On this day—October 3, 1944 The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem wrote to Heinrich Himmler and asked for an Arab-Muslim army to fight the Jews beside the Reich. He had already know the Holocaust architect well. In his memoirs, the Mufti called Himmler his “close friend,” and described taking tea with the Reichsführer-SS. On one such occasion, Himmler signed a photo of the two of them together: “To his eminence the Grand Mufti, a memento.” Germany was losing. The Red Army was already in Poland. Meanwhile, the Nazis kept the gas chambers running. The Mufti had been in Berlin since 1941, on the German payroll, broadcasting for the Nazis in Arabic, and pleading with European leaders to send Jewish children to Poland where they could be murdered rather than allowing them passage to British Mandate Palestine. The Mufti had already helped recruit the 13th SS Mountain Division, Handschar. Now he wrote to Himmler asking for an Arab-Islamic army in Germany where volunteers would be merged with the units already in existence. All, of course, to be trained and armed by the Reich. He wrote that the effect in the Arab and Islamic countries would be “the most favorable.” That same month, the SS dropped a five-man German-Arab commando into the Jordan Valley with weapons, explosives, and German-Arabic dictionaries. The British caught them. Under interrogation, they said the Mufti had briefed each of them, compared Islam with National Socialism, and told them the fight in Mandate Palestine would help Germany. On November 2, the German Foreign Office issued a statement. Al-Husseini complained to Ribbentrop that it was not enough. They had cut the word “Muslim.” The Nazis were happy to use Muslim volunteers, but would not endorse the Mufti’s army. He flew out of Germany on May 7, 1945, the day of the surrender. Yugoslavia listed him as a war criminal for the SS recruitment, but he was never tried. The Arab Higher Committee took him back as its leader just in time to work to continue the Holocaust by annihilating the Jews of Mandate Palestine who were getting ready to declare their state. He lost there too.