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Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2026/01/10/grand-mufti-nazi-collaboration-yugoslavia-archives/
The Nazi War Criminal the Arab World Protected
(Israel Hayom) Ariel Bulshtein - Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia provided a stage for the lethal operations of Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, Jerusalem's Grand Mufti. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he had orchestrated anti-Jewish pogroms in the Land of Israel, and during World War II, he managed German propaganda to the Muslim world and developed strategies to mobilize Muslim minorities across the Soviet Union and the Balkans for the Third Reich. In Yugoslavia he helped raise three Waffen-SS divisions composed entirely of local Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina. These units perpetrated horrific war crimes - massacring Serbs and Jews, incinerating entire villages with their inhabitants still inside, carrying out systematic rape, torture, and pillage. When the war concluded in 1945, Yugoslavia's liberated government moved to investigate the Mufti's role in Nazi atrocities, formally listing him as a war criminal and petitioning a UN special committee for his extradition. Al-Husseini's allies throughout the Arab world unleashed tremendous pressure and threats that forced Yugoslav authorities to retreat from extradition demands.