Imagine, in the waning days of World War II, any American publication — let alone the New York Times — publishing an opinion piece by one of Hitler’s deputies, running this identifier (with an honorific, always an honorific):

“Mr. Himmler devised the very first concentration camp for Nazi Germany.”

Sounds like something out of The Onion, right? But this, in effect, is what the Times did on Thursday, publishing an op-ed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, describing him as “the deputy leader of the Taliban,” rather than what he is: an unrepentant terrorist.

In a column politely titled “What We, the Taliban, Want,” Haqqani claims that the Taliban, which provided safe haven for Osama bin Laden to plot 9/11, “did not choose our war with the foreign coalition led by the United States.”

?!?!?!?!

It’s hard to decide what’s more horrific: The notion that the Times’ top editors agreed to run Haqqani’s piece as-is or that they really feel he has a point here.

Haqqani has been among the FBI’s Most Wanted for years. There’s a $5 million bounty on his head. Our intelligence agencies don’t even know what he really looks like.

Yet here’s the New York Times, in pleasant communication with a terrorist who — wait for it — once held a New York Times reporter hostage! For eight months! Until he escaped and ran for his life!

Self-loathing liberalism doesn’t get much lower. And they know it — for this article, online commentary has been disabled. If you’d like to weigh in on a Times piece about a controversial man trying to reinvent himself, head on over to the profile of Ben Affleck.

Haqqani promises, in his op-ed, “a new, inclusive political system in which the voice of every Afghan is reflected and where no Afghan feels excluded” under the Taliban — except, of course, for women, who will be granted only those “rights” — really, restrictive dogmatic and theocratic limitations, but let’s not split hairs — afforded by Islam.

The Times, ever self-congratulatory on domestic women’s rights under monster Donald Trump, allows this line to stand!

Here’s what girls and women historically can’t do under the Taliban: Go to school. Work. Go outside without wrapped head-to-toe in a burqa. Leave a husband who beats them.

Just last summer, the Times published a piece proclaiming “The Taliban Promises to Protect Women. Here’s Why Women Don’t Believe Them.”

Of course they don’t! Even for a terrorist, Haqqani is particularly bloodthirsty, In December 2008, he was reportedly behind the bombing of an elementary school; multiple children were killed. That same year he plotted an attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul, then considered a heavily fortified safe zone, which killed six people including one American. Haqqani also tried to assassinate then-president Hamid Karzai, but hey, bygones.

Even the Times’ own senior correspondent in Afghanistan is appalled by the Times’ decision.

“Siraj is no Taliban peacemaker as he paints himself,” Mujib Mashal tweeted in part. “He’s behind some of the most ruthless attacks of this war with many civilian lives lost.”

If an op-ed by Himmler seems hyperbolic, consider that in 2005, Laurel Leff reported in her book “Buried by the Times,” that the paper downplayed stories of the Holocaust and substituted the word “person” for “Jews” throughout World War II. She makes the argument that by minimizing this mass extinction, the Times debased its peerless stature in favor of the 20th century’s greatest monsters.

How fitting, then, that Mr. Haqqani should find a home nearly as welcoming.