Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (11 page)

Throughout the summer of 1942, Germany’s Afrika Korps and Great Britain’s Eighth Army attacked and counterattacked each other on several Egyptian battle fronts. On June 21, Rommel’s army captured the key British-held port of Tobruk, taking thirty-five thousand prisoners. The British defeat “was second only to the capture of Singapore by the Japanese as the greatest British disaster of the war.” Hitler was so impressed that he promoted Rommel to field marshal.
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In September, British prime minister Winston Churchill, in the hope of gaining the initiative, placed one of Great Britain’s top generals, Bernard L. Montgomery, in command of the Eighth Army. Churchill’s hope soon proved futile. Despite the fact that Montgomery was able to motivate his soldiers and rebuild the weakened and demoralized army,
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he and his troops were no match for the superior German army under the command of Rommel, the brilliant Desert Fox. Hitler’s fortuitous decision to postpone his invasion of Soviet Russia and transfer the bulk of his armed forces to support Rommel in Egypt proved crucial to the German victories at El Alamein and, subsequently, elsewhere throughout the Middle East. By October 1942, Rommel’s massively reinforced Afrika Korps now numbered more than four hundred thousand men and two thousand armed tanks—double the number of Montgomery’s men and machines.

At 9:30 p.m. on October 23, 1942, the British Eighth Army began its attack against the German defenses south of El Alamein.
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Two days later, the Germans launched a major counteroffensive against Montgomery’s Eighth Army, in an assault on the enemy lines at El Alamein itself. Within two weeks, the German victory at El Alamein was complete: British losses totaled more than twenty thousand casualties and thirty thousand prisoners; nearly all of their tanks and artillery were destroyed or captured.
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By winning the Battle of El Alamein, one of the decisive military engagements of World War II, Germany’s famed desert commander Erwin Rommel had decisively turned the tide of the war in North Africa, paving the way for German military hegemony throughout North Africa and the Middle East. With El Alamein won, the road to Cairo was open. Germany was in occupation of Egypt, controlling the Suez Canal and within striking distance of the Middle Eastern oil fields. As one German officer remarked after the Nazi triumph: “Imagine, if we had not had that petrol, we would have lost the Middle East and with it, the war!” The news was delivered to an exultant Hitler, who immediately shared the report of Rommel’s victory to Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. Together, they toasted Rommel’s success and the Nazi future. Not since the surrender of France in June 1940 had the führer and his Reichministers known such a triumph. As Winston Churchill would later lament: “Before El Alamein we never had a defeat. After Alamein we never had a victory.”
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The British retreat from Egypt was swift. When the German forces occupied the Suez Canal, the lifeline of the British Empire was in Hitler’s hands. During the next few weeks, Rommel’s Afrika Korps crossed the Sinai desert and entered Palestine, where they won victory after victory over the British in quick succession. Despite help from Palestine’s Jewish defense brigades, the recently armed Haganah, the retreating British army could not regain the initiative against Rommel’s onslaught. On November 18, 1942, Rommel’s army marched up the coast of Palestine to capture the twin cities of Tel Aviv and Jaffa.
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Inspired by the mufti’s radio broadcasts from Berlin, the Arabs of Jaffa received the Germans joyously, dancing in the streets. With the capture of Jaffa and Tel Aviv assured, Rommel marched toward Jerusalem, entering the Holy City on November 20.
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During these momentous events, the mufti traveled from Berlin to Jerusalem, arriving in his native city on the same day as Rommel’s army. In city after city—Jaffa, Hebron, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem—the mufti called for jihad, inspiring and mobilizing his Arab countrymen to rise up against the Jews and help the invading German army defeat the British and liberate Palestine. Quoting from
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
as well as from the Koran, the mufti reminded his people that killing the Jews and liberating Jerusalem from the Zionists would be doing the work of Allah. Speaking from the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the mufti called for the extermination of Palestinian Jewry. “Kill the Jews of Palestine wherever you find them,” he beseeched his impassioned audience, “this pleases God, history and religion.”
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Rioting everywhere, the Arabs of Jerusalem followed the mufti’s ardent advice, killing thousands of Jews and destroying most of Jewish Jerusalem’s homes and businesses. As al-Husseini would later confide to Rommel, “With your help and the help of Allah, Palestine like Germany will soon be
Judenrein
” (free of Jews).

The British retreat from Palestine made front-page news. The photographs of British troops boarding ships in Haifa’s harbor were reminiscent of the pictures and newsreels from Dunkirk, where Germany also had won a resounding victory. But this time there was no next battle. Within a matter of weeks, the Arab Middle East had fallen to Axis hands, as Rommel’s forces advanced from Cairo to Damascus, Baghdad, and Jerusalem, establishing Nazi hegemony wherever they went. After their victory at El Alamein, Rommel’s Afrika Korps, aided by units of the German Twentieth Army, defeated the remnants of the retreating British Eighth Army in several battles before invading Palestine. After quickly vanquishing the British at Aleppo in northern Syria, they easily captured Damascus. One by one, the major cities of Free French Syria fell to the invading German armies. Rommel’s forces, having conquered Syria, crossed into Iraq, pursuing the British first to Mosul and then toward Baghdad.
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By the time Rommel’s Afrika Korps arrived in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were firmly under German control.

Shortly after Rommel’s victory at El Alamein, the British high commissioner of Palestine, realizing that the German advance into Palestine was unstoppable and that the German army would soon occupy Jerusalem, made plans to evacuate the city before Rommel’s forces arrived. On October 26, the high commissioner managed to flee Jerusalem for Haifa, feeling fortunate to have escaped with his life. After boarding a small plane piloted by a Royal Air Force officer under his command, he was flown to Haifa harbor. There, at midnight, he embarked by warship on the dangerous voyage to Great Britain. During the next few days, the remaining British officials of the British mandatory government in Palestine and of British army headquarters left their rooms and offices in the King David Hotel and drove out of the city. As they left, the British Union Jack was lowered from the hotel parapet.
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On November 2, 1942, the last of the British government officials and soldiers boarded several ships in Haifa harbor. Twenty-five years to the day after the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate, with its promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was no more.

As German troops entered Jerusalem in late November 1942, and the swastika flag flew over the city’s German colony, the fate of the Jews of Palestine was sealed. Although there was some resistance by the Haganah, the military arm of the Jewish Agency, it was over within a few weeks. A remnant of Jewish freedom fighters resolved to retreat to the mountaintop of Masada, determined to reenact the heroic Jewish resistance against the Roman Empire in 70 CE. In the ultimate ironic twist of history, the Palestinian Jewish standoff against Nazi German forces at Masada in December 1942 ended with German soldiers advancing up the ramp of the very road the Romans had used to destroy the Jewish fortress at Masada nineteen centuries earlier. With that, all Jewish resistance to the German occupation of Palestine ended.

Nazi Germany had long planned to expand the extermination of the Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine. In 1942, the Nazi leadership had created a special Einsatzgruppe Egypt, a mobile SS death squad, under the supervision of Adolf Eichmann, which was to carry out the mass murder of Jews in Palestine similar to the way the Final Solution had been carried out at Auschwitz and at the other Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe. By the following year, the Einsatzgruppe had been ready to go to Palestine and begin killing the close to half million Jews of Palestine, more than fifty thousand of whom had fled Europe to escape Nazi death camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau.
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Even before the Battle of El Alamein, in the summer of 1942, the Einsatzgruppe Egypt had been standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine, attached to General Rommel’s Afrika Korps. This Middle Eastern death squad, similar to those operating throughout Eastern Europe during World War II, was led by SS Obersturmbannführer Walther Rauff,
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one of Eichmann’s most trusted deputies.

The November 16 order to round up the Jews and place them in a sealed city within Tel Aviv, first announced by SS Obersturmbannführer Rauff, was completed swiftly. (The order for the roundup of Palestinian Jewry, historians would later recount, took place exactly eleven months before the roundup of the Jews of Rome, 1,007 of whom were subsequently sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.) The mufti’s close friend Adolf Eichmann was assigned the task of implementing the roundup order, a task for which he was well prepared and which he executed with deadly efficiency. The first death camps in Tel Aviv, modeled after the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau, began operating shortly after Eichmann’s arrival. Under Rauff and Eichmann’s direction, and with the invaluable help of the mufti, the members of the SS Einsatzgruppe death squad enlisted hundreds of Palestinian Arab collaborators so that the “mass murder would continue under German leadership without interruption.”
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As Eichmann would later attest, his friend the mufti was instrumental in personally recruiting these Palestinian Arab collaborators, who were eager to facilitate the work of the Nazi death squad and thus enable the mufti to carry out his long promised jihad against Palestinian Jewry.

Within three months, all 450,000 Jews in Palestine had been exterminated. In Palestine, as in much of Europe, the Final Solution had been carried out with great efficiency and success. In early March 1944, speaking from his pulpit at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the mufti joyously proclaimed that Palestine was “now and forever,
Judenrein.
” Several days later over dinner at the King David Hotel, a former Jewish-owned establishment left standing in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann and Haj Amin al-Husseini rejoiced that together they had succeeded in bringing about the Final Solution of the Jewish problem, both in Europe and now in Palestine. “This is only the beginning,” Eichmann promised his friend al-Husseini. “In our thousand-year Reich, there will soon be no Jews anywhere.”

The following month, Hitler personally flew to Jerusalem, where he welcomed the mufti, his friend, ally, and collaborator in the Final Solution, and appointed him president of the newly established German protectorate of Palestine. “As I promised you at our historic meeting in November 1941,” Hitler told the mufti, “Jerusalem and all of Palestine is now yours.” The mufti was triumphant: He was now Hitler’s designated führer of Palestine and of the entire Arab Middle East.

The Arab Higher Committee for Palestine was immediately disbanded and replaced by the new government of All-Palestine. The mufti was inaugurated as president of a free, independent Palestine, accountable only to the führer himself. In an inaugural ceremony in Jerusalem attended by the mufti’s close friends Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann, al-Husseini publicly expressed his deep appreciation and loyalty to the Third Reich and pledged his full support to Adolf Hitler until complete victory was achieved.

With Rommel’s military victories and Hitler’s triumph in the Middle East complete, the age-old Islamic caliphate, which had been abolished two decades earlier by Turkey, was reestablished, with Haj Amin al-Husseini as its head. On the first Friday after the mufti’s inauguration as the first president of the new All-Palestine state, al-Husseini attended a prayer service at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, at which the restoration of the Islamic caliphate was formally announced. At a celebratory dinner that evening, which Eichmann and Himmler also attended, al-Husseini was publicly designated and acclaimed as the caliph of the Islamic Middle East, the undisputed and absolute ruler of a new pan-Islamic empire, encompassing all the major cities of the Muslim world, including Cairo, Tehran, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, and Jerusalem. More than symbolically, perhaps, the dinner celebrating the new caliph was held at the King David Hotel, until recently the headquarters of the British high commissioner and the hated British mandatory government in Palestine. The British Mandate was no more. As Eichmann and Himmler noted proudly in their remarks that evening, their staunch friend and ally, and Hitler’s loyal deputy, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who did so much to make Palestine
Judenrein
and to extend the Final Solution beyond Europe’s borders, was now the true führer of the Arab world.

Within months of his inauguration as caliph and the final British exit from Palestine, al-Husseini had other good news to celebrate. Over the years, Haj Amin al-Husseini’s hatred of the British had known no bounds. While Rommel’s humiliating defeat of the British throughout the Middle East and the end of the detested British Mandate in Palestine had been music to the mufti’s ears, he eagerly awaited the final defeat of Britain by Germany and its Axis allies and the demise of Churchill’s government. In mid-April 1944, al-Husseini was exhilarated to hear that the German military defeat of Great Britain was finally complete. The Battle of Britain had been won. King George VI had been forced off the throne and replaced by his older brother, the pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor—the former king Edward VIII—whom Hitler had often entertained at Berchtesgaden. Sir Oswald Mosley, the charismatic leader of the anti-Semitic Union of British Fascists and a longtime friend and admirer of the Hitler regime, was released from prison, where Churchill had sent him in May 1940, and replaced Churchill as prime minister. Throughout the 1930s, Mosley—a former Conservative who had become a Labour Party member of Parliament, was a member of one of Great Britain’s most aristocratic families, and whom many had assumed would be a future prime minister—had achieved special notoriety as the “Führer of British Fascism.”
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Mosley’s Blackshirt followers had marched through London’s Jewish East End in the 1930s, targeting Jewish homes and synagogues for attack and calling for the extermination of the Jews. Equally exhilarating was the news that Sir Oswald’s choice for deputy prime minister was Lord Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the seventh Marquess of Londonderry and close friend and confidant of the Duke of Windsor, both before and after the duke’s abdication as King Edward VIII. Lord Londonderry, a cousin of Winston Churchill, scion of one of Great Britain’s wealthiest families, and a pillar of the British aristocracy, also had achieved well-deserved notoriety as the only British cabinet member to openly support the Nazis and as “Hitler’s leading apologist in Great Britain.”
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