Hitler's Foreign Executioners (51 page)

The town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue sprawls along the banks of the l’Aveyron River that winds through the Mid-Pyrenees in south-west France. Clinging to the wooded slopes that rise steeply from the river is the little chapel of Calvaire St Jean d’Airgrement, which commands a broad view of the wide, flat plain that rolls northwards. In the early morning, the l’Aveyron valley is quiet, tranquil, even bucolic. A few farm vehicles putter along narrow rural roads. In 1943, this was ‘Maquis’ country – for the German occupiers, a region to be feared and mastered. In most of the villages and towns of the Mid-Pyrenees stand memorials to French resistance fighters who died here fighting the Nazi terror machine. But in September 2006, the town council of Villefranche-de-Rouergue unveiled a very different memorial. It is dedicated not to wartime French heroes, but ‘
jeunes soldats de Croatie et de Bosnie-Herzégovinie tombés lors du soulévement du 17 Septembre 1943 à Villefranche-de-Rouergue contre leurs oppresseurs Nazis
’.

Why and how did young men from Croatia and Bosnia come to die so far from home in this pretty French village? The memorial tells us some of their story. They served in an SS division known as the ‘Handschar’, which had been recruited in Bosnia. Most of the recruits were Muslims. Here in Villefranche, a handful rose up against their officers. For a few hours they held the might of the SS at bay. Himmler, enraged, meted out violent retribution. The mutineers were hauled in front of a
kangaroo court then shot dead by an SS firing squad. The drama that unfolded seventy years ago in Villefranche-de-Rouergue provides a surprising insight into Himmler’s quest to harvest Germanic blood ‘wherever it might be found’. Few Bosnian Muslims regarded their people as ‘Germanic’ at all – and might never have enlisted in Hitler’s war had they not fallen under the malign influence of one of the most notorious of all wartime collaborators: the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. It was el-Husseini who convinced these Bosnians to become SS men and join the Nazi Jihad against the ‘Jewish World Enemy’. Himmler’s pact with this malevolent Arab cleric poisons the battleground of Middle Eastern nationalist ideologies to this day.

Writing in his diary at the end of the war Albert Speer recalled:

One of the longed-for miracle weapons imagined by Hitler at the end of the war was the ‘Amerikabomber’, a Daimler designed, four-engine giant that in theory could bring terror to faraway New York City. Hitler despised New York as the capital of world Jewry. His destructive fantasy was finally realised by Mohammed Atta and his fellow pilots when they flew their fuel laden aircraft into the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. Might the Jihad of our own time have been inspired by plans hatched in Third Reich?
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On 29 April 1945 Hitler, his mind and body ruined by drugs and disease, hidden away beneath the ruined Chancellery in Berlin, ordered Traudl Junge, his favourite secretary, to accompany him to the conference room. Hitler, his limbs shaking uncontrollably, leant on the abandoned map table and began to dictate his ‘Last Testament’. Frau Junge struggled to keep pace with the torrent of poison. Hitler raged against the Jewish conspirators whom he claimed had brought down the Reich. He insisted time and again that he had wanted only to defend Germany against its sworn Jewish enemies in Moscow and Wall Street. Then, in an astonishing outburst, Hitler listed all the lost opportunities torn from his grasp by cowardly and treacherous subordinates:

It is one of modern history’s most troubling counterfactuals: suppose, in 1941, Hitler had abandoned plans for the invasion of Russia and sent his forces to the Middle East instead. The German Wehrmacht could have easily have swatted aside the enfeebled, poorly equipped British forces based in Egypt and Palestine. Heydrich’s Special Task Forces would have rampaged through Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In Syria, the Vichy administration would have waved the German army through the border with Iraq while the Luftwaffe pounded British garrison forces there and swept on to the borders of the Raj. In Persia, Hitler’s war machine could have feasted on oil reserves as rich and deep as any in Romania or the Caucasus. It was a prospect Churchill feared. In his darkest moments, he imagined ‘Hitler’s hand’ stretching as far as the Indian border ‘beckon[ing] to the Japanese’. Churchill’s nightmare never became real, although Luftwaffe aircraft did bomb Baghdad. Hitler’s mind was fixated by the Bolshevik enemy and a future empire in the east. His vision of empire was brutal, but profoundly parochial. He spurned most efforts to undermine the British Raj or empower to dark-skinned, ‘inferior races’. But as Hitler’s Reich flexed its imperial muscles, the British Empire had long been in decline. In the pink regions of the world map, new nationalist movements demanded freedom from British rule. At home, the moral authority of the empire was no longer taken for granted. In India and Palestine, where the imperial crisis was most acute, some of those waging war on the British Empire turned to Hitler’s Reich to speed the collapse of foreign rule. For Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist who spent much of the war lobbying the German Foreign Office in Berlin to back his cause, it was a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Bose had few illusions about Hitler’s racist world view and, when he met the Führer at the Wolf’s Lair, had the guts to criticise his pejorative comments about Indians in
Mein Kampf
. Bose remained silent about Hitler’s hatred of Jews.

Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, was very different species of collaborator. He too spent the war in Berlin. Unlike Bose, he fully embraced the Nazi racial vision and backed the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish problem’. After 1945, el-Husseini escaped back to the Middle East. In the 1960s, the old man became a mentor to a young Palestinian called Mohammed el-Husseini, no relation, who would soon be better known as Yasser Arafat. From the ruins of the Third Reich, the Grand Mufti brought back to his lost homeland the virus of European anti-Semitism. If you seek his monument, then watch an Arab satellite channel like Al-Manar (the Beacon). Here is an extract from
Diaspora
, an ambitious twenty-nine-part ‘history’ series: ‘Listen!’ says a Rabbi to a young Jew. ‘We have received an order from above. We need the blood of a Christian child for the unleavened bread for the Passover feast.’ A petrified boy is seized, and, in a gloating
close-up, his throat is cut and his blood drained into a metal basin.
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This wicked nonsense resurrects one of the most enduring and potent myths in western anti-Semitism: the ‘Blood Libel’. As Anthony Julius points out, this medieval fantasy has become one of the most virulent anti-Semitic myths in circulation in modern Islamic discourse.
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Al-Manar belongs to Hizbollah (Party of God). The
Diaspora
series, made with Syrian government backing, was shown for the first time during Ramadan in 2003. At least 10 million people a day tune in to Al-Manar’s roundthe-clock broadcasts recorded in Beirut.

The same message was once transmitted from a radio station built south-east of Berlin in Zeesen, a suburb of Königs Wusterhausen. From studios buried deep beneath a towering mast, the exiled Grand Mufti broadcast to his fellow Muslims in coffee houses, bazaars and public squares all over the Arab world. Radio Zeesen became the most popular radio station in the Middle East: el-Husseini and his colleagues used music and quotations from the Koran mixed together with Nazi propaganda that insisted that the Allies were lackeys of the Jews – and that Jews were dangerous enemies of Islam: ‘The Jew is the enemy and it pleases Allah to kill him.’
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Then in 1943, Haj Amin el-Husseini took on another mighty task for the Reich. The Grand Mufti was already well known to the SS. He corresponded obsequiously with Himmler. Now recruitment chief, Gottlob Berger, wrote to the Mufti. He had an unusual request. Berger hoped the Grand Mufti would agree to travel to Sarejevo in Bosnia – then incorporated by the puppet state of Croatia (NDH) – and assist with a new SS recruitment drive. Hitler had recently authorised recruiting Bosnian Muslims as SS warriors and el-Husseini’s task would be to make a series of public appearances designed to persuade young Bosnians to join up and ‘cleanse the land’. The Grand Mufti’s campaign was astonishingly successful. By 1944, over 20,000 young men had volunteered to join the new 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS ‘Handschar’ (1st Croatian). The SS issued their new recruits with a custom-designed uniform that included a fez. Himmler promised the Mufti that his Muslim warriors would be spared any exposure to ‘pork, pork sausages and alcohol’ and that their spiritual needs would be attended to by Bosnian Imams, specially trained at colleges in Dresden and Göttingen.

For his part, el-Husseini fervently hoped that the SS ‘Handschar’ and other Muslim divisions recruited by the Reich would spearhead the destruction of the British mandate in Palestine and the liquidation of all Jews who enjoyed its protection. From his Berlin radio studio, the Mufti demanded: ‘Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. Allah is with you.’ Himmler and the Mufti both believed that the destruction of their Jewish enemies depended on sacrifice and martyrdom, the shedding of blood. The
Grand Mufti proclaimed in one of his radio talks: ‘The spilled blood of martyrs is the water of life. It has revived Arab heroism, as water revives dry ground. The martyr’s death is the protective tree in whose shadows marvellous plants again bloom.’ Why did the Grand Mufti pledge allegiance to the Third Reich? How did the Bosnian Muslims, a Slavic Balkan people, come to figure so prominently in Himmler’s master plan?
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Although Bosnian Muslims and Haj Amin el-Husseini had the faith of Islam in common, their political worlds did not overlap until the middle of the Second World War. If they looked outside their own homeland, the majority of Bosnian Muslims followed events in neutral Turkey but had little interest in the broader Islamic movement or noticed the protests of Palestinian Arabs against Jewish immigration. These matters naturally obsessed Haj Amin el-Husseini, however, and led him in due course to seek an alliance with the anti-Semitic German Reich.

In the period after the First World War, many influential Arabs admired Germany. They recalled the close bond between Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire and regarded the Weimar Republic as a potential ally against the British and French mandate governments in Syria and Palestine. After 1933, Hitler’s widely publicised anti-Jewish proclamations had a seductive appeal for many in the Arab world and ‘Hitler frenzy’ spread across many parts of the Middle East and North Africa like a nasty rash. The most prominent and influential pro-German in the Arab movement was Haj Amin el-Husseini, who became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the highest Islamic post in Palestine, in April 1921. A frail and diminutive man with a fluting, high-pitched voice, el-Husseini soon established himself as de facto leader of the pan-Arab movement by promoting a violent campaign against Jewish immigration to Palestine. He had discovered ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ just after the war, and lost few opportunities to denounce the wickedness of Jews and the misery they brought to the entire world. He bitterly opposed any Palestinian Arabs who dared refer to the benefits brought to Palestine by immigrant Jews.
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The Mufti’s campaign culminated with the eruption of the Arab Revolt in July 1937; Arab gangs targeted not only Palestinian Jews and British mandate officials but also moderate Arabs and the Mufti’s political rivals. As violence engulfed Palestine, the British resolved to get rid of this troublesome cleric and the Mufti fled to Beirut in the French mandate of Syria on 14 October.
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From a succession of opulent villas, the exiled Mufti organised a terror campaign against the British and the Palestinian Jews. Although the French and then Vichy authorities thwarted efforts to have him
arrested, the Mufti eventually fled to Baghdad, probably with French connivance. Here he conspired with the pro-Nazi Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali el Gaylani, who launched a coup against the pro British Hashemite regime. In May 1941, on the eve of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, Iraqi troops surrounded the British RAF base at Habbaniya, backed ineptly by special forces recruited by the Arabist, and former German ambassador in Iraq, Fritz Grobba and a handful of Luftwaffe bombers that ran out of fuel after flying a few ineffectual missions against the besieged British base. In London, the government somewhat reluctantly dispatched a relief force from Palestine to snuff out the uprising. Hitler’s Gulf War ended less than a month after it had begun. El-Husseini and his followers then fled to pro-Axis Tehran. In the aftermath of the uprising, fanatical Iraqi nationalists turned on Baghdad’s Jews as they celebrated the festival of Shavuot and in a two-day frenzy killed nearly 200 people. Jews refer to this forgotten pogrom as the Farhud.
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