Dutch Holocaust Survivor - "I Saw How The Mufti Of Jerusalem Paid A Visit To Auschwitz-Monowitz"

Dutch Holocaust Survivor - "I Saw How The Mufti Of Jerusalem Paid A Visit To Auschwitz-Monowitz".(MIM).By Emerson Vermaat.San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - "It was a very hot day in June or July 1944 when I was at work in Monowitz, also known as Auschwitz III. And then I suddenly noticed a group of people who looked like actors. They were wearing long robes and strange headgear. Occasionally, internees did perform a play in the camp. I wanted to find out myself and as I walked towards that group I was stopped by a high ranking SS-officer whom I didn't know. He was from the main camp (Auschwitz I) or Birkenau (Auschwitz II). The officer asked me, 'What do you want?' 'I just wanted to know whether these people are actors or not. Is there going to be a stage performance tonight?' 'These people aren't actors,' the SS-officer told me. 'They are the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his retinue.' I then asked him, 'What is he doing here?' 'He is paying a visit to the camp,' the SS-officer said. 'He lives in Berlin where he enjoys Hitler's personal protection. He is now paying a visit to Monowitz to see how the Jews are working themselves to death in factories. He is also in Auschwitz to see the gas chambers. When we have won the war he will return to Palestine to build gas chambers and kill the Jews who are living over there.'"
Ernst Verduin, a Dutch Jew from Amsterdam born in 1927, was deported to Auschwitz in September 1943. Upon arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau he was first selected for the gas chamber but then somehow managed to leave the "gas chamber group" and join the group selected for slave labor. "An SS- officer protested loudly, but I didn't care," Verduin told me at the end of February. 'He didn't use his machine gun and kill me, although he could have done so quite easily.
I later learned that the SS wanted to avoid panic at all costs and that I wasn't the only one who switched from one group to another. I already knew about the gas chambers of Auschwitz when I was still in Holland. An SS-officer named Ettlinger who was stationed at the concentration camp of Vught, told me about it. Ettlinger had previously been stationed at Auschwitz, so he knew exactly what was going on there."
"The worst thing I saw after my arrival at Auschwitz was a group of prisoners who entered the gas chambers. These people were about to die. I later tried not to remember this terrible spectacle." Verduin only spent a few hours in Auschwitz I and II and was then transferred to Monowitz where he stayed between September 1943 and mid-January 1945.
Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was an important Palestinian leader who sided with the Nazis during the Second World War. Not only did this hate cleric and jihadist meet Hitler in November 1941, also did he cultivate the personal friendship of Adolf Eichmann, the very man who was in charge of organizing the Holocaust. Eichmann told his friend Willem Sassen after the war that he was proud of having killed at least 5 million "enemies of the German Reich." The Holocaust was codenamed "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" ("Die Endloesung der Judenfrage"). The Mufti used a similar term on at least one occasion.
"About four million Jews have been killed in the various death camps, and an additional two million have been killed in another manner, most of whom were executed by the SS-Einsatz commandos of the Security Police during the invasion of Russia," Eichmann told Wilhelm Hoettl at the end of August 1944. Hoettl was an SS-Sturmbannführer (major) stationed at Budapest at the time. In Hungary alone, more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers between May 8, and July 8, 1944 – a very short period indeed. Eichmann personally oversaw the whole operation. So when Haj Amin Al-Husseini visited Auschwitz and Monowitz in the summer of 1944, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being exterminated.
Verduin claims that few people believed him when he said that he saw how the Mufti of Jerusalem paid a visit to Auschwitz-Monowitz.
Only Simon Wiesenthal wrote a book back in 1947 in which he claims that the Mufti and his staff "paid visits to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek to convince themselves of the capacity of the crematoria." "Haj Amin was introduced to the SS-guards and expressed his appreciation for those SS-men who were very capable," Wiesenthal writes. But Wiesenthal was confronted with scepticism, too. However, Verduin told me that he saw how the Mufti and his group "were accompanied by very high ranking SS-officers." "They were not far from the camp's sick barracks and the Mufti was clearly talking to these high-ranking SS-officers."
The SS-officer who told Verduin about the Mufti's visit threatened him that if he would not resume work immediately he would leave Monowitz entirely. Verduin, of course, had no intention of being killed in the gas chambers of Birkenau, so he did as he was told. But he informed some of his trusted camp mates of what he had seen.
Eichmann was greatly impressed by the personality of the Grand Mufti. He repeatedly said to me, both then and on a later occasion, that the Mufti had made a powerful impression on him, and also on Himmler, and that he had an acknowledged influence on Arab-Jewish affairs. To my knowledge, Eichmann saw the Mufti from time to time and spoke to him."
So Eichmann, Himmler and the Mufti planned another Holocaust in Palestine, a British mandate at time. Their plan was about to succeed in the summer of 1942 when German troops were not far from the Suez Canal and were also on the offensive in southern Russia. (The Nazi flag was installed on Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus in August 1942.)
Gideon Hausner later wrote in his excellent book "Justice in Jerusalem": "The ex-Mufti's ties with Eichmann were of long standing. At the beginning of 1942 Eichmann received him and his retinue at the department's headquarters and lectured to them on the Final Solution in Europe. The ex-Mufti was so strongly impressed that he immediately requested Himmler to designate someone on Eichmann's team to be his 'personal advisor' on 'finally solving' the Jewish problem also in Palestine, once the ex-Mufti was reinstated in his office by the victorious Axis. Eichmann welcomed the offer. 'A priceless jewel… The biggest friend of the Arabs,' recorded the ex-Mufti on Eichmann in his personal diary."
Wisliceny claims that the Mufti also prevented 10,000 Jewish children from leaving Poland. "It was planned to exchange these children for German civilian prisoners, through the services of the International Red Cross. But suddenly Wisliceny was summoned to Berlin by Eichmann. "He disclosed to me to me that the idea of the planned operation had become known to the Grand Mufti, by means of his intelligence service in Palestine. As a result he protested vigorously to Himmler, using the argument that these Jewish children would, within a few years become adults and would strengthen the Jewish element in Palestine. Following this, Himmler (as he told me) forbade the whole operation.Hmmmm.......... “As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” ~ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Read the full story here.