Copyright 2014 by David Motadel
All rights reserved
Jacket design: Annamarie Why
Jacket photograph: SS recruits from Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1943, German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Image 146-1989-050-00, Mielke
978-0-674-74495-0 (EPUB)
978-0-674-74496-7 (MOBI)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Motadel, David.
Islam and Nazi Germanys war / David Motadel.
First printing.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-72460-0 (alk. paper)
1. World War, 19391945Participation, Muslim. 2. National socialism and Islam. 3. Arab countriesForeign relationsGermany. 4. GermanyForeign relationsArab countries. I. Title.
D810.M8M68 2014
940.530917'67dc23 2014021587
Book design by Dean Bornstein
The Second World War involved significant parts of the Islamic world. Around 150 million Muslims between North Africa and Southeast Asia lived under British and French rule, and more than 20 million were governed by Moscow. At the height of the war, when Japan advanced into Muslim lands in Southeast Asia and German troops entered Muslim territories in the Balkans, North Africa, the Crimea, and the Caucasus and approached the Middle East and Central Asia, all major Axis and Allied powers began to see Islam as politically and strategically important.
It was at this time, in 19411942, that Berlin began to promote an alliance with the Muslim world against their alleged common enemies, most notably the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Jews. In the Muslim war zones, in North Africa and the Middle East, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, the Germans presented themselves as the friends of Muslims and defenders of their faith. At the same time, they began recruiting tens of thousands of Muslims into the Wehrmacht and the SS. Most of them came from the Soviet Union, though many were also enlisted in the Balkans and, albeit in fewer numbers, from the Middle East. German authorities founded several Muslim institutions, such as the Berlin Islamic Central Institute (Islamisches Zentralinstitut), inaugurated in 1942, and employed numerous religious leaders from across the Muslim world to support their efforts. Among the most prominent were the Lithuanian mufti Jakub Szynkiewicz of Vilnius, who propagated Hitlers New Order as the foundation of an Islamic consolidation and revival in the Muslim territories of eastern Europe and Central Asia; the Bosnian Islamic dignitary Muhamed Panda, a leading member of the Sarajevo ulama and ally of the Germans in the Balkans; and the legendary mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, who called on the faithful between Morocco and the Malay peninsula to wage holy war against the Allies. Stretching across three continents, this effort represented a major attempt to politicize Islam and to involve Muslims in the war on the German side.
For Berlin, Muslims became relevant in two contexts, both connected to a general shift in the course of the Second World War that took place in 19411942. Geographically, as the European war turned increasingly into a world war, Muslim areas became war zones. In 1942, German soldiers had occupied a vast territory from the Channel Islands in the West to the Caucasus mountains in the East; they stood in Scandinavia and in the Sahara desert. At once, German troops were encountering large Muslim populations in the Caucasus and the Crimea, in the Maghrib and the Balkans. Countless minarets now stood on Hitlers invaded territories. Germany controlled Muslim metropolises like Tunis, Sarajevo, and Bakchisarai. Almost all of the few non-European territories occupied by the Germans were populated by Muslims, and even within Europe, in the Balkans, Berlin increasingly tightened its hold over Muslim areas. Of perhaps equal importance, the German regime anticipated that many more would come under its control once the Islamic belt between the Asian and European theaters was conquered. The prospect of winning Muslim support in these areas became all the more important as this belt seemed, for a short period, to emerge as the decisive battleground of the war.
Strategically, Germanys attempts to mobilize Muslims against their enemies were not the result of long-term planning but developed over the course of the war as the tide turned against the Axis. In this respect, these efforts can be seen as part of a general shift toward strategic pragmatism and the logic of total mobilization. All of these developments were dictated by the exigencies of the war rather than by ideological considerations. Berlins efforts to rally the Islamic world can be seen as an important facet of this shift toward strategic pragmatism and total mobilization.
Germanys courtship of Muslims was not only an attempt to control and stabilize Muslim areas behind the front. It was also, and perhaps more importantly, an effort to stir up unrest behind enemy lines, most notably on the unstable Muslim fringes of the Soviet Union, as well as in British (and later Free French) colonial domains in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Eventually it also aimed to mobilize Muslims into the German armies.
In order to win Muslims over, German authorities made extensive attempts to employ Islam. Religious policies and propaganda were used to enhance social and political control in the occupied territories and war zones, to recruit Muslims into the Wehrmacht and the SS, and to rally the faithful in enemy territories and armies. Germanys policies involved Islamic institutions and religious authorities. Its propaganda drew on politicized religious imperatives and rhetoric, sacred texts and Islamic iconography to give the involvement of Muslims in the war religious legitimacy. Although these policies, as with so many other German policies during the war, were characterized by improvisation and ad hoc measures, they were overall remarkably coherent.
Berlins policies toward Muslims were the expression of a specific set of assumptions, ideas, and conceptions about Islam that informed German officials. They frequently reduced Muslims to their religious affiliation, no matter how pious they were or how different their notion of Islam. Indeed, the terms Islam (Islam or Mohammedanertum) and Muslim (Muslim, Moslem, Mohammedaner, or Muselmane) became primary bureaucratic categories in official documents. Although German authorities often recognized the diversity and complexity of the Muslim world in principle, in practice they frequently fell back on essentialist ideas about Islam as an entity with distinct
This book examines the ways in which German authoritiesmost notably in the Wehrmacht and the SS but also in the Foreign Office (Auswrtiges Amt), the Propaganda Ministry (Reichsministerium fr Volksaufklrung und Propaganda), and the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium fr die besetzten Ostgebiete)engaged with Islam in an attempt to build an alliance with Muslims in Germanys occupied territories and in the wider world. It asks how Islam was employed in practice in the war zones, as well as in military recruitment and mobilization. Simultaneously, it addresses the underlying political conceptions about Islam that informed decision makers and officers in the German capital and in the field.
