r/holocaust

Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni was a Nazi collaborator during the Holocaust. He met with Hitler, recruited for the Nazis’ Waffen-SS and toured a concentration camp, spread antisemitic propaganda advocating for genocide of Jews, incited violent uprisings targeting Jews resulting in murder of Jews, and acted to block the escape of Jews from the Holocaust:

• Met with Hitler: Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni met with Hitler in 1941. The Nazis provided Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni with a lavish villa in Berlin
• Antisemitic propaganist: Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni spread antisemitic, genocidal Nazi propaganda to the Arab world and told Arabs to kill Jews wherever Arabs found Jews. He advocated removing Jews from the land of Israel and driving every Jew out of Arab lands.
• Toured concentration camp: Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni toured a concentration camp, expressing interest in the Jewish prisoners
• Nazi recruiter: Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni recruited Arabs to the Nazis’ Waffen-SS division. He was credited with aiding recruitment of some 24-27,000 Arabs to the 13th Waffen SS Mountain Division by Nazi officials
• Incited violence against Jews: Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni incited violent riots that led to the murder of 5 Jews and the injury of 211 Jews in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in 1920.
• Sabotaging rescue of Jews: Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni acted to block escape routes of Jews fleeing the Holocaust, and demanded that rescue operations be halted, explicitly stating that he preferred that Jewish children be murdered in Poland.

On November 28, 1941, Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni met with Adolf Hitler at a widely covered meeting in Berlin**.** 

Throughout the war, in collaboration with the Nazis, Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni broadcast antisemitic, Nazi propaganda and anti-Allied propaganda by radio to the Arab world and to Muslim communities under German control or influence. He compared Jews to “infectious disease”, “bacilli”, “microbes” and said that Arabs should kill Jews wherever Arabs found Jews.

In 1942 Al-Hussayni was hosted by the Reich Central Office for Security for an elaborate tour of the Oranienburg concentration camp. At this tour the “educational” value of the camp was discussed, and Al-Hussayni and his entourage inspected household appliances and equipment that the prisoners produced in forced labor in the concentration camp. While there they expressed interest in the Jewish prisoners.

Al-Husayni recruited Arabs to Waffen-SS divisions. Al-Hussayni hoped these units would augment uprisings he planned to foment and become the core of the army of a future pan-Arab state. In 1943, the SS decided to recruit among Bosnian Muslims for a new division of the Waffen-SS. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni was enlisted in a recruitment drive. SS Office Main Chief Berger reported that 24,000-27,000 recruits signed up, crediting Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni, stating that the "visit of the Grand Mufti…had had an extraordinarily successful impact.” Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni spoke to the 13th Waffen SS Mountain Division he recruited to, instructing them that Germans and Muslims had a common enemy: World Jewry, England and its Allies and Bolshevism. During the unit’s deployment in Bosnia, the possibility that the unit participated in capture or murder of individual Jews found in hiding or captured cannot be excluded, although such crimes have yet to be documented..

Nazi Germany provided al-Husayni with a lavish villa in Berlin for his office and residence, as well as a generous monthly stipend.

Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni hoped to create a Panarab state, an idea that was for him and his followers inextricably linked to ending Jewish immigration to the land of Israel. After listening to Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni’s speeches, Arab civilians initiated violent riots in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1920 which included the murder of 5 Jews and the wounding of 211 Jews. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni was convicted by the British for inciting this violence. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni told Arabs to kill Jews wherever Arabs found Jews. Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni advocated removing Jews from the land of Israel and driving every Jew out of Arab lands.

Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni acted to prevent the rescue of Jews fleeing the Holocaust. When Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni learned of efforts to allow Jews to flee to the land of Israel, he demanded that the rescue operations be halted, Hajj Amin Al-Hussayni explicitly stated that he preferred that Jewish children be murdered in Poland than rescued from the Holocaust.

Images courtesy of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)

References
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-wartime-propagandist
[2] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-key-dates?parent=en%2F11099
[3] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/hajj-amin-al-husayni-meets-hitler-for-the-first-time

The kids dont even have shoes on. They are being loaded onto trains headed to Treblinka. I will never understand this cruelty.

So, despite the fact that he lost every single person in his entire family both immediate and extended, based on this short account Eddie basically bounced from (compared to other Jewish people’s situations) bed of roses to bed of roses throughout the Holocaust. Like, he was in a really awful situation, I am not trying to say he was not, every Jew in Nazi Europe was. But at the same time, over and over again he was absurdly fortunate.

After Eddie’s dad starved to death in the Łódź Ghetto and his mom was deported to Chelmno, Eddie was “adopted” by Dora Fuchs. She was the secretary to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the ghetto, and so Eddie became a member (or at least member-adjacent) of the tiny ghetto elite who all basically lived in the same apartment building, there weren't very many of them. This meant he ate well: plenty of food and many items such as oranges and chocolate and eggs, that were not on the menu for the average Łódź Ghetto resident. The average ghetto resident subsisted on starvation rations of mostly bread (often adulterated with inedible things), potatoes and turnips (often rotten), and occasional shreds of horsemeat (which is nonkosher so religious Jews could not eat it).

After the Łódź Ghetto was liquidated and Eddie was sent to Auschwitz he survived selection and landed on his feet with a job in the kitchen, one of the most coveted work assignments for obvious reasons. Over and over, people he encountered went out of their way to protect him. Later on he became a runner, also one of the best camp jobs, delivering messages and things between different sections of camp.

Then he transferred to the Sosnowiec camp, which was a much better regime than Auschwitz. No gas chambers there, no selections; it was a work camp. Eddie was a runner there, could go pretty much anywhere in camp, and was a daily presence in the commandant’s office. The commandant liked him and actually GAVE HIM CHRISTMAS PRESENTS! Later on Eddie asked for a factory job “so I can learn a trade” (in fact he had escape plans and needed a night shift job for this) and the commandant consented to this. Another Nazi might’ve murdered him on the spot for daring to imply he had a future he should learn a trade for.

Subsequently Auschwitz and Sosnowiec were evacuated and Eddie survived the death march to Mauthausen. He got some boils and was sent to the camp “hospital” which like every camp hospital was just death's waiting room. In fact a death certificate was even issued for Eddie at Mauthausen. But instead of selecting him to die, a German officer… treated his injuries.

And so he survived. He got all the luck. The rest of his family got none at all, his parents and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins all wiped out.

It's a short book but I thought it was very enlightening given Eddie's unique perspective. The aforementioned ghetto chairman, Rumkowski, is an extremely controversial figure in Holocaust history. This is in part because he allowed the Nazis to deport almost all the children from the ghetto to their deaths (defending it to the ghetto by saying sometimes you have to cut off limbs to save bodies), and in part because Rumkowski was almost certainly a pedophile and serial rapist. He was involved with orphanages and community activities and stuff prior to the war and the allegations against him had gotten to the point that by the late 1930s there was an investigation opened by the authorities in Poland into his conduct towards children, but then the war happened and of course the investigation fell by the wayside. Lodz Ghetto survivor Lucille Eichengreen wrote a book that's basically a collection of witness reports (including her own) of Rumkowski abusing children and women inside the ghetto.

Eddie's memoir doesn't directly address the allegations about Rumkowski. But he certainly knew about them and he makes a point of saying that he never personally saw or experienced Rumkowski being anything other than kind to children. He doesn't seem to have particularly cared for Rumkowski though, and thought he was a narcissist. I think he felt that way about all the Lodz Ghetto elite. He said it was very uncomfortable for him living with Dora Fuchs and watching her pitching a fit because her egg delivery was late and she couldn't have her favorite breakfast when he knew almost no one in the ghetto had access to eggs and that his own father had died of starvation.

Reading this Holocaust book re-emphasized for me just how much luck and chance played a role in people’s survival or lack thereof.

This family’s 15-year-old daughter had been secretly dating a local boy, and when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the girl ran off with her boyfriend. The rest of the family left Skalat, their little shtetl close to the Polish-Ukrainian border, to try to find her. They did find her and the boy but found themselves unable to return home due to the war situation.

What followed was a very dangerous period of wandering aimlessly as refugees, during which on several occasions the family escaped death by the skin of their teeth. Eventually everyone got evacuated into Central Asia, I think Uzbekistan, and nearly starved to death there.

Everyone in the family blamed the daughter and her boyfriend for the predicament they were in: ”If you hadn’t run off together, we wouldn’t have had to leave Skalat to chase after you and we wouldn’t have wound up in this dump. We’d still be at home and everything would have been great, but you two had to ruin everything.”

After the war ended, the family made preparations to return to Skalat ASAP. The mom sent a letter to their extended relatives they’d left behind there, to let them know they were coming back.

They got a reply but it was from a stranger. It said: “No one is left of your relatives. The Nazis killed them all.”

I have long marveled at the courage of the Polish resistance during WWII. Poland, tragically sandwiched between Germany and Russia, was quickly overrun by both. Despite the overwhelming force against them, many Poles resisted bravely. One such resistor was Irena Sendler.

I was surprised to learn that antisemitism was present in Poland even before the war, partly due to the influx of Jewish refugees fleeing Russian persecution. Irena’s father, a compassionate doctor, treated all patients—including Jews—for free. He ultimately died of typhus contracted from one of them. The Jewish community offered to support Irena and her mother financially, but they declined.

As a university student, Irena protested the segregation of Jewish classmates and defaced the “non-Jewish” label on her report card. Her activism started early and only deepened with time. She became a social worker, focusing on helping mothers and children.

When the Nazis occupied Poland and the persecution of Jews intensified, Irena fought back quietly. After her Jewish colleagues were removed from her department, she began forging documents for Jews in need. Because of her role in social work, she was allowed to enter the Warsaw Ghetto under the pretense of disease control. She smuggled in food and medicine—and smuggled out children and infants.

Together with other social workers, she helped form Żegota, a network dedicated to rescuing Jewish children and placing them in convents. Irena carefully recorded each child’s original and new identity, hoping to reunite them with family after the war. She buried them in glass jars underneath an apple tree. When the Gestapo caught wind of her efforts, Irena was arrested. Just before her capture, she managed to toss the records to a colleague who hid them in her clothing. They were never discovered.

Despite brutal interrogations, including breaking her legs, Irena revealed nothing. She was eventually sentenced to death, but fellow resistance members bribed her guards, and she escaped. Even after the war, under communist rule, she continued her work protecting children.

Irena Sendler faced unimaginable danger, yet never gave in to hatred. She lived to be 98.

Thank you, Irena.