The Fourth Reich?

[Rolo]

I think Nazi have played a big role in the roots of modern radical islam...

Haj Amin al-Husseini - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini - was one angry muslim... not only did he fight in WWI for the Ottoman empire, but he also did terror attacks against jews after WWI, made revolts in Iraq against the british, and had close ties with the Nazi before and during WWII. After WWII he went to Egypt where he continued his radical islam..

In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, al-Husayni sent a telegram to Berlin addressed to the German counsul-general in the British Mandate of Palestine saying he looked forward to spreading their ideology in the Middle East, especially in Palestine and offered his services. Al-Husayni's offer was rejected at first out of concern for disrupting Anglo-German relations by allying with an anti-British leader. But one month later, Al-Husayni secretly met Wolff, the German Consul-General, near the Dead Sea and expressed his approval of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and asked him not to send any Jews to Palestine. Later that year, the Mufti's assistants approached Wolff, seeking his help in establishing a National Socialist Arab party in Palestine. Wolff and his superiors disapproved because they didn't want to become involved in a British sphere of influence, the Nazi's desired further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and because the Nazi party, was restricted to German speaking "Aryans" only.

On 21 July 1937, Al-Husayni paid a visit to the new German Consul-General, Döhle, in Palestine. He repeated his former support for Germany and "wanted to know to what extent the Third Reich was prepared to support the Arab movement against the Jews"

In September 1937 two SS officers, named Karl Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen, came to Palestine with the objective of getting "acquainted with the country and the life and to establish contact with people" among them Al-Husayni.

In 1938, though Anglo-German relations were no longer a concern and Al-Husayni's offer was accepted. Al-Husayni's links to the Nazi regime grew very close. From Berlin, al-Husayni played a significant role in inter-Arab politics.

In 1939, al-Husayni fled from Lebanon to Iraq.

In May 1940, the British Foreign Office declined a proposal from the chairman of the Vaad Leumi (Jewish national council in Palestine) that they assassinate al-Husayni, but in November of that year Winston Churchill approved such a plan. In May 1941, several members of the Irgun including its leader David Raziel were released from prison and flown to Iraq for this purpose. The mission was abandoned when Raziel was killed by a German plane (Mattar, 1984).

in 1941 the Mufti and the "Golden Square" pro-German army officers, led by General Rashid Ali, forced the Iraqi Prime Minister, the pro-British Nuri Said Pasha, to resign. In May he declared jihad against Britain. In a few months British troops crushed the rebellion and the Mufti went to Germany, via Iran, Turkey and Mussolini's office in Rome.

Amin-Husseini

Haj Amin el Husseini fled to Europe dressed as a woman, in violation of Islamic law. On 20 November 1941 the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. Nazi Germany established for der Grossmufti von Jerusalem a Bureau from which he organized the following: 1) radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany; 2) espionage and fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East; 3) the formation of Muslim Waffen SS and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia, the Balkans, North Africa, and Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union; and, 4) the formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units. As soon as he arrived in Europe,the Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim leaders. He would spend the remainder of the war organizing and rallying Muslims in support of Nazi Germany. Two months after The Mufti's arival the Nazi system of working Jews to death changed to a systematic attempt to exterminate them.

"Germany and Italy recognize the illegality of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. They recognize the right of Palestine and other Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements in Palestine and in other Arab countries as required by national interests, and in the same way as the Jewish question in the Axis lands is being solved."

The Mufti

The Mufti approached representatives of the Nazi regime and sought cooperation on July 21, 1937, when he visited the German Consul in Jerusalem. He later sent an agent and personal representative to Berlin for discussions with Nazi leaders. SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich was second in command to Heinrich Himmler in the SS hierarchy and was the chief of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) and was the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS Security Service. In Septemper, 1937, Heydrich sent two SS officers, SS Hauptscharfuehrer Adolf Eichmann and SS Oberscharfuehrer Herbert Hagen on a mission to Palestine, one of the main objectives being to establish contact with the Grand Mufti. During this period Husseini received financial and military assistance and supplies from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.

After meeting Hitler and Ribbentrop in Berlin in 1941, the Mufti was made an SS Gruppenfuehrer by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

Beginning in 1943, al-Husayni was involved in the organization and formation of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th "Handschar" division (21,065 men), which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944. In fact 13th SS "Handschar" was at least made up of 10% catholic Croats, this was done out of compromise since the Croat facists, the Ustashe had objected to the recruitment of the Bosnian Muslims, since they were worried about possible independence and considered the Muslim areas apart of their greater Croatia. The uniform worn by the division was regular SS issue, with a divisional collar patch showing an arm, holding a Scimitar, over a Swastika. On the left arm was a Croatian armshield (red-white chessboard). Headgear was the Fez, in field grey (normal service) or red ("walking out"), with the SS eagle and death's head emblazoned. Non-Muslim members could opt to wear the normal SS mountain cap. The oval mountain troop Edelweiss patch was worn on the right arm. The division also had Muslim imams in the division.

The "Handschar" division was entirely commanded by German officers and was sent to France for training where some members staged a mutiny on sept 17-18 1943, in reality it was only a small number of communist sympathizers who staged the mutiny, a few were killed during the mutiny and later 12 others were executed by the Germans. The division later completed training in Germany.

It was responsible for a number of atrocities against civilians mostly committed during its anti partisan operations, of which it was specifically raised for. Towards the end of the war however, many of its members deserted the division sometimes with their weapons, as many of the Muslims decided to return to Bosnia to protect their homes and families or defected to titos partisans. The division was essentially disbanded by november 1944, although some sources allege a small number continued to fight until being captured or killed by 1945.

The 21st "Kama" division (3,793 men) did not reach divisional operations strength and was disbanded after five months; its personnel being transferred to other units. Additional units included a Muslim SS self-defense regiment in the Rashka (Sandzak) region of Serbia, the Ostmusselmanische SS-Regiment.

In June 1944, Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann's deputy for Slovakia and Hungary, told Dr. Rudolf Kasztner in Budapest that he was convinced that the Mufti had

played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews... The importance of this role must not be disregarded ...The Mufti had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution of the Palestinian problem.

In his conversation with Endre Steiner in Bratislava, Wisliceny said:

The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in execution of this plan...He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.

Wisliceny, who himself was a major war criminal and finally executed in 1948, repeated the Mufti's participation in the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials in July 1946.

He testified that after the Mufti's arrival in Germany he had paid visit to Himmler and shortly afterwards (late in 1941 or early in 1942) had visited Eichmann in his Berlin office at Kürfurstrasse 116. According to Wisliceny, Eichmann told him that he had brought the Mufti to a special room where he showed him maps illustrating the distribution of the Jewish population in various European countries and delivered a detailed report on the solution of the Jewish problem in Europe. The Mufti seemed to have been much impressed.

The Mufti knew exactly what was going on in Poland. In a broadcast from Berlin on 21 September 1944 he said: "Is it not in your power, O Arabs, to repulse the Jews who number not more than eleven million?". It was a common knowledge that before 1939 the world's Jewish population numbered 17 million.

In 1944 al-Husayni launched a chemical warfare assault on the Jewish community in Palestine. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system of Tel Aviv, a predominantly Jewish city. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, "The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers." (Source: The Quest for the Red Prince by Michael Bar-Zohar and Eitan Haber, 1983)