Well, both in this video are wrong but Roman is wrong because he is not precise enough and Finkelstein is just plain old wrong with regards to al-Husseini being sought after by the Nuremberg Trial. (I didn't watch the whole thing, even those few seconds I found unbearable as is so often the case when al-Husseini is discussed but more about that later).

The short version is that the Yugoslav delegation at the International Military Tribunal and the Yugoslav government wanted al-Husseini tried either at Nuremberg or in one of their own courts. Several Zionist organizations petitioned the British to have him tried as a war criminal also. The British and other main Allies refused, partly because al-Husseini was deemed not important enough, partly because of political reasons, not wanting to make the problems brewing for the British in Egypt and Palestine worse.

When discussion al-Husseini and his collaboration with the Nazi regime, a few things need to be mentioned:

As can probably be gleaned from the above linked video, al-Husseini's involvement with the Nazis and the Holocaust is a very contentious issue where modern day politics plays a huge role. The most extreme positions in this discussion is on one hand overstating his role in order to draw a direct line from the Nazis to the Palestinian liberation movement on the other hand completely downplaying his role in order to hide his involvement with the Nazi state. This makes it extremely difficult to find scholarship that assesses his role from a historical stand-point.

Furthermore, al-Husseini is probably the Nazi collaborator who had the most stuff written about him thus giving us a rather distorted picture because other collaborators of similar importance such as Rashid Al-Gailani, former prime-minister of Iraq or Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian Nazi collaborator, often get forgotten.

Now, when we want to evaluate the extent and effectiveness of al-Husseini collaboration, there is a lot to be said but I will mainly focus on the time after his arrival in Germany (if you have any questions about the time before, I'll be happy to supply more info). One thing that can be dismissed right away however: While it is true that al-Husseini had initiated contact with Nazi Germany as early as 1933, he did not meet with Eichmann and Hagen during their attempted Palestine trip in 1936 because both Hagen and Eichmann were denied entry visas to Palestine by the British and did not set out to meet the Mufti there.

Al-Husseini and Gailani both arrived in Germany after Gailani's pro-Axis government had been overthrown by the British in 1941. Al-Husseini had been in Iraq since 1939 and had had a hand in creating Gailani's government but not too much influence. Anyways, before his arrival in October 1941 and even as early as January of 1941, al-Husseini had asked Hitler to publish a declaration that Nazi Germany would create an Arab Palestine once they beat the British in North Africa. This was also the subject of their meeting in November 1941. Al-Husseini demanded that the Nazis recognize an Arab-lead Palestine. Hitler and the German foreign office were not thrilled by the idea and also didn't believe al-Husseini's story of him being the leader of a secret organization that once the Germans would recognize an Arab-Palestine would incite a revolt against the British in Palestine (this never materialized and there is no evidence for what al-Husseini claimed here).

In that meeting they also talked about the Jews and it has been used often to say that al-Husseini had some kind of role on the formulation of policy in the Holocaust. Husseini stressed that part of the German policy should be the "destruction of the Jewish homestead in Palestine" to which Hitler replied that "the German aim was the destruction of the Jews living under British protection in Palestine".

Now, as I said, this has often been argued as evidence that al-Husseini knew about the Holocaust and basically asked Hitler to kill the Jews in Palestine. However, there are a couple of factors to be taken into account here: al-Husseini had only been in German for about one month at that point. And the murder of the Jews at this stage was not yet the centralized policy it would become mere months later. While true that the Nazis already murdered whole Jewish communities in the Soviet Union at this point, a decision on the murder of all European Jews had not been reached as can be seen by the fact that around the same time Himmler chewed out one of his Higher SS and Police Leader, Jeckeln, who had shot several thousand German Jews near Riga. It is impossible to say what al-Husseini knew of the so-called Final Solution at this point and even if Hitler had already decided that "destruction of the Jews living under British Protection in Palestine" would mean that they were going to be killed.

It is however pretty clear that at some point in 1942 al-Husseini learned at least of the general facts of the Holocaust and the killing program of the Germans. This can be seen from several letters he wrote in 1943 attempting to bloc the emigration of several thousand Jewish children from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to Palestine. These governments, especially the Romanians, wanted to make good with the Allies at that point and therefore decided to allow the emigration of 4000 Jewish children and 500 adults to Palestine. Al-Husseini learned of this and wrote these governments that instead of Palestine, they should send these children and adults "to Poland", a veiled reference to Auschwitz. While the timeline is not entirely clear on this, it is fair to assume that al-Husseini's letters did have little impact in the matter however since the Germans had decided to forbid this action several weeks before al-Husseini wrote his letters.

The extent of al-Husseini's practical collaboration with the Nazis was limited to propaganda for the Arab world via radio and from 1943 recruitment for the Waffen-SS, specifically the Muslim Bosnian troops in the Waffen-SS. It is impossible to gauge the impact his propaganda had but since the revolt against the British he called for never materialized, it failed its main goal. As for the Bosnian Handjar Division, while this division was responsible for war crimes in Yugoslavia (and that was the reason the Yugoslavs wanted to have a trial against him), for the Germans it was not a success. The Division mutinied twice and refused to be send anywhere else than their native Bosnia. Gottlob Berger of the SS Main Office complained about it frequently in fact and deemed it a failure.

As for the other things said about al-Husseini and the Holocaust, a lot of it comes from the post-war testimony of Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann's men giving testimony in Nuremberg later to be executed by the Czechs. Wisliceny is the origin of a lot of myths about the Holocaust (including Eichmann being more important than Himmler, something that would bite Israeli prosecutors in the ass several times during the Eichmann trial) but also about al-Husseini. It was Wisliceny who asserted completely without basis that it was al-Husseini's idea to kill the Jews, that he was best friends with Eichmann, and that he visited Auschwitz. All of them are bunk. Al-Husseini, while obviously fine with killing Jews, did not have to give the Germans any ideas in that matter and Wisliceny obviously used him to shift blame. Eichmann and al-Husseini never met except once at an official function. And there is no record that al-Husseini ever visited Auschwitz. Gailani once members of his entourage and members of al-Husseini's entourage once on a Potemkin-village tour of the Lichtenburg Concentration Camp but nothing more in that direction.

Historically speaking, the assessment of most of the delegations at the IMT that al-Husseini was simply not important enough to be tried at Nuremberg rings very true. The Yugoslavians might have had a case against him with his involvement in the Handjar division but in the end, al-Husseini was a collaborator that was not pretty effective and who while certainly in support of Holocaust, did not play any kind of significant role in the process of murdering the Jews.

Sources:

• Nicosia, Francis R. (2000). The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. Transaction Publishers.

• Höpp, Gerhard, Mufti-Papiere: Briefe, Memoranden, Reden, und Aufrufe Amīn al-Husanīs aus dem Exil, 1940-1945. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2001.

• Gensicke, Klaus, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine politische Biographie Amin al-Husseinis. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft, 2007.

• PAAA Handakten Grobba

• BArch, R 58 Persönliche Papiere Reichsführer-SS

• NARA, RG-242, T-175, Correspondence SS Main Office.