Also little known: The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar was a Muslim combat formation, approved by the Grand Mufti and Hitler. It was used by the SS in Yugoslavia.
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"The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," Robert Fisk, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007, Chapter 11:[1 - 2]
But amid the evil of the Holocaust, Haj Amin's moral position seems untenable. There is, too, in the archives of the wartime BBC Monitoring Service, a series of transcripts from Nazi radio stations that cast a dark shadow over any moral precepts Haj Amin might hace claimed. Here he is, for example, addressing a Balfour Day rally at the Luftwaffe hall in Berlin on 2 November 1943: "The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews . . . They have definitely solved the Jewish problem." And on Berlin radio on 1 March 1944: "Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion." On 21 January that year, Haj Amin had visited Ante Pavelic's ferocious Fascist state of Croatia—which included present-day Bosnia— where he addressed Muslim recruits to the SS with these words, so sharply in contrast with sentiments expressed in his postwar memoirs: "There are also considerable similarities between Islamic principles and National Socialism, namely, in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship. . . in the ideas of order."
He even played a role in fomenting hatred between Bosnian Muslims and the largely Serb-led partisan force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia, an anger that burst forth again in the atrocities of 1992.
On 26 May 1944, the BBC Monitoring Service recorded Haj Amin describing Tito as "a friend of the Jews and a foe of the Prophet." In 1943 he received from Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust, a telegram recalling for him that “the National Socialist Party had inscribed on its flag 'the extermination of world Jewry.' Our party sympathizes with the fight of the Arabs, especially the Arabs of Palestine, against the foreign Jew."
Radio Berlin later reported that Haj Amin had "arrived in Frankfurt for the purpose of visiting the Research Institute on the Jewish problem."
Did Haj Amin know about the Jewish Holocaust? According to his most meticulous biographer, Zvi Elpeleg—a former Israeli military governor of Gaza who is respected as a historian even by Haj Amin's surviving family—“his frequent, close contacts with leaders of the Nazi regime cannot have left Haj Amin with any doubt as to the fate which awaited the Jews whose emigration was prevented by his efforts." In July 1943, when the extermination camps were already in operation in Poland, Haj Amin was complaining to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, about Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine in the following words: “If there are reasons which make their removal necessary, it would be essential and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control as, for example, Poland. . ." Before his death, Haj Amin was to write that "the Germans settled their accounts with the Jews well before my arrival in Germany," a statement that is factually and historical untrue...
Alia al-Husseini, Haj Amin's granddaughter, recalled for me how her grandfather, in his last years, spoke of Hitler's true aims. “He said that after the Jews, the Germans would destroy the Arabs— he knew this... ...