Hitler’s Heirs: The Unbroken Line from the Mufti to Hamas

There is a line that runs from the bunker in Berlin to the killing fields of the Negev. It bends through decades of propaganda, through refugee camps and mosques and school curricula, through satellite broadcasts and social media. But it is unbroken. And if we are serious about understanding October 7, we must follow it to its source.

That source has a name: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And it has an address: Berlin, November 1941, where the Mufti sat across from Adolf Hitler and found in him not a wartime necessity but a kindred spirit in the oldest hatred in human history.

Adolf Hitler’s vision was not merely political. It was biological and theological — the belief that Jews were a corrupting, subhuman force that had to be eradicated from the earth for civilization to survive. This was not metaphor. It was operational doctrine, expressed in Mein Kampf, enacted in the Nuremberg Laws, and industrialized in the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, where six million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered. Six million. A number so vast the world has spent eighty years struggling to comprehend it — while some parts spent those same eighty years celebrating it.

When the Mufti arrived in Berlin, he did not come as a diplomat. He arrived as a believer. He had spent years building a movement rooted in religious antisemitism — the belief that Jewish sovereignty was theologically intolerable and that violence against Jews was not just justified but sanctified. He did not need convincing. He needed weapons and a microphone. Hitler gave him both.

Together they forged a synthesis — racial and religious antisemitism fused into a single worldview — that would outlive both of them by decades and find its most murderous modern expression on October 7, 2023.

The Mufti broadcast that worldview every night from Radio Berlin — that Jews were the enemy of God and humanity, that killing them was a religious obligation. He recruited Muslims for SS divisions. And when Jewish children had the chance to flee the death camps for Eretz Yisrael — the ancestral homeland to which Jews have maintained an unbroken connection for three thousand years — he wrote personally to the Nazi foreign ministry to ensure they were sent back to be murdered. Those letters are in the archive. They are not disputed. They are simply not discussed.

Germany surrendered in May 1945. The vision did not.

In Europe, military defeat was followed by ideological reckoning. De-Nazification happened. Nuremberg happened. Decades of education produced a culture in which Holocaust denial is prosecuted and the Nazi salute is a criminal act. Germany became a democracy not by forgetting but by remembering, relentlessly and with deliberate shame.

None of this happened in the Arab world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Tsarist-era forgery debunked in Western courts, became required reading. Mein Kampf became a bestseller across the Middle East. State-run media broadcast antisemitic content Goebbels would have recognized. These are the residue of a propaganda campaign never dismantled because it was never confronted.

This obsession is not incidental. Survey after survey in Palestinian territories has documented levels of Hitler admiration that would constitute a civilizational emergency in the Western world. Palestinian children have been photographed giving Nazi salutes at school events. Hamas summer camps dressed children in SS-style uniforms. Palestinian Authority television broadcast children’s programs celebrating the killing of Jews in language from Nazi propaganda. A 2014 ADL global survey found 93 percent of respondents in the Palestinian territories held antisemitic views — the highest rate of any population on earth. Not a fringe. Ninety-three percent. This is the product of a deliberate, multigenerational educational project rooted in the ideology the Mufti carried home from Berlin.

Hamas did not invent its worldview. It inherited it.

The Hamas founding charter of 1988 does not call for a two-state solution. There is no occupation — the Jewish people are the indigenous owners of this land. Israel is not a colonial invention. It is the birthplace of the Jewish people, the land where Jewish kings ruled and Jewish civilization was born, to which Jews have returned not as conquerors but as a people coming home. The charter calls for the killing of Jews, citing a hadith in which trees and stones call out to Muslims to kill the Jews hiding behind them. This is a religious extermination order — the Mufti’s synthesis handed to an organization governing Gaza since 2007, using billions in international aid not to build a state but to build a killing machine aimed at Israel.

The 2017 revision softened the language. The theology, the tunnels, and the intent did not change.

Yahya Sinwar spent years in Israeli prison — treated in Israeli hospitals, given rights no Israeli hostage has ever received from Hamas. He did not emerge with coexistence in mind. He emerged with October 7. The targeting of a music festival, the burning of families, the kidnapping of infants, the filming of murders for celebration — this is not a movement with political grievances. It is a movement that has absorbed, across generations, the belief that Jews are not fully human and that killing them is an act of worship. It is Nazism with a different flag.

We have seen this logic before. We know where it leads.

I did not arrive at these conclusions as a historian. I arrived at them as a filmmaker.

While producing Ashes of Identity — my documentary about October 7 and global surge of antisemitism, hosted and narrated by internationally celebrated Israeli singer Dudu Fisher — I spent months in the wreckage, interviewing survivors, families of victims, soldiers, forensic archaeologists, and first responders at Kibbutz Be’eri and the Nova site. I was looking for what had happened. What I kept finding was the ideology.

Among those I interviewed was Walter Bingham — 102 years old, a survivor of Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom in which synagogues burned and thousands of Jews were dragged to concentration camps. When he watched footage from October 7, he said six words: “I have seen all this before”.

A Kristallnacht survivor recognized October 7 on sight. He knew its grammar, its logic, its face. If a man born in 1922 can look at 2023 and see the same ideology in new clothes, the world has no excuse for its confusion.

I also collected reports from soldiers who found Mein Kampf and Nazi literature in Hamas positions alongside weapons. When the pattern repeats — in the bunkers, the sermons, the language fighters used — it stops being a pattern and becomes a doctrine. Eighty years old. Written in Berlin. Never renounced.

My previous film, Baltic Truth, documented how Latvia and Lithuania whitewashed their Holocaust participation — honoring collaborators while erasing Jewish memory. The mechanism is identical to Gaza: a narrative constructed to eliminate Jewish victimhood and prepare the next generation to continue. Different geography. Same machinery.

The international community applies one standard to European antisemitism and another to Middle Eastern antisemitism. The first is legislated against. The second is funded through international aid and given platforms at the United Nations. This is not hypocrisy. It is complicity.

Israel is the reborn sovereign state of the world’s oldest continuously existing people on their oldest continuously claimed land — the only democracy in the Middle East, a nation that has built world-class institutions while fighting for its survival every day of its existence. It has absorbed refugees from the Holocaust, from Arab expulsions that drove 850,000 Jews from their homes, and from Soviet persecution. It has offered peace repeatedly and been answered with war. It has the absolute, unqualified right to exist and to defend itself.

It would not fare to say that Palestinians embrace this ideology. There are those who want peace and deserve a future. But the obstacle has never been Israel. Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005 and was rewarded with rockets. The obstacle is an ideology telling Palestinians that coexistence is treason and Jewish elimination the only acceptable outcome. Until that ideology is confronted and rejected, there will be no peace — only more October 7s.

Germany became a democracy by confronting Nazism honestly in courts, classrooms, and public squares. That reckoning has not happened in Palestinian political culture. A generation of children in Gaza has been raised in Hamas schools where Jews are depicted as in Nazi propaganda and killing them is the highest calling. This is not a response to anything Israel has done. This is radicalization being systematically manufactured by an organization whose charter is a genocide manual.

Ashes of Identity is in post-production now, with a planned release on October 7, 2026 — the third anniversary of the massacre. To complete the film and ensure it reaches the widest possible audience, we need your support. If you believe the story of October 7 must be told with the full force of documented truth, please donate at every.org/israelusa/f/support-ashes-of-identity. Help us make sure the world sees this film.

October 7 was not a surprise. It was a graduation.

Israel will survive. The Jewish people have survived Egyptian bondage, Roman destruction, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and the Holocaust — through an unbreakable will to live, remember, rebuild, and return. The IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza today are the living answer to the Mufti’s broadcasts. They are what never again looks like in practice.

Hitler’s vision did not die in the bunker. It was exported, translated, theologized, and handed forward with a blessing. The ashes of October 7 are its latest harvest.

But Israel is still standing. The Jewish people are still here.

Walter Bingham saw it coming. He had seen it before. And across 102 years he has seen something no enemy of the Jewish people has ever extinguished: the absolute, undefeatable refusal of the Jewish people to disappear from the earth they were born on — and to which they will always return.