue in Saul Friedlander's
second volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945: The Years of
Extermination.
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Husseini
meets with SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, April 1943.
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In my own The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda
during World War II and the Holocaust, a study of propaganda within
Germany, I pointed out that by summer and early fall of 1941 Hitler's
fiction of an international Jewish conspiracy waging war against Germany,
a fiction which Hitler had repeatedly mentioned since a speech in the
Reichstag on January 30, 1939, seemed in his own eyes to be taking shape
in the form of the alliance of Britain with the Soviet Union following
his invasion of Russia in June 1941. The anti-Hitler coalition confirmed in
his mind the truth of his conspiracy theory. As "international
Jewry" appeared intent on waging a war of extermination against
Germany, so he would "exterminate the Jewish race" in Europe in
retaliation. He had been discussing these ideas since early 1939. They
reached a fever pitch in summer and early fall of 1941 before he met with
Husseini.
Hitler made the decision to
implement the Final Solution well before his November 1941 meeting with
Husseini.
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The now widely accepted international consensus
among historians of the Holocaust is that Hitler had both made the
decisions to implement the Final Solution and had communicated those
decisions to key actors in the Nazi regime at the latest a month before his
meeting with Husseini on November 28th. Husseini owed his life to
Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom aided his escape from British forces
chasing him after the British overthrew the pro-Nazi government he had
helped to establish in early 1941. While he agreed with Hitler about
fundamental ideological issues, he was in no position to have a major
influence on decision-making about German policy toward the Jews in
Europe.
I examined Husseini's meeting with Hitler in my Nazi
Propaganda for the Arab World. As the text published by this paper
yesterday indicates, Hitler told the Mufti that when the German armies
drove south from the Caucuses, "Germany's objective would then be
solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere
under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be
the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his
task to set off the Arab operations, which he had secretly
prepared." Hitler had referred to "the total destruction of the
Judeo-Communist empire in Europe," a typically vague and sinister
reference to his anti-Jewish policies in Europe. Yet he was very clear
that he was eager to enlist Husseini in his plans to extend the final
solution beyond Europe to encompass the Jews of North Africa and the
Middle East. It is in this effort to extend the Final Solution beyond the
shores of Europe, not its implementation within Europe, that Husseini
came to play a prominent role.
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Husseini
was instrumental in the formation of a volunteer Nazi Waffen-SS
division in Bosnia, made up mostly of Bosnian Muslims.
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Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World drew on
German archives and on the files of the United States Department of State
and US intelligence agencies to present the most extensive documentation
available about the vast Arabic language propaganda radio broadcasts and
printed leaflets that the Nazi regime sent to the Arab societies during
World War II. Husseini played a central role in those broadcasts. He
became world famous at the time for his incitement on the radio to
"kill the Jews" in summer 1942 as Rommel's Afrika Korps
threatened to overwhelm the British and capture the Jews of pre-state
Palestine. As the German historians Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin
Cuppers have documented in Nazi Palestine: Plans for the Extermination of
the Jews of Palestine, had the Germans won the Battle of Al Alamein, an
SS Einsatzgruppe was prepared to come to Egypt to carry out mass murders
with techniques that had been perfected on the Eastern Front in Europe.
The record of Husseini's ranting and raving on Nazi radio was well
documented by American diplomats at the Embassy in wartime Cairo. I used
those thousands of pages of translations when I wrote Nazi Propaganda for
the Arab World. (That work is translated into French, Italian, Japanese
and Spanish but for some strange reason German publishers in a country famous
for "coming to terms with the Nazi past" have refused to
translate the most extensive record of Husseini's fulminations against
the Jews.)
As the British historian David Motadel has
recently shown in his important work Islam and Nazi Germany's War, Husseini
and other Muslim clerics did play an important role in German policy in
Europe but it was not by exerting an important influence on Holocaust
decision-making. Rather he helped to recruit Imams who preached to tens
of thousands of Muslims who fought with Wehrmacht, especially on the
Eastern Front against the Red Army. While some of these units took part
in actions against Jews, this considerable collaboration did not have an
influence on Hitler's decision-making.
Though Netanyahu is thus wrong about Husseini's
role in the decisions that led to the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, he
is right to draw attention to Husseini's disastrous impact on Palestinian
politics and society. In response to the storm of criticism that greeted
his remarks, Netanyahu replied:
My intention was
not to absolve Hitler of his responsibility, but rather to show that the
forefathers of the Palestinian nation, without a country and without the
so-called 'occupation', without land and without settlements, even then
aspired to systematic incitement to exterminate the Jews."
Husseini absolutely wanted to exterminate the
Jews, above all, the Jews of pre-state Palestine, and then the Jews of
Israel. The evidence of Husseini's pleas to kill the Jews, of his
boundless hatred of Judaism as a religion and the Jews as a people is
well documented in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.
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Bosnian
Waffen-SS soldiers read a booklet titled Islam und Judentum, a
German version of the mufti's pamphlet Islam i židovstvo (Islam
and Judaism) that demonized Jews and Judaism.
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Husseini embedded his Jew-hatred in his
understanding of Islam as early as a 1937 speech in Syria that the
Germans published in German the following year. In the midst of the
terrorist attacks he led and incited from 1936 to 1939 in Palestine, it
was Husseini who claimed that the Zionists wanted to seize or destroy the
Al Aksa Mosque. This lie became a central element of Palestinian
propaganda over the decades until recent weeks.
On November 5, 1943, Husseini spoke at the
Islamic Institute in Berlin on "Balfour Day," a day to denounce
the Balfour Declaration. The speech was printed in German and broadcast
on the radio. I examine it in Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. He
vents his hatred of the Jews and the British for helping the Zionists.
The Jews, he said, had tormented the world for ages, and have been the
enemy of the Arabs and of Islam since its emergence. The Holy Koran
expressed this old enmity in the following words: You will find that
those who are most hostile to the believers are the Jews.' They tried to
poison the great and noble prophets. They resisted them, were hostile to
them, and intrigued against them. This was the case for 1,300 years. For
all that time, they have not stopped spinning intrigues against the Arabs
and Muslims.
Husseini's lasting accomplishment
was to fuse secular Arab anti-Zionism with theologically inspired
hatred of Jews.
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Husseini the Palestinian leader of the war of
1948 and hero to Yasser Arafat and his generation of leaders of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, interpreted Zionism as only the most
recent of this supposed age-old Jewish hostility not only to the
Palestinians or Arabs as modern national groups but also to the religion
of Islam. In the Islamic Institute speech he also referred to a supposed
"Jewish desire" to seize the Islamic holy sites, a desire that
extended to the Al Akas Mosque. Indeed, the Jews, he said, planned
"to build a temple on its ruins." Haj Amin al-Husseini's very
regrettable but consequential accomplishment was to fuse secular Arab
anti-Zionism with the Islamist and thus theologically inspired hatred of
the Jews and Judaism. The lies which Mahmoud Abbas and others have told
in recent weeks about Israel's supposed desire to somehow infringe on the
rights of Muslims to pay at the Al Aksa Mosque have their origins in lies
that are now at least 75 years old.
Netanyahu added the following:
Unfortunately, Haj
Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He
appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding
fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him,
inciting the murder of Jews – continues. Not in the same format, but in a
different one, and this is the root of the problem. To stop the murders,
it is necessary to stop the incitement. What is important is to recognize
the historical facts and not ignore them, not then and not today."
Here the Prime Minister is on rock solid ground.
Far from denouncing Husseini for spreading lies, absurd conspiracy
theories and radical anti-Semitism, he has remained a revered figure in
Palestinian political memory. The absurdities for which Husseini became
famous in the 1940s have continued to play a far too prominent role in
the Palestinian political culture ever since. He did incite others to
murder Jews. He did spread ridiculous conspiracy theories comparable to
those of the Nazis. He did all that he could to help the Nazis in a failing
effort to spread the Holocaust to the Middle East and to win the war in
Europe. He left behind a legacy of hatred, paranoia, religious fanaticism
and celebration of terror so long as it was aimed at Jews and Israelis.
The Palestinian authority and Hamas even more so has kept that legacy is
alive and well and fills the heads of Palestinian teenagers with rubbish
that has led to the terror wave of recent weeks.
The Prime Minister has erred in his understanding
of the timing of Hitler's decision-making but he is right about
Husseini's disastrous impact on Palestinian political culture. I hope
that the discussion his comments have generated will draw more attention
to the now abundant scholarship on Husseini's role in collaborating with
the Nazis in their failed efforts to murder the Jews of North African and
the Middle East during World War II. We need more public discussion about
the atrocious legacy he left behind that has been playing itself out, yet
again, in the knife attacks on the streets of Israel's cities. That
legacy of a political culture that venerates violence and anti-Semitism
is a huge barrier to successful diplomacy and resolution of the old
conflict. The more decision-makers in Washington cast a harsh glare on
the enduring impact of Husseini's legacy, the more likely they will
enhance the now dim chances for diplomatic success. If they can't find
the words to speak clearly about it, diplomacy will stand little chance
of success.
Jeffrey Herf is a professor of
History at the University of Maryland-College Park and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum. His recent works include: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009)
and The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the
Holocaust (2006).
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