Explosive New Report on US-Nazi-Arab-Holocaust Links during WWII

As reported in the NYT, An interagency group created by Congress to work on federal records of Nazi war crimes has published a report that not only documents US assistance to Nazi war criminals in the wake of World War II, but also the Nazi regime's ties to prominent Arab anti-Zionist leaders in Palestine (specifically, Hajj Amin al-Husseini) and Iraq (Rashid Ali al-Gailani). 

In chilling detail, the report . . . elaborates on the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the British.

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.”

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.”

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.

That Amin al-Husseini was working with Hitler's murderous regime is hardly news, nor is it news that the coup that brought Arab nationalists into power under Rashid Ali al-Gailani favored Nazi Germany, who was, after all, the enemy of the British government that had been Iraq's overlords since 1917 - and that invaded and reoccupied Iraq after forcing Rashid Ali out of power.

However, you can expect the George Wills and Charles Krauthammers of the punditocracy to be all over this new report as new ammunition with which to smear current Arab - and European, and Latin American - resistance to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, by trying to link them directly to the hideous acts of Hitler's "Final Solution."

It's hugely important that evidence such as this be made public and disseminated broadly.  But with the "peace process" languishing, various parties exhorting Mr. Obama to put more pressure on Mr. Netanyahu's government, and the Netanyahu government still harping on Iran's nuclear "threat" as the harbinger of a second Holocaust, the timing of its appearance could hardly be worse for those who want to restore more reason and sanity to the debate.