Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Barry Rubin & Wolfgang G. Schwanitz

Author:Barry Rubin & Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 20. Heinrich Himmler and Amin al-Husaini meet on July 4, 1943 near the Ukrainian town of Zhitomir. On that occasion, as al-Husaini admitted in his 1999 memoirs, Himmler confided to him that he had killed three million Jews.

Muslims know, continued Sabri, that “as Muhammad said: ‘You will never see a Jew and a Muslim together without the Jew trying secretly to destroy the Muslim.’” Even before Nazism, Arabs and other Muslims had placed restrictions on the Jews who lived among them. God had revealed Islam; Jews had created Communism.55 Sabri even adapted the Nazi term of Jews as subhuman, Untermenschen. Consequently, he concluded, “The German steps against the Jews nowhere found so much sympathy and support as with the Muslim people.”56

While there were many later attempts to revise or explain away the rhetoric of al-Husaini and his colleagues, they were always totally unrepentant. For al-Husaini, the Arabs and Muslims were engaged in a “struggle for liberation [against the] dirty race” of Jews.57 In his memoirs, al-Husaini recalls telling the students at the imam school that the Jews were full of greedy egoism and feelings of superiority, hatred, and self-hatred. All attempts to educate or improve them had failed. Consequently, the only solution was extermination.58

It was at the site of such an extermination campaign, in the village of Zhitomir, just east of Kiev, where Himmler and al-Husaini met on July 4, 1943. The previous year Jews in the area had been wiped out by the Germans. Now the village had been renamed Hochwald and was the site of Himmler’s field headquarters. He traveled there on his own private train named “Heinrich,” after himself, managed by an SS officer, Josef Tiefenbacher.

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