Recruitment
Al-Husayni salutes the recruits on the cover of magazine "Vienna Illustrated"
Beginning in 1943, al-Husayni was involved in the organization and recruitment of Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th "Handschar" division of 21,065 men (sometimes spelled Hanjar: the word Scimitar in Turkish, Arabic Khanjar خنجر

, which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944.
Al-Husayni insisted that "The most important task of this division must be to protect the homeland and families (of the Bosnian volunteers); the division must not be permitted to leave Bosnia.", but this request was ignored by the Germans (German archives cited in Lepre, p34).
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The Holocaust
The Mufti's knowledge about the holocaust while living in Nazi Germany has been debated with the Mufti himself denying any such knowledge after the war. Testimony presented at the Nuremberg trials, however, accused the Mufti of not only having knowledge about the holocaust but of also actively encouraging the initiation of extermination programs against European Jews. Adolf Eichmann`s deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified during his war crimes trial in 1946 that ... "The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan... He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz."
When the Red Cross offered to mediate with Adolf Eichmann in a trade prisoner-of-war exchange involving the freeing of German citizens in exchange for 5,000 Jewish children being sent from Poland to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Husseini directly intervened with Himmler and the exchange was cancelled, although there is no evidence that his intervention prevented their rescue.[citation needed]
Among the sabotage al-Husayni organized was an attempted chemical warfare assault on the second largest and predominantly Jewish city in Palestine, Tel Aviv. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, "The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers."[5]
Recent Nazi documents uncovered in the German Minstry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg [6] by two researchers, Klaus Michael Mallmann from Stuttgart University and Martin Cüppers from the University of Ludwigsburg, indicated that in the event of the British being defeated in Egypt by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps the Nazis had planned to deploy a special unit called Einsatzkommando Ägypten to exterminate Palestinian Jews and that they wanted Arab support to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state. In their book the researchers concluded that, "the most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem".[[7] According to the German researchers Husayni was a prime example of how Arabs and Nazis became friends out of a hatred of Jews. Al-Husseini had met several times with Adolf Eichmann[8], Adolf Hitler's chief architect of the Holocaust [4] [9],[10],[11],[12],[13].
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Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (ca. 1895 - July 4, 1974, أمين الحسيني, alternatively spelt al-Husseini), the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a Muslim religious leader. Known for his anti-Zionism, al-Husayni fought against the establishment of a Jewish state in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. To this end, Husayni collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and helped recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS. Recent Nazi documents uncovered in German Minstry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg [1] by two researchers from Stuttgart University found that the Nazis had planned to exploit Arab friendship for their planned landing in Palestine and murdering of about 500,000 European Jews who had taken refuge there. In their book the researchers concluded that "The most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem".[2].