Disbelief and disgust meet Netanyahu's claim of Palestinian incitement of Holocaust

This posting has these items:
1) Guardian: Germany refuses to accept Netanyahu’s claim Palestinian inspired Holocaust;
2) JC: No serious historian would agree with Netanyahu, historian Michael Burleigh says Netanyahu has stretched the supposed lessons of history beyond credibility;
3) WP: The murky story behind Netanyahu’s claim of a Palestinian role in the Holocaust, the murky story is of the machinations of the Grand Mufti, not Prime Minister;
4) Haaretz: Yad Vashem’s Chief Historian on Hitler and the Mufti: Netanyahu Had It All Wrong, what do Israel’s holocaust historians think?;
5) Ma’an: Erekat: Netanyahu speech blames Palestinians for Holocaust;
6) Ma’an: Abbas slams Netanyahu Holocaust comments as UN urges calm;
7) JC: Fury grows over Bibi’s Holocaust ‘distortion’, Anshel Pfeffer does not treat Netanyahu kindly;
8- NPR: After Netanyahu’s Holocaust Remark, Germany Cites Its Own ‘Break With Civilization’, US publication focuses on German response;
9) Ynet: Historians, politicians slam PM’s ‘distortion of history’, absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, a war criminal;
10) FT: Netanyahu’s Holocaust comments anger Palestinians, The Israeli leader has made the claim about the Grand Mufti before, including in a 2012 speech in which he called Husseini “one of the architects of the Final Solution”.;
11) IBT: Israel: PM Netanyahu blames Hitler’s Holocaust on Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini; accounts that he planted the idea of the Final Solution into the Nazi’s dictator’s head have been dismissed as false by most historians;
12) Notes and links including one article in German (Der Spiegel) and one in French (Le Monde).

Arab recruits line up in a barracks square in the British Mandate of Palestine, on December 28, 1940, for their first drill under a British solider. Some 6,000 Palestinian Arabs signed up with the British Army during the course of World War II. AP Photo

Germany refuses to accept Netanyahu’s claim Palestinian inspired Holocaust

Germany says it has no reason to change its view of history after Israel’s prime minister blames mufti of Jerusalem for inciting Holocaust

By Kate Connolly in Berlin, The Guardian
October 21 /22, 2015

Germany has said it has no reason to change its view of history after Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said Adolf Hitler had been persuaded to carry out the Holocaust by a Palestinian leader.

Before a trip to Berlin, Netanyahu provoked incredulity and anger among many when he claimed in a speech that Hitler had only wanted to expel Europe’s Jews and that the idea to exterminate them had come from the then mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

But at a joint press conference with Netanyahu on Wednesday, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, made it clear she saw no need for a shift in interpreting history, saying: “We abide by our responsibility for the Shoah.”

Earlier, her spokesman Steffen Seibert said the Holocaust was “very much” a German crime. “Speaking on behalf of the German government, I can say that all of us Germans know very precisely the history of the murderous racial fanaticism of the National Socialists that led to the break with civilisation that was the Shoah,” Seibert told journalists in Berlin.

“This is taught in German schools for good reason. It must never be forgotten. And I don’t see any reason that we should change our view of history in any way whatsoever. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own,” he said.

In a speech at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described a meeting between Hitler and Husseini in November 1941, and claimed: “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said: ‘Burn them.’”

Before leaving for Germany for talks with Merkel, as well as the US secretary of state, John Kerry, who will meet him in Berlin, the Israeli prime minister said it was absurd to say he was absolving Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. But he added: “It’s equally absurd to ignore the role played by the mufti, a war criminal” who he said was “instrumental in the decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe”.

Writing in the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt, the prominent commentator Alan Posener said Germans were used to despots reinterpreting German history, but it was a shock to hear a Jewish leader apparently trying to belittle Hitler’s role in the Holocaust.

“His interpretation of history has all the marks of the opportunism that defines his whole behaviour. By exculpating the Germans and incriminating a Muslim, he is hoping to win friends among European Islamophobes. His motivation is understandable, but wrong,” wrote Posener.

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No serious historian would agree with Netanyahu

By Michael Burleigh, Jewish Chronicle
October 22, 2015

Most countries use history among their policy tools. We have just had an example of it this week: President Xi Jinping archly told our Parliament that China enjoyed the rule of law thousands of years ago — while our ancestors were still hunting and gathering around the Thames.

Sometimes the supposed lessons of history can be stretched beyond credibility. I fear that Israel’s Prime Minister did this in the course of his speech to the 37th World Zionist Congress this week.

Mr Netanyahu’s speech was largely about the shocking knife attacks that innocent Israelis have had to endure in recent weeks in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. But he also made one historical leap too far. Personalising matters, Mr Netanyahu spoke of how, after his grandfather came to Jaffa in 1920, Arab attackers burned down the British Mandate’s local immigration office. They had been incited by Haj Amin al-Husseini who, ironically enough, was later appointed Mufti — or chief Muslim cleric — by the British in order to moderate the violence.

In fact, the Mufti was mainly responsible for whipping up Arab fears that Jews had designs on Temple Mount’s Al Aqsa mosque, even as he sought to restrict Jews from praying at the Wailing Wall. In 1929, this resulted in mob violence that left 133 Jewish people dead in Jerusalem and beyond. The death toll would have been greater had the Haganah forces not fought back, before the British Army restored control.

While all of this is a matter of record, what Mr Netanyahu claimed next is not.

The Israeli leader said that until Hitler met the Mufti in November 1941, he did not want to exterminate the Jews, but rather expel them from Germany. Mr Netanyahu then claimed that al-Husseini had convinced Hitler to “burn” them instead.

While most biographies of Hitler have walk-on roles for murderous foreign antisemites, such as the dictatorial Croat Ante Pavelic or the Romanian Ion Antonescu, as well as the Mufti, no serious historian would claim any of them influenced his decision to murder Europe’s Jews.

These men were remote from the decision-making inner circles of the Third Reich. Hitler’s obsessional hatred of Jews was deep and longstanding, a fire that required no further stoking by any external hand.

Nazi murderousness towards the Jews burst onto German and Austrian streets during Kristallnacht in November 1938, while its keener SS Jew-killers got ahead of themselves from day one of the September 1939 invasion of Poland. The inspiration for this was Hitler’s “prophetic” speech on January 30 of that year when he said that the outbreak of a world war would result “in the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”.

Four months before the invasion of Russia, in March 1941, the German security and military apparatus put in place the structures and the personnel for the wholesale murder of “Jewish Bolsheviks”, leaving ample latitude for that to mean Jews in general.
The SS Einsatzgruppen and their local helpers went about that task with a vengeance after Operation Barbarossa commenced on June 22 1941.

A mandate for industrial-scale mass-murder was issued on July 31, seemingly in response to pressures (for example, Jews starving to death in winter) that Nazi policy had created in the first place.

Mr Netanyahu is right not to allow the world to ignore a vicious stream of antisemitism that has long been rife within what is risibly called the “Arab world” but which extends to non-Arab Muslims too, from Iran to Pakistan.

Palestinian Arabs are not immune to this either, despite adroitly casting themselves as victims. But this should not distract from where ultimate responsibility lay for the Holocaust, which was with Germany and Hitler.

Professor Michael Burleigh is a historian who specialises in Nazi Germany

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Soviet investigators (at left) view an opened grave at Babi Yar, Kiev, 1944

The murky story behind Netanyahu’s claim of a Palestinian role in the Holocaust

By Justin Wm. Moyer, Washington Post
October 22, 2015

In 1941, Adolph Hitler’s war in Europe was going pretty well. The Nazis had invaded Poland in 1939, and France the following year. While the Blitz hadn’t finished off the United Kingdom, the United States was, at least, still not officially in the fight.

On Nov. 28 of that year, Hitler took the time to meet with a Palestinian politician: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the “Mufti of Jerusalem.” For a generation raised on “Saving Private Ryan” more familiar with D-Day than Nazi Germany’s machinations in the Middle East, Husseini’s name was not familiar — perhaps until now, thanks to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in a speech to the World Zionist Congress on Tuesday, said the all-but-forgotten leader inspired the Fuhrer to exterminate six million Jews.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.’” Husseini had “a central role in fomenting the Final Solution,” Netanyahu added.

As The Washington Post’s William Booth pointed out, Netanyahu’s “remarks were intended to underline his contention that the root cause of Palestinian violence is not Israel’s 48-year-old military occupation of the West Bank, the building of Jewish settlements on lands that the Palestinians hope to make part of their future state, or the partial trade and travel blockade of the Gaza Strip, but old and intractable hatred of Jews.”

Many around the world immediately decried Netanyahu’s remarks. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office had to point out that it was Nazis, not Palestinians, who “led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust.”

“Perhaps we should exhume the corpses of the 33,771 Jews murdered in Babi Yar [in the Ukraine] in September 1941, two months before the Mufti and Hitler met, and bring them up to speed on the fact that the Nazis had no intention of destroying them,” Zehava Galon of Israel’s left-wing Meretz party wrote on her Facebook page.

So, if Husseini wasn’t inspiring Hitler to build concentration camps during their meeting, what was he doing? According to one record of the meeting, trying to get Hitler to publicly support him — and failing.

As The Post’s Booth reported, Husseini was a religious and political leader of the Arab population in British-controlled Palestine between the world wars. He fomented deadly riots against the Zionists coming to Palestine; opposed mass migration of Jews; and

Al-Husseini meets Himmler and apparently asks to see the gas ovens. No-one suggests they were his idea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

allied with Hitler and the Nazis during World War II, in part because of his opposition to British colonial rule. A pan-Arabist, Husseini spent the war in Berlin, broadcasting Arabic language propaganda and incitement against Jews and the allies.

A record of the Mufti’s meeting with Hitler appears in “Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918-1945, Series D, Vol XIII” — a trove of captured German foreign policy documents published after the war. (The original can be seen here — an account of the meeting begins on Page 873. The Times of Israel has posted a version that’s a bit easier to read.) As the account, written in the third person, makes clear, Husseini started out by stressing that he was on the Nazis’ side.

“The Arab countries were firmly convinced that Germany would win the war and that the Arab cause would then prosper,” Husseini said, as the document paraphrased. “The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists.”

But if Hitler wanted Arabs to rise up, Husseini said he would need visible support.

“A public declaration in this sense would be very useful for its propagandistic effect on the Arab peoples at this moment,” Husseini said. “It would rouse the Arabs from their momentary lethargy and give them new courage. It would also ease the Mufti’s work of secretly organizing the Arabs against the moment when they could strike. At the same time, he could give the assurance that the Arabs would in strict discipline patiently wait for the right moment and only strike upon an order from Berlin.”

Hitler’s response? He supported the Arabs, and was for “uncompromising war against the Jews.” But he had a problem: a world war with “two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia.” Sure, eventually Germany would get around to crushing Zionist dreams in the Middle East — when that effort wouldn’t drain resources from the battlefields of Europe. The Fuhrer, after all, “had to think and speak coolly and deliberately.”

Husseini would have to wait.

“For the good of their common cause, it would be better if the Arab proclamation were put off for a few more months than if Germany were to create difficulties for herself without being able thereby to help the Arabs,” Hitler said.

Husseini, undeterred, pressed the Fuhrer again: “He asked, however, whether it would not be possible, secretly at least, to enter into an agreement with Germany of the kind he had just outlined for the Fuhrer.” Hitler’s underwhelming response: “The Fuhrer replied that he had just now given the Grand Mufti precisely that confidential declaration.”

Historians, of course, disagree on the significance of Husseini’s relationship with Hitler and the significance of this meeting.

“There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the Mufti had an important role in the Holocaust,” Boris Havel of Croatia’s ministry of foreign affairs, the author of a recent journal article about Husseini, wrote The Washington Post in an e-mail. “By the end of 1930s Germany still allowed its Jews to emigrate. No Jews were allowed to emigrate after Mufti established himself in Berlin. The Mufti has been calling on killing Jews since early 1920s, i.e. even before Nazi regime came to power in Germany.” (In an e-mail, Havel his views “do not reflect the official policy or position of the Institution by which he is employed.”)

One book, “Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam” (2008) — citing Hitler’s alleged comment to Husseini “the Jews are yours” — argued that the Mufti’s sit-down with the Fuhrer was pivotal.

“At the conclusion of their ninety-five-minute meeting, the mufti could reflect with great satisfaction on what he had achieved,” David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann wrote. “Only three weeks after his arrival in Berlin on November 7, the mufti’s dream of a more formal alliance between radical Islam and Hitler’s Germany had become a reality.”

But other historians disagreed.

“Hitler’s alleged and highly unlikely pledge to Husseini (‘The Jews are yours’) is based on a passage in the mufti’s own memoirs,” historian Tom Segev explained in a New York Times review of the book. “But there is an official German record of his meeting with Hitler that contains no such statement. In fact the mufti did not achieve his major goal: Hitler refused to sign a public statement of support for him.”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum — while highlighting Husseini’s rabid antisemitism, wartime propaganda work and recruitment efforts for the SS among Bosnian Muslims — also said in an article on its Web site that he never got what he wanted from the Nazis.

The Arab Legion fought on the British side when Britain attacked the rebel government of Rashid Ali in Iraq in 1941 and restored the previous (pro-British) ruler.

Husseini “sought public recognition from the Axis powers of his status as leader of a proposed Arab nation,” the museum’s Web site explained. “He also sought public approval from the Axis powers for an independent Arab state or federation to ‘remove” or ‘eliminate’ the proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine. He made this declaration a condition for the awaited general uprising in the Arab world. The Germans, and Hitler in particular, repeatedly denied [his] request for legitimization.”

In the end, the mufti who met Hitler — a man who shared his vision, but would refuse to tell the world — ended up marginalized. Exiled after the war, he died in Lebanon in 1974.

Husseini “tried in vain to retain leadership of the Palestinian movement,” an obituary read. “But by then, younger Palestinians were turning away from him and eventually formed the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

Another historian found the debate — if there is one — about Husseini’s connection to Hitler “puzzling.”

“The authorship of the Holocaust is not really up for debate,” Stefan Ihrig, a German historian at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, said in a telephone interview, “and there is nothing in the research of the last 20 to 30 years to suggest that it would be.”

Justin Wm. Moyer is a reporter for The Washington Post’s Morning Mix. Follow him on Twitter: @justinwmmoyer.

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Rounded up by Einsatzkommando, Ukrainian Jews are forced to dig their own grave and strip naked before execution at Babi Yar outside Kiev, September 1941, three months after the start of Operation Barbarossa and before Hitler met Al-Husseini.

Yad Vashem’s Chief Historian on Hitler and the Mufti: Netanyahu Had It All Wrong

There is no evidence that Haj Amin al-Husseini proposed the ‘final solution’ to Hitler, according to Yad Vashem chief historian Dina Porat.

By Ofer Aderet, Haaretz
October 22, 2015

Prof. Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Hitler did not seek to exterminate the Jews until his meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini “completely erroneous, on all counts.”

Porat, a senior historian at Tel Aviv University who specializes in Holocaust studies, told Haaretz on Wednesday: “Hitler did not need anyone to encourage the final solution. In terms of the facts, there’s no debate … all these actions, Hitler’s obsessions, have no link to the mufti.”

In his speech to the 37th Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Netanyahu ostensibly quoted from the conversation between Hitler and the mufti at their meeting in Berlin in November 1941: “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler asked Husseini, “So what should I do with them?,” to which the mufti replied, “Burn them.”

When asked whether Netanyahu fabricated the dialogue that he quoted, Porat said that Netanyahu is very knowledgeable about Jewish history. “He grew up in a home full of Jewish history. But what he said is not in the minutes of the meeting. That should be clear.”

The meeting between Hitler and Husseini was documented only with general statements and topic headings, and was not transcribed word for word. There is no record of Hitler asking Husseini what to do with Europe’s Jews.

“The mufti did not speak to Hitler in terms of ‘you should do this,’ or ‘what do you think of a final solution?’ Nor is it recorded that the mufti told Hitler to ‘burn them.’ Hitler never asked anyone what to do with the Jews,” Porat said. She did say, however, that Hitler told the mufti that he would “’continue his plans,’ meaning that he had already begun, and certainly not because the mufti asked him to.”

According to Porat, “all of the facts show that during Hitler and the mufti’s meeting, the ‘final solution’ was already under way.”

Porat explained that Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jewry dated back to years before his meeting with Husseini, noting references to it in “Mein Kampf,” which was published in 1925, as well as the 1933 Nazi party charter and remarks in the Reichstag in 1939, when Hitler threatened to “exterminate the Jewish people.”

“And there’s no debating later on, with the invasion of Poland, the orders from Berlin to build ghettos, which were documented as a stage of the ‘final solution,’” Porat said. Later, mass killings of Jews began with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. “The order to kill wasn’t signed by Hitler, but the first death camp, Chelmno, began operating in December 1941, a few weeks after the meeting with the mufti — and it’s something that had been worked on long before,” added Porat.

Husseini asked Hitler to advance the final solution in the Middle East, but he certainly didn’t come up with the plan himself, Porat said. “Had Netanyahu added the words ‘in the Middle East’ to his speech, he wouldn’t be in this mess. But he didn’t add them,” Porat said: “That’s what the mufti wanted, and that’s why he went to Berlin.”

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Erekat: Netanyahu speech blames Palestinians for Holocaust

By Ma’an news
October 21, 2015

BETHLEHEM — Secretary-General of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, on Wednesday strongly condemned comments by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the 37th World Zionist Congress which blamed the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for actions taken by Nazi Germany under leader Adolf Hitler.

Addressing the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that Haj Amin al-Husseini, who famously met with Hitler in 1941, played a central role in “fomenting the final solution,” referring to the genocide of European Jewry.

“He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them,”‘ the Israeli leader said.

The reference to the Mufti was made while attempting to deny that Israel has plans to change the status quo at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount.

Erekat said the comments by the Israeli PM deepen the divide “during a time when a just and lasting peace is needed most” and attempt to turn a political issue into a religious one.

“Just a day after the Israeli occupying forces gunned down five Palestinians, raising up the number of Palestinians killed since October 1st to 50, Mr. Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians for the Holocaust and completely absolved Adolf Hitler’s heinous and reprehensible genocide of the Jewish people,” the PLO official said.

“On behalf of the thousands of Palestinians that fought alongside the Allied Troops in defence of international justice, the State of Palestine denounces these morally indefensible and inflammatory statements.”

Erekat added that it is a “sad day in history” when the leader of Israel hates his neighbour so much that he would absolve the most notorious war criminal in history, Adolf Hitler, of the murder of six million Jews.

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Abbas slams Netanyahu Holocaust comments as UN urges calm

By Ma’an news
October 21, 2015

RAMALLAH — President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday condemned comments by the Israeli Prime Minister which blamed the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for actions taken by Nazi Germany under leader Adolf Hitler, calling the speech an attempt to “evade Palestinian rights.”

During a joint press conference with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki moon, Abbas urged the Jewish people to “respond to Netanyahu’s lies about Nazism and the Holocaust.”

The Israeli PM had earlier said that Haj Amin al-Husseini, who famously met with Hitler in 1941, played a central role in “fomenting the final solution,” referring to the genocide of European Jewry.

President Abbas also spoke about the current upsurge in violence, stressing that Palestine needs a “system of international protection” against the ongoing occupation, settler violence and “collective punishment,” such as home demolitions.

He warned that the “ongoing violations by the occupation of the holy Muslim and Christian places in East Jerusalem, especially Al-Aqsa Mosque, will open the doors to a bitter religious conflict.”

Abbas said he appreciated the efforts of the UN in trying to keep peace and order in “our region, and in the whole world,” and asked for those efforts to be escalated.
He affirmed that the Palestinian people view the UN as the main body that supervises the implementation of international law, which he said “will enable us to end the Israeli occupation and [Israeli] settlement of Palestinian land.”

“Hopefully Palestine will soon become a full member of the UN,” he added.

Ban Ki moon called for both sides to “choose peace,” saying the most urgent challenge was to stop the current violence and avoid further loss of life.

The UN chief said that a political solution, including the end to Israel’s occupation, is the only way to end the violence.

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Fury grows over Bibi’s Holocaust ‘distortion’

Mufti gave Shoah idea to Hitler, says PM

By Anshel Pfeffer, Jewish Chronicle
October 22, 2015

The Israeli Prime Minister has caused uproar by saying that it was only after meeting the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, in November 1941, that Adolf Hitler decided to embark on the Final Solution.

Speaking to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Mr Netanyahu said that when the two men met, “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here (to Palestine).'”

According to Mr Netanyahu – whose father was a lauded historian – Hitler asked Al-Husseini: “What should I do with them?” He replied: “Burn them.”

The Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the founding fathers of Palestinian nationalism, was widely known as a virulent antisemite and supporter of Hitler.

But this account of their meeting, which is based solely on the statement of one SS officer, has been dismissed by almost all serious historians.

Professor Dina Porat, chief historian at Yad Vashem, said: “You cannot say that it was the mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews. It’s not true.”

Al-Husseini’s influence in the Third Reich is generally regarded as limited to propaganda broadcasts in German and helping recruit Bosnian Muslims for the SS.
By the time the men met in November 1941, around a million Jews had already been murdered in shooting-pits in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.

Mr Netanyahu’s words have been taken as implying that the Palestinians share some responsibility for the Shoah.

In 2012, the Israeli Prime Minister described al-Husseini as “one of the leading architects of the Final Solution”.

Opposition politicians have dismissed Mr Netanyahu’s assertion. Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog said that the words could be seen as trivialising the Holocaust.
“This is a dangerous historical distortion and I demand Netanyahu correct it immediately as it minimises the Holocaust, Nazism and … Hitler’s part in our people’s terrible disaster,” said Mr Herzog.

Some commentators said that Mr Netanyahu’s words revealed either that he sees the conflict between Israel and its immediate neighbours as a continuation of the Holocaust, or that he is prepared to manipulate history for political purposes.

Mr Netanyahu was due to meet german Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin this week to discuss the security situation in Israel and the wider Middle East.

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After Netanyahu’s Holocaust Remark, Germany Cites Its Own ‘Break With Civilization’

By Bill Chapell, NPR
October 21, 2015

Despite Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial claim — that a Palestinian leader gave Adolf Hitler the idea to exterminate Jews — a representative of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel says Germans know that responsibility for the Holocaust is “very much our own.”

“All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust,” Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said, according to ITV News.

Netanyahu’s statement came in an address to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Tuesday, in which he described a 1941 meeting between former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler — who, Netanyahu said, “didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews.”

Years before al-Husseini helped frame the Nazis’ notorious Final Solution, Netanyahu said, he had urged deadly attacks on Jews in British-ruled Palestine.

From the official transcript of Netanyahu’s statement:

And this attack and other attacks on the Jewish community in 1920, 1921, 1929, were instigated by a call of the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was later sought for war crimes in the Nuremberg trials because he had a central role in fomenting the final solution. He flew to Berlin. Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.’

Responding to the statement, Isaac Herzog, the Israeli leader of the opposition Zionist Union party, said the remark was “a dangerous distortion of history [that] trivializes the Holocaust, trivializes the Nazis and the share of the terrible dictator Adolf Hitler’s terrible tragedy of our people during the Holocaust.”

After his comments caused a stir — and just before leaving for a trip to Germany for an annual meeting with Merkel — Netanyahu clarified his view Wednesday during a brief media appearance at a Tel Aviv airport.

“Netanyahu said he had no intention of absolving Hitler of his crimes,” reports the Jerusalem Post. “Hitler, he said, is responsible for the Final Solution. But by the same token, he said, it is ‘absurd’ to ignore the role played by the mufti in encouraging Hitler and his henchmen to murder the Jews.”

Reporting on the controversy in Germany, Der Spiegel notes that several months before Hitler met with al-Husseini, the German SS had already killed tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and Ukraine. The newspaper also cites two Israeli history professors who disagree with Netanyahu — including one, Meir Litvak, who says Hitler was already planning a genocide in 1939.

“Al-Husseini was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims to their side and whose antisemitism was well-documented,” the AP reports. The news agency also cites historian Moshe Zimmermann of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, who said the mufti was a “lightweight” whose offer to form a formal treaty was rejected by Hitler.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu said of the mufti, “Unfortunately, Haj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society, he appears in textbooks and it is taught that he is one of the founding fathers of the nation, and this incitement that started then with him, inciting the murder of Jews — continues.”

With his remarks about Hitler, Der Spiegel says, Netanyahu echoed some of the sentiments of historical revisionists and Holocaust deniers who have said Hitler’s main intention had been to expel Jews from Germany.

During the years of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany killed some 6 million Jews along with millions of other people. Today in Germany, denying the events of the Holocaust is a criminal offence punishable by a jail term.

Merkel spokesman Seibert says there is a good reason the Holocaust is taught in German schools: “it must never be forgotten.”

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Historians, politicians slam PM’s ‘distortion of history’

Holocaust scholars refute prime minister’s assertion that Muslim religious leader first suggested the Final Solution; Netanyahu: ‘I had absolutely no intention of absolving Hitler’; Germany: Responsibility is ours.

By Ahiya Raved, Ynet news
October 21, 2015

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday at the 37th Zionist Congress that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler did not initially plan to exterminate the Jews and was convinced by the grand mufti of Jerusalem – but renowned historians said definitively on Wednesday that this was not the case.

Professor Dan Michman, a world-renowned expert who is the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem said Hitler did indeed meet the mufti – but this only occurred after the Final Solution began.

“He flew to Berlin,” Netanyahu said of the mufti. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Hajj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.'”

Netanyahu also said that the mufti was sought during the Nuremberg trials but managed to evade them.

He further noted that the mufti claimed Jews wanted to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque before the war, and “this lie is about a hundred years old.”

Yad Vashem’s chief historian, Professor Dina Porat, told Ynet that Netanyahu’s statements were factually incorrect. “You cannot say that it was the mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews,” she said. “It’s not true. Their meeting occurred after a series of events that point to this.”

Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Wednesday on Netanyahu’s remarks: “Of course Hajj Amin al-Husseini did not invent’ the Final Solution to the Jewish question’. History clearly shows that Hitler initiated it. Hajj Amin al-Husseini joined him.” He added that “the jihadist movements today are encouraging antisemitism and lean on known Nazi heritage.”

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog called Netanyahu’s remarks “distortion of history” on his Facebook page.

“No one needs to teach me how much of an Israel-hater the mufti war,” wrote Herzog. “He gave an order to murder my grandfather, Rabbi Herzog, and actively supported Hitler. But there was only one Hitler. Hitler did not need Husseini to order the murder of Jews just because they were Jewish.”

Professor Meir Litvak, who teaches at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Middle Eastern History, said the idea of annihilating the Jews came up in 1939. While the initial plan was to send Europe’s Jews to an area north of the Ural Mountains so that they would die of disease, he said, the plan was nixed when the Soviet Union did not surrender in 1941. At that point, Litvak said, the extermination idea arose.

“Husseini supported the extermination of the Jews, he tried to prevent rescuing of Jews, he recruited Arabs for the SS,” said Litvak. “He was an abominable person, but this must not minimize the scale of Hitler’s guilt.”

The PLO made its own statement on its Twitter page. “Netanyahu hates Palestinians so much that he is willing to absolve Hitler for the murder of 6 million Jews,” the account quoted Saeb Erekat, former chief negotiator in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, as saying. “On behalf of the thousands of Palestinians that fought alongside the Allied Troops in defense of international justice, the State of Palestine denounces these morally indefensible and inflammatory statements.”

“I had absolutely no intention of absolving Hitler of his diabolical responsibility for the extermination of Europe’s Jews,” Netanyahu said as he prepared to depart for Berlin to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to murder six million, it was his decision.

At the same time it is absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal, in encouraging and goading Hitler, Ribbentrop, Himmler and others to exterminate European Jewry.

There are many testimonies to this, including the testimony of Eichmann’s deputy at Nuremberg – not now, but after the Second World War.

He said: ‘The Mufti played a role in the decision of the German government to exterminate the European Jews, the importance of which must not be disregarded. He has repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he has been in contact, above all before Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution for the Palestine problem.

Eichmann’s deputy added: ‘The Mufti was one of the initiators of the diabolical extermination of European Jewry and was a partner and advisor to Eichman and Hitler in the carrying-out of this plan.’

This attempt by certain researchers and certain people to give an apologetic to the central and important role Hajj Amin al-Husseini had is obvious. Many other scholars quote this testimony and other testimonies as to Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s role.

My goal was not to absolve Hitler from the responsibility that he bears, but rather to show that the father of the Palestinian nation at that time, without a state and without what they call “the occupation”, without Palestinian territories and without settlements, already aspired to destroy the Jews through systematic incitement. Unfortunately, Hajj Amin al-Husseini is still a revered figure in Palestinian society. He appears in textbooks and is elevated as the father of the nation, and the incitement that began with him, incitement to kill Jews, continues. It’s not the same format, but in another format, and it’s the root of the problem. In order to stop the murder, we must stop the incitement.

The German government said regarding Netanyahu’s remarks that responsibility for the Holocaust lay with the Germans.

“All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said when asked about Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks.

“This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own.”

The prime minister made similar statements three years ago in the Knesset, claiming that the mufti was “one of the leading architects of the Final Solution”.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Netanyahu’s Holocaust comments anger Palestinians

By John Reed in Jerusalem, FT
October 21, 2015