Books

The swastika
and the crescent
To the end, Hitler rued the Third Reichs failure
in rousing Muslims en masse to his cause
By Tibor Krausz

MOST GERMANS saw Adolf Hitler as the

savior of the Aryan race, but he was an equally epochal figure for Iranian Muslims. Thats
because the Fuhrer was the Hidden Imam,
the Mahdi, a long-awaited Islamic messiah
expected by Irans Twelver Shiites to usher in
an era of universal justice on earth. Or so Nazi
propagandists would have Iranians believe. Let
no one say the Nazis werent creative: if turning Muslims against the Allies required a bit of
religious legerdemain, so be it.
Or rather, make that a lot of sleight of hand.
In their zeal to draw on Islamic sources and traditions for their outreach to Muslims during the
war, Nazi propagandists werent above producing their own textual readings of the Koran and
the hadiths. They identified Jews as the Masih
ad-Dajjal, a sinister false messiah who is the
Mahdis arch enemy in Islamic eschatological
tradition and was now out to subjugate Muslims worldwide. Only Hitler could save the
faithful from this supreme evil.
Muslim reactions to such creative religious
commentaries were mixed especially as
the Allies, too, were peddling their own Koran-thumping spiels, from North Africa to India, to counter German propaganda. Rhetorical
tit-for-tats could lead to peculiar scenarios. On
radio airwaves and in print, Nazi and Allied
propagandists frequently wound up in spirited tussles of Koranic exegesis, duly quoting
apposite surahs to convince Muslims of their
expository conclusions on which warring side
enjoyed Allahs favors.
Such wartime peccadillos come to us courtesy of Cambridge historian David Motadels
Islam and Nazi Germanys War, which won
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the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History

for 2014 and follows another recently published tome on the Nazis dalliance with the
Islamic world, Nazis, Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by the late
American-Israeli scholar Barry Rubin and his
German-American co-author Wolfgang G.
Schwanitz.

HITLER CONSIDERED
ARABS, TURKS
AND IRANIANS
TO BE RACIALLY
INFERIOR, YET THEY
WERE REBRANDED
HONORARY
ARYANS
Most historians of World War II have tended
to see the Muslim world as peripheral to the
life-or-death battles of wills between Western
liberalism and Soviet communism, on the one
hand, and Nazism and fascism, on the other.
The resurgence of militant Islamism, however,
has now refocused attention on the role Islam
and Muslims played during the war, if only in
the imagination of warring Europeans. Motadels goal, in his informative and scrupulously
researched if somewhat stolid account, is to
put Islam on the political and strategic map of
the Second World War.
THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015

In that he succeeds. From the late 19th century onward, German agitators tried hard to
co-opt Islamic beliefs to undermine British and
French power. Decades later, Motadel shows,
a new generation of German propagandists
mentored by the old guard were still at it,
seeking to rally Muslims against the Allies.
In the Nazis alliance with Muslims, pragmatism trumped ideology. Hitler considered Arabs, Turks and Iranians to be racially inferior,
yet thanks to an ideological sleight of hand they
were rebranded honorary Aryans to avoid
damaging relations with sympathetic Muslim
states. Arabs may have been Semites like
Jews, but to the Nazis they were good Semites.
The Third Reich even stopped using the term
anti-Semitic (Antisemitische) in its propaganda in favor of anti-Jewish (Antijdische).
Joseph Goebbelss Ministry of Propaganda
instructed German newspapers to depict Islam
positively, portray Muslims as the victims of
scheming Jews and Allied imperialists, and
emphasize the affinity between Nazi ideology
and Islamic theology. Bosnian and other southeastern European Muslims were redesignated
racially valuable peoples and allowed into
the ethnically pure ranks of the Waffen-SS,
where some of them acquitted themselves by
murdering Jews with zeal.
In private, both Hitler, who entertained romantic penny dreadful-style notions of Arab
culture, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, a
lapsed Catholic who admired Mohammed,
repeatedly extolled the virtues of Islam,
which they viewed as a suitably virile religion
with a warriors creed, unlike effete turn-theother-cheek Christianity, which they despised

COURTESY JEWISH AGENCY

as the feeble, emasculating product of malignant Jewish influence.

As it becomes clear from Motadels account,
however, the Nazi leaderships attempts to woo
Muslims and mobilize them en masse remained
largely ineffective. Throughout the 1930s, Hitler viewed North Africa and the Middle East
as marginal to Germanys territorial interests.
The Fuhrer did engage in military offensives in
North Africa from early 1941, but his purpose
was less to conquer new territories for Germany let alone liberate local Muslims from
the French and British than to try and undo
a strategic debacle the Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini had created with his disastrous military challenge to Britains regional hegemony.
Mussolini, too, sought to curry Islamist support for his cause and at a public ceremony in
1937 the Duce declared himself a protector of
Muslims, while brandishing an ornamented
Sword of Allah and professing his desire to
respect the laws of the Prophet. He stopped
well short of converting to Islam, but Nazi propagandists gladly assisted him in stoking religious resentment against the Allies, which they
portrayed as desecrators of Muslim shrines and
accomplices of parasitic Jews.
Abetting the Nazis in their propaganda blitzkriegs was a motley crew of Muslims. There
was Alimjan Idris, an imam of Tartar origins
from Central Asia who headed an SS school for

Islamic preachers in Dresden and labeled Jews

the most despicable, repulsive and corrupting people on earth. (Several of his protgs
would become pillars of West Germanys postwar Muslim community.) There was Iraqi journalist Yunus Bahri, a mercurial agitator who
hosted an incendiary Arab-language program
on Radio Berlin.

AND THERE was, of course, the vile Arab

nationalist Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, an unscrupulous provocateur
and indefatigable schemer with delusions of
grandeur who spent much of the war in Berlin,
from where he positioned himself as a pan-Arab leader and kept inciting vociferously against
the Jews of Palestine while seeking Hitlers
help for their extermination.
The mufti is credited by Rubin and Schwanitz with helping instigate the Final Solution
directly and from the start by pushing Hitler
toward a more radical solution to the Jewish
question: mass murder instead of mass expulsion. In early 1941, before the Holocaust was
launched in earnest, al-Husseinis insistence
that a German-Muslim alliance would be jeopardized if European Jewish refugees were allowed to flee to Palestine convinced Hitler, the
authors argue, that the mass murder of Jews
remained the only option.
Its a tantalizing thesis but one based largely
THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015

Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem,

meets German Foreign Minister Joachim
von Ribbentrop in Berlin, November 20, 1941

on circumstantial evidence. The scholars establish credibly that al-Husseini knew and approved of the Germans efforts to exterminate
European Jewry (despite his postwar denials),
and that he lobbied the Nazis and their fascist
allies relentlessly to murder Jews rather than let
them immigrate.

YET RUBIN and Schwanitz may well overstate the muftis contribution to a hardening of
Nazi attitudes toward Jews: chronological correlation doesnt equal proof of causation. According to Motadel himself, the muftis greatest
achievement in Berlin (which was nonetheless
no mean feat) lay in stopping Jewish immigration from the Balkans, which led to the death of
numerous Jews.
Yet it wasnt for want of trying that al-Husseini didnt succeed in getting more Jews killed. In
his Arab-language radio broadcasts, the mufti
exhorted his coreligionists across the Middle
East to Kill Jews wherever you find them, for
the love of Allah. Some Muslims responded
to such calls. In June 1941, rioters in Baghdad,
incited by Radio Berlin broadcasts, murdered
some 180 Jews in the Farhud massacre.
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Books
Its wrong to see [al-Husseini] and his fellow
radicals as merely importing European anti-Semitism, Rubin and Schwanitz stress. Nazis, fascists,
Arab nationalists and Islamists, they argue, came
together on the basis of both common interests and
similar worldviews, the latter of which included
the centrality of Jews as the villains of all history,
the eternal enemy without whose extinction salvation and a proper world were impossible. They
point to the ideological inspiration that modern Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood
(whose founder Hassan al-Banna admired Hitler),
and Baath Party nationalists alike would draw from
National Socialist ideas and propaganda.

THAT SAID, a comprehensive German policy for

winning Muslims over, Motadel explains, began to
fall into place only in 1943, when the tide of war had
turned irreversibly against the Third Reich. In some
regions the Nazis outreach did produce tangible
results. In the Caucasus, Muslim villagers gave the
German invaders a heros welcome, cheering Hitler Effendi as their liberator from the depredations
of Stalinism. The Germans allowed them to reopen
their mosques and resume their religious festivals
with Islamic and Nazi symbols displayed side by
side.
Seeking to exploit the militarism in Islamic theology, Hitler instructed his generals that pure Mohammedans from occupied territories were the most desirable non-German recruits for the Wehrmacht, and
hundreds of thousands of Muslims Tartars, Azeris,
Chechens, Turkestanis, Uzbeks, Khazaks, Bosnians,
Herzegovinians were promptly conscripted into Islamic auxiliary units, Ostlegionen (Eastern Legions)
battalions, and a 20,000-strong Bosnian SS division.
Muslim recruits from the Soviet Union, many of
them released from POW camps, received religious
indoctrination in the hope they would serve as the
vanguard of a homegrown Islamist rebellion against
the godless Soviet regime. Only Germany can
save the world, and she will also save you and your
religion from subjugation under the red flag, they
were told by a mass-produced German leaflet, which
cited Koranic verses that instruct the faithful to fight
unbelievers.
Thousands of Muslims fought in Hitlers armies
and became involved in gruesome atrocities and
massacres. [But] others fought against the German
regime [on the Allied side], Motadel notes, cautioning against generalizations. Likewise, he adds,
whereas some Muslims eagerly aided the Nazis in
the mass murder of Jews, others, including several
Albanian Muslims, helped save their Jewish neighbors. In Sarajevo, Fehim Spaho, the elderly head of
the local ulama, assisted local Jews in converting to
Islam to try and help them, often unsuccessfully, to
avoid being deported and killed by the Germans and
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their fascist Croatian allies.

In the end, despite Hitlers best efforts, a grand Nazi-Islamic alliance wasnt to be, not least because the
Germans had underestimated the deep-seated ethnic
and tribal differences among Muslims by mistaking
them to be a homogenous group with a unified agenda. To the end, Hitler rued the Third Reichs failure
in rousing Muslims to his cause in plaintive laments
to his private secretary Martin Bormann.
Yet the Nazis did succeed in one thing: poisoning
the mind of many a Muslim against Jews. Anti-Semitic tropes propagated by the Third Reich, from
medieval Christian blood libels to virulent conspiracy theories, have been grafted seamlessly onto old Islamic anti-Jewish prejudices, thereby gaining a new
lease on life in the Muslim world. Thats why its not
only the Nazis wartime dalliance with Islam that
should hold our interest but also numerous surviving Nazi stalwarts symbiotic postwar relationships
with Middle Eastern regimes, under whose shelter
they sought refuge from being held to account for
war crimes.

ARAB STATES welcomed Nazi war criminals,

some 4,000 of them, with open arms. No Arab
country ever expelled any of them, Rubin and
Schwanitz point out, but instead shielded [them]
from prosecution and employed them as military
advisors, intelligence operatives and propagandists.
Erstwhile Nazis like the rabidly anti-Jewish SS
major Johann von Leers, who relocated to Cairo,
converted to Islam and reinvented himself as Omar
Amir von Leers, and Adolf Eichmanns right-hand
man Alois Brunner, who found a new home in Damascus, proved themselves useful as avidly virulent
anti-Zionist propagandists for their hosts. Others like
Brunners former boss, who was hiding out in Argentina, acted as cheerleaders for a united Arab offensive
against Israel. With a book he was writing before his
capture by the Mossad in 1960, Eichmann planned
to lend succor to the ongoing demonization of the
nascent Jewish state, as it has recently been revealed.
Israeli bayonets are now overrunning the Egyptian people... Israeli air squadrons are bombing
peaceful Egyptian villages and towns, Eichmann
opined in the unpublished manuscript in 1956
apropos the Suez Canal war that year. Who are the
aggressors here? Who are the war criminals? The
victims are Egyptians, Arabs, Mohammedans... [The
Jews] are the main aggressor and perpetrator against
humanity in the Middle East.
That assessment has long since turned from a
fringe opinion into a mainstream view on the Israeli-Arab conflict. If not for his genocidal record, Eichmann might well now be hailed by many self-styled
anti-Zionists in the West as a prophetic voice on
the Middle East. He may yet be hailed as such in
spite of it. 

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015

Nazis, Islamists, and the Making

of the Modern Middle East
Barry Rubin and
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Yale University Press
360 pages; $35

Islam and Nazi Germanys War

David Motadel
Belknap Press
512 pages; $35