Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday dismissed criticism that he had absolved Adolf Hitler of the Holocaust in statements he'd made suggesting that the Nazi leader had gotten the idea from a Palestinian cleric.
"It is absurd," Netanyahu said in a statement issued from his office. "I had no intention to absolve Hitler of responsibility for his diabolical destruction of European Jewry. Hitler was responsible for the Final Solution to exterminate six million Jews. He made the decision."
Netanyahu, while speaking at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on Wednesday, told attendees that the so-called Final Solution was the result of a meeting between the top Nazi leadership and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, in 1941.
"Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews," Netanyahu said. "And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here [to Palestine].'" Netanyahu went on to say that when Hitler asked "What should I do with them?" Husseini replied: "Burn them."
The mufti did, in fact, fully support the Nazi treatment of the Jews and issued propaganda throughout the war supporting Hitler and inciting hatred. But after his comments were made public, numerous historians and politicians — including Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon — disagreed with Netanyahu's timeline, pointing out that the Holocaust's mechanisms were already underway when the meeting between Hitler and Husseini occurred.
"You cannot say that it was the mufti who gave Hitler the idea to kill or burn Jews," Dina Porat, the chief historian at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, told Israeli news website Ynet. "It's not true. Their meeting occurred after a series of events that point to this."
In pushing back against critics, Netanyahu stood by his assessment of Husseini's place in history: "It is equally absurd to ignore the role played by the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a war criminal, for encouraging and urging Hitler, Ribbentropp, Himmler and others, to exterminate European Jewry."
After Netanyahu's initial statements, Germany — where Netanyahu is currently traveling — was quick to reassert that, yes, the Holocaust was Germany's fault. "All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust," Steffen Seibert, a spokesperson for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Reuters. "We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own."