New Details On Close Relationship Between Nazis And Grand Mufti

Newly declassified documents contained in a report: Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War, reveal how leniently US counter-intelligence treated many Gestapo, SS officers and Nazi collaborators--to an even greater degree than previously thought.

In addition, there are also details on the close relationship between the Nazis and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem:

In fact, the report says, the Muslim leader was paid “an absolute fortune” of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year). It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party’s elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated more than 350,000 Jews there.


On Nov. 28, 1941, the authors say, Hitler told Mr. Husseini that the Afrika Corps and German troops deployed from the Caucasus region would liberate Arabs in the Middle East and that “Germany’s only objective there would be the destruction of the Jews.”

Despite the Mufti's background, the French had no trouble finding an excuse to allow the mufti into Syria:

The report details how Mr. Husseini himself was allowed to flee after the war to Syria — he was in the custody of the French, who did not want to alienate Middle East regimes — and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israeli Arab leaders and “were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism.”

“You have an actual contract between officials of the Nazi Foreign Ministry with Arab leaders, including Husseini, extending after the war because they saw a cause they believed in,” Dr. Breitman said. “And after the war, you have real Nazi war criminals — Wilhelm Beisner, Franz Rademacher and Alois Brunner — who were quite influential in Arab countries.”

And the British also thought that the mufti would be useful--against the Jews in then-Palestine:

In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine’s Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attaché in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and “cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can’t do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that.”

“We have more detailed scholarly accounts today of Husseini’s wartime activities, but Husseini’s C.I.A. file indicates that wartime Allied intelligence organizations gathered a healthy portion of this incriminating evidence,” the report says. “This evidence is significant in light of Husseini’s lenient postwar treatment.” He died in Beirut in 1974.

Hey, who needs Wikileaks to uncover embarrassing information about what world governments do!?

Apparently, Europe found it as convenient to appease Nazis after the war as they did during the events leading up to the war.

Technorati Tag: Haj Amin al-Husseini and Grand Mufti and Nazis.