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Books The swastika and the crescent To the end, Hitler rued the Third Reich’s failure in rousing Muslims en masse to his cause By Tibor Krausz MOST GERMANS saw Adolf Hitler as the the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History In that he succeeds. From the late 19th cen- savior of the Aryan race, but he was an equal- for 2014 and follows another recently pub- tury onward, German agitators tried hard to ly epochal figure for Iranian Muslims. That’s lished tome on the Nazis’ dalliance with the co-opt Islamic beliefs to undermine British and because the Fuhrer was the “Hidden Imam,” Islamic world, “Nazis, Islamists and the Mak- French power. Decades later, Motadel shows, the Mahdi, a long-awaited Islamic messiah ing of the Modern Middle East,” by the late a new generation of German propagandists expected by Iran’s Twelver Shi’ites to usher in American-Israeli scholar Barry Rubin and his – mentored by the old guard – were still at it, an era of universal justice on earth. Or so Nazi German-American co-author Wolfgang G. seeking to rally Muslims against the Allies. propagandists would have Iranians believe. Let Schwanitz. In the Nazis’ alliance with Muslims, pragma- no one say the Nazis weren’t creative: if turn- tism trumped ideology. Hitler considered Ar- ing Muslims against the Allies required a bit of HITLER CONSIDERED abs, Turks and Iranians to be racially inferior, religious legerdemain, so be it. yet thanks to an ideological sleight of hand they Or rather, make that a lot of sleight of hand. ARABS, TURKS were rebranded “honorary Aryans” to avoid In their zeal to draw on Islamic sources and tra- damaging relations with sympathetic Muslim ditions for their outreach to Muslims during the AND IRANIANS states. Arabs may have been “Semites” like war, Nazi propagandists weren’t above produc- Jews, but to the Nazis they were good Semites. ing their own textual readings of the Koran and TO BE RACIALLY The Third Reich even stopped using the term the hadiths. They identified Jews as the Masih INFERIOR, YET THEY “anti-Semitic” (Antisemitische) in its propa- ad-Dajjal, a sinister false messiah who is the ganda in favor of “anti-Jewish” (Antijüdische). Mahdi’s arch enemy in Islamic eschatological WERE REBRANDED Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda tradition and was now out to subjugate Mus- instructed German newspapers to depict Islam lims worldwide. Only Hitler could save the ‘HONORARY positively, portray Muslims as the victims of faithful from this supreme evil. scheming Jews and Allied imperialists, and Muslim reactions to such creative religious ARYANS’ emphasize the affinity between Nazi ideology commentaries were mixed – especially as and Islamic theology. Bosnian and other south- the Allies, too, were peddling their own Ko- Most historians of World War II have tended eastern European Muslims were redesignated ran-thumping spiels, from North Africa to In- to see the Muslim world as peripheral to the “racially valuable peoples” and allowed into dia, to counter German propaganda. Rhetorical life-or-death battles of wills between Western the ethnically pure ranks of the Waffen-SS, tit-for-tats could lead to peculiar scenarios. On liberalism and Soviet communism, on the one where some of them acquitted themselves by radio airwaves and in print, Nazi and Allied hand, and Nazism and fascism, on the other. murdering Jews with zeal. propagandists frequently wound up in spirit- The resurgence of militant Islamism, however, In private, both Hitler, who entertained ro- ed tussles of Koranic exegesis, duly quoting has now refocused attention on the role Islam mantic penny dreadful-style notions of Arab apposite surahs to convince Muslims of their and Muslims played during the war, if only in culture, and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, a expository conclusions on which warring side the imagination of warring Europeans. Mota- lapsed Catholic who admired Mohammed, enjoyed Allah’s favors. del’s goal, in his informative and scrupulously repeatedly extolled the virtues of Islam, Such wartime peccadillos come to us cour- researched if somewhat stolid account, is to which they viewed as a suitably virile religion tesy of Cambridge historian David Motadel’s “put Islam on the political and strategic map of with a warrior’s creed, unlike effete turn-the- “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War,” which won the Second World War.” other-cheek Christianity, which they despised 44 THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015 COURTESY JEWISH AGENCY COURTESY Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, as the feeble, emasculating product of malig- Islamic preachers in Dresden and labeled Jews meets German Foreign Minister Joachim nant Jewish influence. “the most despicable, repulsive and corrupt- von Ribbentrop in Berlin, November 20, 1941 As it becomes clear from Motadel’s account, ing people on earth.” (Several of his protégés however, the Nazi leadership’s attempts to woo would become pillars of West Germany’s post- Muslims and mobilize them en masse remained war Muslim community.) There was Iraqi jour- largely ineffective. Throughout the 1930s, Hit- nalist Yunus Bahri, a mercurial agitator who on circumstantial evidence. The scholars es- ler viewed North Africa and the Middle East hosted an incendiary Arab-language program tablish credibly that al-Husseini knew and ap- as marginal to Germany’s territorial interests. on Radio Berlin. proved of the Germans’ efforts to exterminate The Fuhrer did engage in military offensives in European Jewry (despite his postwar denials), North Africa from early 1941, but his purpose AND THERE was, of course, the vile Arab and that he lobbied the Nazis and their fascist was less to conquer new territories for Germa- nationalist Amin al-Husseini, the grand muf- allies relentlessly to murder Jews rather than let ny – let alone “liberate” local Muslims from ti of Jerusalem, an unscrupulous provocateur them immigrate. the French and British – than to try and undo and indefatigable schemer with delusions of a strategic debacle the Italian dictator Benito grandeur who spent much of the war in Berlin, YET RUBIN and Schwanitz may well over- Mussolini had created with his disastrous mili- from where he positioned himself as a pan-Ar- state the mufti’s contribution to a hardening of tary challenge to Britain’s regional hegemony. ab leader and kept inciting vociferously against Nazi attitudes toward Jews: chronological cor- Mussolini, too, sought to curry Islamist sup- the Jews of Palestine while seeking Hitler’s relation doesn’t equal proof of causation. Ac- port for his cause and at a public ceremony in help for their extermination. cording to Motadel himself, the mufti’s greatest 1937 the Duce declared himself a protector of The mufti is credited by Rubin and Schwan- achievement in Berlin (which was nonetheless Muslims, while brandishing an ornamented itz with helping instigate the Final Solution no mean feat) lay in stopping Jewish immigra- “Sword of Allah” and professing his desire to “directly and from the start” by pushing Hitler tion from the Balkans, which led to the death of respect “the laws of the Prophet.” He stopped toward a more radical solution to the “Jewish numerous Jews. well short of converting to Islam, but Nazi pro- question”: mass murder instead of mass expul- Yet it wasn’t for want of trying that al-Hussei- pagandists gladly assisted him in stoking reli- sion. In early 1941, before the Holocaust was ni didn’t succeed in getting more Jews killed. In gious resentment against the Allies, which they launched in earnest, al-Husseini’s insistence his Arab-language radio broadcasts, the mufti portrayed as desecrators of Muslim shrines and that a German-Muslim alliance would be jeop- exhorted his coreligionists across the Middle accomplices of “parasitic” Jews. ardized if European Jewish refugees were al- East to “Kill Jews wherever you find them, for Abetting the Nazis in their propaganda blitz- lowed to flee to Palestine convinced Hitler, the the love of Allah.” Some Muslims responded kriegs was a motley crew of Muslims. There authors argue, that the mass murder of Jews to such calls. In June 1941, rioters in Baghdad, was Alimjan Idris, an imam of Tartar origins remained the only option. incited by Radio Berlin broadcasts, murdered from Central Asia who headed an SS school for It’s a tantalizing thesis but one based largely some 180 Jews in the Farhud massacre. THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 1, 2015 45 Books “It’s wrong to see [al-Husseini] and his fellow their fascist Croatian allies. radicals as merely importing European anti-Semi- In the end, despite Hitler’s best efforts, a grand Na- tism,” Rubin and Schwanitz stress. Nazis, fascists, zi-Islamic alliance wasn’t to be, not least because the Arab nationalists and Islamists, they argue, “came Germans had underestimated the deep-seated ethnic together on the basis of both common interests and and tribal differences among Muslims by mistaking similar worldviews,” the latter of which included them to be a homogenous group with a unified agen- the centrality of Jews as “the villains of all history, da. To the end, Hitler rued the Third Reich’s failure the eternal enemy without whose extinction sal- in rousing Muslims to his cause in plaintive laments vation and a proper world were impossible.” They to his private secretary Martin Bormann. point to the ideological inspiration that modern Isla- Yet the Nazis did succeed in one thing: poisoning mist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood the mind of many a Muslim against Jews. Anti-Se- (whose founder Hassan al-Banna admired Hitler), mitic tropes propagated by the Third Reich, from and Ba’ath Party nationalists alike would draw from medieval Christian blood libels to virulent conspira- National Socialist ideas and propaganda.

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