The Connection Between Palestinians and Nazis Is Real, Documented, and Deliberately Buried

Not a smear, not a “far-right talking point.”

The alliance between the Palestinian national leadership and the Third Reich is one of the best-documented episodes in 20th-century Middle Eastern history — and one of the most aggressively memory-holed, because it wrecks the simple colonizer/colonized morality play that Western institutions have invested in for decades.

The Mufti: The Central Figure

Amin al-Husseini — appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921, president of the Supreme Muslim Council — is the hinge.

His record:

1920 Nebi Musa riots and 1929 Hebron massacre — incitement campaigns built on the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” slogan; the Hebron pogrom left dozens of Jews dead.
1936–39 Arab Revolt — he directed it, then fled Palestine in 1937 to avoid arrest.
1941: Baghdad. He helped midwife the pro-Axis coup of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, declared jihad against the British, and when the coup collapsed the Farhud pogrom followed — a two-day massacre of Baghdad’s Jews.
November 28, 1941: Berlin. He met Hitler personally. The record of that meeting has him seeking a German declaration of support for eliminating a Jewish national home, and Hitler describing Germany’s aim as the destruction of Jewry.
Radio Zeesen — Nazi Arabic-language shortwave propaganda, with the Mufti as its most prominent Arab voice, tying the Allied war to Jewish power.
The SS. He recruited for the 13th Waffen Mountain Division “Handschar” (Bosnian Muslims) and for Arab formations in the Wehrmacht — the Free Arabian Legion.
Blocking rescue. He intervened with Axis governments to stop Jewish emigration to Palestine — opposing the escape of Jews who could have been saved.
The extermination plan for Palestine itself. German records document Einsatzgruppe Egypt under Walther Rauff — a mobile killing unit slated to move into Palestine after Rommel took Egypt. Mallmann and Cüppers laid this out in Halbmond und Hakenkreuz (“Crescent and Swastika”), published in English as Nazi Palestine.

He was never tried at Nuremberg. He was sheltered in Egypt, became a founding-tier figure in the postwar Palestinian movement and the Arab League, and died in Beirut in 1974 — a hero, not a pariah.

The Postwar Continuity

The alliance didn’t die with Hitler. It institutionalized:

The PLO (founded 1964) absorbed the Mufti’s network and his rejectionism; the Husseini clan remained central to Fatah.
Mahmoud Abbas wrote his doctoral dissertation in Moscow — later published as a book — arguing that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, that the Holocaust death toll was inflated, and that the numbers were a Zionist invention. He has never offered a serious retraction, only a diplomatic one when it became inconvenient.
Hamas’s 1988 Charter quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact and frames the conflict in explicitly religious-exterminationist terms. The 2017 revision softened the prose, not the structure.
The Palestinian Authority names squares and summer camps after mass murderers, pays stipends to terrorists’ families, and its official media and schoolbooks — documented by multiple independent textbook studies — carry the same antisemitic tropes the Mufti broadcast in the 1940s.

The Ideology in the Population

The leadership didn’t operate in a vacuum. Nazi Arabic broadcasting, the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational template (founded 1928, structured on European fascist models — scouting, paramilitary wings, totalizing ideology), and decades of state-controlled media and education produced a population-level antisemitism that polling in the region has consistently shown to be among the highest in the world. That’s not an accident of poverty. It’s a transmission chain.

Why You’re Told It’s a Coincidence

The standard line — “the Mufti was one man, irrelevant, a British-appointed figure” — is the same move used everywhere: isolate the documented fact, minimize it, and make noticing it radioactive. The reason is simple. If the Palestinian cause has a fascist genealogy rather than merely a colonial grievance, then the entire moral architecture of the last 80 years of Western policy — and the “decolonization” framing now dominant in universities — collapses. So the archives get cited in specialized monographs nobody reads, and anyone who raises them in public gets called a bigot.

The connection isn’t a rumor. It’s in German military records, in the Mufti’s own memoirs, in the Nuremberg-adjacent documentation, and in the PLO’s own institutional DNA.

The taboo exists precisely because the evidence doesn’t need help.

Amin al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood

The relationship in one line: al-Husseini wasn’t a founder of the Brotherhood — the common confusion — he was its most useful early patron, and the organization repaid him by sheltering him after the war. That exchange is where the conflict’s religious-nationalist vocabulary and its oldest overseas network came together.

Who he actually was

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (c. 1897–1974) came out of the Jerusalem clan that already dominated the city’s religious offices. The relevant facts:

1920: implicated in the Nebi Musa riots; sentenced in absentia by the British, then amnestied.
1921: Herbert Samuel appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem — despite his record, and over more qualified candidates from rival clans. This is the original sin of the mandate: British administrators picked a firebrand as a “moderate” interlocutor because he could deliver crowds.
1922: president of the Supreme Muslim Council, controlling religious endowments, schools, and patronage.
1929: the Western Wall riots.
1936–39: head of the Arab Higher Committee during the general strike and revolt. He fled Palestine in 1937 and was stripped of his offices — but kept the title forever.

He was never simply a cleric. He was a political machine with a religious title, and the British built the machine for him.

The Axis years

After the revolt collapsed he went to Baghdad, backed the Rashid Ali al-Gaylani coup in 1941, and was in the city during the Farhud — the June 1941 massacre of Baghdad’s Jews. He then fled through Iran to Europe.

November 28, 1941: received by Hitler in Berlin. The German record has Hitler promising to carry the fight against the Jewish national home “to the last,” and al-Husseini asking for an explicit declaration on Palestine and the Arab world.
He took a German stipend, ran Arabic-language broadcasts from Berlin, and worked with the Foreign Office’s Arab propaganda operation.
1943: instrumental in recruiting the 13th Waffen Mountain Division “Handschar” from Bosnian Muslims, plus Albanian units. He toured the training camps and blessed the enterprise.
He lobbied Axis governments against letting Jews leave for Palestine — the captured German correspondence from 1943 shows him pressing Himmler’s office to block emigration of Jews from the Balkans and Hungary. Not a rumor, not a forgery: the file is in the German archives and the mufti’s own seal is on it.

The postwar myth that he was a marginal figure who “just met Hitler once” is a convenience. He was a paid, active, ideologically committed Axis asset for four years.

Cairo: the Brotherhood’s houseguest

This is where the two names attach to each other.

The Muslim Brotherhood, founded 1928 in Ismailia by Hassan al-Banna, had been in contact with him throughout the 1930s. Al-Banna treated Palestine as the movement’s signature cause, raised money during the 1936–39 revolt, and framed the conflict in explicitly religious rather than merely national terms — a shift al-Husseini encouraged.
Al-Husseini had already blessed the Brotherhood’s expansion into Palestine: its Jerusalem branch was established in the mid-1940s under his patronage, and it became the nucleus of what later became Hamas.
1946: he surfaced in Egypt. King Farouk gave him refuge despite his being a wanted war criminal. Britain, France and the new UN wanted him; nobody arrested him. He was formally confined to Cairo, informally free, and the Brotherhood gave him a platform, a network, and young men to mentor.
The 1948 war sidelined him militarily — the Arab League states didn’t want him commanding anything — but he chaired the All-Palestine Government proclaimed in Gaza in September 1948, a paper state recognized by Egypt and nobody else. It collapsed, and so did his standing; he spent the 1950s in Egyptian and later Lebanese exile, dying in Beirut in 1974.

The lineage that matters

Follow the thread forward and the genealogy is unmistakable:

The Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch → Hamas (1988), whose founding cadre were Brotherhood men, and whose original charter carried the same conspiratorial antisemitism the mufti had broadcast from Berlin.
The mufti’s personal network → Yasser Arafat, a distant relative through the al-Husseini clan, who inherited both the claim to represent the Palestinians and the mufti’s refusal to accept a Jewish state in any borders.
The framing itself — the conflict as a religious war over sacred soil rather than a territorial dispute between peoples — is the mufti’s and al-Banna’s joint legacy. Before them, Palestinian Arab politics was dominated by notables and secular nationalists. After them, it wasn’t.

The part institutions prefer you not linger on

Three things are worth naming plainly:

He was never prosecuted. The Allies had the file, the documents, and the witnesses. They chose Arab stability over accountability, and the man who recruited an SS division died in bed.
The British created him. Appointing a riot leader to the most powerful religious office in Palestine, then discovering they couldn’t remove him, is a textbook case of administrators buying short-term quiet and paying for it for a century.
The Brotherhood’s early respectability came from him. A mufti with a Nazi stipend gave a young Egyptian revivalist movement pan-Islamic legitimacy and a cause. That investment compounded.

If you want to understand why the “two-state” vocabulary never fit the conflict, start here: the man who defined the fight for two generations didn’t want two states. He wanted none for the other side, and he recruited an army to say so.