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Reviewed by:
  • Islam and Nazi Germany’s War by David Motadel
  • Gerhard L. Weinberg
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War, David Motadel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 512 pp., hardcover $35.00.

This is a very detailed study of Germany’s efforts during World War II to mobilize the Muslim world against the Reich’s enemies, generally defined as the British, the Soviet Union, and the Jews. As the author notes, while World War I had seen [End Page 371] some German interest, including practical steps such as special religious services and the building of Germany’s first mosque for Muslim prisoners of war, it was really only in 1941 and 1942 that Germany began to make substantial efforts. These were the product of practical considerations such as heavy casualties on the Eastern Front and the need to send a German force to Libya to rescue the Italians from the British. Hitler himself thought of Islam as a warrior religion that could be helpful to Germany, and both Heinrich Himmler and Gottlob Berger, who headed the main office responsible for SS recruiting, were enthusiastic about enlisting Muslims and utilizing German propaganda in the Muslim world (always perceived as a unit).

As the author explains in considerable detail in chapter 2, it was under circumstances of war that Germany had its “Muslim Moment.” Hitler met with the Mufti whose name is spelled here “Amin Al-Husayni,” and whose extensive activities on behalf of Nazi Germany are recounted throughout. The steady and increasing efforts by the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS to recruit Muslims from both prisoner of war camps and local populations in areas under German control are fully covered. The problems the Germans encountered in the process also receive the attention they deserve: providing a diet that excluded pork, observing Muslim religious holidays, the Muslim insistence on ritual slaughter banned in Germany. There was the issue of circumcision, a marker that frequently had led to the killing of prisoners of war assumed to be Jews. Despite the challenges, propaganda depicting the supposed natural alliance of Germany with Islam emphasized the hostility of both to the Jews.

As German troops arrived in North Africa, a major propaganda effort ensued. The author quotes from both leaflets and radio broadcasts, parts of an operation run by the Germans from Spanish Morocco, and points out that widespread illiteracy and the rarity of radio ownership hampered the project. Like much of the book, this is an aspect of the war in the Mediterranean and Middle East that has hitherto received little attention. Motadel also engages the actions of the Allies to counter these German attempts to subvert both their armies and the local population, especially in Egypt. He provides a good account of the failure of German hopes to rally the people of Tunisia in winter 1942/43 because German soldiers held and acted on the racist attitudes inculcated during the ceaseless interwar attacks on French colonial African soldiers during the French occupation of the Rhineland.

In his subsequent review of German recruitment on the Eastern Front, the author first concentrates on the Crimea, where Tatar Muslims were mobilized in substantial numbers. There the commander of the German Eleventh Army, Erich von Manstein, cooperated effectively with the commander of Einsatzkommando D, Otto Ohlendorf, in this and in the murder of Jews (their only argument—not mentioned in this book—was over how to allocate the watches taken from the victims). The exceedingly complicated situation in the Caucasus, which German troops entered in late summer 1942, is covered in considerable detail, including the recruitment of soldiers from both the Muslim and the Christian communities before the [End Page 372] Germans evacuated in early 1943 (they held the Crimea into spring 1944). There is also a full account of German appeals to Muslims in the Baltic States, especially Lithuania. In all occupied areas the general terror of German rule hindered recruitment; Soviet propaganda about the equality of peoples under Soviet rule likely helped thwart them as well.

In the Balkans the Germans engaged Muslims in Yugoslavia, Albania, and parts of Greece and Bulgaria. The book offers a detailed account of German approaches to the Muslims there and...

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