Kind of a weird question but I was messing around with a friend and came across this website:
http://www.billionbibles.org/sharia/hitler-muslim-brotherhood.html
Needless to say it makes some interesting claims and I was curious if they were founded or complete lunacy.
It's closer to complete lunacy.
Let's go line by line:
Hassan al-Banna, a 22-year old Muslim who admired Adolf Hitler's hatred of the Jews and persistently wrote to Hitler to express his admiration for Hitler and his desire for collaboration with Hitler's Nazi Party.
I have been unable to find any references suggesting that al-Banna "persistently" wrote letters (or any letter at all) to Hitler. Al-Banna was certainly himself anti-Semitic, under his leadership the "Secret Apparatus" of the Muslim Brotherhood carried out bomb attacks on Egyptian Jews, and he trucked in Jewish global financial domination and conspiracies of "world Jewry".
When Hitler rose to power, his Nazis supported al-Banna, a school teacher, to grow the Muslim Brotherhood into its ally in the Middle East; by 1938, the membership of Muslim Brotherhood topped 200,000.
The Brotherhood may have received subsidies from the German government legation prior to 1939 (when Germans were expelled from Egypt). To say that the Brotherhood was an "ally" of the Nazis in the Middle East, or that the subsidies (granted, whose sums we don't know) were instrumental in the growth of the Brotherhood as some sort of astro-turfing operation strikes me as a vast overstatement. The Brotherhood was anti-imperialist and as a result anti-British. The German government backed many such groups and figures throughout the British-dominated parts of the Middle East, of which the Brotherhood would, at best, have been only a minor part. Of greater note, because they held greater power, were Nazi contacts with sympathetic military figures, including the Egyptian Army Chief of Staff, who attempted to flee to Axis-backed Iraq in May 1941, potentially with German support. (The Iraqi government would itself be deposed shortly thereafter by the British.)
During World War II, members of the Muslim Brotherhood spied for Hitler's Nazis in the Middle East and fought for Hitler as Nazi troops in two specially formed Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions (see Religion of Peace). 'Handschar' is German for scimitar, the curved saber used by the Muslim troops of the Ottoman empire.
I'm sure this is true, but I don't see how it's relevant. Plenty of people of all kinds of ideological and other persuasions spied for the Nazis, or for Soviet Russia, or for the Allies.
Above is Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a close ally of al-Banna, in Berlin, where he lived as Hitler's VIP guest from 1941 to 1945 before joining al-Banna in Egypt in 1946. The Muslim Nazi troops of the Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions are being reviewed by Haj Amin al-Husseini (right) and by SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler (below)
This and the associated pictures strike me as just trying to conflate "Muslim Brotherhood" with Muslims by showing the most prominent Muslim collaborator with the Nazis. The statements are also factually untrue. Husseini fled Iraq in 1941 after the British defeated the pro-Axis government. Husseini's relations with the Nazis are complicated and to simply summarize them as his being Hitler's VIP guest is laughable. For one thing, Hitler and the Nazis were unwilling to back the cause of Arab independence.
Due to their large number of volunteers, Handschar Divisions were the largest of Hitler's 38 Waffen-SS Divisions.
I'll leave it to others to discuss the Handschar divisions and Husseini's role in creating them but it's my understanding that they were almost entirely composed of Balkan Muslims. Husseini, among other things, objected to the use of Arab troops on the eastern front.
Again, what any of this has to do with the Muslim Brotherhood is unclear to me. Husseini was not a member of the Brotherhood.
After World War II, Muslim Brotherhood continued to grow, supported this time by the West, which saw it as a counterweight to the threat of Soviet-backed Communism in the Middle East.
Uhh, a very big [citation needed]. The Brotherhood after the war became increasingly focused on Palestine heading into 1948. As far as I'm aware they had no Western backing at this time.
While some of them built schools and medical clinics, other continued to engage in violence, including bombings, arsons and murders.
This is mentioned en passant, as though building schools and clinics was just some side activity of the Brotherhood when actually it was one of the Brotherhood's core activities and means of propagating. Basically whenever the Brotherhood moved into a new area it would build a school, clinic, or mosque as a kind of proselytization by charity.
The violent "Secret Apparatus" of the Brotherhood was likewise a core part of the movement, though violence in 1930s and 40s Egyptian politics was pervasive; virtually every political group had a paramilitary organization.
and participated in the invasion of the newly re-created nation of Israel.
Their "participation" was minor. No figures are known for how many Brothers arrived in Palestine; they were arguably more relevant in the civil war period before independence, but even then the ability of the Brotherhood to carry out activity beyond Egypt was extremely limited.
By the time the actual independence war broke out in 1948 national armies were the relevant actors, with the Brotherhood intentionally sidelined.
NB: What does any of this have to do with Hitler?
The Muslim Brotherhood's violent conflict with the Egyptian government, which also included the government's assassination of al-Banna and two failed Muslim Brotherhood assassination attempts on the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, eventually led to many of its leaders being jailed while others fled and established branches abroad, mostly in other Middle Eastern Arab nations but also in Europe, UK and USA.
The first foreign branches of the Brotherhood were founded long before this, in the 1930s and 40s. To say that their leaders were jailed by Nasser is an understatement, the entire Brotherhood was suppressed and many of its key leaders tortured and executed, notably Sayyid Qutb.
Surmising that it didn't yet have the muscle to spread Islam by force, Muslim Brotherhood 'officially' renounced violence in the 1970s and adopted more cunning strategies detailed in its secret internal manifesto, "The Project."
Why would the Brotherhood need to spread Islam by force in Islamic countries? That's not the point of the Brotherhood and that's not what Preachers Not Judges, the document renouncing violence that this is referring to, was about.
In 1979, Western powers supported the Muslim Brotherhood to form the Mujahedeen army and fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
No. Just. No. That's an absurd oversimplification.
In 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel created Hamas, whose members still use the Nazi salute (above) and read Hitler's Mein Kampf, which the Muslim Brotherhood re-titled, My Jihad, and translated into Arabic in the 1930s (Mein Kampf remains the #6 best-seller in the Muslim world today and a favorite among members of the Muslim Brotherhood
As far as I'm aware the Brotherhood had no role in the translation of Mein Kampf into Arabic, and the name of the book in Arabic is not "My Jihad." That it's a best seller in the Arab world is certainly true, but that has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood; it's popular in plenty of countries where the Brotherhood is banned.
In 1989, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mujahedeen army pushed the Soviet army out of Afghanistan and then split. One of the factions became Al Qaeda, led by a Muslim Brotherhood-schooled Saudi named, Osama bin Laden.
"The Muslim Brotherhood's mujahideen army" is a laughable statement. Al-Qaeda was not and did not emerge as a "faction" of the Mujahideen. Osama Bin Laden was not a member of the Brotherhood; he was not "Muslim Brotherhood schooled" though he might well have had teachers who were Brothers.
Basically TL;DR: No, "billionbibles.com" has not provided an accurate account of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sourcewise: The best history of the Brotherhood is Richard Mitchell's The Society of Muslim Brothers. See also Gudrun Kramer's biography of Al-Banna in the "Makers of the Muslim World" series.