The Jew is Not My Enemy (8 page)
Read The Jew is Not My Enemy Online
Authors: Tarek Fatah
Nora Baker, the woman the Nazis had captured in Paris as a radio operator working for British Intelligence and the French Resistance, was in fact an Indian princess, a Muslim by the name of Noor Inayat Khan. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the last Muslim sovereign of South India, who died fighting the British in 1799. Ironically, the sultan’s descendant would die fighting for the British.
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Noor Inayat Khan was not the only Muslim who died fighting the Nazis. Tens of thousands of my people gave their lives to stop the Holocaust and destroy Hitler’s killing machine. If India’s Princess Noor represented heroism and valour in covert military action, other Muslims, like the Albanian family of Destan and Lime Balla, represented silent courage that earned them honourable mention in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem – Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust – as “Righteous Among the Nations.” Decades later, Lime Balla would write:
In 1943, at the time of Ramadan, seventeen people came to our village of Shengjergj from Tirana [capital of Albania]. They were all escaping from the Germans. At first I did not know they were Jews. We divided them among the villagers. My family took in three brothers by the name of Lazar. We were poor – we didn’t even have a dining table – but we never allowed them to pay for the food and shelter. I went into the forest to chop wood and haul water. We grew vegetables in our garden so we all had plenty to eat. The Jews were sheltered in our village for fifteen months. We dressed them all like farmers, like us. Even the local police knew that the villagers were sheltering Jews. I knew they spoke many different
languages. In December 1945, the Jews left for Pristina where a nephew of ours, who was a partisan, helped them. After that we lost all contact with the Lazar brothers. It was not until 1990, forty-five years later, that Schlomo and Mordecai Lazar made contact with us from Israel. All of us were Muslims. We were sheltering God’s children under our Besa.
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As Nazis hunted Jews across Europe, Muslims were not only saving Jewish lives by offering refuge and protection. One Muslim family saved a Jewish treasure that was centuries old.
Meet Dervis Korkut of Bosnia, who, in 1942, was the curator of the Sarajevo Museum that housed the renowned “Sarajevo Haggadah.” This superbly illuminated fourteenth-century volume was the best known and most admired of Haggadahs in the world.
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(The Haggadah is used as a guide to the Exodus story recounted at the Seder.) When the commanding officer at Sarajevo, Gen. Johann Hans Fortner, came looking for the famous Haggadah to confiscate the historic text, he was told that another, unidentified Nazi officer had already taken it away.
In fact Dervis Korkut had hidden the 109 bleached calfskin pages elsewhere in the museum. He later entrusted the Haggadah to a Muslim family, who kept it in their farmhouse, deep in the hills of Bosnia, for the duration of the war.
Rescuing the Haggadah was not Korkut’s only act of solidarity with the Jewish people. In 1941, when the Nazis occupied Yugoslavia, the SS began recruiting Balkan Muslims, hoping to capitalize on their supposed anti-Jewish attitudes. Dervis Korkut submitted a courageously worded position paper to the government titled “Anti-Semitism Is Foreign to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
Korkut and his wife, Servet, would also save the life of Mira Papo, a Jewish woman who was part of a communist partisan unit being hunted by the Nazis. As the Nazis closed in on her, Mira was introduced to Korkut, who smuggled her into his home. She was given the name Ameera and dressed in Muslim attire to avoid suspicion. Neighbours were told that Ameera had come from a village to work as a nanny for the Korkuts’ newborn son. Mira “Ameera” Papo lived with her Muslim family for four months, until she was spirited out of Sarajevo by family friends. In 1994, Dervis and Servet Korkut were posthumously honoured by Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations” and their names engraved at the Yad Vashem.
The story does not end there. During the Kosovo war of 1999, the Korkuts’ daughter Lamija Jaha and her husband became refugees in Macedonia after fleeing the Serbian assault on Pristina. Because of what her parents had done for Mira Papo and the Sarajevo Haggadah, Lamija and her family were accorded residency in Israel, where she now lives among the Jews.
There were many more Muslims who fought the Nazis. Among them was Palestinian Hazim Khalidi, a graduate of the London School of Economics who volunteered in the Indian army’s Palestine Regiment and saw action in Syria and Libya. Few people have heard of the Palestine Regiment, a unit in which Jew and Muslim fought side by side against Hitler’s Afrika Korps in Libya.
At the time of Kristallnacht, in 1938, the only Muslim monarch in Europe, King Zog of Albania, issued four hundred passports to German Jews so that they could escape Germany as Albanian citizens. Another Muslim monarch, the Arab King of Morocco – a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad – went out of his way to protect the lives of his Jewish subjects. When the German-influenced Vichy government of France announced that it had prepared 200,000 yellow stars for the Jews of Morocco, King Mohammed v replied that he would need fifty more
for himself and other members of his royal family. He refused to make any distinction between his Muslim and Jewish citizens.
Muslims from places as diverse as Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan in central Asia and France’s Tirailleurs Senegalese in Africa fought and gave their lives to end the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of Indian Muslims fell in such far-off battlegrounds as Singapore and the Sahara. Muslims contributed to the victory in battles from Stalingrad, where Hitler’s advance into the Soviet Union was blunted, to North Africa, where they helped send Hitler’s Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, scurrying back to his den in Berlin.
In the cemeteries of El Alamein, Egypt, lie the dead Muslims – the Muhammads, the Khans, and the Ismails – who gave their lives so that Nazism could be defeated. The cemeteries of Stalingrad bear the names of the young central Asian Muslims whose tombstones remind us of the human spirit that came together to stop the Nazi war machine.
But while the Muslim King Zog of Albania smuggled Jews out of Germany and King Mohammed of Morocco was giving them protection, there were other Muslims actively serving Nazi Germany.
Most were recruited from among the Muslim soldiers of the Red Army taken prisoner during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941–42.
The architects of this recruitment of Muslims into the Nazi army were two men with very different backgrounds. The first was a Muslim German of Uzbek ancestry, Veli Kayum Khan, who had fled communism and made Germany his home in 1922. Khan was the head of Operation Tiger B, assigned to form an exclusive Muslim regiment to aid the Nazi war effort on the Eastern Front. He was armed with an Islamic endorsement from one of the most prominent figures of the Muslim world, the Grand Mufti of Palestine.
Operation Tiger B soon expanded, and the Wehrmacht established the 450th Infantry Battalion. By 1943, Veli Kayum Khan’s efforts
would result in three more regiments that were all amalgamated to form a new division under the SS known as the East Turkestan Armed Formation.
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The Muslim soldiers in this division wore the regular German army uniforms but with one addition: an armpatch outlining the historic Chah-I-Zindeh mosque in Samarkand, with the phrase, Biz Allah Bilen (God be with us) under the mosque emblem.
Veli Kayum Khan may have spoken the Turkic languages of the former Soviet soldiers, but it is unlikely he would have met the same success in his recruitment without the Islamic endorsement by the Grand Mufti of Palestine.
Hajj al-Husayni was a guest of the Führer assigned the task of whipping up anti-Jewish sentiment among Muslims around the world. While Muslims from India to Senegal were dying fighting the Wehrmacht, Mufti Hajj al-Husayni was photographed with Hitler and often dined with Himmler. The Nazis even had him preside over the opening of the Islamische Zentral-Institut (Islamic Central Institute) in Berlin in December 1942.
Hajj Al-Husayni’s flirtation with Hitler could be dismissed as trivial in the larger scheme of things, but his fascination with fascism did not end with the fall of Berlin. He was lucky. He had the distinction of being the only former associate of Hitler who escaped and was never tried as a war criminal. While prominent Nazis were hunted down and tried, Hajj al-Husayni, with 50,000 marks in his pocket from the German Foreign Office, was allowed to escape, first to France – where he was put up in the Villa Les Roses in the Parisian suburb of Louveciennes with a chauffeur, two bodyguards, and his secretary – and then to Egypt, where he was granted asylum. Unwilling to risk offending the large Muslim population in Egypt, and to avoid any problems in Palestine, which was still under British mandate, Britain looked the other way as the mufti ended up in Cairo.
Yugoslavia, where the mufti had organized the Muslim SS division responsible for the murder of thousands of Marshal Tito’s partisans, demanded that Hajj al-Husayni be tried for war crimes. Britain, reeling after the surprise defeat of Churchill two months after he won the war, was now governed by Clement Atlee’s Labour Party. The last thing Atlee’s government wanted was unrest in the colonies. Britain wanted out of both Palestine and India, and in both places, partition was in the air and Muslims were restless. Not wanting to offend the Muslims – assuming wrongly that they were at the beck and call of a pro-Hitler mufti – London made a feeble request to France, asking them to hand over al-Husayni. The French balked, and the British simply dropped the matter.
Behind the scenes, al-Husayni was pulling the strings of his Egyptian connection, the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, there existed a reservoir of sympathy for the Nazis. Men like Anwar Sadat, who would become president, and many other Egyptian army officers had openly expressed sympathy, and some had worked for the Germans as spies. In this climate, the Brotherhood, with its pro-Nazi leanings, took up the cause of Hajj al-Husayni. They sent a telegram to the British ambassador in Cairo asking him to ensure the well-being of the mufti, referring to him as the sole representative of Palestine. Simultaneously, the Brotherhood sent telegrams and delegations to the French ambassador to convey their thanks to Paris.
With both London and Paris unwilling to bring the mufti before a war crimes tribunal, Yugoslavia approached the United States to apply pressure. When America asked Paris to hand over Hajj al-Husayni, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood sent a protest memorandum to the Americans that read: “We, in the name of the Muslim Brothers and all Arabs and Muslims, would like to warn your government not to continue this unjust Zionist policy.… We would also like you to confirm to your government our preparedness to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of rescuing our brethren, wherever necessary.”
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This posturing by the Muslim Brotherhood actually worked. Soon, the year-old Arab League, not wanting to be seen as abandoning an Arab leader, also added its name to the call to save the Grand Mufti from prosecution. In June 1946, al-Husayni managed to quietly slip out of France and into Egypt, where King Farouk readily granted him asylum. Britain once more half-heartedly asked Cairo to extradite the mufti, but the Egyptians knew this was more of a formality than an order. Like the French, they too shrugged off the British, whose strength as an empire had been sapped beyond recognition.
Today, when European governments kowtow to Islamo-fascists, fearing a backlash, one is reminded of the lack of will to prosecute the Grand Mufti of Palestine in 1945.
In Egypt, where he was treated as a hero, Hajj al-Husayni expressed no regret for his role in the deaths of thousands of Yugoslav partisans. This was not the first time the Arab Street has cheered a mass murderer. When the Egyptian government criticized those who had backed Hitler, including al-Husayni, his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood came to his defence. They declared that the mufti had committed no wrong by aligning himself with the Nazis. In fact, they claimed, Hajj al-Husayni was simply carrying out jihad.
Between the Zionists, who grossly exaggerate the mufti’s role in the Holocaust, if any, and his apologists, who, depending on the audience, either dismiss any culpability on his part or express regret at Hitler’s ignominious failure, one thing is clear: the Mufti worked for Hitler. The nature and purpose of their relationship can be judged by the minutes of their meeting in 1941.
Minutes of the meeting between German Chancellor Adolf
Hitler and Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini:
Zionism and the Arab Cause (November 28, 1941)
The Grand Mufti began by thanking the Führer for the great honor he had bestowed by receiving him. He wished to seize the opportunity to convey to the Führer of the Greater German Reich, admired by the entire Arab world, his thanks for the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches. The Arab countries were firmly convinced that Germany would win the war and that the Arab cause would then prosper: The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists. They were therefore prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion. The Arabs could be more useful to Germany as allies than might be apparent at first glance, both for geographical reasons and because of the suffering inflicted upon them by the English and the Jews. Furthermore, they had had close relations with all Moslem nations, of which they could make use in behalf of the common cause. The Arab Legion would be quite easy to raise. An appeal by the Mufti to the Arab countries and the prisoners of Arab, Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan nationality in Germany would produce a great number of volunteers eager to fight. Of Germany’s victory the Arab world was firmly convinced, not only because the Reich possessed a large army, brave soldiers, and military leaders of genius, but also because the Almighty could never award the victory to an unjust cause.
In this struggle, the Arabs were striving for the independence and unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq. They had the
fullest confidence in the Führer and looked to his hand for the balm on their wounds which had been inflicted upon them by the enemies of Germany.
The Mufti then mentioned the letter he had received from Germany, which stated that Germany was holding no Arab territories and understood and recognized the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs, just as she supported the elimination of the Jewish national home.
A public declaration in this sense would be very useful for its propagandistic effect on the Arab peoples at this moment. 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.
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In these circumstances he was renewing his request that the Führer make a public declaration so that the Arabs would not lose hope, which is so powerful a force in the life of nations. With such hope in their hearts the Arabs, as he had said, were willing to wait. They were not pressing for immediate realization of their aspirations: they could easily wait half a year or a whole year. But if they were not inspired with such a hope by a declaration of this sort, it could be expected that the English would be the gainers from it.
The Führer replied that Germany’s fundamental attitude on these questions, as the Mufti himself had already stated, was clear. Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the
Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the function of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie. The work there was done only by the Arabs, not by the Jews. Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.
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The aid to the Arabs would have to be material aid. Of how little help sympathies alone were in such a battle had been demonstrated plainly by the operation in Iraq, where circumstances had not permitted the rendering of really effective, practical aid. In spite of all the sympathies, German aid had not been sufficient and Iraq was overcome by the power of Britain, that is, the guardian of the Jews.
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The Führer then made the following statement to the Mufti, enjoining him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart:
1. He (the Führer) would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.
2. At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.
3. As soon as this had happened, the Führer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab
sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.
Once Germany had forced open the road to Iran and Iraq through Rostov, it would be also the beginning of the end of the British world empire. He (the Führer) hoped that the coming year would make it possible for Germany to thrust open the Caucasian gate to the Middle East. 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.
He (the Führer) fully appreciated the eagerness of the Arabs for a public declaration of the sort requested by the Grand Mufti. But he would beg him to consider that he (the Führer) himself was the Chief of State of the German Reich for five long years during which he was unable to make to his own homeland the announcement of its liberation. He had to wait with that until the announcement could be made on the basis of a situation brought about by the force of arms that the Anschluss had been carried out.
The moment that Germany’s tank divisions and air squadrons had made their appearance south of the Caucasus, the public appeal requested by the Grand Mufti could go out to the Arab world.
The Grand Mufti replied that it was his view that everything would come to pass just as the Führer had indicated. He was fully reassured and satisfied by the words which he had
heard from the Chief of the German State. 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 Führer.
The Führer replied that he had just now given the Grand Mufti precisely that confidential declaration. The Grand Mufti thanked him for it and stated in conclusion that he was taking his leave from the Führer in full confidence and with reiterated thanks for the interest shown in the Arab cause.
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