Arab antizionist leader محمد أمين الحسيني MOHAMED AMIN AL-ḤUSAYNI urged Bulgarian officials to send יהודים YEHUDIM for extermination in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The secured text is a postwar English translation labeled Translation from the German copy of a letter from the Mufti. Its first page reads:

The Jewish danger to the entire world, and especially to those countries where Jews are living, has become an established fact for most nations and has induced them to take measures in self-protection. The Axis powers and their allies are among the first who have recognized the vital national necessity of preventing these hostile elements from continuing their destructive activity by spying, by undermining the morale of the people, by disseminating communist thought, and by paralyzing the economic life.

These measures, which were taken exclusively for the protection of the people concerned, has provoked—as was to be expected—the fury of world Jewry and its propagandists, and has led to the bitter and desperate fight against the Axis powers. England, the United States and Russia are today at the service of the Jews, and have placed at their disposal all available means.

The English have in fact authorized their representatives in Bulgaria to negotiate to this end with the authorities—that is to say by way of securing emigration permits for the Jews of Bulgaria. We learned recently from a statement made in the House of Commons by Oliver Stanley, British Minister for the Colonies, that the negotiations with the Bulgarian Government resulted in the emigration of 4,000 Jewish children and their 500 adult companions, and that they will start their trip to Palestine after completing these preliminaries.

We ourselves do not believe that Jewish emigration can solve this problem. Once the Jews have emigrated, they can without hindrance get into touch with their racial brethren in the rest of the world and can do more damage to the country they have left than they did before. In this way they would have the possibility of settling in Palestine or in another country of the Near East and of organizing themselves in order to do further and more intensive evil.²

Its conclusion makes the requested alternative explicit:

Apart from this, the emigration of the Jews to Arab countries and especially to Palestine is against the most essential and vital interest of the Arab nation which, from every point of view, stands at the side of the Axis and their allies. Furthermore, it would be a further step in the realization of the Jewish aim of the establishment of a Jewish national home which is supported by England, America and Russia.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it would be most desirable and more useful to prevent the emigration of the Jews from your country and to send them there where they would be under stringent control, e.g., to Poland. In that way one would avoid the danger which they constitute and do a good and grateful deed towards the Arab nation for which they will always remember you and which will make still closer the friendly relations with your country.³

The document literally proposes Poland and stringent control; it does not use the word kill. In May 1943, German-occupied Poland was the principal killing center of the Holocaust. USHMM interprets the preference as explicit that the children be killed rather than reach ארץ ישראל EREẒ YISRAʾEL.⁴

The article preserves both levels: the exact euphemistic words and their genocidal wartime setting. It does not replace the document with a stronger quotation it never contained.

USHMM concludes that its impact was nil: German authorities had already acted to foil the proposed rescue transports before and independently of al-Husayni's intervention, and none of the recipient governments transported the children to Poland because of these letters.⁵

That does not lessen what the letter proves about al-Husayni's chosen policy. It prevents an unsupported causal claim that this particular appeal determined the children's fate.

The American Jewish Archives scan is a postwar evidentiary dossier assembled in the Abba Hillel Silver papers. Exhibit D is an English translation of a German copy, not a facsimile of the source Arabic letter. Höpp identifies Arabic material and a draft in the Institute for Contemporary History file Eich-1309; that Arabic witness has not been retrieved as a public scan or transcript.⁶ Mattar reports that the captured rescue-obstruction letters were mostly preserved as unsigned drafts.⁷

The translated copy is headed Berlin, May 6, 1943. TJD's Hebrew-calendar conversion places that civil date on א׳ באייר ה׳תש״ג 1st 𝑜𝑓 Iyar, AM 5703.⁸ No time of day is supplied.

• What do the letter's proposed destination and phrase stringent control establish, and what does the wartime setting add to their meaning?
• How should the lack of a demonstrated effect on the rescue plan limit the claim about consequences without softening the policy the letter advocated?