Preservation of one's own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.

Cesar Chavez

Tens of thousands of Muslims fought for the Nazis in World War Two. DW spoke with historian David Motadel about whether pragmatism or anti-Semitism drove Adolf Hitler's overtures and why some Muslim leaders backed him.

David Motadel: At the height of the war in 1941-1942, when German troops entered Muslim-populated territories in the Balkans, North Africa, Crimea, and the Caucasus, and approached the Middle East and Central Asia, Berlin began to see Islam as politically significant. Nazi Germany made significant attempts to promote an alliance with the "Muslim world" against their alleged common enemies — the British Empire, the Soviet Union, America and Jews.

In the war zones, Germany engaged with a wide range of religious policies and propaganda to promote the Nazi regime as the patron of Islam. As early as 1941, the Wehrmacht distributed the military handbook "Islam" to train its soldiers to behave correctly towards Muslim populations. On the eastern Front, the Nazi occupiers ordered the rebuilding of mosques, prayer halls, and madrasas — previously destroyed by Moscow — and the re-establishment of religious rituals and celebrations in order to undermine Soviet rule.

German military authorities also made extensive efforts to co-opt Islamic dignitaries. German propagandists in the eastern territories, the Balkans, and North Africa tried to use religious rhetoric, vocabulary and iconography to mobilize Muslims. They politicized sacred texts like the Quran as well as religious imperatives, most notably the concept of jihad, in order to foment religious violence for political ends.

From 1941 onwards, the Nazi Wehrmacht army and the paramilitary SS recruited tens of thousands of Muslims, mainly to save German blood. Muslim soldiers fought on all fronts. German army officials granted these recruits a wide range of religious concessions, even lifting the ban on ritual slaughter, a practice that had been prohibited for anti-Semitic reasons by Hitler's Law for the Protection of Animals of 1933.

A widespread assumption exists that Muslims supported the Nazi Regime because they shared an anti-Semitic perspective. This is precisely why the Nazis tried to get Muslims on the regime's side. What can you tell us about this assumption?

On the German side pragmatic, strategic interests were the most important driving force behind this policy. In its propaganda, however, especially in the Arab world, anti-Semitic themes played an important role. Anti-Semitic propaganda was often connected to attacks against the Zionist migration to Palestine which had emerged as a main topic in Arab political discourses.

On the Muslim side one cannot generalize. Some of the Muslim allies of the Nazi regime — most importantly the famous Mufti of Jerusalem — shared the Nazis' Jew-hatred. In the war zones, in the Balkans, in North Africa, and in the Eastern territories, the picture is more complicated. In many of these regions, Muslims and Jews had lived together for centuries. And in some cases, Muslims would now help their Jewish neighbors, for example hiding them from the Germans.

The Third Reich's engagement with Islam was not only that Muslim-populated regions had become part of the war zones, but also, more importantly, that from 1941 to 1942, Germany's military situation had deteriorated. In the Soviet Union, Hitler's Blitzkrieg strategy had failed. As the Wehrmacht came under pressure, strategists in Berlin began to seek broader war coalitions, thereby demonstrating remarkable pragmatism. The courtship of Muslims was to pacify the occupied Muslim-populated territories and to mobilize Muslims to fight on the side of Hitler's armies.

Many of those Muslims who worked with the Nazi regime had pragmatic reasons. They believed that Nazi Germany in 1941-1942 would be victorious and that it would determine the future world order and that the Nazis could help them become liberated from, for example, British imperial rule.

The motives of these soldiers varied considerably. Of course some recruits were driven by religious hatred and anti-Bolshevist, ideological fervor. Overall, however, Muslims often had rather profane motives for enlisting.

Did the Nazis really see Islam as something inherently positive or were the Muslims only a means to an end?

Overall, I think that Muslims were means to an end. Nazi policies towards Islam were informed by pragmatism. Some leading Nazis, particularly Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, repeatedly expressed their respect for Islam. Whenever denouncing the Catholic Church, Hitler routinely contrasted it with Islam. While he denounced Catholicism as a weak, effeminate religion, he praised Islam as a strong, aggressive, martial religion. Overall, however, it was strategic considerations, not ideology, that led to Nazi Germany's campaign for Islamic mobilization.

Hitler had already postulated the racial inferiority of non-European peoples in "Mein Kampf." Once in power, however, German officials showed themselves to be more pragmatic: Non-Jewish Turks, Iranians and Arabs had already been explicitly exempted from any official racial discrimination in the 1930s, following diplomatic interventions from the governments in Tehran, Ankara, and Cairo. And during the war the Germans showed similar pragmatism. Muslims everywhere, it was clear to every German officer, were to be treated as allies.

The realities on the ground were by no means straightforward. In the first months of the Nazi invasion of Russia, SS squads executed thousands of Muslims on the assumption that their circumcision showed that they were Jewish. Eventually, Reinhard Heydrich, chief Nazi security officer, sent out a directive cautioning the task force executing squads to be more careful. On the southern fringes of the Soviet Union, however, German killing squads still had difficulties distinguishing Muslims from Jews. Moreover, in North Africa, the Balkans, and on the Eastern Front, German soldiers were confronted with diverse Muslim populations, including Muslim Roma and Jewish converts to Islam.

I think sometimes we underestimate just how vulnerable Israel is on the public-relations front. That's why they spend so much money on propaganda. And that's why they panic every time they feel like they're losing the propaganda war.

Norman Finkelstein

October 6 - Pratheep Nanongkham, 24, a greenhouse worker from Maha Sarakham province in Thailand, was killed when armed terrorists infiltrated the hothouse area of Kfar Darom in the central Gaza Strip. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

Jean Anouilh

October 7 - A total of 32 people were killed in terror bombings at two Sinai holiday resorts frequented by Israelis: 29 at the Taba Hilton and three at Ras a-Satan. Among the dead were 12 Israelis; over 120 were wounded. The Israeli victims at Taba: Assaf Greenwald, 27, of Ramat Gan; Hafez al-Hafi, 39, of Lod; Rotem Moriah, 27, of Tel Aviv; Tzila Niv, 43, and her two sons, Gilad, 11, and Lior, 3, of Rakefet; Oleg Paizakov, 32, and his wife Ludmilla, 30, of Bat Yam; and Khalil Zeitounya, 10, of Jaffa. The Israeli victims at Ras a-Satan: Michal Alexander, 27, of Ganei Tikva; Roy Avisaf, 28, of Kfar Sava; and Einat Naor, 27, of Kibbutz Zikim.

https://youtu.be/Qqj9Ii4Wj3w

October 19 - St.-Sgt. Yair Nisim Turgemann, 22, of Kiryat Arba, was killed at an IDF base near Mevo Dotan in Samaria when Palestinian gunmen opened fire from Palestinian territory west of the community. The Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.

October 21 - Sgt.-Maj. Moshe Almaliach, 35, of Dimona, a career NCO in the IDF engineering corps, was killed by a bomb explosion While conducting construction work on the Philadelphi road in the Gaza Strip. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Nazis, with the help of an Arab cleric, used Islamic extremists as a tool

When the Nazis heard Mohammed Amin al-Husseini calling for Arabs to “kill the jews wherever you find them,” they knew they had found an ally in their terrible ideology.

Adolf Hitler believed Muslims could be manipulated into being a powerful tool for the Nazis. For the most part, he was wrong, and the majority of Muslims fought against Germany. However a significant number—a whole division—were radicalized through a partnership with virulently anti-Semitic Islamic extremists.

The main such extremist was al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the highest ranking Muslim political leader in Palestine. He was virulently anti-Semitic, with a history of organizing aggressive actions against Jewish people in the Middle East. He also regularly broadcast propaganda over Nazi-controlled radio stations.

As Al-Husseini later explained to Hitler, the Arabs had the same enemies as the Nazis: the Jews, English, and Russians. According to the German record of their meeting, Al-Husseini said the Muslims under his sway “were prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion.” He was tasked by Hitler with recruiting Bosnian Muslims into what became the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS, the first non-German SS division.

Such a partnership was at odds with the Nazi narrative of racial purity, of course. Hitler had declared Muslims racially inferior in Mein Kampf, yet he recruited and met with Al-Husseini. Hitler went on to say say that the Mufti seemed “a man with more than one Aryan among his ancestors” and declared him an honorary Aryan. Bosnia’s Muslims were also declared pure Aryan too. It seemed military and political ends trumped genes for Hitler, who warmed to Islam so long as their enemies remained in common.

Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, also said he had nothing against Islam because it promises followers “heaven if they fight and are killed in action” and that is was “a very practical religion for soldiers.” He saw an opportunity to manipulate that belief. In fact, it was Himmler who suggested to Hitler raising a Muslim SS division in the first place.



But the prospect did make for some odd imagery. Members of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division wore fezzes emblazoned with Nazi insignias, a contradictory mix of Middle Eastern culture and white nationalism. Pictures from the time show SS members with a pamphlet of anti-Semitic propaganda which, judging by the title, framed Jews as the enemy of Islam.

The Waffen Mountain Division of the SS comprised 20,000 troops and mostly fought Communist resistance forces in Bosnia—a key reason the division was formed in the first place. It fought seven other campaigns for the Nazis in the Balkans region, playing an active role in atrocities committed against Jews there. In all, 12,000 of 14,000 Bosnian Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their allies. Ancient synagogues were destroyed, and some Jews were forced to do that very destroying. The last members of the division surrendered to the British in May of 1945. Ten of them were eventually executed for war crimes.

https://timeline.com/nazis-muslim-extremists-ss-6824aee281d2

October 28 - Sgt. Michael Chizhik, 21, of Tiberias was killed and six other soldiers wounded in a mortar shell attack on an IDF outpost at Morag in the southern Gaza Strip. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

November 1 - Three people were killed and over 30 wounded in a suicide bombing at the Carmel Market in central Tel Aviv. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Nablus claimed responsibility for the attack, carried out by Amar Alfar, 18, from Askar refugee camp in Nablus. The victims: Tatiana Ackerman, 32, of Tel Aviv; Leah Levine, 64, of Givatayim; and Shmuel Levy, 65, of Jaffa.

December 7 - St.-Sgt. Nadav Kudinski, 20, of Kiryat Gat of the Oketz canine unit was killed by a bomb, along with his dog, when a booby-trapped chicken coup exploded northwest of the Karni Corssing in the Gaza Strip. Four soldiers were wounded in the exchange of fire while evacuating him. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

December 12 - Five IDF soldiers were killed and five wounded when a tunnel filled with 1.5 tons of explosives were detonated under an IDF post at the Rafah crossing, followed by the infiltration of the post by two terrorists who opened fire and activated another explosive device. Hamas and the Fatah Hawks claimed responsibility for the attack. The soldiers killed: Sgt. Araf Azbarga, 19, of Kseifeh; Sgt. Sa'id Jahaja, 19, of Arara; Sgt. Hussein Abu Leil, 23, of Ein Mahal; Corp. Adham Shehada, 19, of Turan; and Sgt. Tarek al-Ziadne, 20, of Rahat.