1. Amin al-Husseini then established himself in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which he collaborated with during World War II against Britain, requesting during a meeting with Adolf Hitler backing for Arab independence and opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Amin al-Husseini was born around 1897 in Jerusalem, the son of the mufti of that city and prominent early opponent of Zionism, Tahir al-Husayni.
The al-Husseini clan consisted of wealthy landowners in southern Palestine, centered around the district of Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini attended a Qur'an school, and Ottoman government secondary school where he learned Turkish, and a Catholic secondary school run by French missionaries, the Catholic Freres, where he learned French.
Amin al-Husseini studied at the Alliance Israelite Universelle with its Jewish director Albert Antebi.
In 1913, approximately at the age of 16, Amin al-Husseini accompanied his mother Zainab to Mecca and received the honorary title of Hajji.
Amin al-Husseini was recovering from an illness there when the city was captured by the British a year later.
In 1919, Amin al-Husseini attended the Pan-Syrian Congress held in Damascus where he supported Emir Faisal for King of Syria.
That year Amin al-Husseini founded the pro-British Jerusalem branch of the Syrian-based "Arab Club", which then vied with the Nashashibi-sponsored "Literary Club" for influence over public opinion, and he soon became its president.
Until late 1920, Amin al-Husseini focused his efforts on Pan-Arabism and the ideology of a Greater Syria in particular, with Palestine understood as a southern province of an Arab state, whose capital was to be established in Damascus.
Amin al-Husseini accepted the pardon only in the wake of the death of his half-brother, the mufti Kamil al-Husayni, in March 1921.
Elections were then held, and of the four candidates running for the office of Mufti, Amin al-Husseini received the fewest votes, the first three being Nashashibi candidates.
In 1922, Amin al-Husseini was elected president of the Supreme Muslim Council which had been created by Samuel in 1921.
The Supreme Muslim Council and its head Amin al-Husseini, who regarded himself as guardian of one of the three holy sites of Islam, launched an international campaign in Muslim countries to gather funds to restore and improve the or Temple Mount, and particularly the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock shrine.
In restoring the site, Amin al-Husseini was assisted by the Mandatory power's Catholic Director of Antiquities, Ernest Richmond.
Amin al-Husseini took certain statements, for example, by the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook regarding the eventual return in time of the Temple Mount back to Jewish hands, and turned them to a concrete political plot to seize control of the area.
Chancellor asked him to be patient, and Amin al-Husseini offered to stop works on the Mount on condition that this gesture not be taken as a recognition of Jewish rights.
Amin al-Husseini asked the Zionist representatives to refrain from filling their newspapers with attacks on the government and Muslim authorities.
Strongly tied to the anti-Hashemite party, and attacked by supporters of Abdullah in Transjordan for misusing funds marked out for campaigning against France, Amin al-Husseini asked for a visa for himself and Awni Abd al-Hadi to travel to Syria, where the leadership of the Syrian anti-French cause was being contested.
The sermon at Al-Aqsa was to be delivered by another preacher, but Luke prevailed on Amin al-Husseini to leave his home and go to the mosque, where he was greeted as "the sword of the faith" and where he instructed the preacher to deliver a pacific sermon, while sending an urgent message for police reinforcements around the Haram.
Amin al-Husseini had nonetheless collaborated from the 23rd of that month in pacifying rioters and reestablishing order.
Amin al-Husseini therefore attributed to the Mufti a greater share of the blame than the official report had.
Izzat Darwaza, an Arab nationalist rival of Amin al-Husseini, alone asserts, without details, that Amin al-Husseini was responsible.
Amin al-Husseini assured Chancellor of his cooperation in maintaining public order.
In 1931, Amin al-Husseini founded the World Islamic Congress, on which he was to serve as president.
Versions differ as to whether or not Amin al-Husseini supported Izz ad-Din al-Qassam when he undertook clandestine activities against the British Mandate authorities.
Amin al-Husseini vigorously opposed the Qassamites' exactions against the Christian and Druze communities.
In 1933, according to Alami, Amin al-Husseini expressed interest in Ben Gurion's proposal of a Jewish-Palestine as part of a larger Arab federation.
Amin al-Husseini stayed there for three months, directing the revolt from within.
Neve Gordon writes that Amin al-Husseini regarded all alternative nationalist views as treasonous, opponents became traitors and collaborators, and patronizing or employing Jews of any description illegitimate.
The various proposals by Palestinian Arab notables like Amin al-Husseini were rejected consistently over the years out of concern to avoid disrupting Anglo-German relations, in line with Germany's policy of not imperiling their economic and cultural interests in the region by a change in their policy of neutrality, and respect for British interests.
Amin al-Husseini was among the key promoters of the pan-Arab Al-Muthanna Club, and supported the coup d'etat by Rashid Ali in April 1941.
Amin al-Husseini outlined his proposals before Ubaldo Alberto Mellini Ponce de Leon.
Back in the summer of 1940 and again in February 1941, Amin al-Husseini submitted to the Nazi German Government a draft declaration of German-Arab cooperation, containing a clause.
In December 1942, Amin al-Husseini held a speech at the celebration of the opening of the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, of which he served as honorary chair.
At the Nuremberg trials, one of Adolf Eichmann's deputies, Dieter Wisliceny, stated that Amin al-Husseini had actively encouraged the extermination of European Jews, and that Amin al-Husseini had a meeting with Eichmann at his office, during which Eichmann gave him a view of the current state of the "Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe" by the Third Reich.
Amin al-Husseini had been invited to Palestine in 1937 with his superior Hagen by a representative of the Haganah, Feival Polkes, Polkes supported German foreign policy in the Near East and offered to work for them in intelligence.
The Jerusalem court accepted Wisliceny's testimony about a key conversation between Eichmann and the mufti, and found as proven that Amin al-Husseini had aimed to implement the Final Solution.
Hannah Arendt, who was present at the trial, concluded in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, that the evidence for an Eichmann- Amin al-Husseini connection was based on rumour and unfounded.
Amin al-Husseini asked the Foreign Minister "to do his utmost" to block all such proposals, and this request was complied with.
In June 1943 Amin al-Husseini recommended to the Hungarian minister that it would be better to send Jews in Hungary to concentration camps in Poland rather than let them find asylum in Palestine.
Amin al-Husseini suggested that if such transfers of population were deemed necessary, then.
In September 1943, intense negotiations to rescue 500 Jewish children from the Arbe concentration camp collapsed due to the objection of Amin al-Husseini who blocked the children's departure to Turkey because they would end up in Palestine.
Amin al-Husseini was thereby joined by other Arabs such as Fawzi al-Qawuqji and Hasan Salama.
Amin al-Husseini was taken into custody at Konstanz by the French occupying troops on 5 May 1945, and on 19 May, he was transferred to the Paris region and put under house arrest.
On 12 August 1947, Amin al-Husseini wrote to French foreign minister Georges Bidault, thanking France for its hospitality and suggesting that France continue this policy to increase its prestige in the eyes of all Muslims.
Subsequently, Amin al-Husseini returned to Egypt and began his practical leadership of the Palestinian Arabs while residing in Cairo.
The wartime reputation of Amin al-Husseini was employed as an argument for the establishment of a Jewish State during the deliberations at UN in 1947.
Amin al-Husseini's demands included the appointment of a Palestinian Arab representative to the League's General Staff, the formation of a Palestinian Provisional Government, the transfer of authority to local National Committees in areas evacuated by the British, and both a loan for Palestinian administration and an appropriation of large sums to the Arab Higher Executive for Palestinian Arabs entitled to war damages.
Anwar Nusseibeh, a supporter of Amin al-Husseini, said he refused to issue arms to anyone except his loyal supporters, and only recruited loyal supporters for the forces of the Holy War Army.
Hilmi's cabinet consisted largely of relatives and followers of Amin al-Husseini, but included representatives of other factions of the Palestinian ruling class.
The opposition of a relevant percentage of the Palestinian society to Amin al-Husseini goes back to an earlier period and was connected to the British way of dealing with the local majority: "The present administration of Palestine", lamented for example the representatives of the Palestine Arab Delegation in a letter to British public opinion in 1930, "is appointed by His Majesty's Government and governs the country through an autocratic system in which the population has no say".
Amin al-Husseini refused requests to lend his support to the emergent PLO after the Six-Day War of 1967, was opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank after 1967, and his closest collaborator, Emil Ghuri, continued to work for the Jordanian monarchy even after the Jordanian Civil War there in 1970.
Amin al-Husseini had wished to be buried on the Haram ash-Sharif in Jerusalem.
Walter Laqueur, Benny Morris, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers, the evidential basis for whose claims in their book, translated as "Nazi Palestine" were questioned by Michael Sells as based on selective statements by a few writers taken at face value, share the view that Amin al-Husseini was biased against Jews, not just against Zionists.
Amin al-Husseini recorded that Himmler told him how shocked he was to observe Jewish kapos abusing fellow Jews and that Himmler claimed he had the culprits punished.
Peter Novick has argued that the post-war historiographical depiction of Amin al-Husseini reflected complex geopolitical interests that distorted the record.
In October 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler at the time was not thinking of exterminating the Jews, but only of expelling them, and that it was al-Husseini who inspired Hitler to embark on a programme of genocide to prevent them from coming to Palestine.
In 1947 Simon Wiesenthal alleged that Eichmann had accompanied Husseini on an inspection tour of both Auschwitz and Majdanek, and that Amin al-Husseini had praised the hardest workers at the crematoria.
One must note in passing that Amin al-Husseini's memoirs are an antidote against Holocaust denial: He knew that the genocide took place and boasted of having been perfectly aware of it from 1943 on.