There’s no question Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany when it implemented the “final solution” in an effort to kill all Jews.

But, in a speech this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested it wasn’t Hitler’s idea.

Rather, he pointed to Jerusalem’s then-grand mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who met with the Nazi leader in Germany in the early 1940s.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews,” Netanyahu said Tuesday at the 37th Zionist Congress, according to a transcript on his website. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here.’

“‘So what should I do with them?’ (Hitler) asked. (Husseini) said, ‘Burn them.'”

There’s no video or audio, not even a transcript, that can definitively prove Netanyahu’s account of the conversation between Hitler and Husseini, who as grand mufti oversaw Muslim sites in Jerusalem. But it quickly spurred criticism in Israel and the Palestinian territories, with some claiming that Netanyahu had effectively absolved Hitler of the Holocaust’s most gruesome, deplorable aspect and instead blamed Husseini — then and now a renowned figure in Palestinian circles — for the systematic killing of more than 6 million Jews using gas chambers and firing squads.