You do not have to know much about the World War II period to know that some people whose nations were under Nazi domination collaborated with the Nazis and some did what they could to resist. You also only have to have basic knowledge of the Middle East during that time to know and understand that senior Islamic clerics threw their lot in with Adolf Hitler rather than side with the Allies and this cleaving to Hitler was primarily down to a culture of Islamic Jew hate. Islamic clerics such as Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the time of the British Mandate of Palestine, wanted the Nazis to bring the Holocaust from Europe to the Middle East.
There were different types of collaboration with the Nazi enemy that went on in those lands that had been overrun by the Germans. The reasons why people in Nazi occupied countries were diverse. Some people collaborated to survive, some out of greed and some did so because they agreed with the policies and philosophy of the Nazis. There was lesser collaboration and collaboration of a greater and more serious degree.
It’s not easy for a Briton to get inside the heads of those who collaborated with the Nazis as Britain, apart from the Channel Islands, did not have the Bosche on British soil. We didn’t have the Huns in our homes or our schools or running our nation primarily in the interests of the Germans or imposing draconian punishments on those who disagreed with a German occupation government. If the situation had been otherwise and the Nazis had occupied part or the whole of Britain I’d say that it would be relatively safe to assume that just as in places like France or Belgium or the Netherlands, there would have been Britons who would have colluded with the Nazis and would have done so for various reasons.
Post-war, the nations that were occupied by the Nazis tended to talk up their level of resistance to the Nazi occupation. After the inevitable ‘ugly carnivals’ in which mobs hunted down known collaborators who had traded with, assisted or been intimate with the Germans and the trials and punishment of major collaborators were over, nations rebuilt and tried to forget that their nations had assisted the Germans during the occupation of their countries. Lots of people then claimed to have been resisters when they may have done very little to actually resist or even been ambivalent about German occupation.
There were of course degrees of collaboration in occupied nations. There was a moral difference between a French baker selling some cakes to a random German soldier and actively participating in supporting the Germans. Selling some cakes is clearly a far lesser degree of collaboration than joining voluntarily a German or German aligned military or paramilitary group or raising troops or encouraging others to fight on the side of the Germans.
If we take the crime of raising troops to fight for the Nazis or publicly backing the Nazi cause as an example of the very worst of the collaboration types then the actions of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem would most surely come into that category. The Grand Mufti raised troops to fight for the German SS and is known to have admired the Germans extermination of Europe’s Jews and wanted to bring similar exterminations to the Middle East. He collaborated with the Germans because he wanted the Germans to win WWII and do to the Jews of the Middle East and in what is now Israel, what they had done to European Jewry.
There’s a fabulous paper published in 2016 and written by Professor Johannes Houwink ten Cate of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs which goes into the story of the collaboration by the Grand Mufti with the Nazis but it sets it in context of the collaboration that occurred in nations that were occupied by the Germans during World War II. Professor ten Cate talks about the different types of collaboration that occurred in different nations and called the sort of collaboration of the Grand Mufti as ‘unconditional collaboration’. The collaboration that The Grand Mufti engaged in was not undertaken merely for personal or familial survival or for reasons of fiscal greed, but out of unconditional support for the aims of the Nazis.
Here’s a section of Professor ten Cate’s paper about the particular collaboration of the Grand Mufti and it’s clear that, like those Dutch who joined the SS, he was an enthusiastic collaborator. He was a collaborator even though being resident on what was then Allied territory in the form of Mandate Palestine, he was not in any personal danger from being put under any sort of pressure by the Nazi regime.
Professor ten Cate said:
Recently, scholars have shown renewed interest in these (foreign SS – ed)volunteers. The Dutch historian Evertjan van Roekel set the record straight by examining the diaries of Dutchmen in the SS. He discovered that contrary to previous claims in their postwar memoirs that they knew nothing about the Holocaust, these Dutchmen actually had internalized the antisemitism of their German masters. In their diaries they describe executions of Jews, with bullets and grenades; the hanging of a rabbi from the tower of a synagogue; and the burning of the beards of Jews with petrol.93 A Danish volunteer happily wrote: “Yes, we’ll eradicate these Jews from the surface of the earth….”94
The unconditional ideological and propagandistic collaboration of the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini has been analyzed in the recent work by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz, in a book by David Motadel, and in this journal, by Jeffrey Herf and by Matthias Künzel. The Mufti’s status as an unconditional collaborationist certainly comes from his propaganda to recruit Muslim volunteers for the Waffen-SS. Himmler’s biographer, Peter Longerich, describes how Himmler accepted Bosnian Muslims to the SS, after he had accepted volunteers from Wallonia and France, who definitely were not regarded as Germanic. By so doing, Himmler reformed the SS a second time, by adding non-Germanic soldiers who fought in a type of foreign legion of the German elite army and the pan-Germanic army.95 David Motadel has described the role of the Grand Mufti. He played “almost no role in SS recruitment in the East.” But he had considerable success in the Balkans:
In the Balkans, Himmler and Berger [the SS-General with recruitment in his portfolio] employed the mufti of Jerusalem to promote enrolment in the Handzar division [of Bosnian Muslims]. In fact, the aim of the mufti’s tour in spring 1943 was not only to win back the trust of the Muslim civil population but also to promote the new division and to give a religious character to SS recruitment in the Balkans. Al-Husayni’s efforts to promote military recruitment during his tour seemed successful. By the time he left the Balkans, thousands of Muslims had enlisted, much to the delight of SS officials.96
As usual, the propaganda disseminated grandiose promises, as follows: “Only if Germany were victorious, would Muslims have an opportunity to gain their independence” from the English, American, French and Russian foreign rulers: “If Germany is defeated, the last hope for you Muslims ever to become free also fades. “The Mufti’s use of this type of propaganda granted “Islamic legitimacy to the recruitment campaign.”
It’s clear to me that reading Professor ten Cate’s piece that the Grand Mufti saw collaboration with the Nazis as being perfectly acceptable from an Islamic point of view.
Professor ten Cate continued:
In the summer of 1943, the SS organized a training course for the first imams of the Handzar Division. For three weeks they underwent training in Babelsberg, a pleasant Berlin suburb, near the parks of Potsdam, the German Versailles and home of the German movie industry. The aim of the course was to turn the imams into “motivated SS officers.” Hajj Amin al-Husseini “set out the overall agenda of the course,” by making the “most elaborate attempt ever made to connect National Socialist ideas with Islam.” He emphasized four areas that “formed the basis of an alliance between the Third Reich and the Muslim world: ” 1) Germany had never attacked any Islamic state; 2) Germany was fighting “world Judaism,” the ”hereditary enemy of Islam,” as well as England, which had destroyed Muslim rule in India, and Bolshevism, which “tyrannized 40 million Muslims;” 3) According to the Mufti, National Socialism in “many respects” shared the “Islamic worldview,” in its emphasis on the idea of leadership, and; 4) Muslims wanted to die for their ideology as did the Germans. The attitudes of National Socialists and Muslims toward community, family, motherhood, children and work ethic were very similar. Hajj Amin concluded:
It is the task and duty of all Muslims to unite for the defense of this impending threat and to cooperate with their friends hand in hand. The genuine cooperation of the 400 million Muslims with their true friends, the Germans, can have a great influence on the course of the war and is, for both sides, very advantageous.100
Whilst some non-German people fought for the Nazis because they were adventurers who liked fighting or because they perceived that they would get better pay and conditions if they fought for the Nazis, the Grand Mufti was not one of those sort of collaborators. The Grand Mufti saw that there was a similarity between the Nazi belief system and that of Islam. He supported the Nazis because he believed in them.
There might be some who think all this talk about Nazi collaborators during World War II is all so much ancient and irrelevant history, but it is not. Since the 7/10 Pogrom and for a long time before that the views of extremist Muslims about Jews have been indistinguishable from those of Nazis and of Germany as a whole during this period. There is the same culturally rooted and encouraged exterminationist Jew hatred, the same hatred of the Western world and of the Western inspired Enlightenment and the same worship of death as a form of glory and eternal life.
Once we understand that similarity then we can start to understand that the reason for the high numbers of Muslim identified individuals who are marching in support of Hamas in the West is not because of concerns about the suffering of innocent people as part of the Israel / Palestine or Israel / Hamas conflict, but because they support the Nazi-like attitudes to Jews that are held by groups like Hamas. What we see on the numerous Hamas supporting hate marches that are occurring across the world is not something new or novel but something we’ve seen before less than a century ago where Islamic religious leaders such as the Grand Mufti chose, freely and publicly, to support the Nazis and all that that entailed. Back then those who actively chose to follow the murderous path of Nazism were more often than not called ‘Hans’ or ‘Dieter’ but now they are called ‘Abdul’ and ‘Mohammed’. What we have on our streets with regards to the pro-Hamas demonstrations are not public cries for aid and succour for the innocent people caught up in the current war but the modern analogue of the Brownshirts and Blackshirts of Europe’s past. To paraphrase George Orwell’s closing words to his great novel ‘Animal Farm’, ‘I look from radical Muslim screaming for ‘Palestine’ to the SS attempting to eradicate Europe’s Jews and I’m buggered if I can really tell the moral or practical difference’.
Please take the time to read Professor ten Cate’s excellent paper on Collaboration and you will begin to understand that there are a number of similarities to how Islamic Jew hatred operates today and how Nazi Jew hatred worked in the past. The Professor’s piece can be found in its entirety via the link below.
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